Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © Adam Zamoyski 2018

Cover photograph © Getty Images

Adam Zamoyski asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Maps by Martin Brown

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Source ISBN: 9780008116071

Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008116088

Version: 2018-08-28

Dedication

In memory

of

GILLON AITKEN

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

List of Illustrations

List of Maps

Family Tree

Map

Preface

1 A Reluctant Messiah

2 Insular Dreams

3 Boy Soldier

4 Freedom

5 Corsica

6 France or Corsica

7 The Jacobin

8 Adolescent Loves

9 General Vendémiaire

10 Italy

11 Lodi

12 Victory and Legend

13 Master of Italy

14 Eastern Promise

15 Egypt

16 Plague

17 The Saviour

18 Fog

19 The Consul

20 Consolidation

21 Marengo

22 Caesar

23 Peace

24 The Liberator of Europe

25 His Consular Majesty

26 Towards Empire

27 Napoleon I

28 Austerlitz

29 The Emperor of the West

30 Master of Europe

31 The Sun Emperor

32 The Emperor of the East

33 The Cost of Power

34 Apotheosis

35 Apogee

36 Blinding Power

37 The Rubicon

38 Nemesis

39 Hollow Victories

40 Last Chance

41 The Wounded Lion

42 Rejection

43 The Outlaw

44 A Crown of Thorns

Notes

Picture Section

Bibliography

Index

Also by Adam Zamoyski

About the Author

About the Publisher

Illustrations

Napoleon’s mother Letizia Bonaparte in 1800, by Jean-Baptiste Greuze. (Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo)

Two sketches of Bonaparte by Jacques-Louis David. (Sketches of Napoleon Bonaparte, 1797 (pencil), David, Jacques-Louis (1748–1825)/Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Palais Massena, Nice, France/Bridgeman Images)

Bonaparte during the Italian campaign of 1796, by Giuseppe Longhi. (Paul Fearn/Alamy Stock Photo)

Bonaparte leading his troops across the bridge at Arcole, by Antoine-Jean Gros. (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

Bonaparte in 1797, by Francesco Cossia. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Josephine Bonaparte in 1797, by Andrea Appiani. (ART Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)

Auguste Marmont, by Georges Rouget. (Wikimedia Commons)

Andoche Junot, by David. (© President and Fellows of Harvard College)

Joachim Murat. (ART Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)

Josephine’s son Eugène de Beauharnais, by Gros. (Hirarchivum Press/Alamy Stock Photo)

Napoleon’s younger sister Pauline, by Jean Jacques Thérésa de Lusse. (flickr/lost gallery/Pauline Bonaparte, Princess Borghese/De Lusse/CC by 2.0)

Bonaparte visiting plague victims at Jaffa during his Syrian campaign, by Gros. (Photo by Archiv Gerstenberg/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

Joseph Bonaparte. (Photo by Stefano Bianchetti/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, by Nicolas Joseph Jouy. (Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo)

Napoleon’s younger brother Lucien, by François-Xavier Fabre, c.1808. (ART Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)

Bonaparte in 1800, by Louis Léopold Boilly. (Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) Premier Consul (oil on canvas), Boilly, Louis Léopold (1761–1845)/Private Collection/Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Images)

The house in the rue de la Victoire. (Photo 12/Alamy Stock Photo)

The Tuileries, c.1860. (Photo by LL/Roger Viollet/Getty Images)

Jean-Jacques-Régis Cambacérès, by Greuze, 1805. (Cambacérès/Photo © CCI/Bridgeman Images)

Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand in 1804, by David. (Photo Josse/Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images)

Joseph Fouché. (Portrait of Joseph Fouché (1759–1820) Duke of Otranto, 1813 (oil on canvas), French School, (19th century)/Château de Versailles, France/Bridgeman Images)

Josephine’s daughter Hortense de Beauharnais, by François Gérard. (Paul Fearn/Alamy Stock Photo)

The Château of Malmaison, by Henri Courvoisier-Voisin. (Photo Josse/Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images)

Napoleon’s younger brother Louis in 1809, by Charles Howard Hodges. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Napoleon crossing the Alps in 1802, by David. (Photo by GraphicaArtis/Getty Images)

The Emperor Napoleon I in 1805, by David. (Photo Josse/Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images)

A fragment of David’s painting of the coronation, showing Joseph, Louis, Napoleon’s three sisters, Hortense and her son Napoléon-Charles. (Photo Josse/Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images)

Napoleon’s youngest brother Jérôme, 1805. (Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, xx.5.52)

Napoleon at Eylau, by Gros (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

Marshal Jean Lannes, by Gérard. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

General Armand de Caulaincourt, sketched in 1805 by David. (Portrait of Armand Augustin Louis. Marquis de Caulaincourt (1772–1827) (pencil on paper) (b/w photo), David, Jacques Louis (1748–1825)/Musée des Beaux-Arts, Besancon, France/Bridgeman Images)

General Géraud-Christophe Duroc, by Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson. (Portrait of Duroc, Grand Marshal of the Palace (oil on canvas), Girodet de Roucy-Trioson, Anne Louis (1767–1824)/Musée Bonnat, Bayonne, France/Bridgeman Images)

Napoleon I in 1806, by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. (Photo Josse/Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images)

View of the proposed palace for the King of Rome, by Pierre-François Fontaine. (From Projets d’architecture, plan number 32, France, 19th century/De Agostini Picture Library/Bridgeman Images)

Napoleon en famille, by Alexandre Menjaud. (Napoleon I (1769–1821), Marie Louise (1791–1847) and the King of Rome (1811–73) 1812 (oil on canvas), Menjaud, Alexandre (1773–1832)/Château de Versailles, France/Bridgeman Images)

Napoleon in early 1812, by David. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)

Napoleon on the bridge of HMS Bellerophon, by Charles Lock Eastlake, 1815. (Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo)

The house at Longwood on St Helena, where Napoleon spent his last years. (Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images)

Napoleon on St Helena, 1820. (Paul Fearn/Alamy Stock Photo)

Maps

Europe in 1792

Toulon

The Italian theatre

Montenotte

Lodi

The pursuit

Castiglione

Würmser outmanoeuvred

Arcole

Rivoli

The march on Vienna

The settlement of Campo Formio

Egypt

Europe in 1800

Marengo

Ulm

Austerlitz

The campaigns of 1806–07

Europe in 1808

Aspern–Essling

Wagram

Europe in 1812

The invasion of Russia

Borodino

The Berezina

The Saxon campaign, 1813

The defence of France in 1814

The Waterloo campaign

Family Tree

Map

Preface

A Polish home, English schools, and holidays with French cousins exposed me from an early age to violently conflicting visions of Napoleon – as godlike genius, Romantic avatar, evil monster or just nasty little dictator. In this crossfire of fantasy and prejudice I developed an empathy with each of these views without being able to agree with any of them.

Napoleon was a man, and while I understand how others have done, I can see nothing superhuman about him. Although he did exhibit some extraordinary qualities, he was in many ways a very ordinary man. I find it difficult to credit genius to someone who, for all his many triumphs, presided over the worst (and entirely self-inflicted) disaster in military history and single-handedly destroyed the great enterprise he and others had toiled so hard to construct. He was undoubtedly a brilliant tactician, as one would expect of a clever operator from a small-town background. But he was no strategist, as his miserable end attests.

Nor was Napoleon an evil monster. He could be as selfish and violent as the next man, but there is no evidence of him wishing to inflict suffering gratuitously. His motives were on the whole praiseworthy, and his ambition no greater than that of contemporaries such as Alexander I of Russia, Wellington, Nelson, Metternich, Blücher, Bernadotte and many more. What made his ambition so exceptional was the scope it was accorded by circumstance.

On hearing the news of his death, the Austrian dramatist Franz Grillparzer wrote a poem on the subject. He had been a student in Vienna when Napoleon bombarded the city in 1809, so he had no reason to like him, but in the poem he admits that while he cannot love him, he cannot bring himself to hate him; according to Grillparzer, Napoleon was but the visible symptom of the sickness of the times, and as such bore the blame for the sins of all. There is much truth in this view.1

In the half-century before Napoleon came to power, a titanic struggle for dominion saw the British acquire Canada, large swathes of India, a string of colonies, and aspire to lay down the law at sea; Austria grab provinces in Italy and Poland; Prussia increase in size by two-thirds; and Russia push her frontier 600 kilometres into Europe and occupy large areas of Central Asia, Siberia and Alaska, laying claims as far afield as California. Yet George III, Maria Theresa, Frederick William II and Catherine II are not generally accused of being megalomaniac monsters and compulsive warmongers.

Napoleon is frequently condemned for his invasion of Egypt, while the British occupation which followed, designed to guarantee colonial monopoly over India, is not. He is regularly blamed for re-establishing slavery in Martinique, while Britain applied it in its colonies for a further thirty years, and every other colonial power for several decades after that. His use of police surveillance and censorship is also regularly reproved, even though every other state in Europe emulated him, with varying degrees of discretion or hypocrisy.

The tone was set by the victors of 1815, who arrogated the role of defenders of a supposedly righteous social order against evil, and writing on Napoleon has been bedevilled ever since by a moral dimension, which has entailed an imperative to slander or glorify. Beginning with Stendhal, who claimed he could only write of Napoleon in religious terms, and no doubt inspired by Goethe, who saw his life as ‘that of a demi-god’, French and other European historians have struggled to keep the numinous out of their work, and even today it is tinged by a sense of awe. Until very recently, Anglo-Saxon historians have shown reluctance to allow an understanding of the spirit of the times to help them see Napoleon as anything other than an alien monster. Rival national mythologies have added layers of prejudice which many find hard to overcome.2

Napoleon was in every sense the product of his times; he was in many ways the embodiment of his epoch. If one wishes to gain an understanding of him and what he was about, one has to place him in context. This requires ruthless jettisoning of received opinion and nationalist prejudice, and dispassionate examination of what the seismic conditions of his times threatened and offered.

In the 1790s Napoleon entered a world at war, and one in which the very basis of human society was being questioned. It was a struggle for supremacy and survival in which every state on the Continent acted out of self-interest, breaking treaties and betraying allies shamelessly. Monarchs, statesmen and commanders on all sides displayed similar levels of fearful aggression, greed, callousness and brutality. To ascribe to any of the states involved a morally superior role is ahistorical humbug, and to condemn the lust for power is to deny human nature and political necessity.

For Aristotle power was, along with wealth and friendship, one of the essential components of individual happiness. For Hobbes, the urge to acquire it was not only innate but beneficent, as it led men to dominate and therefore organise communities, and no social organisation of any form could exist without the power of one or more individuals to order others.

Napoleon did not start the war that broke out in 1792 when he was a mere lieutenant and continued, with one brief interruption, until 1814. Which side was responsible for the outbreak and for the continuing hostilities is fruitlessly debatable, since responsibility cannot be laid squarely on one side or the other. The fighting cost lives, for which responsibility is often heaped on Napoleon, which is absurd, as all the belligerents must share the blame. And he was not as profligate with the lives of his own soldiers as some.

French losses in the seven years of revolutionary government (1792–99) are estimated at four to five hundred thousand; those during the fifteen years of Napoleon’s rule at just under twice as high, at eight to nine hundred thousand. Given that these figures include not only dead, wounded and sick, but also those reported as missing, whose numbers went up dramatically as his ventures took the armies further afield, it is clear that battle losses were lower under Napoleon than during the revolutionary period – despite the increasing use of heavy artillery and the greater size of the armies. The majority of those classed as missing were deserters who either drifted back home or settled in other countries. This is not to diminish the suffering or the trauma of the war, but to put it in perspective.3

My aim in this book is not to justify or condemn, but to piece together the life of the man born Napoleone Buonaparte, and to examine how he became ‘Napoleon’ and achieved what he did, and how it came about that he undid it.

In order to do so I have concentrated on verifiable primary sources, treating with caution the memoirs of those such as Bourrienne, Fouché, Barras and others who wrote principally to justify themselves or to tailor their own image, and have avoided using as evidence those of the duchesse d’Abrantès, which were written years after the events by her lover the novelist Balzac. I also ignore the various anecdotes regarding Napoleon’s birth and childhood, believing that it is immaterial as well as unprovable that he cried or not when he was born, that he liked playing with swords and drums as a child, had a childhood crush on some little girl, or that a comet was sighted at his birth and death. There are quite enough solid facts to deal with.

I have devoted more space in relative terms to Napoleon’s formative years than to his time in power, as I believe they hold the key to understanding his extraordinary trajectory. As I consider the military aspects only insofar as they produced an effect, on him and his career or the international situation, the reader will find my coverage very uneven. I give prominence to the first Italian campaign because it demonstrates the ways in which Napoleon was superior to his enemies and colleagues, and because it turned him into an exceptional being, both in his own eyes and those of others. Subsequent battles are of interest primarily for the use he made of them, while the Russian campaign is seminal to his decline and reveals the confusion in his mind which led to his political suicide. To those who would like to learn more about the battles I would recommend Andrew Roberts’s masterful Napoleon the Great. The battle maps in the text are similarly spare, and do not pretend to accuracy; they are designed to illustrate the essence of the action.

The subject is so vast that anyone attempting a life of Napoleon must necessarily rely on the work of many who have trawled through archives and on published sources. I feel hugely indebted to all those involved in the Fondation Napoléon’s new edition of Napoleon’s correspondence. I also owe a great deal to the work done over the past two decades by French historians in debunking the myths that have gained the status of truth and excising the carbuncles that have overgrown the verifiable facts during the past two centuries. Thierry Lentz and Jean Tulard stand out in this respect, but Pierre Branda, Jean Defranceschi, Patrice Gueniffey, Annie Jourdan, Aurélien Lignereux and Michel Vergé-Franceschi have also helped to blow away cobwebs and enlighten. Among Anglo-Saxon historians, Philip Dwyer has my gratitude for his brilliant work on Napoleon as propagandist, and Munro Price for his invaluable archival research on the last phase of his reign. The work of Michael Broers and Steven Englund is also noteworthy.

I owe a debt of thanks to Olivier Varlan for bibliographic guidance, and particularly for having let me see Caulaincourt’s manuscript on the Prussian and Russian campaigns of 1806–07; to Vincenz Hoppe for seeking out sources in Germany; to Hubert Czyżewski for assisting me in unearthing obscure sources in Polish libraries; to Laetitia Oppenheim for doing the same for me in France; to Carlo De Luca for alerting me to the existence of the diary of Giuseppe Mallardi; and to Angelika von Hase for helping me with German sources. I also owe thanks to Shervie Price for reading the typescript, and to the incomparable Robert Lacey for his sensitive editing.

Although at times I felt like cursing him, I would like to thank Detlef Felken for his implicit faith in suggesting I write this book, and Clare Alexander and Arabella Pike for their support. Finally, I must thank my wife Emma for putting up with me and encouraging me throughout what has been a challenging task.

Adam Zamoyski

1
A Reluctant Messiah

At noon on 10 December 1797 a thunderous discharge from a battery of guns echoed across Paris, opening yet another of the many grandiose festivals for which the French Revolution was so notable.

Although the day was cold and grey, crowds had been gathering around the Luxembourg Palace, the seat of the Executive Directory which governed France, and according to the Prussian diplomat Daniel von Sandoz-Rollin, ‘never had the cheering sounded more enthusiastic’. People lined the streets leading up to the palace in the hope of catching a glimpse of the hero of the day. But his reticence defeated them. At around ten o’clock that morning he had left his modest house on the rue Chantereine with one of the Directors who had come to fetch him in a cab. As it trundled through the streets, followed by several officers on horseback, he sat well back, seeming in the words of one English witness ‘to shrink from those acclamations which were then the voluntary offering of the heart’.1

They were indeed heartfelt. The people of France were tired after eight years of revolution and political struggle marked by violent lurches to the right or the left. They were sick of the war which had lasted for more than five years and which the Directory seemed unable to end. The man they were cheering, a twenty-eight-year-old general by the name of Bonaparte, had won a string of victories in Italy against France’s principal enemy, Austria, and forced her emperor to come to terms. The relief felt at the prospect of peace and the political stability it was hoped would ensue was accompanied by a subliminal sense of deliverance.

