NAPOLEON
Vincent Cronin

Dedication

FOR

CHANTAL

Contents

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

PREFACE

1. A Happy Childhood

2. Military Academies

3. The Young Reformer

4. Failure in Corsica

5. Saving the Revolution

6. In Love

7. Josephine

8. The Italian Campaign

9. Fruits of Victory

10. Beyond the Pyramids

11. A New Constitution

12. The First Consul

13. Rebuilding France

14. Opening the Churches

15. Peace or War?

16. Emperor of the French

17. Napoleon’s Empire

18. Friends and Enemies

19. The Empire Style

20. The Road to Moscow

21. Retreat

22. Collapse

23. Abdication

24. Sovereign of Elba

25. A Hundred and Thirty-Six Days

26. The Last Battle

27. The End

APPENDIX A: Memoir-Writers and Napoleon

APPENDIX B: ‘Clisson et Eugénie’

SOURCES AND NOTES

INDEX

KEEP READING

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

Preface

WHEN Napoleon first set foot on the deck of an English warship, he watched the sailors heaving the anchor up and setting the sails, and he remarked how much quieter the ship was than a French ship. Six times quieter, he reckoned. The book that follows is quieter than most books about Napoleon in the sense that there is less gunfire. It is a biography of Napoleon, not a history of the Napoleonic period, and biography, I believe, should deal with events that throw light on character. Not all Napoleon’s battles do that, and Napoleon himself declared that on the battlefield he counted for no more than half: ‘It is the army that wins the battle.’

But why a new biography at all? For two reasons. First, since 1951 new material has come to light of great importance, not in the sense that it adds fresh details here and there, but because it obliges us to take a fundamentally new look at Napoleon the man. This material is: the Notebooks of Alexandre des Mazis, Napoleon’s closest friend in his youth, Napoleon’s letters to Désirée Clary, the first woman in his life, the Memoirs of Louis Marchand, Napoleon’s valet, and General Bertrand’s Boswellian St Helena diary. None of this, save the last part of Bertrand, has been published in England. Also important is the long-missing central section of Napoleon’s autobiographical story, ‘Clisson et Eugénie’, into which a frustrated young officer of twenty-five poured his aspirations, and which is here published for the first time.

The second reason is more personal. There are in existence a large number of Lives of Napoleon and, though it will sound presumptuous, I was dissatisfied with their picture of Napoleon. I could not find a living, breathing man. Always to my mind there were glaring contradictions of character. To take one example from many, biographers repeat Napoleon’s phrase: ‘Friendship is only a word. I love no man.’ But at the same time it was obvious from their own pages that Napoleon had many close friends, more I reckon than any ruler of France, and that he was as fond of them as they were of him. Many of the biographers were evidently embarrassed by this seeming contradiction, and they tried to explain it by saying that Napoleon was different from other men: ‘Napoleon was a monster of egoism,’ or ‘Napoleon was a monster of insincerity.’

I for one do not believe in monsters. I wanted, as I say, to find a Napoleon I could picture as a living, breathing man. I knew of course that widely divergent opinions were only to be expected about Napoleon’s public life, but about the facts of his personal life there was no reason to expect divergency. So I began to look at the sources. I found that a surprising number of the sources generally used were, to say the least, of dubious value. Napoleon’s phrase, ‘Friendship is only a word’, occurs only in the Memoirs of Bourrienne, Napoleon’s former secretary. Now Bourrienne embezzled half a million francs from Napoleon, had to be posted abroad, where he embezzled a further 2 million, and finally had to be dismissed the service. After Napoleon’s fall he rallied to the Bourbons, but again had to be dismissed for dishonesty. In order to help pay his debts he decided to publish his Memoirs. Bourrienne did not write them, though; he only supplied notes for part of them, and these were then ‘ghosted’ by a journalist favourable to the Bourbons. Shortly after publication Bourrienne had to be shut up in a lunatic asylum. Immediately after his Memoirs appeared a group of men in a position to know published a book of 720 pages entirely devoted to correcting Bourrienne’s errors of fact. That admittedly is an extreme example but there are eight other Memoirs which no jury in an English court of law would accept as fair evidence; yet these have been drawn on again and again by biographers.

As I continued my critical evaluation of sources – which appears as Appendix A – I was able to clear up many of the contradictions that had puzzled me. But in the process I found that I had to modify my previous opinion of Napoleon. Different qualities, different defects began to emerge, and it was then that I decided to try to write a new Life of Napoleon, one of the first to be based on a critical evaluation of sources, which would also combine the new material I have spoken about earlier. It would be more concerned with civil than with military matters, because Napoleon himself gave more time to civil matters. Even as a second lieutenant Napoleon cared more about social improvements at home than conquests abroad, and though circumstances caused him to fight during most of his reign, he always insisted that he was primarily a statesman. In describing Napoleon’s constructive work, and even his thwarted intentions, I have drawn wherever possible on the diaries or Memoirs of the men who knew him best: such as Desaix in Italy, Roerderer during the Consulate, Caulaincourt during the last years of Empire.

Napoleon once dreamed he was being devoured by a bear. That, and two other dreams – one about drowning, the other about Josephine – are all we know about his dream life. But Napoleon was, among other things, a bookworm. During his leisure moments, whether at Malmaison or on campaign, he could usually be found deep in a book, and we know exactly which books and plays moved him. These I discuss in some detail, believing that, like dreams, they throw light on his longings and fears.

I have used the following manuscripts in public collections: in the Bibliothèque Thiers the rich collection formed by Frédéric Masson, including the journal of Dr James Verling, who lived in Longwood from July, 1818 to September, 1819, and the unexpurgated copy of Gourgaud’s diary: both provide valuable details about Napoleon’s health and morale; in the Institut de France, the Cuvier papers, which show how Napoleon organized education; in the Public Record Office, Lowe’s dispatches to Lord Bathurst and the Foreign Office papers relating to Switzerland, which clarify the rupture of the Treaty of Amiens; in the British Museum, two short Napoleon autographs; the Windham Papers, which show how closely the English ruling class was involved with French émigrés; the Liverpool Papers, particularly Add. MS. 38,569, the volume of cipher letters from Drake, in Munich, to Hawkesbury, keeping him abreast of the plot to overthrow Napoleon; and the diary and reports of Captain Nicholls in St Helena.

A word about spelling. I have followed English usage in omitting the accents from Napoleon, Josephine and Jerome, and the hyphen from double Christian names, such as Marie Louise. For places in France I have used French spelling; for places elsewhere I have adopted English versions.

I wish to thank for their generous help Dr Frank G. Healey, Dr Paul Arrighi, Monsieur Etienne Leca, Conservateur of the Bibliothèque Municipale in Ajaccio, Monsieur J. Leblanc of the Musée d’Ajaccio, Mr Nigel Samuel, who kindly allowed me to use his manuscript of part of ‘Clisson et Eugénie’, Madame L. Hautecoeur of the Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, Mademoiselle Hélène Michaud of the Bibliothèque Thiers, Miss Banner of the Royal College of Music, Mrs Barbara Lowe, who typed the book, and, for a number of Napoleonic details, my friend Mr Basil Rooke-Ley.

