A French Emperor who dreamed of retiring in New Jersey. A military dictator who wrote steamy romances. A corporal who saw the world past death. These are the weird things you don't know about Napoleon. Keep watching to find out!
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00:00A French emperor who dreamed of retiring in New Jersey, a military dictator who wrote
00:04steamy romances, a corporal who saw the world pass death — these are the weird things
00:09you don't know about Napoleon. Keep watching to find out.
00:12Most people seem to know just two things about Napoleon. He was short, and he was French.
00:17But actually, he wasn't French. He was Corsican. A small island southeast of France, Corsica
00:21was ruled by Genoa for nearly five centuries before a rebellion finally gained them their
00:26independence in 1755. But it didn't last long. In 1769, France conquered the island,
00:32and four months later, Napoleon was born. His parents were fervent revolutionaries,
00:36so he grew up hating the French. In fact, his letters of the time were full of references
00:40to French monsters and vivid passages about killing Frenchmen.
00:44Eventually, though, the ideals of the French Revolution and a falling out with Corsican
00:47resistance leader Pasquale Paoli ultimately resulted in Napoleon switching allegiances
00:52and changing the course of history.
00:54Oh, and if you learned all your history from Bill and Ted, it should be said that at 5
00:58feet 6 inches tall, Napoleon was actually average height for his time.
01:02Dad, it's Napoleon. The short, dead dude from our history review.
01:09Everyone needs to blow off some steam, even military dictators. But Napoleon's outlet
01:13might come as a surprise. He occasionally wrote steamy romance stories.
01:18Clisson & Eugénie is the 17-page story of a dashing French military officer and the
01:23woman he falls for while on a spa break. They have lots of romantic encounters and
01:27ultimately marry, but the handsome officer is called back into action. After his wife
01:31cheats on him with a comrade, the grief-stricken Clisson volunteers to lead a doomed charge
01:35into battle, where he ultimately dies.
01:38The original story was written in 1795 and is a fictionalized account of Napoleon's relationship
01:43with Bernadine Eugénie-Désirée Clary, who later became Queen of Sweden and Norway.
01:48In the real world, it was Napoleon who broke their engagement after becoming involved with
01:52the future Empress Josephine. But hey, when you're the writer, you can change the story
01:56however you want.
01:57The original manuscript was broken up and individual pages sold around the globe as
02:01souvenirs after Napoleon's death. The full story wasn't completely pieced back together
02:05until 2009.
02:07As you might expect from a guy who tried to conquer the whole of Europe in barely a decade,
02:11Napoleon was famously impatient. That can be bad enough when you live in an age of instant
02:15communication, but for someone living in 18th century France, it was suffocating.
02:20After Napoleon joined the French Revolutionary Army, sending a cat gift from France to Italy
02:24involved days of hard writing. But Napoleon was also a guy who liked to get things done,
02:29so he set about pioneering a new, high-speed communications system.
02:33Napoleon, don't be jealous that I've been chatting online with babes all day.
02:37Well, not that kind of communication.
02:39Napoleon instead pioneered a semaphore system invented by Claude Chaub, which involved sticking
02:44a pair of mechanical arms atop a tower or mountain and moving them in various positions
02:49to signal different things. Chatting with people online wasn't available yet.
02:53Another guy on the next tower would replicate those movements to signal further towers,
02:57and so on.
02:58A basic network was installed by the revolutionary government, but it was Napoleon who expanded
03:02it into an international system. Under his watch, this system developed until you could
03:06send a message from Amsterdam to Venice in mere hours.
03:10Napoleon's 1812 foray into Russia is the stuff of legends. Of the 600,000 or so men who attacked
03:16Moscow, fewer than 100,000 made it back alive. It was a humiliating setback for a man praised
03:21as a military genius. But what you might not know thanks to that oversized reputation is
03:26that Napoleon suffered many other terrible defeats as well, and not just at Waterloo.
03:30Take the Leclerc expedition. In 1802, Napoleon sent out a vast French army to retake the
03:35rebellious colony of Haiti and reimpose slavery. Tens of thousands of French soldiers sailed
03:40off to the Caribbean, only to be stopped by Toussaint Louverture's ill-equipped amateur
03:44slave armies. And in 1807, Napoleon launched the similarly doomed Peninsular War against
03:50Spain, which saw over 110,000 French troops fail to take down a ragtag bunch of Spanish
03:55peasants.