The Revolution which began in 1789 had unleashed boundless hopes of a new era in human affairs. These had been whipped up and manipulated by successive political leaders in a self-perpetuating power struggle, and people longed for someone who could put an end to it. They had read the Bulletins recounting this general’s deeds and his proclamations to the people of Italy, which contrasted sharply with the utterances of those ruling France. Many believed, or just hoped, that the longed-for man had come. The sense of exaltation engendered by the Revolution had been kept alive by overblown festivals, and this one was, according to one witness, as ‘magnifique’ as any.2

The great court of the Luxembourg Palace had been transformed for the occasion. A dais had been erected opposite the entrance, on which stood the indispensable ‘altar of the fatherland’ surmounted by three statues, representing Liberty, Equality and Peace. These were flanked by panoplies of enemy standards captured during the recent campaign, beneath which were placed seats for the five members of the Directory, one for its secretary-general, and more below them for the ministers. Beneath were places for the diplomatic corps, and to either side stretched a great amphitheatre for the members of the two legislative chambers and for the 1,200-strong choir of the Conservatoire. The courtyard was decked with tricolour flags and covered by an awning, turning it into a monumental tent.3

As the last echoes of the gun salute died away, the Directors emerged from a chamber in the depths of the palace, dressed in their ‘grand costume’. Designed by the painter Jacques-Louis David, this consisted of a blue velvet tunic heavily embroidered with gold thread and girded with a gold-tasselled white silk sash, white breeches and stockings, and shoes with blue bows. It was given a supposedly classical look by a voluminous red cloak with a white lace collar, a ‘Roman’ sword on a richly embroidered baldric, and a black felt hat adorned by a blue-white-red tricolour of three ostrich feathers.

The Directors took their place at the end of a cortège led by the commissioners of police, followed by magistrates, civil servants, the judiciary, teachers, members of the Institute of Arts and Sciences, officers, officials, the diplomatic representatives of foreign powers, and the ministers of the Directory. It was preceded by a band playing ‘the airs beloved of the French Republic’.4

The cortège snaked its way through the corridors of the palace and out into the courtyard, the various bodies taking their appointed seats. The members of the legislative chambers had already taken theirs. They wore costumes similar to that of the Directors, the ‘Roman’ look in their case sitting uneasily with their four-cornered caps, which were David’s homage to the heroes of the Polish revolution of 1794.

Having taken their seats, the Directors despatched an official to usher in the principal actors of the day’s festivities. The airs beloved of the French Republic had been superseded by a symphony performed by the orchestra of the Conservatoire, but this was rudely interrupted by shouts of ‘Vive Bonaparte!’, ‘Vive la Nation!’, ‘Vive le libérateur de l’Italie!’ and ‘Vive le pacificateur du continent!’ as a group of men entered the courtyard.

First came the ministers of war and foreign relations in their black ceremonial costumes. They were followed by a diminutive, gaunt figure in uniform, his lank hair dressed in the already unfashionable ‘dog’s ears’ flopping on either side of his face. His gauche movements ‘charmed every heart’, according to one onlooker. He was accompanied by three aides-de-camp, ‘all taller than him, but almost bowed by the respect they showed him’. There was a religious silence as the group entered the courtyard. Everyone present stood and uncovered themselves. Then the cheering broke out again. ‘The present elite of France applauded the victorious general, for he was the hope of everyone: republicans, royalists, all saw their present and future salvation in the support of his powerful arm.’ The dazzling military victories and diplomatic triumph he had achieved contrasted so strikingly with his puny stature, dishevelled appearance and unassuming manner that it was difficult not to believe he was inspired and guided by some higher power. The philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt was so impressed when he saw him, he thought he was contemplating an ideal of modern humanity.5

When the group reached the foot of the altar of the fatherland, the orchestra and choir of the Conservatoire struck up a ‘Hymn to Liberty’ composed by François-Joseph Gossec to the tune of the Catholic Eucharistic hymn O Salutaris Hostia, and the crowd joined in an emotionally charged rendition of what the official account of the proceedings described as ‘this religious couplet’. The Directors and assembled dignitaries took their seats, with the exception of the general himself. ‘I saw him decline placing himself in the chair of state which had been prepared for him, and seem as if he wished to escape from the general bursts of applause,’ recalled the English lady, who was full of admiration for the ‘modesty in his demeanour’. He had in fact requested that the ceremony be cancelled when he heard what was in store. But there was no escape.6

The Republic’s minister for foreign relations, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, limped forward in his orthopaedic shoe, his ceremonial sword and the plumes in his hat performing curious motions as he went. The President of the Directory had chosen him rather than the minister of war to present the reluctant hero. ‘It is not the general, it is the peacemaker, and above all the citizen that you must single out to praise here,’ he had written to Talleyrand. ‘My colleagues are terrified, not without reason, of military glory.’ This was true.7

‘No government has ever been so universally despised,’ an informant in France had written to his masters in Vienna only a couple of weeks before, assuring them that the first general with the courage to raise the standard of revolt would have half of the nation behind him. Many in Paris, at both ends of the political spectrum, were expecting General Bonaparte to make such a move, and in the words of one observer, ‘everyone seemed to be watching each other’. According to another, there were many present who would happily have strangled him.8

The forty-three-year-old ex-aristocrat and former bishop Talleyrand knew all this. He was used to shrouding his feelings with an impassive countenance, but his upturned nose and thin lips, curling up on the left-hand side in a way suggesting wry amusement, were well fitted to the speech he now delivered.

‘Citizen Directors,’ he began, ‘I have the honour to present to the executive Directory citizen Bonaparte, who comes bearing the ratification of the treaty of peace concluded with the emperor.’ While reminding those present that the peace was only the crowning glory of ‘innumerable marvels’ on the battlefield, he reassured the shrinking general that he would not dwell on his military achievements, leaving that to posterity, secure in the knowledge that the hero himself viewed them not as his own, but as those of France and the Revolution. ‘Thus, all Frenchmen have been victorious through Bonaparte; thus his glory is the property of all; thus there is no republican who cannot claim his part of it.’ The general’s extraordinary talents, which Talleyrand briefly ran through, were, he admitted, innate to him, but they were also in large measure the fruit of his ‘insatiable love of the fatherland and of humanity’. But it was his modesty, the fact that he seemed to ‘apologise for his own glory’, his extraordinary taste for simplicity, worthy of the heroes of classical antiquity, his love of the abstract sciences, his literary passion for ‘that sublime Ossian’ and ‘his profound contempt for show, luxury, ostentation, those paltry ambitions of common souls’ that were so striking, indeed alarming: ‘Oh! far from fearing what some would call his ambition, I feel that we will one day have to beg him to give up the comforts of his studious retreat.’ The general’s countless civic virtues were almost a burden to him: ‘All France will be free: it may be that he will never be, that is his destiny.’9

When the minister had concluded, the victim of destiny presented the ratified copy of the peace treaty to the Directors, and then addressed the assembly ‘with a kind of feigned nonchalance, as though he were trying to intimate that he little liked the regime under which he was called to serve’, in the words of one observer. According to another, he spoke ‘like a man who knows his worth’.10

In a few clipped sentences, delivered in an atrocious foreign accent, he attributed his victories to the French nation, which through the Revolution had abolished eighteen centuries of bigotry and tyranny, had established representative government and roused the other two great nations of Europe, the Germans and Italians, enabling them to embrace the ‘spirit of liberty’. He concluded, somewhat bluntly, that the whole of Europe would be truly free and at peace ‘when the happiness of the French people will be based on the best organic laws’.11

The response of the Directory to this equivocal statement was delivered by its president, Paul François Barras, a forty-two-year-old minor nobleman from Provence with a fine figure and what one contemporary described as the swagger of a fencing-master. He began with the usual flowery glorification of ‘the sublime revolution of the French nation’ before moving on to vaporous praise of the ‘peacemaker of the continent’, whom he likened to Socrates and hailed as the liberator of the people of Italy. General Bonaparte had rivalled Caesar, but unlike other victorious generals, he was a man of peace: ‘at the first word of a proposal of peace, you halted your triumphant progress, you laid down the sword with which the fatherland had armed you, and preferred to take up the olive branch of peace!’ Bonaparte was living proof ‘that one can give up the pursuit of victory without relinquishing greatness’.12

The address meandered off into a diatribe against those ‘vile Carthaginians’ (the British) who were the last obstacle standing in the way of a general peace which the new Rome (France) was striving to bestow on the Continent. Barras concluded by exhorting the general, ‘the liberator to whom outraged humanity calls out with plaintive appeals’, to lead an army across the Channel, whose waters would be proud to carry him and his men: ‘As soon as the tricolour standard is unfurled on its bloodied shores, a unanimous cry of benediction will greet your presence; and, seeing the dawn of approaching happiness, that generous nation will hail you as liberators who come not to fight and enslave it, but to put an end to its sufferings.’13

Barras then stepped forward with extended arms and in the name of the French nation embraced the general in a ‘fraternal accolade’. The other Directors did likewise, followed by the ministers and other dignitaries, after which the general was allowed to step down from the altar of the fatherland and take his seat. The choir intoned a hymn to peace written for the occasion by the revolutionary bard Marie-Joseph Chénier, set to music by Étienne Méhul.

The minister for war, General Barthélémy Scherer, a forty-nine-year-old veteran of several campaigns, then presented to the Directory two of Bonaparte’s aides bearing a huge white standard on which the triumphs of the Army of Italy were embroidered in gold thread. These included: the capture of 150,000 prisoners, 170 flags and over a thousand pieces of artillery, as well as some fifty ships; the conclusion of a number of armistices and treaties with various Italian states; the liberation of the people of most of northern Italy; and the acquisition for France of masterpieces by Michelangelo, Guercino, Titian, Veronese, Correggio, Caracci, Raphael, Leonardo and other works of art. Scherer praised the soldiers of the Army of Italy and particularly their commander, who had ‘married the audacity of Achilles to the wisdom of Nestor’.14

The guns thundered as Barras received the standard from the hands of the two officers, and in another interminable address, he returned to his anti-British theme. ‘May the palace of St. James crumble! The Fatherland wishes it, humanity demands it, vengeance commands it.’ After the two warriors had received the ‘fraternal accolade’ of the Directors and ministers, the ceremony closed with a rendition of the rousing revolutionary war hymn Le Chant du Départ, following which the Directors exited as they had come, and Bonaparte left, cheered by the multitude gathered outside, greatly relieved that it was all over.15

For all his apparent nonchalance, he had been treading warily throughout. The Directory had not welcomed the coming of peace. The war had paid for its armies and bolstered its finances, while the victories had deflected criticism of its domestic shortcomings. More important, war kept the army occupied and ambitious generals away from Paris. This peace had been made by Bonaparte in total disregard of the Directory’s instructions, and it was no secret that the Directors had been furious when they were presented with the draft treaty. A few days after receiving it, they had nominated Bonaparte commander of the Army of England, not because they believed in the possibility of a successful invasion, but because they wanted him away from Paris and committed to a venture which would surely undermine his reputation. Their principal preoccupation now was to get him away from Paris, where he was a natural focus for their enemies.16

The day’s event had been a politically charged performance in which, as Bonaparte’s secretary put it, ‘everyone acted out as best they could this scene from a sentimental comedy’. But it was a dangerous one; according to one well-informed observer, ‘it was one of those occasions when one imprudent word, one gesture out of place can decide the future of a great man’. As Sandoz-Rollin pointed out, Paris could easily have become the general’s ‘tomb’.17

The hero of the day was well aware of this. The ceremony was followed by illuminations ‘worthy of the majesty of the people’ and a banquet given in his honour by the minister of the interior, in the course of which no fewer than twelve toasts were raised, each followed by a three-gun salute and an appropriate burst of song from the choir of the Conservatoire. Closely guarded by his aides, the general did not touch a morsel of food or drink a thing, for fear of being poisoned.18

It was not only the Directors who wished him ill. The royalists who longed for a return of Bourbon rule hated him as a ruthless defender of the Republic. The extreme revolutionaries, the Jacobins who had been ousted from power, feared he might be scheming to restore the monarchy. They denounced the treaty he had signed as ‘an abominable betrayal’ of the Republic’s values and referred to him as a ‘little Caesar’ about to stage a coup and seize power.19

Such thoughts were not far from the general’s mind. But he hid them as he assessed the possibilities, playing to perfection the part of a latter-day Cincinnatus. He refused the offer of the Directory to place a guard of honour outside his door, he avoided public events and kept a low profile, wearing civilian dress when he went out. ‘His behaviour continues to upset all the extravagant calculations and perfidious adulation of certain people,’ reported the Journal des hommes libres approvingly. Sandoz-Rollin assured his masters in Berlin that there was nothing which might lead one to suspect Bonaparte of meaning to take power. ‘The health of this general is weak, his chest is in a very poor state,’ he wrote, ‘his taste for literature and philosophy and his need of rest as well as to silence the envious will lead him to live a quiet life among friends …’20

One man was not fooled. For all his cynicism, Talleyrand was impressed, and sensed power. ‘What a man this Bonaparte,’ he had written to a friend a few weeks before. ‘He has not finished his twenty-eighth year: and he is crowned with all the glories. Those of war and those of peace, those of moderation, those of generosity. He has everything.’21

2
Insular Dreams

The man who had everything was born into a family of little consequence in one of the poorest places in Europe, the island of Corsica. It was also one of the most idiosyncratic, having never been an independent political unit and yet never been fully a province or colony of another state. It had always been a world of its own.

In the late Middle Ages the Republic of Genoa established bases at the anchorages of Bastia on the north-eastern coast and Ajaccio in the south-west to protect its shipping lanes and deny their use to others. It garrisoned these with soldiers, mostly impoverished nobles from the Italian mainland, and gradually extended its rule inland. But the mountainous interior held little economic interest, and although they penetrated it in order to put down insurgencies and exact what contributions they could, the Genoese found it impossible to control its feral denizens and largely left it alone, not even bothering to map it.

The indigenous population preserved its traditional ways, subsisting on a diet of chestnuts (from which even the local bread was made), cheese, onions, fruit and the occasional piece of goat or pork, washed down with local wine. They dressed in homespun brown cloth and spoke their own Italian patois. They were in constant conflict over issues such as grazing rights with the inhabitants of the port towns. These considered themselves superior and married amongst themselves or found spouses on the Italian mainland, yet with time they could not help being absorbed by the interior and its ways.

It was a pre-feudal society. The majority owned at least a scrap of land, and while a few families aspired to nobility, the differentials of wealth were narrow. Even the poorest families had a sense of pride, of their dignity and of the worth of their ‘house’. It was also a fundamentally pagan society, with Christianity spread thinly, if tenaciously, over a stew of ancient myths and atavisms. A profound belief in destiny overrode the Christian vision of salvation.

As there was hardly any coinage in circulation, most of the necessities of life were bartered. The result was a complicated web of favours granted and expected, of rights established or revindicated, agreements, often unspoken, and a plethora of litigation. Any violent move could provoke a vendetta from which it was almost impossible to escape, as nothing could be kept secret for long in such a restricted space. Shortage of land meant that ownership was divided and subdivided, traded and encumbered with complicated clauses governing rights of reversal. It was also the principal motive for marriage. And so it was for General Bonaparte’s father, Carlo Maria Buonaparte.

When his son came to power, genealogists, sycophants and fortune-hunters set about tracing his ancestry and came up with various pedigrees, linking him to Roman emperors, Guelf kings and even the Man in the Iron Mask. The only indisputable facts concerning his ancestry are that he was descended from a Gabriele Buonaparte who in the sixteenth century owned the grandest mansion in Ajaccio, consisting of two rooms and a kitchen over a shop and a store room, and a small garden with a mulberry tree.

Where Gabriele came from remains uncertain. The most convincing filiation is to minor gentry of the same name from the little town of Sarzana on the borders of Tuscany and Liguria, some of whom took service with the Genoese and were sent to Corsica. Recent DNA tests have shown that the Corsican Buonaparte belonged to the population group E, which is found mainly in North Africa, Sicily and particularly the Levant. This does not rule out a Ligurian connection, since people from those areas washed up over the ages on the coasts of Italy as well as those of Corsica.1

Gabriele’s son Geronimo had been notable enough to be sent as Ajaccio’s deputy to Genoa in 1572, and acquired, by marriage, a house in Ajaccio as well as a lease on some low-lying ground outside the town known as the Salines. His descendants also married well, within the circle of Ajaccio notables, but the need to provide dowries for daughters split up the family’s property, and Sebastiano Buonaparte, born in 1683, was reduced to marrying a girl from the upland village of Bocognano, apparently for the two small plots of land in the hills and the ninety sheep she brought him in her dowry. She bore him five children: one girl, Paola Maria, and four boys: Giuseppe Maria, Napoleone, Sebastiano and Luciano.

