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“reality after he won the battle of Pedicoste in 1763. The man the Corsicans nicknamed Il Babbù (Daddy) quickly set about reforming the island’s financial, legal and educational systems, built roads, started a printing press and brought something approaching harmony between the island’s competing clans of powerful families. The young Napoleon grew up revering Paoli as a lawgiver, reformer and genuinely benevolent dictator. Genoa had no appetite for the fight that she knew would be required to reassert her authority over Corsica, and reluctantly sold the island to King Louis XV of France for 40 million francs in January 1768.”
― Andrew Roberts, Napoleon the Great

“The Italian city-state of Genoa had nominally ruled Corsica for over two centuries, but rarely tried to extend her control beyond the coastal towns into the mountainous interior, where the Corsicans were fiercely independent. In 1755 Corsica’s charismatic nationalist leader, Pasquale Paoli, proclaimed an independent republic, a notion that became”
― Andrew Roberts, Napoleon the Great

“Napoleon’s rise through the ranks was therefore by no means unique given the political and military circumstances of the day.73 Still, his progress was impressive: he had spent five and a half years as a second-lieutenant, a year as a lieutenant, sixteen months as a captain, only three months as a major and no time at all as a colonel. On December 22, 1793, having been on leave for fifty-eight of his ninety-nine months of service – with and without permission – and after spending less than four years on active duty, Napoleon was made, at twenty-four, a general.”
― Andrew Roberts, Napoleon the Great

“Despite hating mobs and technically being a nobleman, Napoleon welcomed the Revolution. At least in its early stages it accorded well with the Enlightenment ideals he had ingested from his reading of Rousseau and Voltaire.”
― Andrew Roberts, Napoleon the Great