DNA test denied to solve Boney riddle

France's defence ministry has turned down a historian's request to exhume Napoleon's remains for DNA testing, a move that might have put paid to a growing suspicion that the body buried in Paris is not in fact Boney's.

"The theories that raise doubts about the identity of the body interred in Les Invalides do not, for the time being, hold sufficient weight," the ministry said in a letter quoted by the daily Libération.

Bruno Rey-Henri, a lawyer and historian, had asked for the corpse of the diminutive Corsican-born emperor to be dug up after concluding in a book published last year that DNA testing was the only way to resolve the increasingly heated 30-year old debate.

Mr Rey-Henri, backed by an increasing number of specialists, says there are too many inconsistencies surrounding Napoleon's original burial on the remote Atlantic island of St Helena in May 1821, and the body's later exhumation and transfer to Paris in 1840.

He says Napoleon's real remains were probably spirited away to Westminster Abbey by the emperor's perfidious British captors, and that the body buried in Paris was actually that of his maitre-d'hotel, one Jean-Baptiste Cipriani.

As evidence, the historians cite witnesses' reports from 1821 and 1840 that suggest the body had at least been tampered with: his Legion d'Honneur and vases containing his heart and stomach were found to have moved, and during the exhumation, the body's teeth were described as "exceptionally white", whereas at the initial burial they were reported as "most villainous".

At least one of the several known examples of Bonaparte's death mask is also said to bear a striking resemblance to the unfortunate Cipriani.

Less sensational souls argue that a number of people who knew Napoleon were on hand at both ceremonies to confirm the body's identity.

DNA tests carried out two years ago on a lock of the emperor's hair appeared to lend weight to the theory that he died of arsenic poisoning in British captivity, not cancer as the textbooks say.

Claims that the great man may still be alive are, thankfully, generally discounted.