03:56His forces also suffered humiliating naval defeats, too, particularly at the decisive
04:00Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, where Admiral Horatio Nelson completely obliterated the
04:05French navy without losing a single British ship.
04:09The Louisiana Purchase is famous, because at that time, Thomas Jefferson bought Louisiana
04:13off the French for the presidential equivalent of spare change. That wasn't Napoleon's original
04:17plan, though. No, originally, he wanted to invade North America. In 1802, Napoleon was
04:22still dealing with the Haitian rebellion under Toussaint Louverture, but he still wanted
04:26Haiti's sugar money back. One of his ideas to accomplish that was to work with Louverture
04:30in hopes that they could combine forces to invade America. Ultimately, though, Napoleon
04:34decided to invade both Haiti and America. But after Louverture defeated the French forces
04:39sent to invade Haiti, Napoleon had to divert the army that was heading to Louisiana. Instead,
04:43he sent them to Haiti as reinforcements. When they were smacked to smithereens, Napoleon
04:48just gave up on the whole Louisiana thing and sold it to Jefferson.
04:52After his ultimate defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Napoleon was sent to the
04:56tiny South Atlantic island of St. Helena, a tiny lump of land over 1,200 miles away
05:01from the nearest country. St. Helena is so remote that it didn't even get its first airport
05:05until 2016. So in the early 19th century, it was almost literally the farthest you could
05:11get from civilization.
05:12But there's an alternative history where he spends his retirement somewhere even more
05:16godforsaken than this lump of blasted rock. According to NPR, Napoleon could have retired
05:21to New Jersey. After losing Waterloo, Napoleon had a narrow window of time in which he was
05:25a free man, and he used that time to plan his escape. Letters exchanged between Napoleon
05:30and his remaining allies show he was seriously considering upping sticks and hoofing it to
05:33the land of the free, where he planned to settle into a life of science, horse rearing,
05:37and a whole lot of hunting.
05:39Although we don't know exactly where in America he would have gone, he did have a brother
05:42in New Jersey, which made it a natural destination. Yes, strange as it sounds, Napoleon Bonaparte,
05:48one of the most famous and powerful dictators in the history of the world, had a brother
05:52who lived in New Jersey, of all places. New Jersey, the home of Jersey Shore, the Sopranos,
05:57and John Stewart.
05:58All right, it's kind of weird, right? But how's this story really Jersey?
06:02The kicker is that Napoleon's older brother, Joseph, wasn't just any random Bonaparte.
06:07Joseph had literally been the king of Spain and Naples before everything went pear-shaped
06:10on the continent and they had to flee for their lives. After the debacle of Waterloo,
06:15France made a law to ban all relatives and descendants of Napoleon. The Bonapartes scattered,
06:19and Joseph naturally chose New Jersey as his new home. There, he built a massive house,
06:23amassed the biggest library in America, and spent the next two decades palling around
06:27with guys like John Quincy Adams.
06:29Joseph wasn't the only Bonaparte to visit America. Years earlier, Napoleon's younger
06:33brother Jerome also washed up there and got a woman pregnant. She stayed in America and
06:37raised a line of Bonapartes. One of her grandchildren, Charles Bonaparte, even became Secretary of
06:42the U.S. Navy and later Attorney General. The line didn't peter out until 1945 when,
06:47according to The New York Times, the last of the American Bonapartes died in Central
06:51Park after tripping over a dog leash.
06:53New Jersey isn't even the strangest place that almost became Napoleon's final destination.
06:58According to some rumors, there was a possibility he might have ended up ruling South America.
07:02How? Well, Sir Thomas Cochrane was a captain in the British Navy who was renowned for coming
07:07up with borderline insane schemes that somehow worked. During the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon
07:12himself christened Cochrane the, quote, "'Sea Wolf' for his habit of capturing French vessels."