CHAPTER 1 A Happy Childhood

ON the morning of 2 June 1764 the bronze bells of Ajaccio cathedral began to peal and the little town’s important people – landowners, army officers, judges and notaries – with their ladies in silk dresses, climbed the five steps leading to the sober-fronted cathedral, passed through the doorway, and took their places for the most fashionable wedding of the year. Carlo Buonaparte of Ajaccio, a tall, slim lawyer aged eighteen, was marrying the beautiful fourteen-year-old Letizia Ramolino, also of Ajaccio. As everyone knew, it was a love match. Carlo had been studying law at Pisa University and suddenly, without taking his degree, he had sailed home to propose to Letizia, and had been accepted. On the Continent upper-class marriages were affairs of birth and money, but in unsophisticated Corsica they were usually affairs of the heart. Not that the present wedding was unsatisfactory from the point of view of lineage and property. Far from it.

The Buonapartes lived originally in Tuscany. An army officer named Ugo is mentioned in an act of 1122 as fighting beside Frederick the One-Eyed, Duke of Swabia, to subdue Tuscany, and it was Ugo’s nephew, when he became a member of the Council governing Florence, who took the surname Buonaparte, meaning ‘the good party’. By ‘the good party’ he designated the Emperor’s men, believers in knightly prowess and the unity of Italy, over against the papal party, which included the new business class. But the ‘good party’ lost power and Ugo Buonaparte had to leave Florence. He went to live in the seaport of Sarzana. In the troubled first half of the sixteenth century one of Ugo’s descendants, a certain Francesco Buonaparte, sailed from Sarzana to seek his fortune in Corsica, which had begun to be colonized by Genoa, and here Francesco’s family had made a good name for themselves, chiefly as lawyers active in local government.

The Ramolinos were descended from the Counts of Collalto in Lombardy and had been established in Corsica for 250 years. Like the Buonapartes, they had married mainly into other long-established families of Italian origin, and sons went into the army. Letizia’s father had commanded the Ajaccio garrison, and later became Inspector General of Roads and Bridges, an unexacting post since Corsica was practically devoid of both. He died when Letizia was five, and two years later her mother married Captain Franz Fesch, a Swiss officer serving in the Genoese navy. It was her Swiss stepfather who gave Letizia away.

From the material point of view also the couple were well matched. Carlo, whose father had died four years earlier, brought his wife the family house in the Via Malerba, two of the best vineyards near Ajaccio, and some pasture and arable land, while Letizia’s dowry consisted of thirty-one acres, a mill and a big oven for baking bread, valued altogether at 6,705 livres. With Carlo’s property probably worth about the same, the young couple could expect an annual income of about 670 livres, mainly in kind, equivalent to £700 today.*

So the dashing young lawyer married the army officer’s beautiful daughter and when the last guest had gone took her to live on the first floor of his big house with shutters in a narrow street near the sea. On the ground floor lived Carlo’s mother and his rich, gout-ridden Uncle Lucciano, Archdeacon of Ajaccio; on the top floor lived cousins, who could sometimes be difficult, and now to the household was added Letizia. She was slender and petite – only five feet one. Her eyes were dark brown, her hair chestnut, her teeth white, and she possessed two features of the thoroughbred: a slender, finely bridged nose and long white hands. Despite her beauty, she was extremely shy, sometimes to the point of awkwardness. She was also, even for a Corsican, unusually devout. She went to Mass every day, a practice she was to retain all her life.

Corsica at this time was attracting attention by her efforts to become independent. In 1755 a twenty-nine-year-old ensign in the Corsican Guard serving the King of Naples, Pasquale Paoli by name, returned to the island, put himself at the head of guerrillas and drove the Genoese out of all central Corsica, bottling them up in a few ports, of which Ajaccio was one. He then gave the Corsicans a democratic constitution, with himself as chief executive, and proceeded to rule wisely. He stamped out bandits, built some roads, founded schools and even a small university.

Carlo Buonaparte, like every Corsican, detested Genoese rule, which taxed Corsicans heavily and reserved the best jobs for supercilious Genoese noblemen. He wanted his country to be completely free and, what is more, was prepared to work for that. He was too young to stand for office or even to vote, but he paid visits to Paoli, and two years after his marriage he took Letizia with him on the three-day horseback journey to Corte, Paoli’s fortress capital. Usually Letizia went out only for Mass, and evidently Carlo wanted to show off his striking young wife.

Paoli was a tall, heavy man with reddish-blond hair and piercing blue eyes. He lived in a house guarded by five large dogs, and himself somewhat resembled a friendly mastiff. In his green uniform with gold embroidery, all day he walked up and down, up and down, pulsating with energy, dictating to his secretary or quoting Livy and Plutarch. He drew strength from the classics, as other men from the Bible, and would say, ‘I defy Rome, Sparta or Thebes to show me thirty years of such patriotism as Corsica can boast.’

Paoli was a born bachelor, forty-one years old, and besides lived only for Corsican independence. But he appreciated shy Letizia. So much so that in the evenings he stopped pacing, drew up a chair and played reversi – a card game – with her. Letizia won so often that Paoli told her she had the game in her blood.

Paoli was still very much the guerrilla leader. He told Carlo that he intended to make a diversionary attack on the nearby Genoese island of Capraia, so that Genoese troops in Corsican ports would hurry to Capraia’s defence. This would anger the Pope, who had originally given Corsica and Capraia to Genoa, and Paoli asked Carlo to go to Rome as his ambassador in order to prevent any counter-measures. This was an honour and a great mark of trust in twenty-year-old Carlo.

Leaving Letizia with his mother, Carlo sailed for Rome. It was no easy task he had been set, for the five bishops in Corsica, all appointed from Genoa, continually sent Rome adverse reports on Paoli. However, Carlo was a good talker and his courteous manners made a favourable impression. He explained Paoli’s policy so ably that Rome refrained from reprisals. He did, however, find the Holy City extremely expensive and to get home had to borrow his fare from a Corsican named Saliceti, one of the Pope’s doctors.

Back in Ajaccio, Carlo could feel well satisfied. Paoli was pleased with his work and – perhaps the games of reversi had something to do with it – people were saying that he looked on Carlo as his likely successor. Letizia, after having had the sadness of losing first a boy, then a girl in infancy, was now the proud mother of a healthy son, Giuseppe.

With the suddenness of a Corsican thunderstorm, this happiness was marred. Paoli in a sense had succeeded too well, for the Genoese, realizing the game was up, had decided to sell Corsica. The buyer was the King of France, Louis XV. He had recently lost Minorca and was anxious to redress his power in the Mediterranean. He signed the deed of purchase at Versailles on 15 May 1768, and at once made plans for taking possession.

