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1816. In London, Dr Warden, surgeon on the ship that took the Emperor to St Helena, published letters about his alleged conversations with the Emperor. Great success. Napoleon understood the advantage he could take from this. In 1817-1818, he clandestinely wrote and published three successive writings in English - Les Lettres du Cap, Les Lettres d’un capitaine de bateau, enfin le Manuscrit de l’île d’Elbe - with the same London publisher, under the noses of Governor Hudson Lowe and the British cabinet, who never knew how these texts had reached England. The echo was resounding, but the name of the real author was never discovered before his death in 1821. Changing his style from one book to the next, Napoleon deals successively with episodes of his epic, the conditions of his detention or his legitimacy as a sovereign, and reveals his exceptional genius for communication on the only battlefield left to him, that of opinion. He emerged victorious one last time. These texts have recently been republished thanks to the edition established by Pierre Branda in a new volume under the title Écrits clandestins de Sainte-Hélène of the “Bibliothèque de Sainte-Hélène”, founded and directed by Thierry Lentz (Perrin Editions). In this paper, Pierre Branda reviews the genesis and distribution of these three clandestine writings.