A Contested Relic: Tracing the Object Sold as Napoleon's Penis

The object at the center of this story is reported to be about an inch and a half long,¹ has been kept out of sight for most of the past century, and has never been shown to belong to the man whose name it carries. What can be traced is its paper trail: a chain of heirs, dealers, auction rooms and private owners stretching from a Corsican village in the 1820s to a family in New Jersey. That chain says a good deal about how relics of famous people were made, priced and believed, and about how human remains became merchandise. It says much less about Napoleon.

An autopsy with many witnesses

Napoleon died in exile on St. Helena on May 5, 1821. By his own account, his physician, Francesco Antommarchi, first took a plaster cast of the face and then opened the body; the valet Saint-Denis, whose recollections are discussed below, placed the casting after the autopsy.²³ In his published account Antommarchi lists who watched: the executors Bertrand, Montholon and Marchand, Sir Thomas Reade, several staff officers, and a group of medical men, “together eight in number, whom I had invited.”² He records that Napoleon had wished his hair to be shared among his family, that the head was shaved for that purpose, and that he hoped to carry the heart and stomach to Europe but was refused and had to place them in the coffin.²

Louis Etienne Saint-Denis, the valet known as Ali, described the same scene in recollections he left in manuscript at his death in 1856.³ His version adds details that matter here. The chaplain, Abbé Ange Paul Vignali, served as secretary while the body was measured and described. The bloodstained cloth from the table was cut up afterward and the pieces were shared out among those present, with the English taking the largest part. And at one moment when the British observers were not watching, Antommarchi “had taken two little pieces from a rib which he had given to M. Vignaly and Coursot,” the butler.³

So small portions of the body did leave the room, by the account of someone who was there. But neither Antommarchi nor Saint-Denis says anything about the removal of the genitals. That silence is the first and most important fact about the relic.

The chaplain’s share

Vignali was one of two Corsican priests sent to St. Helena to establish a chapel at Longwood, and he gave Napoleon the last sacrament.⁴ Antommarchi records the moment, writing that Vignali stayed alone with the dying man and then told the others he had administered the viaticum.² Napoleon’s will left the abbé 100,000 francs, asking him to build a house in Corsica, and entrusted him with the consecrated vessels of the Longwood chapel, to be passed to Napoleon’s son.²

According to the catalogue later printed by the dealers who sold his collection, Napoleon’s companions divided among themselves the belongings not assigned by the will, and a share went to Vignali.⁴ He returned to Corsica at the end of 1821, rebuilt his house, and was killed in a vendetta in 1828. His sister Roxane Vignali Gianettini inherited his estate, and after her the collection passed to her son, Charles-Marie Gianettini. According to the catalogue, Gianettini attested in a notarial act that the objects had been kept intact in the family house at Bisinchi, and a notarial document drawn up in 1916 listed and described every item.⁴

From Corsica to Philadelphia

The London booksellers Maggs Bros. bought the collection from the family, according to the Rosenbach Museum and to the book historian Jeremy Norman, who dates that purchase to 1916.⁵⁶ In 1924 Maggs sold it to the Philadelphia dealer A. S. W. Rosenbach, best known for rare books and manuscripts, for £400, then about $2,000.⁶ Contemporary reports of the sale named only Gianettini as the seller, so the exact sequence remains slightly unclear.⁴⁷

Time reported the purchase in May 1924. The collection, it said, numbered about 40 pieces, half of them documents, and included a death mask, a silver cup, silver cutlery engraved with the imperial arms, a shirt and waistcoats, and chapel vestments. Last in its list came “the most gruesome relic, a mummified tendon taken from the ex-Emperor’s body during the postmortem.”⁷

The Rosenbach Company’s own printed description of the collection used the same phrase, “mummified tendon,” for item 9. It then made the claim on which the relic’s reputation has rested ever since: that its authenticity had been confirmed by the posthumous publication, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, of a memoir by Saint-Denis “in which he expressly states that he and Vignali took away small pieces of Napoleon’s corpse during the autopsy.”⁴ The catalogue did not name the object as a penis. That identification appears in later accounts of the object.

What the memoir says

Saint-Denis’s recollections, which the catalogue invoked, can be read today. In the 1922 English translation of Saint-Denis’s recollections, the only removal of tissue he describes is Antommarchi’s taking of two small rib fragments, given to Vignali and to the butler Coursot.³ He does not say that he took anything himself, and he does not mention the genitals. If the catalogue’s summary rests on this passage, it stretched it: rib fragments became “small pieces of Napoleon’s corpse,” and an unnamed piece of tissue from a Corsican estate acquired the authority of an eyewitness.

None of this proves that the object is not what it is said to be. It does mean that the documents cited in its favor do not support the specific claim. Neither eyewitness account cited here records its removal, and nothing links the object in the Vignali collection to the autopsy except family tradition and the catalogue’s reading of a source that says something different.