The family home had been partitioned by dowries, and the seven of them were crammed into the forty square metres that remained theirs. The building was so dilapidated that a military billeting commission classified it as unfit for any but lower ranks. Thus, although they were still considered among the anziani, the elders or notables of Ajaccio, the family’s lifestyle was anything but noble. A smallholding provided vegetables and their vineyards wine for their own needs and some extra to sell or exchange for oil and flour, while their flocks produced occasional meat for their own consumption and a little income.

Luciano was the most intelligent of the brood, and joined the priesthood. He bought out other family members and installed an indoor staircase in the house. His nephew, Giuseppe’s son Carlo Maria, born in 1746, also set about rebuilding the family fortunes, and it is his social ambitions that were to have such a profound effect on European history.2

History had begun to take an interest in Corsica. The corrupt inefficiency of Genoese rule had sparked off a rebellion on the island in 1729. It was put down by troops, but simmered on in the interior. In 1735 three ‘Generals of the Corsican nation’ convoked an assembly, the consulta, at Corte in the uplands and proclaimed independence, attracting the sympathies of many across Europe. One of the dominant themes in the literature of the Enlightenment was that of the noble savage, and Corsica seemed to fit the ideal of a society unspoilt by the supposedly corrupted Christian culture of Europe. In 1736 a German baron, Theodor von Neuhoff, landed in Corsica with weapons and aid for the rebels. He proclaimed himself King of the Corsicans and set about developing the island according to current ideals. Genoa called on France for military assistance, the rebels were obliged to flee, and Theodor settled in London, where he died, a declared bankrupt, in 1756. His vision did not die with him.3

In 1755 Pasquale Paoli, the son of one of the three ‘Generals of the Corsican nation’, had returned from exile in Naples and proclaimed a Corsican Republic. Born in 1725, Paoli had been eleven years old when Theodor expounded to him his vision for the island, and it had haunted him throughout his exile. Styling himself General of the Nation, over the next thirteen years he worked at building an ideal modern state endowed with a constitution, institutions and a university. His charisma ensured him the love of the majority of the Corsicans, who served him devotedly, referring to him as their Babbo, their father. He gained the admiration of enlightened European opinion, with Voltaire and Rousseau in the lead. The British traveller James Boswell visited him in 1765 and wrote up his experiences in what turned into a best-seller, further enhancing his reputation.4

While Paoli ruled the Corsican Nation from the Lilliputian hill-town of Corte at the heart of the island, coastal towns remained in the hands of the Genoese, who had twice called in French military assistance to maintain their grip. The French at first confined themselves to holding the port cities and surrounding areas, but it was unlikely that France would countenance the existence of a utopian republic on its doorstep for long, and wise Corsicans hedged their bets.

On 2 June 1764, a year after the death of his father, the eighteen-year-old Carlo Buonaparte married Letizia Ramolino, who was just under fifteen years of age. She was by all accounts a beauty, but that was not the motive for the match, which had been arranged by Carlo’s uncle Luciano. The Ramolino family, descended from a Lombard nobleman who had come to Corsica a couple of hundred years earlier, were of higher social standing than the Buonaparte. They were also better-connected and richer. Letizia’s dowry, which consisted of a house in Ajaccio and some rooms in another, a vineyard and about a dozen hectares of land, enhanced Carlo’s position. The marriage did not take place in church since the essence of any Corsican marital union was property, the principal element was the contract, and it was customary to sign this in the house of one of the parties, after which the newlyweds might or might not have their marriage blessed by a priest.5

Soon after their wedding, the couple moved to Corte, where Carlo’s uncle Napoleone had already joined Pasquale Paoli. Their first child was stillborn, their second, a daughter born in 1767, died in infancy. On 7 January 1768 they had a son, baptised Joseph Nabullion. Carlo enrolled at the university and eventually published a dissertation on natural rights which reveals a degree of education.6

Paoli resided in a massive structure made of the same dark-grey rock as all the other houses and the paving of the streets in Corte. He imported furniture and textiles from Italy in order to create within this grim building a few rooms in which a head of government could receive. Good-looking and amiable, the young Joseph quickly won his friendship. Letizia was by Corte standards a sophisticated and well-dressed lady, and her beauty and strong personality meant that along with her sister Geltruda Paravicini she was a welcome member of Paoli’s entourage.

Paoli admitted to Boswell that he placed great trust in Providence. That, and the praise being directed at him from various parts of Europe, had lulled him into a state of complacency. He believed that the British, who had taken an interest in supporting the Corsican cause before, and were now in thrall to Boswell’s An Account of Corsica, would come to his aid if he were threatened. By the same token France could not countenance the possibility of the strategically important island falling into the hands of a hostile power. Still smarting from overseas losses to Britain during the recently ended Seven Years’ War, French wounded pride would welcome the balsam of a colonial gain. Genoa had given up on Corsica, and owed France a great deal of money. By the Treaty of Versailles of May 1768 it ceded the island to France, pending the repayment of the overdue debt. French troops moved out of their coastal bases to impose the authority of King Louis XV.7

Paoli issued a call to arms, but his was a lost cause, though the men of the uplands put up a stiff resistance, inflicting heavy casualties on the French. Carlo was at Paoli’s side during the decisive engagement at Ponte-Novo on 8 May 1769, but did not take part in the fighting; Paoli hovered some three kilometres away as his men were routed by a superior French force under the comte de Vaux. Paoli fled over the mountains to Porto Vecchio, whence two British frigates took him and a handful of supporters off to exile in England.8

Carlo Buonaparte was not among them. Family legend has it that Paoli insisted he stay behind in Corsica, but it is more likely that Carlo made the decision himself. The island had never entirely submitted to any regime, and among its inhabitants family came a long way before loyalty to any cause. While Carlo and his uncle Napoleone had served Paoli, his other uncle Luciano had remained in French-held Ajaccio, where he had sworn fealty to the King of France, as had most of the notables of the coastal cities. Unperturbed by the cause of independence, Letizia was writing to her grandfather Giuseppe Maria Pietrasanta in French-held Bastia asking him to send her bales of Lyon silk and new dresses fit for a noblewoman.9

‘I was a good patriot and a Paolist in my heart as long as the national government lasted,’ Carlo wrote. ‘But this government has ceased to exist. We have become French. Eviva il Re e suo governo.’ Having submitted to Vaux, he went back to Ajaccio. On the way home over the mountains, Carlo almost lost his wife and the child she was carrying in her womb when her mule stumbled in the torrent of the river Liamone.10

The child was born on the night of 15 August 1769, and named after his great-uncle Napoleone, who had died two years before. The name did not figure in the liturgical calendar as belonging to a saint, but it was not unknown in Genoa and Corsica, where it was sometimes spelt Nabullione or even Lapullione, and had been given to several members of the family in the past. He would not be christened until July 1771, by which time his father had repositioned himself with considerable skill.11

Since the legal profession was the key to obtaining civic office under any government, Carlo set off for Pisa to obtain the necessary qualifications. ‘One can have no idea of the facility with which the title of doctor is granted here,’ wrote a contemporary French traveller of the university of Pisa. ‘Everyone in the locality is one, even the inn-keepers and post-masters.’ Carlo presented a hastily-written thesis for which he obtained a doctorate, and within six weeks he was back in Ajaccio, where he found no shortage of work.12

With a population of 3,907 according to the French census of 1770, Ajaccio was the second largest city in Corsica, but it was in essence a sleepy, smelly village. When Balzac visited it more than half a century later he was stunned by the ‘unbelievable indolence’ pervading the place, with the menfolk wandering about all day smoking. It consisted of a minuscule citadel stuck out on the promontory shielding the port, and behind it a walled town not more than 250 metres across in any direction, clustered around three radiating streets intersected by another three narrower ones, with an attractive promenade and square between the two named the Olmo after a large elm that grew on it. Within the walls there was a cathedral whose roof fell in in 1771 and would not be repaired for twenty years, and which was unusable in summer due to the stink emanating from the dead buried under its floor. There was also a Jesuit college and a governor’s residence, tucked into an assortment of mean-looking townhouses ranged along narrow streets bordered by small shops whose trade spilled out onto them. The smell of fish drifting over from the harbour mingled with that of the hides put out to dry by the butchers cutting up carcases in the street and the stench from the moat of the citadel. Outside the city walls stood a convent, a hospital, a military barracks and a seminary, and, along the road leading up to the town from the north, an agglomeration of dwellings known as the Borgo, where the poorer inhabitants lived.13

The city was dominated by families such as the Ponte, Pozzo di Borgo, Bacciochi and the Peraldi, and an oligarchy of notaries, lawyers and clerics with ‘noble’ connections such as the Buonaparte. This society was supplemented by the magistrates, judge, officers and other officials of the French administration. The houses within the city walls were mostly divided by multiple ownership like the Buonaparte home, and, since all their inhabitants were related to each other by blood or marriage, the whole area was a familial congeries connected by tangled ties. Ajaccio’s lawyers, Carlo among them, thrived on the squabbles generated by the resulting disputes over restricted space and scant resources. Carlo himself would be engaged for many years in a legal battle over some used wine-making equipment and a few leaky barrels. In one case, he pleaded for a client over one kerchief. There was plenty of work, but it was not remunerative enough or commensurate with Carlo’s ambitions. On the basis of his doctorate, in 1771 he obtained a minor post at the court of Ajaccio, but he was aiming higher.14

He had wasted no time in seeking the favour of the French military governor of the south-west of the island, the comte de Narbonne. On being fobbed off, he offered his services to Narbonne’s superior in Bastia. Charles Louis, comte de Marbeuf, needed a party of supporters among the notables of Ajaccio, and the Buonaparte were ideally placed to provide it. Their collaboration developed so well that Carlo felt bold enough to invite Marbeuf to stand godparent at the christening of his son Napoleone on 21 July 1771, and Marbeuf agreed. In the event Marbeuf was prevented from attending, so he sent a Genoese patrician and later royal lieutenant at Ajaccio, Lorenzo Giubega, to act as proxy. Marbeuf did come to Ajaccio less than a month later for the festivities of the feast of the Assumption and the little Napoleone’s second birthday on 15 August. He was so struck by the beauty of the child’s mother that he insisted she take his arm on the afternoon passegiata up and down the Olmo, and after walking her home he stayed there until one in the morning. Carlo’s ambitions soared.15

France was interested in Corsica both for its strategic importance and for its economic potential. It was accorded the status of a semi-autonomous province within the kingdom, and the French authorities set about organising it. A survey revealed to them the idiosyncratic nature of Corsican society, with its broad base of land tenure and plethora of hunting, gathering and fishing rights and obligations. These would hinder rationalisation, while the egalitarianism that had so enchanted Boswell and Rousseau impeded not only progress but the establishment of a hierarchy necessary for successful political control. One of the first actions of the new French regime was to correct this by recognising as noble the most prominent families. In large measure thanks to the usefulness of Carlo and the charms of his wife, the Buonaparte were included. ‘Ajaccio is struck with astonishment and filled with jealousy by the news,’ Carlo wrote to his wife’s grandfather.16

The connection with Marbeuf was invaluable. In 1772 Carlo was elected to represent Ajaccio in the newly established Assembly of Corsican Estates only because Marbeuf intervened to have his successful rival’s election annulled. The governor’s direct intercession also helped resolve a lengthy court battle between the Buonaparte and their Ornano cousins over a dowry that included a significant part of the house in which they lived. By way of a series of buy-outs, swaps and court cases Carlo would extend his possession over the years against a backdrop of running battles between the various members of the family involving the use of the staircase and other areas where interests clashed. These occasionally flared into violence, and inevitably ended up in court, where the knowledge that Carlo had the backing of Marbeuf counted.17

The rise of Carlo’s fortunes and the governor’s interest in Letizia aroused jealousy and gave rise to gossip. Marbeuf, a widower, did have an official mistress in Bastia, a Madame Varese, but whatever charms she may have possessed, at fifty she was past her prime, while Letizia was still young. It is difficult to see any reason other than an amorous one for him to spend time with an uneducated woman forty years his junior, and he gave every sign of being besotted by Letizia. There is no evidence that the relationship was sexual, but it was widely believed that it was, and that her son Louis, born in 1778, was his.18

Letizia would bear a total of thirteen children, of whom three died young and two in childbirth. The first surviving child was Joseph, born in 1768, the next Napoleone, born in 1769. As his mother was unable to feed him, he was provided with a wet-nurse, Camilla Carbon Ilari, who grew so fond of him that she neglected her own son. Napoleone and his elder brother, christened Joseph but known as Giuseppe, were also spoiled by their father and their grandmother Saveria Paravicini, known in the family as Minanna. But they were kept under strict control by Letizia. Strong, brave and characterful, Letizia was endowed with common sense. Unlike the rest of her family she was pious, and hardly went out other than to church. She was also a strict disciplinarian, administering slaps to all her children, and once giving Napoleone a thrashing which he remembered to the end of his life. She exerted a strong influence on him, and he would later say that he owed everything to her.19

There is no evidence that Napoleone ever attended school, although according to his mother he did go to lessons at a girls’ school. He was probably taught to read at home by a local priest, the Abbé Recco – presumably in Latin rather than the local patois they all spoke. His great-uncle Luciano, effective head of the family, must have found other teachers, as Napoleone from an early age showed an almost obsessive interest in, and remarkable aptitude for, mathematics.20

His seems to have been a happy childhood, much of it spent in the street playing with various cousins, while the summers were passed up in the hills at Bocognano. The family grew, with the birth of a boy, Luciano, in 1775, and a girl, the fourth to be christened Maria-Anna and the first to survive, in 1777. While most of the anecdotes collected by early biographers can be dismissed as ‘remembered’ under the suggestive influence of the boy’s later trajectory, one thing can be retained. His mother admiringly reminisced that of all her children Napoleone had been ‘the most intrepid’. In fact, he seems to have been aggressive and quarrelsome, leading to frequent fights with his elder brother.21

There was violence all around him, since much of the population continued in its lawless ways, and in order to stamp out the remaining resistance and the inherent banditry, the French applied the harshest measures. Mobile columns scoured the countryside burning down the houses and crops and slaughtering the flocks of suspected rebels, breaking them on the wheel and hanging the corpses on public highways as a warning. The five-year-old boy could not have avoided seeing them.

Whatever his feelings, Carlo had tied his family’s fortunes to the French regime and its representative in Corsica. Being thought a cuckold was a small price to pay for the benefits brought by Marbeuf’s favour, which he drew on at every upward step. While Luciano saved every penny and literally slept on his money-bags, Carlo spent lavishly, dressing well in order to keep up appearances when he attended the assembly in Bastia or other official functions. Having gained recognition of his status as a Corsican nobleman, he was determined to propel himself into the French nobility, as only that opened the door to careers in the kingdom. It had been decided that his elder son, Joseph, would go into the Church and Napoleone into the army. Marbeuf’s nephew was the bishop of Autun, in eastern France, and Joseph was easily secured a place at the city’s seminary, with the position of a sub-deacon and a stipend lined up for him.

Placing Napoleone would be more difficult. In 1776 Carlo applied for a place at one of the royal military academies, but the boy would require a royal bursary to pay for his studies. These were awarded to sons of officers and indigent nobles, so Carlo had to prove his noble credentials and provide evidence of his lack of means. The recognition of nobility he had gained in 1771 was based on proofs dating back only 200 years, which was not sufficient. In 1777 Carlo was chosen as one of the deputies to represent the nobility of Corsica at the court of Louis XVI, but he would not be presented to the king unless he could provide proofs of more ancient lineage.