The Corsicans held urgent meetings. There were 130,000 of them at this time: a fiery people, bright-eyed, shrill-voiced, forceful in gesture. The typical Corsican wore a short jacket, breeches and long gaiters made of coarse chocolate-coloured corduroy; on his head was cocked a pointed black velvet cap, across his shoulders lay a loaded musket, shot being carried in a leather pouch. He lived in a stone windowless house, lighted at night by a flaring branch of pine, in a corner of which stood a heap of chestnuts which he ground to make his bread. Olives and grapes he picked from his own trees and vines, game – mainly partridge and boar – he shot with his own gun. So he did not need to work in the fields, and considered such work demeaning. His wants were few, and since coinage was hardly known, he felt small temptation to amass wealth. On the other hand he possessed, to an unusual degree, a sense of independence. This bred tremendous assurance, and its counterpart, self-importance.

With such men as these to lead, Paoli decided to resist the French. Carlo felt the same. They called mass meetings; at one of them Carlo made an impassioned and very honest speech: ‘If freedom could be had for the wishing, everyone would be free, but an unfaltering attachment to freedom, rising above all difficulties and based on facts not appearances, is rarely found in men, and that is why those who do possess that attachment are considered virtually superhuman’ – as Paoli was by the islanders. A majority at this meeting voted for resistance, and the men dispersed shouting ‘Freedom or Death.’

In August 1768 French warships landed 10,000 troops at Bastia, on the other side of the island from Ajaccio. Carlo hurried into the mountains to join Paoli. Letizia went also, to look after him in case he were wounded. The Corsican guerrillas, Paoli excepted, had no uniform and they had no cannon; they charged not to fife and drum but to the shrill haunting note of Triton shells. They knew nothing of drill but they did know every corner of the maquis, the thick undergrowth of myrtle, arbutus, broom and other sweet-smelling shrubs which cover the Corsican hills. Paoli led them to victory and took 500 prisoners. The French had to retreat and their commander, Chauvelin, resigned in shame.

Next spring the French returned, 22,000 of them this time, led by the able Comte de Vaux. Again Carlo took to the maquis. Letizia went with him. She was pregnant and she carried her baby son in her arms. She camped in a granite cavern on Corsica’s highest peak, Monte Rotondo, while Carlo led his men against the French. Sometimes she slipped out to see: ‘Bullets whistled past my ears, but I trusted in the protection of the Virgin Mary, to whom I had consecrated my unborn child.’

The Corsicans fought stubbornly. In this and the previous year’s fighting they killed or wounded no less than 4,200 French. But they were too heavily outnumbered and on 9 May Paoli was decisively defeated at Ponte Nuovo. Carlo was still keeping up resistance on Monte Rotondo when, two weeks later, a French officer arrived carrying a white flag. He told Carlo that Corte was in French hands, and the war over. Paoli had decided to go into exile in England. If Carlo and his comrades returned to their homes they would be unmolested.

Carlo and Letizia went to Corte. Here the Comte de Vaux, who had come to feel a healthy respect for Corsicans, assured them that the French came not as oppressors but as friends. Carlo was now faced with a cruel choice. Should he and Letizia go into exile with Paoli? After all, he was one of Paoli’s trusted lieutenants. Perhaps the English would help them win their freedom, though appeals to England had brought no support in the present war. Or should they accept the new situation? Unlike Paoli, Carlo was a family man, and he saw how difficult it would be to make a living abroad as a lawyer. Paoli was an idealist, ‘superhuman’ in his devotion to freedom, but Carlo was more practical. He had twice risked his life to keep Corsica free. That was enough. He would remain in Ajaccio. But he parted from Paoli on good terms, going to Bastia to wave him goodbye as he sailed in an English warship with 340 other Corsicans who preferred exile to French rule.

Carlo and Letizia, heavy-hearted, resumed their life in Ajaccio. The new French garrison hauled down the Corsican flag – argent, a Moor’s head proper, bandaged over the eyes – and ran up their own blue flag with white lilies. French was the new official language, and while Carlo started to learn it, Letizia waited for the child who, as the result of Carlo’s decision, would be born not a Corsican in London but a Frenchman in Ajaccio.

July passed into August, a stiflingly hot month in the little seaport sheltered from breezes. August 15 is the feast of the Assumption, and Letizia, with her devotion to the Virgin Mary, insisted on going to the cathedral for High Mass. When Mass had begun she felt the first signs of labour. Helped by her practical sister-in-law, Geltruda Paravicini, she regained her house a minute’s walk away. She did not have time to go upstairs to bed; instead she lay down on the sofa on the ground floor, while Geltruda called the doctor. On the sofa, shortly before noon, with almost no pain, Letizia gave birth to a son. He was born with a caul, that is, part of the membrane covered his head, which in Corsica as in many places is considered lucky.

Later that day a priest from the cathedral came to baptize the boy. Doubtless he expected that Maria would be included among his names, since Letizia had consecrated him to the Virgin Mary and he had been born on her greatest feast; it was quite usual to add Maria to the main name: Carlo, for instance, was Carlo Maria. But the parents were not inclined to any feminine touch. The child whom Letizia had gallantly carried beside her soldiering husband was to have one name only: Napoleone, after one of Letizia’s uncles who had fought the French and just recently died. Originally, Napoleone was the name of an Egyptian martyr who suffered in Alexandria under Diocletian. Letizia pronounced it with a short ‘o’, but on most Corsican lips it sounded like Nabullione.

Excitement and exertion on the mountains may have caused the baby to have been born before term; at any rate he was not robust. Letizia breast-fed him herself and engaged a sturdy peasant wet-nurse as well, a sailor’s wife named Camilla Ilari. So the child had no shortage of milk. He was cosseted by a mother who had already lost two children, and when he cried was rocked to sleep in his wooden cradle. All this care, combined with Ajaccio’s healthy climate and sea air, produced the desired effect and the baby which had been born puny began to grow into a sturdy child.

Whereas Giuseppe, the elder boy, was quiet and composed, Napoleone was full of energy and curiosity, so that visitors turned his name into Rabulione – ‘he who meddles in everything’. He had a generous nature and would share his toys and sweets with other children without asking a return. But he was always ready for a scrap. He liked to take on Giuseppe, who was his elder by nineteen months; they would roll on the ground in the garden, biting, slapping, twisting each other’s necks, and often it was the younger boy who won. Evidently with the rowdy Napoleone in mind, Letizia cleared one room of furniture, and here on wet days the boys could do what they liked, even draw on the walls.

Napoleone grew up in an atmosphere of security and affection. His young parents were devoted to each other, and they both loved children. Later Carlo, as a Corsican, would have the right of life and death over his sons, but now it was for the mother to administer discipline. When Carlo tried to gloss over the boys’ faults, ‘Let them be,’ said Letizia. ‘That is not your business, but mine.’ She was a great person for cleanliness, and made her children take daily baths. Napoleone did not mind this, but what he did mind was going to the long-drawn-out High Mass on Sunday. If he tried to skip it, he got a sound slap from Letizia.

