"That was after Napoleon died because there is still a controversy as to whether Napoleon was poisoned with arsenic. And the French say the British did it and the British say the French did it, but he died before the test for arsenic was available"
About this Quote
The specific intent is twofold. First, he’s flexing expertise in a way that plays well on camera: the celebrity pathologist as the guy who can pierce myth with method. Second, he’s gently mocking how national rivalries colonize even a corpse. “The French say...” “the British say...” reads like a script for endless, self-serving blame, with Baden standing outside it, armed with the anticlimax that neither side could have proven anything at the time.
Subtext: people crave courtroom clarity from eras that operated on rumor, politics, and incomplete evidence. Arsenic becomes less a toxin than a metaphor for how history gets contaminated - by pride, by propaganda, by the desire to turn ambiguity into indictment. Baden’s final clause lands like a shrug with a scalpel behind it: if your argument depends on tests that didn’t exist, you’re not doing justice, you’re doing theater.
Contextually, it’s also a defense of modern forensics as cultural authority. Baden isn’t just solving deaths; he’s staking a claim that science can discipline storytelling, even when the story is Napoleon.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite | Cite this Quote |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Baden, Michael. (n.d.). That was after Napoleon died because there is still a controversy as to whether Napoleon was poisoned with arsenic. And the French say the British did it and the British say the French did it, but he died before the test for arsenic was available. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/that-was-after-napoleon-died-because-there-is-168107/
Chicago Style
Baden, Michael. "That was after Napoleon died because there is still a controversy as to whether Napoleon was poisoned with arsenic. And the French say the British did it and the British say the French did it, but he died before the test for arsenic was available." FixQuotes. Accessed February 1, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/that-was-after-napoleon-died-because-there-is-168107/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"That was after Napoleon died because there is still a controversy as to whether Napoleon was poisoned with arsenic. And the French say the British did it and the British say the French did it, but he died before the test for arsenic was available." FixQuotes, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/that-was-after-napoleon-died-because-there-is-168107/. Accessed 1 Feb. 2026.