When he had gone to Pisa to obtain his doctorate, Carlo had obtained from the city’s archbishop a document attesting that his birth entitled him to the status of a ‘noble patrician of Tuscany’. He now returned to Tuscany and located a canon by the name of Filipo Buonaparte, who provided him with documents purportedly relating him to his own family, which could trace noble status back to the fourteenth century. Armed with these, Carlo hoped to be able to gain recognition in France, and with it the right to a bursary for Napoleone.22

On 12 December 1778 Carlo left Ajaccio, accompanied by Letizia and their sons Joseph and Napoleone. The party also included two other young men. One was Letizia’s half-brother Giuseppe Fesch. When her father had died soon after Letizia’s birth her mother had remarried a Swiss naval officer in Genoese service and produced a son. Giuseppe Fesch had been awarded a bursary to study for the priesthood at the seminary of Aix-en-Provence. The other young man was Abbé Varese, a cousin of Letizia who, like Joseph, had been granted the post of sub-deacon at the cathedral of Autun. They travelled by cart and mule via Bocognano to Corte, where a carriage sent by Marbeuf waited to conduct Letizia in greater comfort on the rest of their journey to Bastia. From there, Carlo and the four boys sailed for Marseille while Letizia moved into Marbeuf’s residence.23

They reached Autun on 30 December, having left Fesch at Aix on the way. On 1 January 1779 Joseph and Napoleone entered the college of Autun, the first to prepare for the priesthood, the second in order to learn French. He would spend three months and twenty days at the college, whose thirty boarders were taught by priests of the Oratorian order. During that time he would learn French well enough to carry on a conversation and to write a simple essay, but he did not, then or ever, learn the language well, and his grammar and use of words remained poor. His handwriting never developed beyond an ugly scrawl.24

Carlo travelled on to Paris, where he learned that Napoleone had been deemed eligible for a bursary, subject to the submission of the necessary proofs of nobility. He duly presented these, before joining the other Corsican deputies to be presented to the king at Versailles. On 9 March the three Corsicans were admitted into the royal presence, bowed low and handed their petition to the monarch, who handed it to an attendant minister and graciously watched them leave his presence, stepping backwards and bowing repeatedly. They were then presented to the queen, the dauphin and various dignitaries, after which they were driven around the park in a carriage and rowed up and down the grand canal before being allowed to depart.25

On 28 March the minister of war, the prince de Montbarrey, officially informed Carlo that his son had been admitted with a royal bursary to the military academy of Brienne. As he could not leave Versailles, Carlo asked the father of another boy due to be transferred from Autun to Brienne to take Napoleone there. On 21 April, after an emotional farewell to Joseph, the nine-year-old Napoleone set off on his military career.26

3
Boy Soldier

Napoleone arrived at the military academy of Brienne on 15 May 1779, three months short of his tenth birthday. The regulation kit each boy brought with him consisted of: three pairs of bed-sheets; a set of dining silver and a silver goblet, engraved with his family arms or initials; a dozen napkins; a blue coat with white metal buttons bearing the arms of the academy; two pairs of black serge breeches; twelve shirts, twelve kerchiefs, twelve white collars, six cotton caps, two dressing gowns, a hair-powder pouch and a hair ribbon. The powder and ribbon would be redundant for the first three years, as up to the age of twelve the boys wore their hair close-cropped.1

The academy occupied an inelegant sprawl of buildings in the small town of 400 people, dominated by the château of the Loménie de Brienne family (to whom Marbeuf had recommended the boy). It had some 110 pupils, about fifty of them beneficiaries of royal bursaries like Napoleone. It was an austere institution, run by friars of the Order of Minims, founded in the fifteenth century by St Francis de Paola in Calabria and dedicated to abstention and frugality, so the atmosphere was Spartan. The boys attended mass every morning and discipline was strict, although there was no corporal punishment. At night they were locked in cells furnished with a straw-filled mattress, blanket, ewer and basin. In order to teach them to do without servants, they had to look after themselves and their kit. There were no holidays, and they were only allowed home in exceptional circumstances.2

Following the defeats in the Seven Years’ War, thought to have been partly due to the dilettantism of the officers, French military thinking focused on ways of producing an officer class inured to hardship and inspired by a sense of duty. Institutions such as Brienne were not meant to provide military training; the curriculum, taught by the friars supplemented by lay teachers, included the study of Suetonius, Tacitus, Quintillian, Cicero, Horace and Virgil, and, most importantly Plutarch, whose lives of the heroes of antiquity were meant to serve as role models for the aspiring soldiers. The works of Corneille, Racine, Boileau, Bossuet, Fénelon and other French classics were to awaken in them the instincts of chivalry, honour, duty and sacrifice, as well as teaching them elocution and rhetoric. The curriculum also included German, history, geography, mathematics, physics, drawing, dancing, fencing and music.3

His new environment must have presented a challenge for the young Napoleone at many levels. He was by all accounts a puny child, showing signs of a delicate constitution. He had an olive complexion, which along with his poor French and atrocious accent marked him out as a foreigner. Corsica was seen in France at the time as a land of treacherous brigands. His outlandish first name, pronounced in the French way with the last syllable accented, ended with a sound like ‘nez’, leading to jibes based on the nose. Having a bursary singled him out as the son of a poor family, while his noble status was open to question, or at least mockery, from those of a higher social standing. The patronage of Marbeuf, and occasional visits to the château on Sundays, fed rumours about his mother’s morals and his own paternity. All this laid him open to teasing and bullying, which must have aggravated the homesickness he would have felt on entering this alien world and the cold, sunless climate of north-eastern France. But in boarding schools where boys are cut off from home those with character or certain gifts easily impose themselves and can achieve a status they do not have in the outside world. And Napoleone did not lack character.4

Apart from Charles-Étienne de Gudin, who became a fine general, and Étienne-Marie Champion de Nansouty, later a distinguished cavalry commander, few of Napoleone’s contemporaries at Brienne made much of their lives. Later, some could not resist laying a claim to fame by recording memories, true or invented, of their days together. Childhood reminiscences are unreliable at the best of times, and in this case should be treated with the greatest caution. Typical is the story of a snowball fight that probably took place in the winter of 1783, which assumed epic proportions in various memoirs, with Napoleone organising his colleagues into armies, building elaborate fortifications out of snow and staging assaults which supposedly revealed his tactical talents and leadership qualities.5

The concurrent image of an alienated youth drawn by such memoirists and developed by romantically-minded biographers should likewise be taken with a pinch of salt. Napoleone was capable of standing up to his schoolmates, displaying a ‘ferocity’ and even ‘fury’ born of contempt when provoked, but he did not seek their friendship. ‘I do not recollect, that he ever showed the slightest partiality in favour of any of his comrades; gloomy and fierce to excess, almost always by himself,’ recalled one of the few fellow pupils whose accounts can be trusted, ‘averse likewise to all that is called children’s plays and amusements, he never was seen to share in the noisy mirth of his school-fellows …’6

He did have friends. One was Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, whose family origins in trade may have made him less arrogant than the others. Jean-Baptiste Le Lieur de Ville sur Arce, four years older than Napoleone, recalled being drawn to him by the ‘originality’ of his character, his ‘somewhat strange’ manner and his intelligence, and the two became close. Another friend was Pierre François Laugier de Bellecour, whom Napoleone liked in spite of his frivolity. There were others with whom he was on good terms, and he also had some friends among the friars and the teachers.7

What did set Napoleone apart from his peers was his application and his intellectual curiosity. With a library at his disposal for the first time in his life, he read voraciously. The cadets were assigned small allotments of land to cultivate, and Napoleone fenced his off and planted it so as to provide himself with a place of solitude in which he could read. ‘Reserved in his temper, and wholly occupied by his own pursuits, Buonaparte courted that solitude which seemed to constitute his delight,’ recorded the librarian.8

With Napoleone at Brienne and Joseph at Autun, Carlo with a seat in the Corsican Estates and the appointment in 1779 of his uncle Luciano as archdeacon of Ajaccio cathedral, the senior clerical post in the city, the standing of the family seemed assured. But Carlo’s social ambitions bred requirements which imposed new struggles on him, and anxieties on his family. By a complicated transaction in 1779 he managed to gain sole title to most of the lease granted to his ancestor Geronimo in 1584 on the Salines, twenty-three hectares of land outside Ajaccio. Originally a salt-marsh, it had been partly drained and turned into a cherry orchard, but had reverted to an unhealthy swamp. Carlo applied for a subsidy from the French government to drain the land on grounds of public health and turn it into a nursery for mulberry trees, which, it was hoped, would be planted all over the island and provide raw silk for the French textile industry. Thanks to Marbeuf’s support, the subsidy was granted in June 1782.9

The next objective required more tortuous negotiations, in which his patron’s assistance would be even more necessary. Almost a century earlier, a great-aunt of Carlo had married an Odone, and in her dowry brought him a property which was to revert to the Buonaparte if the progeny of the union were to die out. But instead of returning the property, the last of the Odone bequeathed it to the Jesuits. When the Jesuits were expelled from France in 1764, the property devolved to the state. Carlo intended to prove that the Odone bequest was illegal, and laid claim to Les Milleli, another former Jesuit property, as compensation.10

The matter required a trip to Paris and Versailles, and in September 1782 Carlo set off, taking Letizia with him for a cure at the spa of Bourbonne-les-Bains before going on to Paris. At some stage during this trip she visited Napoleone at Brienne, and recorded being struck by how wasted and sickly he looked.11

Carlo marked his social ascent by restoring the Buonaparte home in Ajaccio, putting in marble fireplaces, mirrors, lining his bedroom with crimson silk, draping the windows with muslin curtains and installing a library. Behind the scenes, things looked different, according to inventories of the family possessions, which list every pot and pan in the kitchen, buckets, iron pokers, pewter plates (three large and twenty-nine small), knives, forks and spoons. The path to grandeur was not without its difficult moments. A row over possession of the part of the house occupied by Carlo’s cousin Maria Giustina and her Pozzo di Borgo husband, which Carlo escalated by trying to deny them the use of the only staircase, climaxed in Maria Giustina emptying her chamberpot over Carlo’s best silk suit, airing on the terrace below, which entailed yet another court case.12

The intimacy with Marbeuf would soon be at an end. He had married a young lady of his own class, and lost interest in his Corsican protégés. This came at a bad moment. The mulberry nursery was not going well, and the costs soon outstripped the amount of the subsidy. Another trip to Paris would be required, for family reasons too. Carlo had succeeded in getting his third son, now referred to as Lucien, admitted to Autun, where he joined Joseph. And he had achieved a social triumph in having his eldest daughter Maria-Anna accepted into the Maison Royale de Saint-Cyr, founded a hundred years before by Louis XIV’s mistress Madame de Maintenon for the daughters of indigent nobility, which not only provided a free education, but also a dowry when they left. In June 1784 he set off for Paris with her. He needed to get more money out of the government for the Salines project, to press his suit over the Odone inheritance and the Milleli compensation, and to lobby for the nine-year-old Lucien to be granted a bursary at Brienne, where he was now due to join Napoleone. After stopping off at Autun to pick up Lucien, Carlo’s appearance at Brienne, dressed in a cerise coat with puce breeches and silk stockings, with silver buckles on his shoes and his hair curled, caused Napoleone embarrassment. ‘My father was a good man,’ he later reminisced, but added that he was ‘a little too fond of the ridiculous gentility of the times’.13

Carlo’s plans were beginning to come unstuck. Joseph had come to the conclusion that he was not made for the priesthood, and announced that he too would like to pursue a military career, as an artillery officer. Carlo was dismayed, and pointed out that Joseph was neither hardy in health nor courageous. With Marbeuf’s backing he would easily obtain a good position and end up a bishop, which would be of advantage to the whole family, while, as Napoleone explained, he could at best make a passable garrison officer, being entirely unsuited for the artillery on account of his lack of application and his ‘weakness of character’.14

These comments were made in the first extant letter written by Napoleone, to his half-uncle Joseph Fesch in June 1784. He was still only fourteen, but while his spelling and grammar are atrocious, he adopts an authoritative tone, particularly with relation to his elder brother, whom he discusses as a parent might a wayward teenager. Of his younger sibling Lucien he remarks that ‘he shows a good disposition and good will’ and ‘should make a good fellow’. Lucien claimed that on his arrival at Brienne Napoleone received him ‘without the slightest show of tenderness’ and that ‘there was nothing amiable in his manner, either towards me or towards the other comrades of his age who did not like him’, but these reminiscences, written down much later by an embittered Lucien, are unreliable.15

Napoleone had originally intended to go into the navy. The voyages of exploration of Admiral Louis-Antoine de Bougainville and the creditable part played by the French navy against the British during the War of American Independence had raised its profile and made it fashionable. The navy offered a better chance of action in peacetime, and with it better prospects for promotion. It held greater appeal than garrison service in some gloomy northern town. In the navy consideration rested on talent, and social origins counted for little. Napoleone was good at mathematics and geography, and he was small and agile, all vital assets. But in 1783 higher powers decided that he should go into the army. Carlo’s interventions in Paris proved fruitless and he was destined for the artillery – which came as a relief to Letizia, as the navy involved the danger of death by drowning as well as by enemy action. The artillery had also gained in prestige due to recent technical advances, and as it was an arm in which favour could not trump ability and mathematics was a prerequisite, Napoleone would also have an advantage. On 22 September 1784 he was interviewed by the inspector Raymond de Monts and selected for the École Militaire in Paris.16

The fifteen-year-old Napoleone and four other cadets set off, under the care of one of the friars, on 17 October, travelling by heavy mail coach to Nogent-sur-Seine, where they changed to a coche d’eau, a barge with a superstructure for passengers and goods, drawn by four Percheron horses along a tow-path. Two days later they disembarked on the left bank of the Seine opposite the Ile de la Cité and walked through what was then known as the ‘pays latin’ to their new school. On the way they stopped at a bookshop to buy books, and at the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés to say a prayer.17

The École Militaire, founded in 1751, had been reformed in the 1770s by the war minister Claude Louis de Saint-Germain. The 200 cadets wore military uniform of blue coat with yellow collar and red facings, red waistcoat and breeches. They were housed in a grand stone building which still stands at the end of the Champ de Mars, with a spacious courtyard in which they performed drills and played ball games. They slept in a dormitory with wooden partitions, each compartment containing an iron bedstead with curtains and minimal built-in furniture for their clothes, ewer and basin, and a chamberpot.18

The day began with mass at six o’clock, followed by eight hours of instruction, except on Thursdays, Sundays and feast days, when the only obligations were four hours of reading and letter-writing, and sometimes target practice. Although the school was run by laymen, the routine included grace before and after breakfast, dinner and supper, prayers in chapel before bedtime, vespers and catechism as well as mass on Sundays, and confession once a month. The cadets were not allowed out, and were punished by detention on bread and water.