The food he ate came largely from his parents’ land; ‘the Buonapartes,’ said Archdeacon Lucciano with pride, ‘have never paid for bread, wine and oil.’ Bread was home-baked from corn ground in the mill that had been part of Letizia’s dowry. The milk was goat’s milk, the cheese a creamy goat’s cheese called bruccio. There was no butter, but plenty of olive oil; little meat, but plenty of fresh fish, including tunny. Everything was of good quality and nutritious. Napoleone took little interest in any food except black cherries: these he liked extremely.

When he was five, he was sent to a mixed day school run by nuns. In the afternoon the children were taken for a walk, and on these occasions Napoleone liked to hold hands with a girl named Giacominetta. The other boys noticed this, as well as the fact that Napoleone, careless about dress, always had his stockings round his ankles. They would follow him, shouting:

Napoleone di mezza calzetta Fa l’amore a Giacominetta.

Corsicans hate being made sport of, and in this respect Napoleone was a typical Corsican. He picked up sticks or stones, rushed among the jeering boys, and yet another scrap began.

From the nuns Napoleone went to a boys’ day school run by a certain Father Recco. Here he learned to read – in Italian, for French innovations did not touch the schools. He learned to write, also in Italian. He learned arithmetic, and this he liked. He even did sums out of school, for pleasure. One day, aged eight, he rode off with a local farmer to inspect a mill. Having learned from the farmer how much corn the mill would grind in an hour, he worked out the quantities ground in one day and one week. He also calculated the volume of water required to turn the mill-stones.

During the long summer holidays the family moved – taking their mattresses with them – to one of their farm houses near the sea or in the hills. Here Napoleone would be taken on long rides with his forceful Aunt Geltruda, who had no children of her own and liked to instruct him in farming. In this way he learned about yields of corn, the planting and pruning of vines, and the damage done by Uncle Lucciano’s goats to olive trees.

Corsican families like the Buonapartes were in a very unusual social position. Both Carlo and Letizia were nobles by birth: that is, for 300 years most of their forbears had married equals, and, although there was no inbreeding, a certain physical and mental refinement could be expected in each generation. But they differed from the rest of the European nobility in that they were not rich and possessed no privileges. They paid taxes like anyone else and workmen called them by their first names. Their house in Ajaccio was larger than most, but not essentially different: it had no family portraits on the walls, no footmen bowing and scraping. While their Continental counterparts, grown soft and fat, sought a never-never world in titillating novels and masked balls, the Corsican nobility had perforce remained close to the soil. They were more direct, more spontaneous: one small example is that members of a family kissed one another on the mouth. Because they lacked the trappings, they paid more attention to the inner characteristics of nobility. The Buonapartes believed – and taught Napoleone to believe – that honour is more important than money, fidelity than self-indulgence, courage than anything else in the world. Drawing on her experience, Letizia told Napoleone, ‘When you grow up, you’ll be poor. But it’s better to have a fine room for receiving friends, a fine suit of clothes and a fine horse, so that you put up a brave show – even if you have to live off dry bread.’ Sometimes she sent Giuseppe and Napoleone to bed supperless, not as a punishment but to train them ‘to bear discomfort without showing it’.

In France or Italy or England Napoleone would have grown up with a few friends of his own rank, but in Corsica all mixed on an equal footing. He was on the closest terms with Camilla, his wet-nurse, and his two best friends were Camilla’s sons. In the streets of Ajaccio and in the country he played with Corsicans of all types. He was taught not by a foreign tutor but by Corsicans. Though only two of his eight great-grandparents were of mainly Corsican stock, Napoleone inherited or acquired a number of Corsican attitudes and values.

The most important of these was a sense of justice. This for centuries had been a prime Corsican trait, for it is mentioned by classical writers. One example of it occurred when Napoleone was at school. The boys were divided into two groups, Romans and Carthaginians; the school walls were hung with swords, shields and standards made of wood or pasteboard, and the group superior in work carried off a trophy from the other. Napoleone was placed among the Carthaginians. He did not know much history, but at least he knew that the Romans had beaten the Carthaginians. He wanted to be on the winning side. It happened that Giuseppe was a Roman and Napoleone finally persuaded his easy-going brother to change places with him. Now he was a Roman, and should have felt content. But on reflection he decided he had been unjust to Giuseppe. He began to be weighed down by remorse. Finally he unburdened himself to his mother, and only when she had reassured him did he feel easy again.

Another example relates to his father. Carlo from time to time liked to go to one of the Ajaccio cafés to have a drink with friends. Sometimes he played cards for money, and if he lost Letizia was left short for housekeeping. She would say to Napoleone, ‘Go and see if your father’s gambling,’ and off he would have to go. He hated the idea of spying, and what is more, spying on his own father: it revolted his sense of justice. He adored his mother but all his life this was one small thing he was to hold against her.

Under Genoese rule justice had been venal, so the Corsicans had taken the law into their own hands and evolved a kind of barbarian justice: revenge. The Corsican instructed his children to believe in God and the Church, but he omitted the precept about forgiving injuries; indeed, he told them that insults must be avenged. Since the Corsican was extremely sensitive to any reflection on his own dignity, vendettas quickly built up, and were the curse of the island. One observer noted that ‘a Corsican is deemed infamous who does not avenge the death of his tenth cousin.’ ‘Those who conceive their honour injured allow their beards to grow … until they have avenged the affront. These long beards they call barbe di vendetta.’ Revenge was the dark side of the Corsican’s manly pride and sense of justice; Carlo possessed it, and so did his son.

In this world of sudden killings on the mountainside people lived in terror of the evil eye, vampires, spells. Letizia, on hearing startling news, would cross herself very quickly and murmur ‘Gesù!’, a habit her son picked up. Then again, the Corsicans had a somewhat unhealthy obsession with violent death. Much of their sung poetry took the form of a sister’s dirges for her dear brother suddenly knifed or shot. There were many ghost stories, which Napoleone heard and remembered; there were haunting tales about death and its presages; when anyone was fated to die, a pale light over the house-top announced it; the owl screeched all night, the dog howled, and often a little drum was heard, beaten by a ghost.

Carlo meanwhile was adapting himself well to French rule. He crossed to Pisa to take his degree in law, and in 1771, when the French divided Corsica into eleven legal districts, Carlo got the job of assessor of the Ajaccio district. He had to help the judge both in civil and criminal cases, and to take his place when necessary. His salary was 900 livres a year. He promptly engaged a nurse for the boys, Caterina by name, and two servants to help Letizia with the cooking and laundry.

