Île-d'Aix (pronounced [il dɛks]) is a commune in the French department of Charente-Maritime, region of Nouvelle-Aquitaine (before 2015: Poitou-Charentes), off the west coast of France.

During the French Revolution, in 1794, the island was used as a prison for the suppression of religious opponents in which hundreds of priests were left to die in moored prison-boats.

On the night of 11 April 1809, Captain Thomas Cochrane led a British fireship attack against a squadron of French warships anchored in the Basque Roads.

[4] From 12 to 15 July 1815, after the defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon spent his last days in France at Île d'Aix, in an attempt to slip past a Royal Navy blockade and escape to North America.

Realising the impossibility of accomplishing his plan, he wrote a letter to the British regent[5] and finally surrendered to HMS Bellerophon, which took him to Torbay and Plymouth before he was transferred to Saint Helena.

The Algerian independentist and future President Ben Bella was imprisoned there from 1956 to 1962, together with other National Liberation Front militants such as Mohamed Khider and Hocine Aït Ahmed.

Altesse royale, en butte aux factions qui divisent mon pays et à l'inimitié des plus grandes puissances de l'Europe, j'ai consommé une carrière politique, et je viens, comme Thémistocle, m'asseoir au foyer du peuple Britannique.

Your royal highness, confronted with the various factions that divide my country, and with the enmity of the greatest nations of Europe, my political career has come to an end, and here I come, like Themistocles, to sit at the hearth of the British people.