On display in New York, 1927

Rosenbach kept the relic in a box of blue morocco and velvet.⁶ In 1927 the Vignali collection was shown to the public by Rosenbach at New York’s Museum of French Art.⁵⁶ A journalist covering the show described the visitors’ reactions and the object itself, seen in a glass case: “something looking like a maltreated strip of buckskin shoelace or shrivelled eel,” as the Rosenbach’s assistant curator later quoted it.⁵ Time has identified the remark as its own.⁸

Perrottet has described the 1927 showing as the object’s only public display.¹ Rosenbach’s biographers recorded his delight in talking about the relics, but the collection did not sell easily.⁵⁶ The collection stayed in the Rosenbach Company’s stock for 23 years, until the collector Donald Hyde bought it in 1947.⁶ As the Rosenbach Museum notes, the object never entered its own institutional collection.⁵

Unsold, then dispersed

After Donald Hyde died in 1966, his widow, Mary Hyde, passed the collection to John Fleming, Rosenbach’s successor in the trade, who sold it to the dealer Bruce Gimelson for $35,000.⁶ About eight years before the Paris sale described below, which places it around 1969, Gimelson consigned it to Christie’s in London to be sold as a single lot, with a reserve equal to what he had paid, and no buyer met it.⁶ In 1977 he tried again at Drouot Rive Gauche in Paris. On this occasion the lots were sold separately, and the object was bought by John K. Lattimer, former chairman of urology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, for the equivalent of about $3,000.⁶⁸ By the account of the writer Tony Perrottet, the French government was given the opportunity to buy it and declined.¹

Lattimer was an eminent physician. He chaired Columbia’s urology department for 25 years, helped establish pediatric urology as a discipline, and developed a cure for renal tuberculosis.⁹¹⁰ As an Army doctor he treated Nazi defendants at Nuremberg, and in 1972 the Kennedy family chose him as the first nongovernmental specialist to review the medical evidence in the president’s assassination.¹⁰ He also collected military, medical and historical memorabilia throughout his life.⁹ His collection included a bloodstained collar associated with Abraham Lincoln and a vial connected with Hermann Goering’s suicide.¹

According to Perrottet, Lattimer bought the object to keep it off the market: “He thought that fun was being poked at it, that it was an object of derision.”¹ He kept it privately and declined requests to see it.¹ Lattimer died on May 10, 2007, at age 92.⁹ His daughter Evan inherited the object and has reportedly received at least one offer of $100,000.⁸¹¹ In 2014 she described her father’s view: “Dad believed that urology should be proper and decent and not a joke.”¹¹ She has allowed about ten people to see it and has not permitted it to be photographed or filmed.¹¹

Authenticity and the ethics of keeping remains

The case for authenticity rests on three things: the object’s continuous ownership from the Vignali family onward, the reputation of the dealers who handled it, and the 1924 catalogue’s appeal to the Saint-Denis memoir. The first two establish provenance from 1916, not from 1821. The third, as shown above, does not say what the catalogue claimed. Statements that X-rays and examinations confirmed what the object is anatomically come from its owner, and no published study comparing it with Napoleon’s DNA was found in preparing this article.¹¹ Its origin remains unproven.

Its history fits a much older pattern. As the St. Helena accounts show, the body of a famous person could be divided at death into keepsakes of hair, cloth and fragments of bone, which then moved through families and markets as both mementos and goods. Napoleon himself arranged for his hair to be given away, and those present at the autopsy took away scraps of the cloth as keepsakes.²³ Earlier centuries had traded human tissue as medicine, a practice discussed in our article on corpse medicine in early modern England. By the twentieth century, remains of the famous had become collectors’ items whose value depended on a story as much as on the material.

Attitudes have shifted since then. In 2011, when Time listed this object among famous body parts taken from the dead, the occasion was the return by a museum in Rouen of a preserved Maori head to New Zealand after more than a century as an exhibit.⁸ Seen alongside such cases, the relic sold under Napoleon’s name is less a curiosity than a record of how human remains were bought, displayed and kept, and of how readily a dealer’s description could stand in for evidence.

Footnotes

1. NPR, July 2, 2008. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

2. Antommarchi 1825, vol. II, account of the last days and autopsy, and the text of the will. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

3. Saint-Denis 1922, introduction and ch. XVIII, “The Death.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

4. Rosenbach Company 1924, introductory pages and item 9. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

5. Haas 2012, Rosenblog. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

6. Norman, HistoryofInformation.com, entry 2290. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

7. Time, May 12, 1924. ↩ ↩²

8. Shay 2011, Time. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

9. CUAJ 2007, 1(3), 348. ↩ ↩² ↩³

10. Associated Press, May 16, 2007. ↩ ↩²

11. Alexander 2014, The Independent. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