Remembering Napoleon in the South Atlantic

It is a cool, moist morning and a hotchpotch of formally attired officials in sashes and curious tourists in T-shirts and thongs are making their way past a bilingual sign down a grassy, gradual incline to the grave.

A small group of schoolchildren carry wreaths and practise their lines to themselves. The local newspaperman is in attendance. Those of us not taking part in the service retire to a terrace overlooking the clearing.

A large French tricolour hangs on a line above the gathering party. Two trumpeters appear and play The Last Post and Reveille, not quite in unison, not quite in tune. A priest emerges from the foliage and everyone grows quiet. Several people bow their heads.

There's just one thing: this tomb is empty. It has been for the better part of two centuries.

The mourners down below us on the lawn are effectively mourning a concrete slab.

Mention the South Atlantic island of St Helena to someone and you're bound to be met with one of two reactions: blank incomprehension or, occasionally, a question. "Isn't that where Napoleon died?"

The French emperor was exiled on the island in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and was rather taken aback by the place. He had been expecting something closer to home - perhaps even Britain itself - but his adversaries weren't taking any chances.

He had already escaped from one exile, on Elba, and the British weren't keen on a repeat performance. In fact, they were so decidedly un-keen on it that they claimed the two islands closest to St Helena as well - Ascension Island, nearly 1300km to the north, and Tristan da Cunha, more than 2430km to the south - to prevent the French from doing so and launching a rescue attempt.

What followed were six long, depressing years for Napoleon, with the sole period of happiness coming at the very beginning of his stay, when he put in two months with William Balcombe and his family while waiting for his official residence to be made ready. Balcombe was subsequently forced to leave the island after governor Hudson Lowe began to suspect him of delivering to Napoleon clandestine correspondence. He later became colonial treasurer of New South Wales.

Napoleon died young, a broken man, and was buried at the place of his choosing, the Valley of the Willows - where we have gathered today - until 1840, when the French repatriated his remains to the Esplanade des Invalides in Paris. They have been there ever since.

The service continues slowly, deliberately, with only the occasional click of a camera disturbing the breeze that blows through the trees that give the valley its name. The priest says a few words, inaudible up here in the nosebleeds, and there is a laying of wreaths by the gathered dignitaries. Acting governor Sean Burns is here. So is French consul Michel Dancoisne-Martineau.

There is no inscription on the tomb. The French had wanted it to read "Napoleon 1769-1821", but the British insisted that "Bonaparte" be added, which was apparently a deal-breaker.

In the end, they agreed to leave the stone blank.

One of the schoolchildren steps forward - I had expected them all to - and utters a single sentence in French: "Napoleon, we will remember you!"

Remembering Napoleon is currently of great importance to St Helena. The island has invested a lot of hope, and no small amount of time and money, in the idea that its cottage Bonaparte industry has the makings of a considerable tourist draw. Next year marks the bicentenary of Napoleon's arrival on the island and the beginning of a whopping six years of planned activities that will culminate in 2021 with the 200th anniversary of his death.

At the heart of the bicentenary preparations is the full-scale restoration of Napoleon's island home, Longwood House, high up on the island's central plateau where the trade winds are cold and cruel, and where one feels one could touch the passing clouds with one's fingertips.

A few days after Napoleon's memorial, our tour guide, Ivy, meets us at the door of Longwood House and ushers us into the green-walled billiard room. She is a tiny woman in a black T-shirt with Napoleon's glowering face printed on it in white. (When she defends his height as being "average", one suspects it's because she's got a personal stake in the argument.) Her mode of delivery is that of seniors-turned- tour-guides the world over: she's learnt the facts by rote and retains them the same way, leaving little room for inspiration and none at all for personal style. A former teacher, she started giving Napoleon tours in 2006, in order to "keep the old brain working".

The room in which Napoleon died is long and narrow. Indeed, it feels more like a hallway than a room. His bed is characteristically short - Ivy insists that this has more to do with the way people slept in those days than with the man's stature - and his death mask sits next to it on a bedside table. He looks a little like Brando in Apocalypse Now.

"It's not a proper likeness," Ivy says. "It was cast too late, nearly 48 hours after his death." Indeed, no one quite knew where to source the plaster for the mask, and the first suggestion was a ham-fisted one. Someone raided the local cemetery for statues, grinding them down, desecrating the graves they'd been taken from and producing no plaster worthy of the name. While this was going on, the rats got to the body and even today you can see their signature: half of the emperor's right ear is missing.

The building is more sparsely furnished than usual. As part of the restoration, about 32 pieces of period furniture, including a pool table and two floor-stand globes, have been shipped to Paris to be returned to their former glory by Amael Gohier, one of France's leading restorers, and will be exhibited in the Esplanade des Invalides before returning to St Helena in mid-2017.

Gohier, meanwhile, has run several courses on the island itself and a number of locals are now employed to restore other pieces of furniture in a purpose-built workshop on-site.

All this may seem a curious courtesy to extend to a man who frankly hated the island. He certainly expended no end of effort, ink or breath on his contempt for the place, telling anyone who would listen that the climate was killing him, his house allowed people to spy on him, and that then governor Lowe was a vindictive boob. All of which may have actually been true.

The explanation may have something to do with the imminent completion and opening, in 2016, of St Helena's first airport and the concomitant understanding of the island's authorities that it is going to have to get tourists here somehow.

The island's most unique selling point - its isolation and difficulty to get to - is precisely the one that the airport will render null and void.

Bonaparte's bicentenary falls at precisely the right time for the island, at the very beginning of a new era, and thus the great man, whatever he may have thought of the place, is being enlisted to play his part. Once more unto the breach.

Not that the locals think Napoleon particularly great, of course. Indeed, for all the pomp and circumstance of the memorial service - or at least the affectation of pomp and circumstance - and for all the effort and money sunk into the next six years, it sometimes seems that St Helena holds its most famous resident in about as high regard as he held it.

At the end of the Longwood House tour, looking over the various photos of royal and official visits over the years, I chance to ask Ivy what she thinks of Napoleon personally.

"Well," she says, "he's not my man. I always liked Nelson. I went for Nelson at school. I always thought Napoleon was a lot like Hitler.

"I do read the stories about what happened in this house and about his life on St Helena and I do feel sorry for him. And I'm ultimately glad that they sent him here, because now we've got people like you visiting.

"But it's like they say; if you kill one man, you're a murderer, if you kill a thousand, you're a hero."