Who is really buried in Napoleon's Paris tomb?

Paul Michaud, Contributor, Paris

Just as France finds itself, once again, in the middle of Napoleonmania, a group of French historians are demanding a DNA test to be performed on the remains presented at the Hotel des Invalides in Paris as being those of the French emperor.

Historians claim there's no solid proof that the remains, which were returned to France in 1840 -- almost two decades following Napoleon's demise on Saint Helena Island -- are in fact those of the former French emperor.

They say that it would have been in the interest of Napoleon's captors to have returned somebody's else's remains, especially given the accusations made in recent years that an excessive amount of arsenic in a sample of Napoleon's hair would indicate that he was killed by his captors in 1821.

And this, just as a major French scientific publication, Science & Vie, announced that an 18-month-long examination of the hair sample by a number of leading scientists indicated that in fact Napoleon died from stomach cancer.

Jean Tulard, one of the world's leading authorities on Napoleon, said that as far as he's concerned, all the talk about Napoleon's assassination or the presence of somebody else's remains at the Invalides is nothing short of crazy.

But in spite of the ridiculous nature of many of the claims made about Napoleon -- claims similar to those made in recent years about Elvis Presley and President John F. Kennedy -- there is no doubt that Napoleonmania is, once again, taking France by storm more than 200 years after the little emperor came to power, during a reign that saw him transform France, and Europe, in ways that none of his successors have ever been able to accomplish.

A four-part TV series recently shown on public channel France 2 was viewed by a total of 30 million viewers, with its popularity so resounding that officials of the Hotel des Invalides museum, where the remains of Napoleon rest in an imposing memorial, has seen the number of visitors increase by 35 percent since the series' broadcast in early October.

Says Thierry Lentz, the director of the Napoleon Foundation in Paris: "It's a phenomenon that has been going on for 200 years, but if it's become even more prominent today, it's largely because of the TV series."

The series is an international coproduction starring comic actor Christian Clavier in the title role, and directed by Canadian filmmaker Yves Simonneau.

Malmaison, the residence he inhabited in suburban Rueil- Malmaison when he was first consul, has been turned into a museum and it has also seen a significant rise in the number of visitors since the broadcast of the TV series, as has the Musee Bonaparte in Ajaccio, the capital of his native Corsica and the city where he was born in in 1769.

C'etait Bonaparte (That was Bonaparte), a play made up of some 55 historic pictures authored by Alain Decaux and directed by Robert Hossein, plays nightly in Paris at the Palais des Sports before a usual standing room crowd of 4,000, with enough advance reservations that the play could very well continue its run through to the end of the year, and well into 2003.

And this in spite of the fact that the play has no well-known actors. Napoleon is portrayed by a complete unknown, Fabrizio Bongione, who has played small roles in his native Belgium.

Officials at the Louvre have reported the same increase in public fascination for all exhibits concerning Napoleon, with the celebrated museum reporting that there is such a crush of onlookers around David's monumental painting of the Coronation of Bonaparte in 1804 as Napoleon I that they have to limit access to the hall where the painting is hung, just as they had to do with the room where the Mona Lisa tended to attract crowds.

Napoleonmania has come to such a fever pitch that the editors of Science et Vie thought the time had come to put an end to the debate that has been raging for decades: whether Napoleon was assassinated or not. The verdict, rendered this weekend, was that the man who had once ruled over continental Europe had died like almost everyone else; rather quietly in his sleep and from stomach cancer.

A spokesman for the magazine Isabelle Bourdial said, "Napoleon was not poisoned, as has often been claimed, and if arsenic was found in the samples we have of his hair, it more likely came from external sources, such as the heating system in the room in Saint-Helena where he died in 1821, the glue in the wallpaper, or perhaps the products he used to groom his hair with, and -- why not -- the chemical was used to conserve in a medallion the sample of his hair that we used to undertake our analysis."

She also said that Jacques di Costanzo, a stomach specialist at Sainte-Marguerite Hospital in Marseilles, had determined that a thorough examination he undertook of anatomical lesions found in Napoleon proved without a doubt that the 52-year-old had stomach problems and apparently died from a common case of cancer.

But, as Isabelle Bourdial pointed out, there will always be those who are convinced that Napoleon was assassinated by his British captors. This is certainly the reason why his legend continues to live on, especially in a day and age when France, the country that he largely transformed into a world power, is seeing itself increasingly diluted within a European Union that will soon have 25 member countries and a population of 450 million in a Europe very much like that which Napoleon had envisioned more than two centuries ago.