The curriculum included Latin, French and German, mathematics, geography, history, moral studies, law, fortification, drawing, fencing, handling of weapons, letter-writing and dancing (those destined for the navy and the artillery were too busy with technical subjects to attend these). The accent was on developing character and a military ethos: the cadets would be taught soldiering when they joined their regiments.19

Napoleone did not take to the establishment, which he found too grand. The food was good and plentiful, and the cadets were waited on by servants, which he found inappropriate. He thought the austerity of Brienne more in keeping with the military life as he imagined it. Although the director, the Chevalier de Valfort, had risen from the ranks, the presence of fee-paying young men not destined for a career in the army lent the place an aristocratic atmosphere Napoleone did not like. At Brienne, the fee-paying cadets had been provincial gentry. Here they were of a higher social and economic standing, and they made the others feel it. Napoleone was teased for his origins, and the allusions to his being Marbeuf’s bastard resurfaced. But he should have felt in good company, given that one of his brother cadets, Władysław Jabłonowski, a Pole of mixed race referred to as ‘le petit noir’, was supposedly the son of King Louis XV.20

In a letter to his father of September 1784, four and a half years after arriving at Brienne, the fifteen-year-old Napoleone had asked him to send a copy of Boswell’s book and any other historical works on Corsica he could find. He had left his homeland at the age of nine, at which time he can have known little of its history or circumstances. His reading at Brienne would have exposed him to the current intellectual and emotional trends, which included the cult of the patrie, the motherland which demanded to be served and died for. Paoli’s Corsican project chimed with this, and his fate appealed to the growing fashion for glorifying victimhood and lost causes. During his last years at Brienne Napoleone went through a phase of what he called ‘grande sensibilité’, and he embraced this one, casting himself as a Corsican patriot and an ardent worshipper of Paoli. The motivation may have been partly the need for a modern hero to emulate. The study of Plutarch had inspired a cult of heroes in late-eighteenth-century France, which was in matters of taste entering the age of neo-classicism. Alexander the Great, Caesar, Brutus, Cicero and others were the lode-stars of Napoleone’s generation. A little wishful thinking could cast Paoli in the same mould. Napoleone’s new-found emotional association with Corsica may also have had something to do with his sense of social inferiority, with a desire to claim for himself a status distinct from and morally superior to that of his fellow cadets with their noble pretensions, that of the persecuted patriot. It was certainly some kind of attempt to capture the moral high ground. But it sat uneasily with his family’s having hitched its fortunes to the French monarchy, let alone his aim of making a career in the service of the King of France. The ambiguities of his situation, both national and social, were inescapable, and made no less real by his father’s increasingly desperate efforts to position his family.21

Carlo was not well. He had taken Joseph away from Autun and back to Corsica, hoping the boy would take a law degree and assume the responsibilities of head of the family. But Joseph persisted in his desire to become an artillery officer. After undergoing a short cure and assisting at the birth of his youngest son Jérôme, at the end of 1784 Carlo left the island with Joseph, meaning to take him to Brienne and then go on to Paris to petition for a bursary on his behalf, as well as press his own case for the award of the Milleli estate. The sea crossing was so rough they were nearly shipwrecked, and by the time they made land, at Saint-Tropez, Carlo was in a bad way. They travelled to Aix, where they met up with Joseph Fesch and decided to consult doctors at the medical school of Montpellier. There they found a close friend of Letizia from Corsica, now married to a tax official by the name of Permon, who helped Joseph and Fesch look after the thirty-nine-year-old Carlo. But he was sinking fast, and the doctors could do nothing for him. The end came on 24 February 1785: the post-mortem suggests either stomach cancer or a perforated ulcer as the cause of death.22

Napoleone had never known his father well. Carlo was away for long spells during his childhood and they only saw each other once in France, when Carlo came to drop off Lucien at Brienne (and possibly when Letizia visited him). That short visit had not made a favourable impression on the boy, and frequent allusions to his paternity made him wonder whether Carlo really was his father. When, as was customary in such circumstances at the École Militaire, his confessor came to console him, Napoleone brushed him off, saying he had enough strength of character to cope with his loss without spiritual consolation. ‘There would be no point in expressing to you how much I have been affected by the misfortune which has befallen us,’ he wrote to his great-uncle Luciano. ‘We have lost in him a father, and God knows what a father, with his tenderness and his attachment.’ The letter dwells on the cruelty of Carlo’s having had to die away from his home and his family, and ends by dutifully imploring Luciano to take the place of the father he has lost.23

His father’s death might have come as something of a liberation in one sense: the socially embarrassing and pushy Carlo, with his limited aspirations, fitted ill with Plutarch’s heroes who filled the boy’s imagination, and his obsequious attachment to France even less with the idealised vision of Paoli’s struggle for the liberation of the Corsican nation which had become central to his view of himself. In Napoleone’s imagination, Paoli was now not only a modern-day Plutarchian hero, a role model to be emulated, but also a spiritual father figure.

His obsession with Paoli was mocked by his fellow cadets, as a surviving caricature attests. But his pose as a representative of the heroic nation wronged by France was psychologically convenient for confronting the superior airs of his aristocratic comrades: he could parry their arrogance with self-righteous contempt. Such sparring should not be made too much of, and he only seems to have had one real hate in the school, a cadet by the name of Le Picard de Phélippeaux.24

Napoleone’s friend Laugier de Bellecour had come to the École Militaire from Brienne with him. Le Lieur de Ville sur Arce had left to join his regiment just before Napoleone arrived, but before leaving he had asked his friend Alexandre des Mazis to look out for him, warning him that he was prickly and difficult. Their first meeting bore this out, but the two soon became close. Napoleone found in him ‘someone who understood him, liked him, and to whom he could without constraint uncover his thoughts’, in the words of des Mazis.25

Napoleone hated drill, and his mind would drift, with the result that his was always the last musket to be shouldered or lowered, despite des Mazis nudging him, incurring a sharp ‘Monsieur de Buonaparte, wake up!’ from the drill-master, at whom on one occasion Napoleone threw his musket in a rage. As a result he was made to perform his drill under the supervision of des Mazis. He loved fencing, but was a dangerous sparring partner. He was aggressive and, if touched, would go for his adversary with such fury that he laid himself open to further touches, which made him all the angrier. He often broke his foil, and sometimes the fencing-master would have to separate the combatants.26

The two boys shared an interest in mathematics, and des Mazis admired the way his friend relished the challenge of a mathematical problem. ‘He would not give up until he had overcome every difficulty,’ he recalled. They were taught by Le Paute d’Agelet, a mathematician and astronomer who had circumnavigated the globe with Bougainville, and who enthralled them with his accounts, reviving Napoleone’s naval aspirations. In 1785 he was preparing to set off on a voyage of discovery with the explorer Jean François de La Pérouse, and along with several others Napoleone applied to accompany the expedition. Only one was chosen, and it was not him. The voyage ended in disaster in the South Pacific, and nobody survived.27

As well as mathematics, Napoleone showed a great curiosity about geography and history, and read widely in both. Although he loved literature, he seemed to have little interest in improving his French, and the exasperated French teacher eventually told him not to bother attending his classes. He also showed what one teacher described as ‘an invincible repugnance’ for learning German. But he was generally popular with the teachers, who were impressed by ‘the persistence with which he argued his points’.28

He struck teachers and cadets alike as serious-minded, and was described by one of them as ‘preferring study to every kind of amusement’, interested in literature and ideas, ‘uncommunicative, fond of solitude, capricious, arrogant, extremely self-centred’, ‘having high self-esteem’ and a good deal of ambition. Much of the time he appeared to be in a world of his own, pacing up and down, lost in thought, sometimes gesticulating or laughing to himself.29

According to des Mazis, ‘he groaned at the frivolity of the other pupils’, and disapproved of their ‘depravities’, going so far as to say the school authorities should do more to ‘preserve them from corruption’. This was not driven by religious feelings: he had taken his first Holy Communion at Brienne and was confirmed at the École Militaire, and while he went through the motions, never rebelling against the obligation to hear mass every day, he showed no religious zeal. It probably had more to do with his own awkwardness, which made him dismiss sex as something silly and embarrassing. He later admitted that puberty had made him ‘morose’. This was exacerbated by the behaviour of his friend Laugier de Bellecour, who had found some like-minded young gentlemen at the École Militaire and flaunted his homosexuality. Napoleone admonished him on the subject and declared that they could not remain friends unless Laugier reformed, as he could not countenance such immoral behaviour. When Laugier teased him for a prig he lost his temper and attacked him physically. Napoleone later expressed regret, and often spoke of his former friend ‘with sincere affection’. But a prig he remained.30

In September 1785 he sat the exam to be admitted into the artillery, and passed forty-second out of fifty-eight candidates. All the others had spent two or in some cases four years longer than him preparing for it, so it was not a bad showing. He was posted second lieutenant to the prestigious regiment of La Fère, stationed at Valence. He quickly put together his new uniform, which consisted of a blue coat with red facings and lining, blue waistcoat, red piping and one epaulette. He was so proud of it that he could not resist showing it off to the Permons and other Corsicans in Paris, as he was now allowed out of the school building.31

Des Mazis had been posted to the same regiment, and on 30 October 1785 the two left Paris together. They took a coach as far as Chalon-sur-Saône, where they transferred to the coche d’eau for the rest of the journey to Lyon, and continued by post-boat down the Rhône to Valence. It was the first time the sixteen-year-old Napoleone had been unsupervised, and at one point he exclaimed, ‘At last, I am free!’ and ran around gesticulating wildly.32

4
Freedom

Valence was a medieval town of tortuous muddy streets dominated by a citadel built to guard the valley of the Rhône and surrounded by fortifications designed by the celebrated engineer Vauban. It had a population of some 5,000, a significant portion of which was accounted for by its fourteen convents, abbeys and priories. Napoleone arrived on 3 November 1785 and took lodgings above a café belonging to Claudine-Marie Bou, a merry and cultivated forty-year-old spinster who washed his linen and looked after his needs. He messed with his fellow officers at the Auberge des Trois Pigeons nearby.1

Second Lieutenant Napolionne de Buonaparte, as he was listed, was placed in command of a company of bombardiers manning mortars and howitzers. He had never handled a piece of ordnance before, and now acquainted himself with the practical aspects of gunnery during frequent exercises on a training ground outside the town. He also had to familiarise himself with the works of the founders of modern French artillery, Generals Gribeauval and Guibert, take more advanced courses in mathematics, trigonometry and geography, and learn how to draw maps and plans.

The regiment of La Fère was one of the most professional in the French army. Its officers were a close-knit family with none of the snobbishness Napoleone had encountered up till now. His messmates included des Mazis and another friend from Brienne, Belly de Bussy, who had joined the regiment a little earlier, and two new ones who were to have distinguished careers, Jean-Ambroise de Lariboisière and Jean-Joseph Sorbier. Napoleone’s company commander was a kindly man who befriended him and invited him to stay at his country house.2

The officers of the regiment were welcomed by the local gentry, and Napoleone took dancing lessons to enable him to participate in social gatherings (he remained a graceless dancer). He was befriended by two English ladies who lived nearby, and was a frequent guest at the château of a Madame du Colombier a dozen kilometres outside the town. He flirted with her daughter Caroline, whom he would describe as an ‘amie de coeur’. ‘Nothing could have been more innocent,’ he recalled: they would arrange secret meetings during which ‘our greatest delight was to eat cherries together’. He was not yet seventeen, and had spent the past eight years cloistered in all-male institutions, so his first emotional stirrings were confused. There is some evidence that he had tender relations with another young woman, a Miss Lauberie de Saint-Germain, but these probably did not amount to much either. ‘He was of a moral purity very rare among young men,’ recalled des Mazis, adding that Napoleone could not conceive how anyone could allow themselves to be dominated by feelings for a woman.3

Napoleone was able to nourish his mind as well as his heart, as he was a welcome guest at the house of Monseigneur de Tardivon, abbot of the abbey of Saint-Ruf, to whom Bishop Marbeuf had given him a letter of introduction. Tardivon, a friend of the renowned anti-colonialist author Abbé Raynal, was the leading light in the intellectual life of Valence, and the gatherings at his lodgings gave Napoleone an opportunity to broaden his views and for the first time in his life take part in intellectual discussion. He caught the spirit of the times and began to question received wisdom and reappraise the world around him; according to one of his brother officers he became insufferably voluble. There was a bookshop which doubled as a reading room opposite his lodgings, to which he took out a subscription, which gave him access to books he could not afford to buy. He read fast, occasionally misunderstanding texts, and erratically: of Voltaire’s works he read some of the least influential, little of Diderot’s, and less of Montesquieu’s, and only those passages of Raynal which related to Corsica. Given his emotional and sexual immaturity, it is not surprising that he was horrified by Sade, but adored the straightforward sentimentality of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie.4

Like most educated young men of ambition at the time, Napoleone began to fancy himself as a man of letters. With France at peace, literature provided a welcome distraction as well as an opportunity to shine, as another artillery officer, Choderlos de Laclos, had shown with his publication four years earlier of Les Liaisons dangereuses. For Napoleone it was a way of formulating his views, and more importantly a conduit for his feelings about his island home and his own identity. His first surviving essay, written in April 1786, is a brief sketch of the history of Corsica.

Barely ten days later he produced a short essay on suicide, a stilted piece full of self-pity and self-dramatisation. ‘Always alone while surrounded by people’, he prefers to come home and indulge his melancholy. He wonders whether he should not end his life, as he can see no useful purpose for himself in this world. ‘Since I must die one day, would it not be as well to kill myself?’ he asks rhetorically. What does come through the verbiage is unhappiness at having recently suffered ‘misfortunes’ as a result of which life holds no pleasure for him, and a sense of disgust at the mediocrity and corruption of people, which has led him to despise the society in which he is obliged to live. Whether this was a response to some amorous rejection or social snub, or just an outburst of teenage angst, one can only speculate. It is not the expression of a deeper malaise. Less than a week later, on 9 May, he wrote an impassioned defence of Rousseau against the Swiss pastor Antoine Jacques Roustan’s criticism of him. Rousseau’s works exerted a profound influence on Napoleone’s emotional development, and although he would later change his mind and deride Rousseau’s sentimentality, he would never shake it off entirely.5

With Carlo gone, Napoleone had become the family’s man in France, and it now fell to him to obtain places in various institutions for his siblings and petition on behalf of the family’s interests. These were not looking good. The Salines had been only partly drained during Carlo’s lifetime, and as only a fraction of the intended mulberry trees had been planted, the government had decided to stop throwing good money after bad. On the other hand, the Buonaparte had won their case for compensation for the Odone legacy in the form of Les Milleli. It was a fine property with a small house and olive groves above Ajaccio. But Napoleone’s great-uncle Luciano was ill and incapacitated, and Joseph was proving incapable in practical matters. Aged seventeen, Napoleone was obliged to take over the management of the family’s affairs. He applied for leave, and on 15 September 1786 was back in Ajaccio. His mother and Joseph were on the quayside to greet him, but the place was unfamiliar. He was seeing Corsica after an absence of seven years and nine months. He had left as a child, and returned a young man. He met for the first time four younger siblings: Louis aged eight, Maria Paolina six, Maria Nunziata three, and Geronimo only two. He even found it difficult speaking to them, as he had not used his Corsican Italian while he was away.6

Luciano had resigned his post as archdeacon, which was taken by Napoleone’s half-uncle Joseph Fesch, but he had some money, which lent him weight in family affairs, and it was with Fesch and Joseph that he took charge of them. Napoleone applied for an extension of his leave and busied himself with the harvest, the family properties and other practical matters.

During that time he got to know his family, not only his mother, whom he had seen just once briefly since he was nine, but also his siblings and the extended network of cousins, uncles and aunts. He revisited his wet-nurse and others who had looked after him when he was little, and spent much time with the ailing Luciano, whom he revered. He developed a relationship with his brother Joseph, who recalled with fondness their long walks along the coast, breathing in the scent of myrtle and orange blossom, sometimes returning home only after dark.