Carlo also earned money as a practising lawyer and even fought cases on his own behalf. He had never received all Letizia’s promised dowry and when Napoleone was five Carlo brought an action, which he won. He obtained the public sale in Ajaccio market-place of ‘two small barrels, two crates, two wooden jars for carrying grapes, a washing bowl and a tub, a large cask, four medium casks, six poor quality barrels, etc.’ A month later Carlo saw that he was still owed the price of an ox: seventy livres. After a new hearing, a new judgment was issued obliging the Ramolino estate to pay ‘the price of the value of an ox demanded by Carlo Buonaparte’.

Another time, Carlo, on the Corsican principle that if he did not stand up for his rights on small matters, he would soon lose them on large ones, brought a lawsuit against his cousins on the top floor ‘for emptying their slops out the window’, and spoiling one of Letizia’s dresses.

Carlo’s most important litigation concerned an estate at Mitelli. It had belonged to Paolo Odone, the brother of Carlo’s great-great-grandmother, who had died without issue and left it to the Jesuits. Since the Jesuit Order had recently been suppressed, Carlo considered it his, but the French authorities had seized the estate and used the revenues for schools. Carlo was constantly trying to prove in law his claim to Mitelli, but lacked documentary evidence and when in 1780 he began to keep a book of accounts and notable family dates, he urged ‘the best qualified of his children’ to continue the register in detail and, alluding to Mitelli, to ‘avenge our family for the tribulations and checks we have experienced in the past.’

Carlo was showing admirable energy but his life still followed the pattern of the past. Thanks to the French, it was now to take a wholly new direction. The French divided society into three classes – nobles, clerics and commoners – and this tidy system they brought to Corsica. If a Corsican wished to continue in politics, as Carlo did, he must do so no longer as an individual but as a member of one of the three classes. A Corsican whose family had lived on the island 200 years and who could prove that it had noble rank during that period was offered privileges similar to those of the French nobility, including exemption from taxes, and the right to sit as a noble in the island’s assembly.

Carlo decided to accept this offer. The Buonapartes had kept in touch with the Tuscan branch in Florence and Carlo was soon able to produce eleven quarters of nobility – seven more than the stipulated minimum. He was duly inscribed as a French nobleman and took his seat when the Corsican States-General met for the first time in May 1772. His fellows thought well of him, for they elected him a member of the Council of Twelve Nobles, which had a say in governing Corsica.

When he was three Napoleone would have noticed a change in his father’s appearance. Tall Carlo took to wearing a powdered curled wig decorated with a double black silk ribbon. He wore embroidered waistcoats, elegant knee-breeches, silk stockings and silver-buckled shoes. At his hip he carried the sword which symbolized his noble rank, and by the local people he came to be called ‘Buonaparte the Magnificent’. There were changes also in the family house. Carlo built on a room where he could give big dinner-parties, and he bought books, a rarity in Corsica. Soon he had a library of a thousand volumes. So it came about that Napoleone, unlike his forbears, grew up within reach of books, and their store of knowledge.

When Napoleone was seven, the Corsicans chose his father as one of three noblemen to convey the island’s loyal respects to King Louis XVI. So off went Buonaparte the Magnificent to the palace of Versailles, where he met the mumbling good-natured King and perhaps also Marie Antoinette, who imported flowering shrubs from Corsica for her garden in Trianon. During this and a second visit in 1779 Carlo tried unsuccessfully to get reimbursed for the Odone legacy, but he did succeed in obtaining a subsidy for the planting of mulberry trees – it was hoped to introduce silk production to Corsica. On his return Carlo could boast that he had spoken to His Majesty, but it was a costly boast. ‘In Paris’, he noted in his accounts book, ‘I received 4,000 francs from the King and a fee of 1,000 crowns from the Government, but I came back without a penny.’

Carlo might rank as a French nobleman, but he was still far from well-off. In 1775, when Napoleone was six, a third son was born, named Lucciano, and two years later a daughter, Maria Anna, so that he now had four children to support and educate on a salary of 900 livres. France, as he had found to his cost, was expensive: doubtless the best he could hope for was to keep his boys at Father Recco’s little school and at sixteen send them to Pisa, like so many generations of Buonapartes, to read law. Fortunately for Carlo and his sons, this problem was soon to be resolved in an unforeseen way.

Paoli had left Corsica, and his place as the most important man had been taken by the French civil and military commander, Louis Charles René, Comte de Marbeuf. Born in Rennes of an old Breton family in 1712, he had entered the army, fought gallantly and risen to brigadier. Then, being charming and witty, he had turned courtier and become gentleman-in-waiting to King Stanislas I, Louis XV’s Polish father-in-law. On his appointment as virtual ruler of Corsica, he had been told by the Minister of Foreign Affairs: ‘Make yourself loved by the Corsicans, and neglect nothing to make them love France.’

Marbeuf did just that. He reduced taxes to a mere 5 per cent of the harvest, he learned the Corsican pronunciation of Italian, so that he could speak with peasants, he sometimes wore their homespun and pointed velvet cap, he built himself a fine house near Corte and entertained generously – as indeed he could well afford, on a salary of 71,208 livres.

Bretons and Scotsmen have two things in common: bagpipes and a flair for administering colonies. When James Boswell toured Corsica, he stayed with Marbeuf, passing, he says, ‘from the mountains of Corsica to the banks of the Seine’, and admired the work of this ‘worthy, open-hearted Frenchman … gay without levity and judicious without severity’. Having fallen ill, Boswell was nursed by Marbeuf personally, on a diet of bouillon and books. Indeed, Marbeuf’s kindness so stands out in Boswell’s Tour that it rather mars the book’s purpose, which was to vaunt the ‘oppressed’ Corsicans.

Carlo liked Marbeuf also. Both of them wanted to improve agriculture. Marbeuf introduced the potato, and encouraged the growing of flax and tobacco. He helped Carlo get a grant of 6,000 livres in order to drain a salt-marsh near Ajaccio and plant barley. Carlo on his own arranged for a seed merchant to come from Tuscany and plant or sow certain French vegetables unknown in Corsica: cabbages, beetroot, celery, artichokes and asparagus. Both men wanted to reclaim and improve. A friendship ripened between them, and when Carlo went to Versailles in 1776 he spoke up for Marbeuf against certain critics at court.

The Marbeufs, like so many Bretons, had a romantic streak. Marbeuf’s father had fallen in love with Louise, daughter of Louis XV, and in public bestowed a kiss on that princess’s cheek – for which a lettre de cachet consigned him to prison. Marbeuf fils had had to make a mariage de raison with a lady much older than himself, and she did not accompany him to Corsica. There he fell in love with a certain Madame de Varesne, and kept her as his mistress until 1776. Then the liaison ended. Marbeuf was sixty-four, but still romantically inclined. At his parties he came to know Letizia, now in her twenties and described by a French eyewitness as ‘easily the most striking woman in Ajaccio’. Soon he fell ‘wildly in love’ with her. It was a Platonic affair, for Letizia had eyes only for Carlo, but it made all the difference to young Napoleone’s fortunes. Instead of merely helping Carlo from time to time with his mulberry plantations, now Marbeuf could not do enough for the beautiful Letizia and her children.

