The relic called Napoleon’s penis: a collection history with an uncertain identity

A disputed relic and its sales history

The object commonly called Napoleon's penis has been exhibited, bought and discussed for more than a century. That modern history is easier to establish than the claim at its centre: that Napoleon's genitalia were removed after his death on Saint Helena in 1821 and survived as this particular relic.

The collection was associated with Abbé Vignali, the priest who attended Napoleon near the end of his life.^[1] In 1916, Vignali's descendants sold Napoleonic objects to a British bookseller.^[1] The American dealer A. S. W. Rosenbach acquired the collection in 1924, and the disputed object appeared in a New York exhibition in 1927.^[1]

A review of the story by The Straight Dope distinguishes those transactions from the accounts of the autopsy. Contemporary descriptions do not establish the removal of a penis; later references to pieces of tissue are not equivalent to an unambiguous identification.^[1] An object's association with authentic possessions cannot authenticate every claim made about it.

The collection's movements are a chain of ownership claims, not a continuous anatomical record. A dealer could establish that an object came from a group associated with Vignali while leaving its identity unresolved. The exhibition and sales show that people treated it as a relic; they do not establish what was removed in 1821.

Dated custody and proposed testing

Urologist John K. Lattimer bought the relic in 1977.^[1] Channel 4's account of its 2014 documentary described his daughter Evan as its owner and reported that a proposed DNA comparison was abandoned because she did not want destructive sampling.^[2] That is a dated account, not proof of who possesses it today.

What the 2022 fragment analysis claimed

There is also a later scientific claim. A 2022 paper by Gérard Lucotte and Stéphan Borensztajn reported examining supplied fragments and argued for a Napoleonic origin using mitochondrial DNA.^[3] Yet its own material analysis described the fragments as more likely tendon or cartilage than penile tissue.^[3] The authors also reported a subsequent sale.^[3] Their conclusions should be attributed, rather than used to claim that the popular story has been conclusively proved.

The 2022 analysis requires particular caution because it examined supplied fragments. Evidence about those fragments must be connected to the object whose history is being told, and identifying a person's biological material is not the same as identifying an organ. The authors' tissue description complicates the popular label rather than simply confirming it.

Provenance, biological identity and attribution to a named person are separate questions. The relic's unusual sales history is real historical material; the label attached to it remains a claim that needs those distinctions.