07:17After he quit Britain following a financial scandal, Cochrane sailed to Chile, where the
07:21country's revolutionary leaders gave him command of their navy and watched as he used it to
07:25almost single-handedly liberate Peru. But there was another side to Cochrane that was
07:30less crazy cool guy and more just, well, crazy. While serving in revolutionary Chile, Cochrane
07:36came up with a plan as counterintuitive as it was nuts.
07:39Deciding that newly liberated South America needed an emperor, he proposed rescuing Napoleon
07:44from exile on St. Helena and just giving him the continent. On the surface, it doesn't
07:48make sense. Cochrane, remember, had previously fought against Napoleon. He must have also
07:53been aware that a whole lot of South America already had a popular ruler named Simon Bolivar.
07:57Whatever the case, it never happened, as Napoleon died in exile before any rescue attempt might
08:02be made.
08:03On the sliding scale of strangeness, Cochrane's apocryphal South American mission might be
08:08weirder than New Jersey, but it doesn't come close to the time a guy wanted to smuggle
08:12Napoleon to freedom inside a homemade submarine. During his six years on St. Helena, Napoleon
08:17was probably the most closely guarded prison in history. Not only was St. Helena 1,200
08:21miles from land, it was surrounded by sheer cliffs with only two viable landing spots,
08:25which the British had garrisoned with nearly 3,000 men. Plus, the Royal Navy had a squadron
08:30of 11 ships constantly on patrol. In other words, nobody was getting in or out, except
08:35maybe smuggler Tom Johnson.
08:37According to the Smithsonian, Johnson had worked with American submarine pioneer Robert
08:41Fulton, and had been paid by the British government to devise a submarine during the War of 1812.
08:46Details are sketchy, but according to some reports, in 1820 he got involved with a group
08:50of French officers looking to rescue Napoleon using that submarine. Johnson's plans were
08:54to surface by St. Helena at night, and with the help of a mechanical harness, lower Napoleon
08:59down before hightailing it back to Europe. No one knows how far the scheme got, but it
09:03wouldn't have worked anyway. Napoleon had rejected leaving St. Helena at anything less
09:07than the head of a conquering French fleet, saying it was beneath his dignity.
09:12Officially, Napoleon's reputation isn't that great. Even the French barely teach Napoleon
09:16at school. But there's one country in Europe where pretty much everyone agrees he's a hero
09:21— Slovenia. Why? Because freedom. That's why. In 1809, when Napoleon negotiated terms
09:26with the defeated Austrians, he turned their province of Slovenia into the center of a
09:30new autonomous region, making Ljubljana the capital. Under the Austrians, Slovenian language
09:34had been suppressed. But Napoleon set up a local government instead, and allowed the
09:38government to be conducted in the Slovenian language. He also guaranteed safety from reconquest
09:43by Austria. Of course, that only lasted a couple years, until Napoleon himself was defeated.
09:48Slovenia was reconquered in 1813, but by then the cat was out of the bag, and a massive
09:52revival of Slovenian folk culture had taken place. Slovenes still credit that revival
09:57with leading to their eventual nationhood in 1991.
10:01Before we go, we just have to spend a few minutes talking about Napoleon's private parts.
10:05You're probably thinking, no, you really don't. But the craziest story of all is that Napoleon's
10:10most prized body part is actually still around, reportedly in a private collection in, you
10:15guessed it, New Jersey.
10:16Just rip my balls off, why don't you?
10:19According to the Washington Post, the doctor who conducted Napoleon's autopsy in 1821 decided
10:24to take home the grossest souvenir imaginable. When no one was watching, he sliced off the
10:29emperor's… and smuggled it back to Europe. From here, the journey becomes so fantastical,
10:34it seems like fiction.
10:35The Washington Post claims that the severed, you know what, was passed from one creepy
10:39collector to another. First, an Italian priest, then a London bookseller, who sold it to
10:43a Philadelphia bookseller, who exhibited it at the New York Museum of French Arts in 1927.
10:49Time magazine sent a reporter who likened it to a, quote, "'maltreated strip of buckskin
10:54shoelace.'"
10:55This just goes to show that no matter how mighty a person is in life, death is the great
10:59equalizer. Think about that next time you tie your shoes.