Marbeuf, aware of Carlo’s financial difficulties, informed him of an arrangement whereby the children of impoverished French noblemen might receive free education. Boys destined for the army could go to military academy, boys wishing to enter the Church could go to the seminary in Aix, and girls to Madame de Maintenon’s school at Saint-Cyr. Marbeuf would have to recommend any child, but if Carlo and Letizia wished to take advantage of the scheme, they could count on his support.

This offer was like an answer to prayer. Abandoned now were the vague schemes for making lawyers of the two older boys. It must be either soldiering or the priesthood. Carlo and Letizia decided that Giuseppe, quiet and good-natured, had the makings of a priest. Not so Napoleone, who had to be slapped to High Mass. Strong and mettlesome, he was more likely to have the Ramolino gift for soldiering. So they decided that Napoleone should try for military academy.

Marbeuf supported Carlo’s requests and sent the documents to Paris, with testimonies that Carlo could not afford the school fees. In 1778 the royal decisions arrived. Giuseppe could go to Aix, but only when he was sixteen. Until then he must clearly have some French schooling, and this Carlo could not afford. Again Marbeuf stepped in. His nephew was Bishop of Autun, and the college at Autun was an excellent school, the French Eton. Giuseppe could go there until he was old enough for Aix, and Marbeuf, who had no children of his own, would look after his fees. As for Napoleone, he was accepted in principle for the military academy at Brienne, though final confirmation had to await a new certificate of nobility, this time from the royal heraldist in Versailles. Court officials were notoriously slow, and the certificate might take months: perhaps it would be a good plan if Napoleone spent those months with his brother at Autun, again at Marbeuf’s expense. Carlo and Letizia gladly agreed.

Carlo was able to show his gratitude in one small way. Already guerrilla leader, lawyer, farmer and politician, he now turned poet, perhaps under the influence of his new library. When Marbeuf, on the death of his first wife, married a young lady called Mademoiselle de Fenoyl – without, however, growing any the less enamoured of Letizia – Carlo wrote and gave him a sonnet in Italian, which he proudly copied into his account book, beside the homely lists of farms, linen, clothes and kitchen utensils. It is quite a good sonnet, reflecting Carlo’s own love of children and hopes for his own sons. May Marbeuf and his wife, he says, soon be blessed with a son, who will bring tears of joy to their eyes, and, following his ancestors’ exalted career, shed lustre on the fleur-de-lys, and on his parents’ honour.

Napoleone aged nine had every reason to be pleased with life. He lived in a fine house in the prettiest town of a strikingly beautiful island. He was proud that his family had fought with Paoli, but too young to feel resentment against French troops or French officials, who in fact were pouring money into Corsica on modernization schemes. He had brothers and a sister, and, though not the eldest, he could get the better of Giuseppe if it came to a fight. He admired his father, who had risen in the world, and loved his mother who, as he put it, was ‘both tender and strict’. He doubtless disliked the idea of leaving home, but it was, everyone said, a great opportunity and he intended to make the most of it. When he went to school his mother would give him a piece of white bread for his lunch. On the way he exchanged it with one of the garrison soldiers for coarse brown bread. When Letizia scolded him, he replied that since he was going to be a soldier he must get used to soldier’s rations, and anyway he preferred brown bread to white.

Napoleone watched his mother, already busy with her baby daughter, as she prepared and marked the vast number of shirts and collars and towels prescribed by boarding-schools. In addition, Napoleone had to have a silver fork and spoon, and a goblet inscribed with the Buonaparte arms: a red shield crossed diagonally by three silver bands, and two six-pointed azure stars, the whole surmounted by a coronet.

On the evening of 11 December 1778 Letizia, following a Corsican custom, took Giuseppe and Napoleone to the Lazarists to be blessed by the Father Superior. Next day the boys said goodbye to their brothers and sister, to the gout-ridden Archdeacon, to the many aunts and countless cousins who composed a Corsican family, and to Camilla: tears ran down her cheeks to see ‘her Napoleone’ leave. Then they set out on horseback across the mountains, with mules for their luggage, as far as Corte, where Marbeuf had arranged for a carriage to take them on to Bastia. Also of the party was Letizia’s half-brother, Giuseppe Fesch, who, again with Marbeuf’s assistance, was entering Aix seminary: a pleasant fat pink lad of sixteen. In the south of the island there was always a cousin or uncle to stay with, but not so at Bastia, and they had to spend the night in a simple inn. An old man dragged mattresses into a chilly room but there were too few to go round, so the five of them huddled together and snatched what sleep they could. Next morning Napoleone boarded the ship for France, a boy of nine and a half leaving home for the first time. As his mother kissed him goodbye she sensed what he was feeling and spoke a last word in his ear: ‘Courage!’

* Throughout the period covered by this book, save the inflationary years 1791–9, the purchasing power of the livre or franc was slightly in excess of £1 today.

CHAPTER 2 Military Academies

ON Christmas Day 1778 at Marseille Napoleone Buonaparte set foot on French soil, and found himself among people whose language he could not understand. Happily his father was there, practical and speaking French, to organize the journey to Aix, where Giuseppe Fesch was dropped off, and then north, probably by boat, the cheapest way, up the rivers Rhône and Saône to the heart of this land eighty times the size of Corsica. At Villefranche, a town of 10,000 inhabitants in the wine-growing Beaujolais, Carlo said, ‘How silly we are to be vain about our country: we boast of the main street in Ajaccio and here, in an ordinary French town, there’s a street just as wide and just as handsome.’

Corsica is mountainous, rugged and poor; to the Buonapartes France must have seemed its complete opposite, with soft rolling contours, trim fields and well-pruned vineyards, straight roads, big houses with park and lake and swans. A population of twenty-five million, by far the largest in Europe, enjoyed a high standard of living and exported almost twice as much as they imported. French furniture, tapestries, gold and silver plate, jewellery and porcelain graced houses from the Tagus to the Volga. Ladies in Stockholm, like ladies in Naples, wore Parisian dresses and gloves, and carried Paris-made fans, while their husbands took snuff from French snuff-boxes, laid out their gardens French style, and considered themselves uneducated if they had not read Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire. In coming to France the two Buonaparte boys had entered the centre of European civilization.

Autun was a slightly smaller town than Villefranche, but richer in fine buildings. There was more beautiful carving over one doorway of its Romanesque cathedral than in all Corsica. Carlo presented his sons to Bishop de Marbeuf and put them in charge of the head-master of Autun College. On the first day of 1779 he said goodbye to Joseph and Napoleon, as they were now being called, and set out for Paris to secure the certificate of Napoleon’s noble birth.