Napoleone explored the island and tried to acquaint himself with its people and their lore, of which he had only dim childhood memories. He was taken aback by primitive aspects of Corsican life that had not struck him when he was a child, but convinced himself that his fellow islanders were noble savages whose vices were the consequence of the barbarous French occupation. He had brought with him a trunk full of books, which no doubt sustained him and provided the moral and emotional arguments which would enable him to construct an appropriate vision of Corsica.7

He spent almost a year on the island, and did not leave until 12 September 1787. He did not rejoin his regiment, but set off instead for Paris, where he hoped to obtain payment of the 3,000 livres of the subsidy still due for the Salines. It was a considerable sum, roughly equal to three years of his pay as a lieutenant. When he reached the capital he called on ministers and people of influence, probably including Loménie de Brienne, now minister of finances. He also went to great lengths to obtain a place at the seminary in Aix for his brother Lucien. An impecunious outsider in a city in which the aristocracy’s wealth and privilege were on display, the provincial subaltern’s social inhibitions could only have been aggravated by the need to beg for favour.8

When not petitioning ministers, he was reading, taking notes and writing draughts of essays which display a critical attitude to the political system. In one, he argued that while Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Machiavelli and others were undoubtedly great men, they were driven by the desire to win acclaim, which made Leonidas, who had set out to lay down his life for his country unconditionally at the battle of Thermopylae, superior to them, a typically Romantic value judgement showing the influence of Rousseau and a tendency to reject the practical. It sat uneasily with his own instincts, if his brother Joseph is to be believed. He recalled that during one of their walks on Corsica Napoleone had told him he wished he could perform some great and noble act which would be recognised by posterity, and that he could, after his death, witness a representation of it ‘and see what a poet such as the great Corneille would make me feel, think and say’. Such transference of the desire for recognition, normal in any teenager, suggests a disinclination or perhaps inability to engage with the world around him. A combination of awkwardness and disdain certainly marked his attitude to sex.9

On the evening of 21 November he went to see a play, and on leaving the theatre strolled through the Palais-Royal, the Paris residence of the Orléans branch of the royal family. It had extensive gardens at the back, flanked by arcades with shops, cafés and small premises in which whores plied their trade. The higher-class ones sat at their windows beckoning to the passers-by, the next degree down would sit in the cafés, and the cheapest would loiter under the colonnade or along the avenues of the garden.10

The following morning, Napoleone sat down and described what happened next as though he were writing up a scientific experiment. ‘My soul, agitated by the vigorous sentiments natural to it, made me bear the cold with indifference,’ he wrote, ‘but when my imagination cooled, I began to feel the rigours of the season and made for the arcades.’ There a young girl caught his eye. She was obviously a prostitute but did not have the brazen manner of the others, and returned his look with modesty. ‘Her timidity encouraged me and I addressed her … I who more than anyone else felt the horror of her kind, and had always felt myself sullied by a mere look from one …’ In his account, he makes it clear that he was looking for someone ‘who would be useful for the observations I wished to make’. He admits that previous attempts to pick up a prostitute had not been ‘crowned with success’, which might appear odd, as a young officer would not normally have difficulty carrying out such a transaction in the Palais-Royal. His record of their conversation goes some way to explain why: he began by asking how she came to her present condition, which was neither tactful nor to the point, and after more such banter on a freezing November night, it was she who suggested they go back to his lodgings, only to be asked what for. ‘Well, we could warm ourselves and you could satisfy your fancy,’ she answered. The clinical account does not mention whether the experience had been pleasurable or not.11

On 1 December, having obtained a six-month extension of his leave, Napoleone set off for Corsica once more. His efforts in Paris had come to nothing, which only contributed to his disenchantment with a state of affairs that seemed to exclude him as well as his native land, whose subjugation he was beginning to take personally. His vision of a noble nation oppressed by a wicked and corrupt France fitted well with a feeling that he and his family were being thwarted, or at least disrespected, by the regime in Paris.

He spent the next four and a half months in Corsica, and it was not until 14 June 1788 that he rejoined his regiment, now stationed at Auxonne, after an absence of twenty-one months. This was not unusual, as in peacetime officers were allowed to absent themselves for long periods.

Auxonne was a fortified town on the river Saône with an artillery school under the sixty-six-year-old lieutenant general baron Jean-Pierre du Teil, a clever and innovative commander who worked his men hard by setting them challenges that upset their routines. Du Teil took an immediate liking to Napoleone. He set him the task of designing and constructing earthworks, which involved calculations of firepower, resistance and ballistics, followed by ten days of physical work, with Napoleone marshalling 200 men with picks and shovels. ‘This extraordinary mark of favour earned me the ill-feeling of the captains who claimed it was insulting to them that a mere lieutenant be charged with such an important task and that if there were more than 50 men involved one of their rank should be in command,’ he wrote to Joseph Fesch on 29 August. He nevertheless pacified them and even gained their friendship; considering him an intellectual, they tasked him with drawing up the Calotte, a regimental code of conduct. He rose to the challenge and produced a document that was both reasoned and idealistic, very much in the spirit of Rousseau, which could have been the constitution for a popular dictatorship.12

From his essays and notes it is clear that he was already a republican, having, like Rousseau, come to the conclusion that existing systems of government were absurd and that kings had no right to rule. In the introduction to what was to be a dissertation on royal authority, he argued that this was entirely ‘usurped’, since sovereignty resided in the people, adding that ‘there are very few kings who have not deserved to be dethroned’. He also adopted Rousseau’s thesis that religion was destructive, since it was in competition with the state as it held out the promise of happiness in another world, when it was for the state to provide people with the means to achieve it in this.13

He continued to read, annotating and commenting as he went, on subjects as varied as ancient and modern history, geography, the fiscal systems of different states, the role of artillery and ballistics, Greek philosophy, Arab culture, biology, natural history, the possibility of digging a canal through the isthmus of Suez, and many more. That summer he read Richardson’s Clarissa and Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, and himself wrote Le Comte d’Essex, a gothick novella about an imagined conspiracy against Charles I featuring ghosts, blood and daggers, and Le Masque Prophète, a short piece set in the Arab world which is a kind of parable about dictatorship. The plots are melodramatic, the prose bristles with adjectives and metaphors, not to mention spelling mistakes, the characterisation is non-existent.14

Auxonne lay in a marshy, misty part of the Burgundian plain, and Napoleone believed it was the insalubrious exhalations from the stagnant moat beyond the ramparts which brought him down with a fever that autumn, but it may in part have been a consequence of his lifestyle. He was economising on food in order to be able to send money home to his mother. He lived in barracks, in a small room with a bed, a table, six straw-seated chairs and one armchair. He messed with the other officers, but although his lodgings were free, he was still only on the pay of second lieutenant, so he had to be careful. But there was also a manic element to his life at this time. ‘I have no other resource here but work,’ he wrote to his great-uncle Luciano in March 1789. ‘I only get dressed once a week, I sleep very little since my illness. It is incredible. I go to bed at ten o’clock and get up at four in the morning. I only take one meal and dine at three; it suits my health very well.’ He would keep the shutters closed to help his concentration. He did in fact go out, for, as he proudly explained in the same letter, ‘I have gained quite a distinguished reputation in this little town with my speeches on various occasions.’15

The French monarchy was virtually bankrupt, and as a last resort to raise money the king called the Estates General. As this body, representing the clergy, the nobility and the non-noble ‘third estate’, had not been summoned for nearly two centuries, this opened up a Pandora’s box of questions about the nature of the government. All over the country people of every station aired their views and propounded solutions to the political crisis. This was accompanied by popular unrest, and on 1 April Napoleone was sent to the town of Seurre with 100 men to suppress riots. The rebellious spirit inspired bad behaviour, and one day he was sent to the monastery of Citeaux to quell a mutiny by the monks. Over dinner a grateful abbot served him ‘delicious wine’ from the Clos Vougeot in the monastery cellar, which the monks had tried to raid. In a letter to Letizia, he described the sumptuous Easter dinner he was given by a local nobleman. ‘But I would rather have been eating ravioli or lasagne in Ajaccio,’ he concluded.16

He was in high spirits. His health had recovered, the weather was glorious, and he bathed in the Saône (once he got a cramp and nearly drowned). ‘My friend, if my heart were susceptible to love, what a favourable moment this would be: fêted everywhere, treated with a respect that you could not imagine,’ he wrote to Joseph, boasting that ‘The prettiest women are delighted with our company.’17

Like most of his generation, he was in a state of excitement about political events. ‘This year heralds some beginnings which will be very welcome to all right-thinking people,’ he wrote to his proxy godfather Giubega from Auxonne in June, ‘and after so many centuries of feudal barbarism and political slavery, it is wonderful to see the word Liberty inflame hearts which seemed corrupted by luxury, weakness and the arts.’ But this raised questions closer to home. ‘While France is being reborn, what will become of us, unfortunate Corsicans?’ he asked. The moment seemed ripe for him to strike a blow for his island nation by publishing a history of Corsica, but he felt he needed the support or at least approval of Paoli, so he wrote to him in his London exile.18

‘I was born as the fatherland was perishing,’ he wrote. ‘My eyes opened to the odious sight of 30,000 French who had been vomited onto our shores drowning the throne of liberty in rivers of blood. The screams of the dying, the moans of the oppressed, tears of despair surrounded my cradle from the moment of my birth.’ There is some doubt as to the authenticity of this letter, as the original has never been found and there is no trace of a response from Paoli. But it would have been an odd one to forge, given Napoleone’s later career, and the melodramatic style is in tune with his contemporary writings, most notably his Nouvelle Corse. This is a confused rant against the French, represented as irredeemably cruel and corrupt, with a plot derived from Robinson Crusoe and Paul et Virginie so lurid and violent as to be incoherent, couched in a pornography of gore, rape and mutilation, punctuated by flights of sentimentality.19

The history he had been planning for the past few years was finally taking shape in the form of Lettres sur la Corse, an emotional account of events up to the beginning of the eighteenth century which anthropomorphises the Corsican ‘nation’ in the fashion of the day. When the first two letters were finished he sent them to his former French teacher at Brienne, the Abbé Dupuy, asking him to edit them. As well as rewriting whole passages, Dupuy delivered a withering verdict, suggesting in the politest terms that he cut out all the ‘metaphysical’ content.20

On 15 July, Napoleone was in the process of writing to his great-uncle Luciano when two brother officers came into the room with the news they had just received from Paris about a riot having got out of hand and the mob having stormed the Bastille. Whatever his feelings about the monarchy, he was alarmed at the disorders. Four days later, riots broke out in Auxonne, and in a letter to Joseph he expressed contempt for the ‘populace’ and the ‘assortment of brigands from outside who had come to pillage’ the customs house and the tax gatherer’s office. Nor was he impressed by the attitude of his own men, who showed reluctance to quell the riot. On the night of 21 July he acted as the general’s aide, marshalling troops against the rioters. While he claims to have brought matters under control with a forty-five-minute harangue (which sounds unlikely given his oratorical skills), he makes no bones about his frustration at not being allowed to fire on the mob, a profound distaste for which shines through his account.21

He was nevertheless excited by the developments. ‘All over France blood has flowed,’ he wrote to Joseph on 8 August, ‘but almost everywhere it was the impure blood of the enemies of Liberty and the Nation.’ His commander had put him in charge of a group of officers with the brief of studying the possibilities of firing bombs from siege pieces, and he wrote up its report diligently, but his thoughts were elsewhere. He had applied for long leave, meaning to go to Corsica and play a part in whatever might take place there. Both his feelings and his ambition drew him there: the ideal of the island nation he had nourished over the past few years beckoned, as did the fact that there he could play a more prominent part than in France.22

On 16 August his regiment mutinied. The soldiers confronted their officers demanding they hand over the regimental chest, which they were obliged to do. The soldiers then got drunk and tried to fraternise with the officers, forcing them to drink with them. Napoleone’s thoughts are not recorded, but there can be little doubt as to what they were. When, a few days later, the regiment went on parade to swear a new oath, to the Nation, the King and the Law, he was probably thinking of another nation. His request for leave had been granted, and in the first days of September he left Auxonne for Corsica.23

5
Corsica

Napoleone reached Ajaccio at the end of September 1789. Apart from Maria-Anna, who was still at Saint-Cyr, the whole family was there. Joseph had a judicial post in the city, but Lucien, who had abandoned a military career because of poor eyesight and then given a clerical one a try, was idling, along with Louis. Their prospects in France had faded and they were reduced to Corsica once more. Napoleone intended to play a part in the island’s affairs, but the political scene was not quite as he had imagined.

There had been riots in the coastal cities in the wake of events in France, but there was no impetus for revolution, since none of the grievances which motivated it in France resonated in Corsica, where feudal privilege and class differences were not major issues. Here, the conflict was between the separatists and those who had thrown in their lot with France, and between rival clans. In the early summer of 1789 a Corsican assembly had sent four deputies to the Estates General at Versailles: Matteo Buttafocco representing the nobility, the Abbé Peretti the clergy, and the lawyer Cristoforo Saliceti and Captain Pietro Paulo Colonna Cesari the third estate. The only thing uniting them was resentment of the French administration. Even the French loyalists Buttafocco and Peretti wanted the island administered by its inhabitants, meaning their own sort. The representatives of the third estate, Saliceti and Cesari, belonged to a faction describing themselves as ‘patriots’, some of whom wanted greater autonomy or even independence, others integration into France.

The Estates General had transformed itself into a National Assembly, and this would decide Corsica’s future. On 17 June 1789 Saliceti and Cesari appealed to it demanding that Corsica be governed by a committee of locals and the formation of a native civic guard on the model of those which had sprung up all over France. Meanwhile, a rash of opportunistic disturbances covered the island as latent gripes were voiced and scores settled. On 14 August the assembly which had chosen the deputies to the Estates General set up a revolutionary municipal authority in Bastia. The following day the festivities of the Assumption of the Virgin in Ajaccio resulted in the formation of a ‘patriotic committee’ there, with Joseph as secretary (since he was the only one of them who could read and write French). Napoleone assumed that the next step would be the formation of a civic guard, and with another young enthusiast, Carlo Andrea Pozzo di Borgo, went about distributing tricolour cockades to be worn as a mark of solidarity with the Revolution in France and encouraging people to form a citizens’ militia.

On 17 October the National Assembly, which had by then transferred from Versailles to Paris, decided against allowing Corsica its own assembly and civic guard, on grounds of cost. Napoleone composed a letter of protest, signed by all the revolutionary activists in Ajaccio. He continued to agitate, and on 30 November his appeal demanding for Corsica the same rights enjoyed by the rest of France was read out to the National Assembly in Paris. It was backed by Saliceti and supported by the revolutionary tribune Mirabeau, and in one of those moments of wild enthusiasm characteristic of the early days of the Revolution, Corsica was integrated into the French nation and all those who had fought against the French were amnestied. Paoli was invited to leave London and come to Paris, where he would be welcomed as a hero before travelling on to Corsica. There were celebrations with the Te Deum sung in the island’s churches, and Napoleone hung a banner on the façade of the Buonaparte house bearing the inscription ‘Vive la Nation! Vive Paoli! Vive Mirabeau!’1

The words encapsulated a confusion as to which ‘nation’ Napoleone now associated with. ‘This young officer was brought up at the École Militaire, his sister is at Saint-Cyr, his mother has been showered with benefactions by the government,’ the French commander in Ajaccio wrote to the minister of war in Paris, adding that he should be with his regiment instead of stirring up trouble in Corsica. But Napoleone was not recalled, and the question of his allegiance would be complicated further with the arrival on the island of Paoli.2

The Babbo was preceded by various of his followers returning from exile whose sufferings in the cause endowed them with a sense of self-righteousness that led them to call into question the loyalty of those who, like the Buonaparte, had accommodated themselves to French rule. This made it incumbent on the Buonaparte brothers to demonstrate their devotion to the Corsican cause. They took down a portrait of Marbeuf which hung in their drawing room and hid it, but it was not clear where they stood.3

As Napoleone was writing his violently anti-French history of Corsica at the time, one must assume he still considered himself a Corsican patriot rather than a Frenchman. But given the uncertainties of the situation, he had to hedge his bets and remember that he had a career in the French army. His immediate priority was to secure position and influence. In February 1790 the two brothers agitated for the election of their friend Jean Jérôme Levie as mayor of Ajaccio, and of Joseph to the municipal council (which entailed archdeacon Fesch falsifying his birth certificate to make him of eligible age).4

The next step was to get Joseph elected to the general assembly which was to meet at Orezza to set up an administration for the island. Joseph was successful, and Napoleone accompanied him as they set off on horseback on 12 April, but on arrival they found themselves looked on askance by many of Paoli’s faithful. Napoleone expressed anti-French feelings and wrote an appeal demanding that all Frenchmen be expelled from the island. He befriended Filippo Buonarroti, a revolutionary and supporter of Paoli from Tuscany, and Filippo Masseria, Paoli’s right-hand man who had been sent ahead from London (and was a British agent). He also wrote to his commanding officer asking for an extension of leave, citing health reasons.5

None of this did much to enhance his credibility with Paoli’s henchmen at Corte, but it did affect his standing in Ajaccio, and when the two brothers returned they faced the enmity of the more conservative inhabitants. In the first days of May, while strolling on the Olmo they were attacked by a gang led by a local priest, but were saved by the appearance of a bandit of their acquaintance. They managed to mobilise their supporters in the Borgo, and on 25 June all French officials were expelled from Ajaccio.6

Joseph was one of those selected to meet Paoli on his way from Paris and accompany him back to his native island, where they landed on 14 July 1790. Napoleone and others from Ajaccio met him at Bastia on 4 August, and the two brothers joined some 500 supporters who rode with him on his triumphal progress to Corte.7

The General of the Corsican Nation was sixty-five and marked by twenty-one years of exile in London, during which he had grown to appreciate the merits of monarchy. Although it was the Revolution that gave him back his homeland, he was no revolutionary. On 8 September he opened a congress at Orezza which he packed with his family and supporters. Over the next three weeks this reorganised the administration of the island, giving him unlimited executive power, overall command of the National Guard and a considerable income. This was out of tune with what was being done in Paris, and many of the measures taken were against the law, given that Corsica was now a department of France.

