Napoleon: A Life

by Andrew Roberts

The architect Pierre Fontaine, who decorated and refurbished many of the Napoleonic palaces, thought it ‘incredible in a man of his position’ that he should speak with such a thick accent.

As part of his active policy of Gallicization of the island’s elite, in 1770 Marbeuf issued an edict declaring that all Corsicans who could prove two centuries of nobility would be allowed to enjoy the extensive privileges of the French noblesse.

Although titles had little purchase in Corsica, where there was no feudalism, Carlo applied for the right of the Bonapartes to be recognized as one of the island’s seventy-eight noble families, and on September 13, 1771 the Corsican Superior Council, having traced the family back to its Florentine roots, declared its official admission into the noblesse.

Napoleon’s education in France made him French.

His weakest subject was German, which he never mastered; another weak subject, surprisingly for someone who so adored ancient history, was Latin.

On the very last page of his school exercise book, following a long list of British imperial possessions, he noted: ‘Sainte-Hélène: petite île.’

For Napoleon, the desire to emulate Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar was not strange. His schooling opened to him the possibility that he might one day stand alongside the giants of the past.

(He reminisced in later years about how he was attacked by a Cossack in 1814 during the battle of Brienne very close to the tree under which as a schoolboy he had read Jerusalem Delivered, Tasso’s epic poem about the First Crusade.)

Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, one of the biggest bestsellers of the eighteenth century, which had influenced him so much as a boy, argued that one should follow one’s authentic feelings rather than society’s norms, an attractive notion for any teenager, particularly a dreamer of ferocious ambition.

September 15, 1784.

the École Royale Militaire in Paris,

(Defeat had been, as it is so often in history, the mother of reform.)

His father’s early death may also in part explain Napoleon’s own drive and boundless energy; he suspected, correctly, that his own lifespan would be short.

This letter is interesting not just for its laudable filial feeling, but for the fact that Napoleon still considered France ‘a foreign country’.

‘l’affaire de la pépinière’,

September 1785,

Valence,

sometimes he had to skip meals in order to afford books, which he continued to read with the same voracious appetite as before.

The list of books from which Napoleon made detailed notes from 1786 to 1791 is long, and includes histories of the Arabs, Venice, the Indies, England, Turkey, Switzerland and the Sorbonne.

It was a curious, indeed treasonous, document for an officer in the French army to write, but Napoleon had idolized Paoli since his schooldays, and from the ages of nine to seventeen he had been largely alone in France, recalling an idealized Corsica.

Napoleon was a writer manqué, penning around sixty essays, novellas, philosophical pieces, histories, treatises, pamphlets and open letters before the age of twenty-six.

he moved from a committed Corsican nationalist in the 1780s to an avowed anti-Paolist French officer who by 1793 wanted the Corsican revolt to be crushed by Jacobin France.

Despite being taught by monks, he was never a true Christian, being unconvinced by the divinity of Jesus.

Later he was sometimes seen to cross himself before battle,77 and, as we shall see, he certainly also knew the social utility of religion.

an Enlightenment sceptic.

The French Revolution, which broke out on July 14, 1789 when a Parisian mob stormed the state prison, the Bastille, was preceded by years of financial crises and turmoil

the Estates-General of France was called on May 5,

On August 26 the National Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and on October 6 the Palace of Versailles was stormed by the mob.

With the advent of the Revolution, and the return of Paoli to Corsica in July 1790, Napoleon’s divided loyalties could not endure much longer. He was going to have to choose.

When in January 1790 the National Assembly passed a decree at Saliceti’s urging making Corsica a department of France, Napoleon supported the move.

July 1790 saw the sixty-five-year-old Paoli’s return to Corsica after twenty-two years in exile.

Montesquieu: ‘Laws are like the statues of certain divinities which on some occasions must be veiled.’

As the Paolists started to fall out with the Paris government, the Bonapartes stayed loyal to the National Assembly

There was nothing he valued so much as books and a good education.

Between February and August 1791

‘You return to your homeland after an absence of four years: you wander round the sites, the places where you played in those first tender years … You feel all the fire of love for the homeland.’

In June 1791 Napoleon was promoted to lieutenant and transferred to the 4th Regiment of Artillery back at Valence.

January and March 1792

In July 1792 Napoleon was promoted to captain, ante-dated by a year with full pay, but without being assigned a new post.

By this time he was a fully-fledged revolutionary, as his support for the overthrow of the monarchy and the nationalization of Corsica’s monasteries attested.

Politically he veered towards the Jacobin extremists, who moreover seemed to be on the winning side.

Napoleon was in Paris on June 20, 1792 when the mob invaded the Tuileries, captured Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and forced the king to wear a red cap of liberty on the palace balcony.

His friend’s house was stuffed with the property of aristocrats who had been forced to sell their belongings at a heavy discount before fleeing France.

When he himself moved into the Tuileries seven years later he had the bullet holes from that day effaced from the building.

On September 21, 1792 France formally declared itself a Republic

the battle of Valmy

simply because the politics of France and of Corsica had profoundly changed and so too had his place within them.

It was impossible for Napoleon to remain a Corsican patriot when the man who personified Corsican nationalism rejected him and his family so comprehensively.

Through his reading, education, time in Paris and immersion in French culture, Napoleon had been imbued with French ideas even while he was still a zealous Corsican nationalist.

When, years later, a mayor attempted to compliment him by saying, ‘It is surprising, Sire, that though you are not a Frenchman, you love France so well, and have done so much for her,’ Napoleon said, ‘I felt as if he had struck me a blow! I turned my back on him.’