Napoleon’s first task was to learn French, which was also the language of educated Europe, the great universal language that Latin had once been. He found it difficult. He was not good at memorizing and reproducing sounds, nor did he have the flexible temperament of the born linguist. In his four months at Autun he learned to speak French, but retained a strong Italian accent, and pronounced certain words Italian style, for example ‘tou’ instead of ‘tu’, ‘classé’ instead of ‘classe’. At Autun in fact he was still very much the Corsican. This led one of his masters, Father Chardon, to speak of the French conquest. ‘Why were you beaten? You had Paoli, and Paoli was meant to be a good general.’ ‘He is, sir,’ replied Napoleon, ‘and I want to grow up like him.’

The royal heraldist issued Napoleon’s certificate and the time came for the two brothers to part. Joseph cried profusely but only one tear ran down Napoleon’s cheek, and this he tried to hide. Afterwards, the assistant head-master, who had been watching, said to Joseph, ‘He didn’t show it, but he’s just as sad as you.’

In the second half of May Napoleon was taken by Bishop de Marbeuf’s vicar to the little town of Brienne, lying in the green part of Champagne, a countryside of forests, ponds and dairy farms. Here stood a plain eighteenth-century building in a garden of five acres approached by an avenue of lime trees. Brienne had been an ordinary boarding-school until two years before, when the Government, alarmed by France’s string of defeats, had turned it into one of twelve new military academies. But they had retained the old staff, so, paradoxically, Brienne Military Academy was run by members of the Order of St Francis, in brown habits and sandals. The head-master was Father Louis Berton, a gruff, rather pompous friar in his early thirties, and the second master was his brother, Father Jean Baptiste Berton, an ex-grenadier known as ‘the friar in ique’ because he used so many words ending in -ique. They were unremarkable men but they ran Brienne well and it was reckoned one of the better academies.

Napoleon was taken to a dormitory containing ten cubicles, each furnished with a bed, a bran mattress, blankets, a wooden chair and a cupboard on which stood a jug and wash-basin. Here he unpacked his three pairs of sheets, twelve towels, two pairs of black stockings, a dozen shirts, a dozen white collars, a dozen handkerchiefs, two nightshirts, six cotton nightcaps, and finally his smart blue cadet’s uniform. A container for holding powder to dress his hair and a hair-ribbon he laid aside, for until the age of twelve cadets had to keep their hair cut short. At ten o’clock a bell rang, candles were blown out and Napoleon’s cubicle, like the others, was locked. If he needed anything he might call to one of two servants who slept in the dormitory.

At six Napoleon was awakened and his cubicle unlocked. Having washed and put on his blue uniform with white buttons, he joined the other boys in his class – the ‘septième’ – for a talk on good behaviour and the laws of France. Then he went to Mass. After breakfast of crusty white bread, fruit and a glass of water, at eight he began lessons, the staple subjects being Latin, history and geography, mathematics and physics. At ten came classes in building fortifications and in drawing, including the drawing and tinting of relief maps. At noon the boys had their main meal of the day. It consisted of soup, boiled meat, an entrée, a dessert, and red burgundy mixed with one-third water.

After dinner Napoleon had one hour’s recreation, then more lessons in the staple subjects. Between four and six he learned, depending on the day, fencing, dancing, gymnastics, music and German, English being an alternative. He then did two hours’ homework and at eight supped off a roast, an entrée and salad. After supper he had his second hour’s recreation. Evening prayers were followed by lights out at ten. On Thursdays and Sundays he went to High Mass and Vespers. He was expected to go to Confession once a month, and to Communion once every two months. He had six weeks’ annual holiday between 15 September and 1 November: only rich pupils could afford to go home and Napoleon was not one of them. In winter the cubicles became very cold and sometimes water in the jugs froze. The first time this happened Napoleon’s puzzled exclamations caused much amusement: he had never before seen ice.

There were fifty boys at Brienne when Napoleon arrived but as he went up in the school numbers increased to a hundred. Most were his social superiors. Some boys had names famous in history, others had fathers or uncles who hunted with the King, mothers who attended Court balls. In Corsica he had been near the top socially; now he suddenly found himself near the bottom. Also, he was a state-subsidized boy, and although Louis XVI had stipulated that no distinction must be made, inevitably the fee-paying boys made the others feel it. Finally, he was the only Corsican. There were other boys from overseas, including at least two English boys, but Napoleon, with his Italian accent, inevitably stood out, and for a new boy that does not pay. Alone in a strange country, far from his family, speaking a new language, still feeling awkward in his blue uniform, he certainly needed the courage his mother had wished him. But at nine, boys are adaptable and soon he had settled in.

We have three authentic incidents from the Brienne years. The first is an early one, when Napoleon was nine or ten. He had broken some rule and the master on duty imposed the usual punishment: he was to wear dunce’s clothes and to eat his dinner kneeling down by the refectory door. With everyone watching, Napoleon came in, dressed no longer in his blue uniform but in coarse brown homespun. He was pale, tense and staring straight ahead. ‘Down on your knees, sir!’ At the seminarist’s command Napoleon was seized by sudden vomiting and a violent attack of nerves. Stamping his foot, he shouted, ‘I’ll eat my dinner standing up, not on my knees. In my family we kneel only to God.’ The seminarist tried to force him, but Napoleon rolled over on the floor sobbing and shouting, ‘Isn’t that true, Maman? Only to God! Only to God!’ Finally the Head-master intervened and cancelled the punishment.

On another occasion the school was having a holiday. Some of the boys were performing a verse tragedy – Voltaire’s La Mort de César – and Napoleon, older now, was cadet-officer of the day, when another cadet came to warn him that the wife of the school porter, Madame Hauté, was trying to push her way in without an invitation. When stopped, she started shouting abuse. ‘Take the woman away,’ said Napoleon curtly, ‘she is bringing licentiousness into the camp.’

All the cadets were allotted a small piece of land on which they could grow vegetables and make a garden. Napoleon, with his farming background, took a lot of trouble planting his piece of land and keeping it neat. Since his immediate neighbours were not interested in gardening he added their ground to his; he put up a trellis, planted bushes, and to keep the garden from being spoiled, enclosed it with a wooden palisade. Here he liked to read and think about home. One of the books he read there was Tasso’s epic of the Crusaders, Jerusalem Delivered, cantos from which the Corsican guerrillas used to sing, and another was Delille’s Jardins, one passage of which imprinted itself on his memory. ‘Potaveri,’ he recalled, ‘is taken from his native land, Tahiti; brought to Europe, he is given every attention and nothing is neglected in order to try to amuse him. But only one thing strikes him, and brings to his eyes tears of sorrow: a mulberry tree; he throws his arms round it and kisses it with a cry of joy: “Tree from my homeland, tree from my homeland!”’

The garden which reminded him of home became Napoleon’s retreat on holidays. If anyone poked a nose in then, Napoleon would chase him out. On 25 August, the feast of St Louis, which was celebrated as the King’s official birthday, every cadet over fourteen was allowed to buy gunpowder and make fireworks. In the garden next to Napoleon’s a group of cadets built a set-piece in the form of a pyramid, but when the time came to light it, a spark shot into a box of gunpowder, there was a terrific explosion, Napoleon’s palisade was smashed and the boys in their alarm stampeded into his garden. Furious at seeing his trellis broken and his bushes trampled down, Napoleon seized a hoe, rushed at the intruders and drove them out.