Napoleone was not put off by such high-handed methods. Thanks to Paoli’s favour, Joseph had obtained a seat in the congress and the presidency of the district of Ajaccio. And although he did not benefit personally, Napoleone supported Paoli, accusing anyone who showed less than full commitment of being ‘bad citizens’, and suggesting to Carlo Andrea Pozzo di Borgo the physical removal of three officials whose zeal he found wanting. ‘The means are violent, possibly illegal, but indispensable,’ he insisted. He considered that Paoli was still placing too much trust in democracy and felt he should be more ruthless.8

Napoleone’s leave was running out, so at the end of October he sailed for France. His ship was twice driven back by gales, and it was not until the end of January 1791 that he would finally make it off the island. In the meantime, he remained politically active. On 6 January, along with Joseph, Lucien and Joseph Fesch he took part in the opening session of the Globbo Patriotico, the Patriotic Club of Ajaccio, affiliated to the extreme revolutionary Jacobin Club of Paris. Napoleone attended regularly, making frequent speeches. He was at his most fervent when it came to denouncing Buttafocco and Peretti, who had been agitating in Paris against Paoli. Napoleone wrote a pamphlet entitled Lettre à Buttafocco in which he denounced the deputy as a traitor and blamed him for all the blood spilt by the French in Corsica. He read the letter out in the club, where it was enthusiastically received, with a vote that a hundred copies be printed.9

When Napoleone did eventually sail for France, he took with him his younger brother Louis. The boy was twelve years old and unlikely to obtain an education if he were left in Ajaccio, and as there was no money to send him to a proper school, Napoleone decided to take this in hand himself.

On 12 February he was back with his regiment at Auxonne. He took two small rooms in the town, one for himself and one for Louis. ‘He is studying hard, learning to read and write French, and I am teaching him mathematics and geography,’ Napoleone wrote to Joseph on 24 April. ‘He will be a fine fellow. All the ladies here are in love with him. He has adopted a slightly French manner, correct and elegant; he goes into society, greets people with grace, makes the usual small talk with the gravity and dignity of a man of thirty. I have no doubt that he will be the best fellow of the four of us.’ He did not mention that young Louis sometimes required a thrashing to encourage him.10

On their journey from the south coast Napoleone had rejoiced in the revolutionary ardour he witnessed everywhere. Passing through Valence he attended a session of the local revolutionary club, and on 8 February in a letter to Joseph Fesch he assured him that the whole country was behind the Revolution, and that the only royalists he had met were women. ‘It is not surprising,’ he quipped. ‘Liberty is a woman more beautiful who eclipses them.’ This reflection seems to have prompted him to scribble some thoughts for an essay on the subject of love, which, he maintained, was an entirely superfluous emotion.11

He was welcomed at Auxonne by his friend des Mazis and his commanding officer du Teil, but many of his brother officers gave him a chilly reception when he began to voice his opinions. In its first stages, the Revolution had been welcomed by most educated Frenchmen, and certainly by young officers in provincial regiments, who resented the aristocracy’s monopoly over higher ranks. The abolition of noble rank itself in June 1790 removed all barriers to advancement, but it was not well received by all, and subsequent developments turned many against the way the Revolution was going. Napoleone’s revolutionary enthusiasm grated on them, and his obsession with Corsica would not have won him much sympathy.

He was busy seeing to the printing of his Lettre à Buttafocco, of which he sent copies to the National Assembly in Paris and to Paoli in Corsica. He was hoping to complete and publish his history of Corsica, and wrote to Paoli requesting access to his archive. Paoli was dismissive, describing the pamphlet as a pointless gesture, and not only failed to comply with Napoleone’s request for access to his papers, but let off the parting shot that history should not be written by young people, making it clear he considered him immature.12

In the process of reorganising the army, the National Assembly replaced the names of artillery regiments with numbers, and that of La Fère now became the First. Napoleone was transferred to the Fourth, formerly the regiment of Grenoble, now based at Valence, in which he was posted first lieutenant. He left Auxonne on 14 June and reached Valence two days later, moving into the same rooms he had occupied before and messing at the same inn. Madame du Colombier and her daughter had left the area, but many of the friends he had made during his previous sojourn were still there. Mademoiselle Lauberie de Saint-Germain, with whom he had flirted before, had in the meantime married Jean-Pierre Bachasson de Montalivet, an intelligent man whom Napoleone befriended.

Having settled in, Napoleone composed Dialogue sur l’amour, a Platonic discourse addressed to des Mazis, who was wont to fall in love and then extol the condition’s joys and sufferings to Napoleone. In it he admitted to having been in love himself, but argued that what was at bottom a simple sensation had been garlanded with too many ‘metaphysical definitions’. ‘I believe it to be harmful to society, to the individual happiness of mankind, and I believe that love does more harm than good,’ he argued, ‘and that it would be a blessing if some protective divinity were to rid us of it and deliver the world from it.’ It seemed absurd to him that men, ‘this sex which is master of the world through its strength, its industry, its mind and other faculties, should find its supreme felicity in languishing in the chains of a weak passion and under the sway of a being more feeble than itself in mind and body’. He might have jettisoned the sentimentality of La Nouvelle Héloïse, but Napoleone was still a child of Rousseau in believing that man’s first duty is to society and the state.13

The nature of the French state was being transformed, testing allegiances and polarising society. A few days after his arrival news reached Valence of the king’s attempt to flee the country and arrest at Varennes near the border with the Austrian Netherlands on the night of 21 June 1791. Back in October 1789 Louis XVI had been obliged by a mob of women to leave Versailles and move to Paris. He and his family effectively became prisoners in the royal palace of the Tuileries, and the increasing hostility of the Paris mob precipitated a decision to flee. This was seen as a betrayal, since his intention had been to join the anti-revolutionary forces gathering against France at Koblenz in Germany under his younger brother the comte d’Artois.

Napoleone had joined the Club des Amis de la Constitution, of which he soon became secretary, at whose meetings he made republican speeches. On 14 July, as his regiment paraded to celebrate the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, the officers and men swore a new oath of loyalty, to the National Assembly. A Te Deum was sung and at a banquet that evening Lieutenant Buonaparte was among those raising republican toasts. Not wishing to perjure themselves by taking an oath which overrode that pledging loyalty to the king, many of his brother officers resigned their commissions, and some would cross the frontier to join the royalist forces. Napoleone felt no such scruples. In his cherished narrative of a Corsica violated by the French, the monarch was the incarnation of the arch enemy, and since he had begun to develop a more positive attitude to France, the king drew the residue of his negative feelings.

Having to support both himself and Louis, Napoleone was short of money, and it was partly the prize of 1,200 francs (more than his annual pay) that induced him to enter a competition announced by the Académie of Lyon for an essay on the theme of ‘Which truths and which sentiments it is most necessary to inculcate in people in order to ensure their happiness’. In the event, neither he nor any of the other fifteen applicants won the prize, as the jury found their efforts wanting. One of its members described Napoleone’s essay as a wild dream, and another commented that ‘It may be the work of a man of some sensibility, but it is too poorly ordered, too disparate, too rambling and too badly written to hold the attention.’ It is indeed pompous, florid, full of cultural references and recherché words (he had made a list of them before starting), but it is nevertheless a fascinating document.14

It bristles with contradictions as Napoleone’s libertarian instincts jostle with an authoritarian urge to order things for the best. He prefaces it with some verses by Pope to the effect that man is born to enjoy life and be happy, and opens with the sentence: ‘At his birth, man acquires the right to that portion of the fruits of the earth which are necessary to his existence.’ He rages against those such as profiteers who stand in the way of this, and against authority in general. He stipulates that everyone should have their portion of land and the full protection of the law, and that people should be allowed to say and write what they like. Yet the law should direct people according to the rules of reason and logic, and protect them from ‘bad’ and ‘perverted’ ideas, which should not be permitted to circulate in word or in print. Intriguingly, he identifies ambition as the principal scourge of mankind, above all ‘the ambition which overthrows states and private fortunes, which feeds on blood and crime; the ambition which inspired Charles V, Philip II, Louis XIV’, which he sees as an ‘unruly passion, a violent and unthinking delirium’, since ‘Ambition is never satisfied, even at the pinnacle of greatness.’ Although he rejects Rousseau’s premise of man’s natural goodness in favour of a more cynical view of human nature, he indulges the noble savage myth and holds up Paoli as a paragon of virtue who had revived the spirit of Athens and Sparta.15

Having managed to obtain leave once more, Napoleone was back in Ajaccio by the beginning of October 1791. He canvassed for Joseph, who was seeking election to represent Corsica at the Legislative Assembly which was to meet in Paris (the National Assembly had dissolved itself). But Paoli placed his favoured candidates, and Joseph was rewarded with no more than a local post at Corte. Paoli showed ambivalence with regard to the Buonaparte clan, and particularly to Napoleone, who wore a French uniform and was beginning to behave more like a French Jacobin than a Corsican patriot.16

Although Paoli had sworn loyalty to the French nation before the National Assembly in Paris on 22 April 1790, he had regarded the French as the enemy for so long that it was difficult for him to trust them. As well as being a monarchist, he was a devout Catholic and a friend of the clergy, who had backed him and sheltered his partisans. The Revolution’s disestablishment of the Church and persecution of the clergy was as offensive to him as to most Corsicans.

Only a couple of weeks after Napoleone’s arrival, on 16 October, his great-uncle Luciano died. Hardly had he breathed his last than his nephews and nieces groped under his mattress and then ransacked the room in search of the money they assumed he had squirrelled away. It turned out there was little left, as Luciano had been obliged to dig into his savings to pay Carlo’s debts. But Joseph managed to persuade the administration (of which he was a member) to reimburse the money Carlo had invested in the Salines over the years. The funds were invested in a number of properties confiscated from the Church, the royal domain and the nobility which were being sold off as biens nationaux, ‘national assets’. It seems that in order to scotch rumours of malversation, the Buonaparte brothers put about the story that they had found a fortune under Luciano’s mattress.17

While Joseph grafted at Corte, Napoleone obtained a command in the National Guard of Ajaccio, which relieved him from having to report back to his regular unit. But a new law stipulated that officers below the rank of lieutenant colonel must leave the National Guard and rejoin their units. Determined to remain in Corsica, he decided to try for that rank. He would have to dispute it with two formidable candidates. One was Matteo Pozzo di Borgo, a member of the most powerful clan in Ajaccio and brother of Carlo Andrea, Paoli’s trusted collaborator and currently a deputy to the Legislative Assembly in Paris. The other, Giovanni Peraldi, an infantry captain, was equally well connected, and his brother Marius was the other Corsican deputy in Paris.

Napoleone spent most of February 1792 at Corte, ostensibly as guide and amanuensis to the visiting philosopher Constantin de Volney, but in fact probably trying to obtain Paoli’s favour. His behaviour was not calculated to engage it: he was hyperactive, attending political gatherings and holding discussions with people in the street, voicing extreme views and calling for action. He did not cut a convincing figure. Although he was now twenty-two he looked much younger, and people made jokes about his small stature. According to one source, when he challenged Peraldi to a duel, the other did not bother to turn up.18

As the elections to the colonelcies of the Ajaccio battalions approached, Napoleone was back at home canvassing. All comers were welcomed into the Buonaparte home to dine. Mattresses were laid out on the floor for supporters from the interior, who would be useful in swaying the national guards, most of whom were also from the country, and it was they who would elect the officers. The opposition also canvassed, but they had not taken into account the determination of the Buonaparte.

The election, set for 1 April, was to be presided over by three commissioners, who arrived in Ajaccio two days before. One, Grimaldi, was lodged with the Buonaparte; another, Quenza, stayed with Letizia’s Ramolino family; but the third, Murati, had accepted the hospitality of the Peraldi. On the eve of the election Napoleone sent one of his henchmen from Bocognano, a patriotic bandit who had fought with Paoli against the French, to the Peraldi house with his gang of cut-throats. They burst in while the household were at dinner and kidnapped the commissioner, bundling him off to the Buonaparte house, where his protests were countered by Napoleone with the assurance that he only wished to preserve his independence of judgement from the influence of the Peraldi.19

In the morning, the 500 or so national guards gathered to elect their officers. Pozzo di Borgo and Peraldi were shouted down, and in a travesty of procedure Giovanni Battista Quenza was elected commanding officer, with Napoleone as lieutenant colonel and second in command. The celebrations in the Buonaparte home that evening were accompanied by a military band.

The following day Colonel Maillard, commander of the French garrison of Ajaccio, inspected Napoleone’s volunteers, but the presence of the two forces in the town made for tension. Just as tense were relations between the generally conservative citizens, who saw in the French regulars a guarantee of stability, and the volunteers, most of them wild men from the hills. On the afternoon of 8 April a quarrel developed between some girls playing skittles on the Olmo, and as onlookers and passers-by took sides insults began to fly which had nothing to do with the original dispute. Shots were fired and Napoleone went out to restore order, but more people spilled out into the streets in a confused outburst of animosities. After one of his officers had been killed, Napoleone was obliged to retire to the safety of the former seminary, where his men were stationed. Quenza and he agreed that the insurgency justified retaliation, and they began shooting at any of the townsfolk who came within range. The fighting gradually turned into a chaotic brawl with guns as private scores were settled. Napoleone tried to exploit the crisis by requesting permission from Maillard to take refuge with his men in the citadel, which aroused the Frenchman’s suspicion, and the following day Maillard ordered the volunteers to withdraw from Ajaccio. Napoleone insisted they remain, and again attempted to gain admittance to the citadel – he even tried to subvert the soldiers by denouncing their colonel as an ‘aristo’.

Hearing of the disturbances, the authorities in Corte despatched commissioners to find out what was going on. Napoleone set off to meet them in order to tell the facts his way, and wrote up a version justifying himself. After a cursory examination of the circumstances, the commissioners had a number of citizens arrested and ordered Napoleone and his volunteers to leave Ajaccio. He duly led them off on 16 April, and intended to go to Corte himself to explain, but he could not expect a welcome there. Paoli’s verdict on the events at Ajaccio was that one could expect nothing less when ‘inexperienced little boys are placed in command of the national guards’. He had had enough of the Buonaparte. ‘The General returned here yesterday evening, he is badly disposed towards me; I saw him this morning, we had an argument, and all is over,’ Joseph wrote to his brother, urging him to go to Paris as soon as he could to justify himself before the government.20

6
France or Corsica

Napoleone had much explaining to do when he reached Paris two weeks later, at the end of May 1792. More than one damning report of his activities in Ajaccio had reached the capital, and he had been denounced in the Legislative Assembly by the Corsican deputies Carlo Maria Pozzo di Borgo and Marius Peraldi, no friends of the Buonaparte since the National Guard elections in which their brothers had been trounced. Peraldi had made up his mind that the family had ‘never, under whatever regime, had any merit other than spying, treachery, vice, impudence and prostitution’. Pozzo di Borgo was more amenable, and Napoleone managed to placate him.1

Napoleone also needed to placate the war ministry, since he had overstayed his leave and could be classed as a deserter. Fortunately for him, war had broken out against Austria barely a month before, and since the emigration of thousands of officers had left a shortage, the ministry was not about to deprive the army of a trained officer on account of a squabble between small-town Corsicans. Colonel Maillard’s denunciation was passed to the ministry of justice, and although this had received similar unfavourable reports from other quarters, the matter rested there.2

The day after his arrival in Paris, on 29 May, Napoleone unexpectedly met an old friend from Brienne, Fauvelet de Bourrienne. Bourrienne had not pursued a military career but had joined the diplomatic service, which took him to Vienna and Warsaw, and he was now at a loose end. The two young men teamed up, sharing what little money they had and thinking up ways of making some more. Napoleone also found friendship at the home of his mother’s childhood friend Panoria Permon, a beautiful woman of doubtful virtue who presided over what appears to have been something of a gaming house in which she received Corsicans and others.3

On 16 June he visited his sister Maria-Anna at Saint-Cyr. ‘She is tall, well-formed, has learned to sew, read, write, dress her hair, dance and also a few words of history,’ he reported to Joseph Fesch, but he was worried that she had lost touch with her roots and become ‘an aristocrat’, and feared that if she had known he was a supporter of the Revolution she would never have agreed to see him. But his own attitude to the Revolution was about to be tested.4

A couple of days later, on 20 June, he met up with Bourrienne for lunch at a restaurant in the rue Saint-Honoré. On coming out they saw a crowd of several thousand men and women armed with pikes, axes, swords, guns and sticks making for the Tuileries. They followed, and took up position on the terrace of the Tuileries gardens, from which they watched as the mob surged up to the palace, broke down the doors, overpowered the national guards on duty and swept inside. Napoleone could not hide his indignation, and when he saw the king submitting to don a red cap of liberty and appear at the window to drink the health of the people, he exploded. ‘Che coglione!’ he reportedly exclaimed, disgusted that nobody had prevented the rabble from storming the palace, and declared that if he had been the king things would have turned out differently. He kept returning to the subject, making pessimistic prognoses for the future. ‘When one sees all this close up one has to admit that the people are hardly worth the trouble we take to win their favour,’ he wrote to Lucien two weeks later, adding that the scenes he had witnessed made their scrape in Ajaccio look like child’s play.5

A week later, on 10 July, he was reintegrated into the artillery with the rank of captain, and awarded six months’ back-pay. Although he was ordered to rejoin his regiment, he was in two minds as to what course to take. He had put the finishing touches to his Lettres sur la Corse, which was now ready for the printer, but as he admitted to Joseph, the political context was unfavourable. He was beginning to think that his future might lie in France, and advised Joseph to get himself elected to the Legislative Assembly in Paris, as Corsica was becoming peripheral. At the same time, he urged him to encourage Lucien to remain close to Paoli. ‘It is more likely than ever that this will all end in our gaining independence,’ he wrote, suggesting they keep their options open.6

Lucien failed to get taken on as a secretary to Paoli. He was seventeen, exalted and rebellious. His spirit was, as he put it himself in a letter to Joseph, gripped by boundless ‘enthusiasm’; he had looked inside himself and was ‘developing’ his character in a ‘strongly pronounced way’. His soul had been set on fire by reading the immensely fashionable Edward Young’s poem Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality, and he had been inspired to discover his identity through writing. He was composing a poem about Brutus, and his pen flew over the paper ‘with astonishing velocity’. ‘I correct little; I do not like rules which restrain genius and I do not observe any,’ he wrote. He had also embraced the most radical revolutionary ideals. He assured Joseph that he ‘felt the courage to kill tyrants’ and would rather die with a dagger in his hand than in a bed surrounded by priestly ‘farce’.7

Warned by his younger brother Louis that Lucien was about to take a step that ‘might well compromise the general interest of the family’, Napoleone wrote to him more than once, trying to restrain him. Lucien was having none of it. He resented Napoleone’s dominant influence, accusing him of having fallen for the courtly attractions of Paris, and expressed his resentment at being told what to do in an impassioned letter to Joseph on 24 June, couched in the obligatory revolutionary idiom. ‘He seems to me to be well suited to being a tyrant and I think that he would be one if he were a king, and that his name would be one of horror for posterity and for the sensitive patriot,’ he wrote, casting himself as a ‘pure’ revolutionary and Napoleone as one who had sold out. ‘I believe him capable of being a turncoat …’8

Napoleone was in fact switching allegiance. He had nourished a vision of himself as the champion of a noble persecuted nation and its heroic leader Paoli, demonising France, on which he heaped responsibility for every ill. But over the past couple of years he had acquainted himself with that downtrodden nation, and found it was less innocent than in his dreams. Its heroic leader turned out to be just as unprincipled and tyrannical as any other ruler – and had failed to accord Napoleone the recognition he felt to be his due. Meanwhile, the demonic France had been reborn as the torchbearer for everything he had come to believe in. Viewed from Paris, Corsica was beginning to look small and mean. On 7 August Napoleone wrote to Joseph that he had made up his mind to remain in France. In its present financial condition, the family would benefit from his rejoining his regiment: at least one member would be drawing a salary. There was a war on, and sooner or later he would get the chance to gain promotion. But only three days later something occurred which changed his mind.9

On 10 August he was roused at his lodgings on the rue du Mail near the Place des Victoires by the sound of the tocsin. Hearing that the Tuileries Palace was being stormed, he set off for the place du Carrousel, where Bourrienne’s brother had a furniture shop, from where he would be able to see what was going on. ‘Before I reached the Carrousel I encountered in the rue des Petits-Champs a group of hideous men bearing a head on the end of a pike,’ he reminisced many years later. ‘Seeing me passably well dressed and looking like a gentleman, they accosted me and made me shout Vive la Nation!, which I readily did, as one can imagine.’10

A mob numbering some 20,000 armed with guns, pikes, axes, knives and even spits had attacked the Tuileries, which were defended by 900 men of the Swiss Guards and a hundred or so courtiers and nobles. The king and his family fled to the protection of the Legislative Assembly, but the defenders of the palace were butchered. When it was over, Napoleone ventured into the palace gardens, where people were finishing off the wounded and mutilating their bodies in obscene ways. ‘Never since has any of my battlefields struck me by the number of dead bodies as did the mass of the Swiss, maybe on account of the constricted space or perhaps because it was the first time I had seen anything like it,’ he recalled. ‘I saw even quite well dressed women commit the most extreme indecencies on the bodies of the Swiss guards.’ Napoleone was terrified as well as horrified, and never shed his fear of the mob.11

He was not going to remain in Paris to watch the slide into anarchy, and he could not afford to leave his sister in an institution that identified her as a noblewoman. On 31 August he went to Saint-Cyr to collect Maria-Anna, and brought her to Paris. On 2 September mobs began breaking into prisons and slaughtering the inmates in reaction to a declaration by the Duke of Brunswick, commander of the allied army marching into France to restore the monarchy, in which he vowed to deal severely with the population of the French capital if the king or any of his family were harmed. The massacre of aristocrats, priests and others detained for one reason or another went on for five days, and it was only on 9 September that Napoleone and his sister were able to leave Paris. They stopped at Marseille just long enough to collect his pay arrears, and on 10 October, by which time the monarchy had been abolished and France declared a republic, the two siblings embarked at Toulon, reaching Ajaccio five days later. Napoleone promptly set off for Corte, hoping to restore the Buonaparte clan to favour.

Paoli may have been a dictator, but his attempts to set up an efficient executive had failed. The culture of the island had been profoundly affected by French rule: the influx of specie up-ended a system in which the majority of the population had never previously held a coin, while the creation of a salaried administration launched a rush for official posts which opened up new fields for conflict between rival clans and tempting prospects for corruption. Most of those in office were more concerned with score-settling, nepotism and profiteering than running the country. It was they who would acquire the biens nationaux being sold off: these made up 12 per cent of the land surface of the island, but only 500 out of a population of 150,000 were able to benefit. This altered the previously egalitarian pattern of land ownership, while newly-introduced regulations impinged on unwritten age-old grazing and gathering rights, leading to disputes and banditry on a scale no government could control.12

Paoli was not well, and was unable to exercise the same authority as in the past. His relationship with France was strained, and he could not but be wary of those who identified with that country or with the Revolution. He viewed the Buonaparte brothers with mistrust. He had dismissed Joseph, whom he regarded as too ambitious for his merits, and had refused to take on the hot-headed Lucien as secretary. When Napoleone appeared in Corte hoping for a senior command, Paoli brushed him off with vague promises and sent him back to Ajaccio to await orders in connection with an impending invasion of Sardinia.

The idea had been mooted in Paris more than a year before. The island was only a few hours’ sailing from Corsica. It was rich in grain and cattle, which the French government needed to feed its armies, and it was assumed that its people needed liberating. Its ruling dynasty, the house of Savoy, also reigned over Piedmont and Savoy, and had joined the coalition against France.

The invasion was to be carried out by a combined force of French regulars, volunteers from Marseille and Corsican national guards. At the end of October, a few days after Napoleone’s return from Corte, the French naval squadron carrying the regulars and a detachment of volunteers dropped anchor off Ajaccio. Its commander, Rear-Admiral Laurent Truguet, was received by the principal families of the town, who entertained him with dinners and dances. The forty-year-old sailor was a frequent guest at the Buonaparte house, having taken a fancy to the sixteen-year-old Maria-Anna. Accompanying him on his flagship was Charles Huguet de Sémonville, on his way to take up the post of ambassador in Constantinople. He too was courted by the Buonaparte family, and he agreed to take Lucien along as his secretary. According to Lucien, Napoleone contemplated going east too, to take service with the British in India, calculating that his professional credentials would provide the chance for a command that would give him the opportunity of achieving great things. In the meantime, he nearly met his end on the streets of Ajaccio.13

When allowed off their ships, the French troops roamed the city picking fights. On 15 December a force of volunteers from Marseille sailed in. It was made up of the dregs of the city’s port, and three days later they teamed up with some of the regulars and began lynching people they accused of being ‘aristos’, including members of the Corsican National Guard, mutilating their bodies and parading them around town before dumping them in the harbour. Order was restored with some difficulty, but in January 1793 a further contingent of volunteers sailed in and Napoleone was only saved from being lynched by some of his guardsmen.

On 18 February, to the relief of the people of Ajaccio, the expedition sailed. Napoleone was in command of a small artillery section under his colleague Quenza. The expedition had been divided into two forces, the larger of which, composed of French regulars, was to attack Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia, while the smaller, made up mostly of Corsican volunteers, took the island of Maddalena off the island’s north coast. This force, commanded by Colonna Cesari, consisted of the corvette La Fauvette and a number of troop transports. Unfavourable winds pushed the flotilla back, and it was only four days later that it sailed, landing on Maddalena on 23 February. The Sardinian garrison took refuge in the small town of Maddalena. Napoleone set up a battery which began bombarding the place into submission, and after two days it was on the point of surrendering. But the crew of La Fauvette decided to sail home, and Cesari was obliged to order immediate withdrawal, with instructions to jettison guns and other heavy equipment. Napoleone and Quenza had to scramble back to the boats, whose crews had been seized by panic. The flotilla was back in Corsica by 28 February.

Napoleone wasted no time in covering his own back. He wrote up a detailed account of the events for Paoli; another, critical of Cesari and by extension Paoli, for the minister of war in Paris; and signed another jointly with the other officers who had taken part, in which he defended Cesari. It was not as easy to defend himself from more direct threats, and he was on the point of being lynched as an ‘aristo’ by sailors from La Fauvette when a group of his own men delivered him.14

In Paris, Saliceti had been putting it about that Paoli was no longer fit to rule and that his clan was embezzling on a gigantic scale. The Convention, which had replaced the National Assembly, decided to investigate, and designated three commissioners with Saliceti at their head to travel to Corsica. Their official brief was to see to the defence of the island against a potential attack by the Royal Navy, as the international situation had become critical. King Louis XVI had been guillotined on 21 January, which shocked public opinion accross Europe and broadened support for the coalition of Austria, Prussia, Spain and Sardinia already fighting France. On 1 February France declared war on Britain and the Netherlands. Paoli’s monarchist and Anglophile sympathies were no secret in Paris. The Convention ordered the four battalions of Corsican national guards to be disbanded and replaced by French regulars, and placed all the forces on the island under the command of a French general.

On 14 March, Lucien, who had accompanied Sémonville back to Toulon when he was recalled, made a speech in the local Société Patriotique denouncing Paoli. He may have been put up to it by some of Paoli’s enemies gathered in Toulon, and he would later claim that he did not really know what he was saying. Nevertheless, on 2 April his speech was read out to the Convention in Paris, which only the day before had received news that the commander of the French army facing the Austrians, General Dumouriez, had defected to the enemy. Seeing treason everywhere, it issued a decree outlawing Paoli and ordering his arrest.15

Saliceti and the other two commissioners were still riding at anchor in the Golfe Juan awaiting favourable winds when they heard the news, and wrote to Paris asking for the decree to be suspended while they investigated. It was not until the beginning of April that they reached Bastia, where they were joined by Joseph Buonaparte. Given the intricate web of alliances, enmities and motivations spread over the island, and that almost everyone involved later destroyed and doctored documents, falsified evidence and spun colourful tales, it is impossible to be certain what the commissioners intended. Saliceti probably hoped to maintain Paoli but replace those around him with his own clan and associates, in which category he may have included the Buonaparte.16

On 18 April news of the Convention’s decree outlawing Paoli reached the island. Paoli tried to calm tempers, and sent two delegates to the Convention to justify himself, but Corsican patriots were in uproar, demanding war with France. Napoleone was in Ajaccio, where he wrote a defence of Paoli, which he personally posted on walls around town with a demand for the Convention’s decree to be rescinded. He also attempted to persuade his fellow citizens to affirm their loyalty to the French Republic, in the hope of avoiding a break with France. But most of the notables of Ajaccio had turned against the Buonaparte clan, and he was warned of a plan to assassinate him. He thought of joining Saliceti in Bastia, but changed his mind, and on 2 May set off for Corte to see Paoli. By then news of Lucien’s Toulon speech had reached the island. Worse, a letter from Lucien to his brother boasting that he had provoked the Convention’s decree against Paoli had been intercepted and sent to Corte.17

On his way, Napoleone met a kinsman who warned him that if he went to Corte he would never get out alive. He turned back and reached Bocognano on the evening of 5 May. But he was by no means out of danger, as Marius Peraldi, brother of his erstwhile rival for the Ajaccio colonelcy, was hot on his heels meaning to arrest him and take him to Corte. The various accounts of what happened next read like an adventure story, with Napoleone arrested, locked up under guard, freed at night by cunning subterfuge, pursued, caught, held with a gun to his temple in a stand-off, and finally spirited away while rival gangs of bandits settled scores. What is certain is that he was arrested in Bocognano, that he was freed by a cousin, briefly held again, and eventually taken to a kinsman shepherd’s hut outside Ajaccio.18

Napoleone could not show himself openly, so he slipped into the poor suburb, the Borgo, where he was popular, and that night went to the house of his friend Levie, former mayor of Ajaccio, in which his partisans had gathered. There they cowered, sleeping on the floor, their guns at the ready, for two days, while a boat was prepared to take Napoleone away at night. On the evening of his intended escape the house was surrounded by gendarmes. Levie told his guests to hide, and invited the chief of the gendarmes in. As they talked, both noticed that some of the sleeping-mats had not been hidden. The gendarme, fearing for his life, pretended to see nothing, and the two men continued to drink and talk while Napoleone was smuggled out of the back of the house and down to the beach, where a boat was waiting. By 10 May he was safe in Bastia.19

On the night of 23 May, Letizia was woken by a knock on the door; a cousin had come to warn her that Paoli’s partisans were on their way to seize everyone in the house. He had brought a handful of armed relatives to escort them to safety. Letizia left her two youngest children, Maria Nunziata and Geronimo, in safe hands and took Louis, Maria-Anna, Maria Paolina and Fesch with her. They crept out of town and made for the hills. A few hours later the Buonaparte home was sacked.

Meanwhile Napoleone had persuaded Saliceti and the other commissioners at Bastia that it would be easy to recover control of Ajaccio with a show of force. Four hundred French regulars were assembled and set sail in two ships, with Napoleone, Joseph and the three commissioners on board. The attempt to take the city failed, but Letizia and her children, Joseph Fesch and various French loyalists were evacuated.20

By 3 June Napoleone and his family were in Calvi, one of only three ports still held by the French. The rest of the island was under Paoli’s sway. On 27 May a thousand-strong assembly in Corte had issued a proclamation condemning the Buonaparte. ‘Born in despotism, nourished and brought up at the expense of a lustful pasha who ruled the island, the three brothers turned themselves with ardent enthusiasm into the zealous collaborators and the perfidious agents of Saliceti,’ it ran. ‘As punishment, the Assembly abandons them to their private remorse and to public opinion which has already condemned them to eternal execration and infamy.’21

Whether the French could hang on at Calvi for much longer was open to doubt, and the Buonaparte could no longer hope to play a part in Corsican affairs. On 11 June Letizia, her half-brother Fesch and her brood sailed for France. It was not a good time to be going there.

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