These three episodes were doubtless remembered because they show a small serious-minded boy standing up for his rights, or asserting himself, to an unusual degree. But they were exceptional occasions, and it must not be thought that Napoleon was stern or rebellious or a poor mixer. The contrary is true. When the Chevalier de Kéralio, inspector of military schools, visited Brienne in 1783 he had this to say of fourteen-year-old Napoleon: ‘obedient, affable, straightforward, grateful’.

Napoleon made two school-friends. One was a scholarship boy a year his senior: Charles Le Lieur de Ville-sur-Arce, who like Napoleon was good at mathematics, and stood up for the Corsican when he was teased. The other was Pierre François Laugier de Bellecour, son of Baron de Laugier. He was a fee-paying boy with a pretty face. Born, aptly enough, in Nancy, he began to show signs of becoming a nancy-boy or, to use Brienne slang, a ‘nymph’. Pierre François was in the class below Napoleon, who, noting these signs, one day took him aside. ‘You’re mixing with a crowd I don’t approve of. Your new friends are corrupting you. So make a choice between them and me.’ ‘I haven’t changed,’ replied Pierre François, ‘and I consider you my best friend.’ Napoleon was satisfied and the two continued on good terms.

Napoleon made two grown-up friends. One was the porter, the husband of the thrusting Madame Hauté, the other the curé of Brienne, Père Charles. He prepared Napoleon for his first Communion at the age of eleven, and the cure’s simple, holy life made a lasting impression on him.

More important than these friendships were the values Napoleon imbibed. They were emphatically not the values of Paris. The scoffers and sneerers of Paris drawing-rooms, Beaumarchais, Holbach and the rest, if they were known at all, counted for little at Brienne. Tucked away in the depths of the country, it belonged to an older, less superficial France, which had never played shepherds and shepherdesses at the Trianon, never accompanied Watteau on the voyage to Cythera. The purpose of Brienne, according to its founder, War Minister Saint-Germain, was to fashion an élite within a framework of heroism. Cadets should have ‘a great zeal to serve the King, not in order to make a successful career, but in order to fulfil a duty imposed by the law of nature and the law of God.’ The whole emphasis of the teaching was on military service to the King, as the embodiment of France, and on the greatness of his kingdom.

Hence the importance of history. Napoleon learned that ‘Germany used to be part of the French empire.’ He studied a Hundred Years’ War in which there were no English victories: ‘At the battles of Agincourt, Crécy and Poitiers King Jean and his knights succumbed in face of the Gascon phalanxes.’ He saw living history in the village, where the Brienne family were rebuilding their ancestral château. Jean de Brienne had fought in the fourth Crusade, ruled Jerusalem from 1210 to 1225, and then the whole Latin Empire of the East; other members of the family, Gautier V and Gautier VI, had been Dukes of Athens. How far the French had travelled, how many lands they had ruled! Less attention was paid to recent defeats than to past victories, and the mockery of French institutions, the defeatism and decadence which were such a feature of Paris intellectual life had no place in Brienne. There Napoleon learned to have faith in France.

Whereas most of Napoleon’s schoolmates came from military families and so tended to reinforce still further this enclave of patriotism, in religion they tended to differ from the good Franciscans. During their long dispute with the Jansenists, the Jesuits had marked out large areas of life for the operation of reason, natural law and free will, areas within which man was not really a fallen creature and in which original sin did not require the counterweight of supernatural grace. They had anticipated many beliefs of the philosophes, at the cost, however, of making revealed religion seem an arbitrary, and in the eyes of some an unnecessary, addition to the natural world.

With this background the cadets introduced an element of disbelief into Brienne. For a Catholic his first Communion is the solemnest day of childhood, but at Brienne some of the boys on that day broke their fast by going out and eating an omelette. They had no intention of committing sacrilege; they simply did not believe that they were going to receive the body of Christ. Napoleon was to some extent influenced by the other boys’ attitude, specially since it chimed in with his father’s agnosticism, and he began to question what the friars said. The decisive moment came when he was eleven, and once again the operative factor was his sense of justice. Napoleon heard a sermon in which the preacher said that Cato and Caesar were in hell. He was scandalized to learn that ‘the most virtuous men of antiquity would burn in eternal flames for not having practised a religion they knew nothing about.’ From that moment he decided he could no longer sincerely call himself a believing Christian.

This was a turning-point in Napoleon’s life. But he had inherited his mother’s strong believing instinct, and he was already a person who needed ideals. The vacuum in his soul did not last long. It was filled by the cult of honour, which he had learned at home, by chivalry, which he had learned about in history classes, and by the notion of heroism, which he learned from Plutarch’s Lives of Famous Men, and above all from Corneille.

Corneille’s heroes are men faced with a choice between duty and personal interest or inclination. By exercising almost superhuman strength of will they eventually choose duty. Patriotism is the first duty of all, courage the chief virtue. As for death:

Mourir pour le pays n’est pas un triste sort: C’est s’immortaliser par une belle mort.

This attitude appealed to Napoleon. He too felt it shameful to die what the Norsemen called ‘a straw death’, that is, in bed, and on his first campaign as commander-in-chief he was to write of a young subaltern: ‘He died with glory in the face of the enemy; he did not suffer a moment. What sensible men would not envy such a death?’

When he was twelve Napoleon, who had grown up beside the sea, decided that he wanted to be a sailor. A taste for mathematics often goes with a liking for the sea and ships – so it was with the Greeks; and Napoleon had another motive too. England and France were at war, and it was being fought at sea; moreover the French admirals, Suffren and de Grasse, were actually winning victories. Napoleon naturally wanted to go into the arm which would see action. Along with other cadets bent on joining the navy, he even slept in a hammock.

That summer Napoleon received a visit from his parents. Carlo wore a fashionable horseshoe-shaped wig, and rather overdid the politeness; Napoleon noticed critically that he and Father Berton spent ages at a doorway, each attempting to bow the other through first. Letizia wore her hair in a chignon, a head-dress of lace, and a white silk dress with a pattern of green flowers. She had just come from Autun, where a boy recalled, ‘I can still feel her caressing hand in my hair, and hear her musical voice as she called me “her little friend, the friend of her son Joseph”’. At Brienne she turned the heads of all the cadets.

Letizia did not approve of Napoleon’s hammock and his plan to be a sailor. She pointed out that in the navy he would be exposed to two dangers instead of one: enemy fire and the sea. When she returned to Corsica, she and Carlo asked Marbeuf, whom Napoleon liked and respected, to use his influence in the same direction, but for the time being Napoleon remained set on the navy.

In 1783 the Chevalier de Kéralio inspected Brienne and reported on the cadets. After remarking that Napoleon had ‘an excellent constitution and health’ and giving the description of his character quoted earlier, he wrote: ‘Very regular in his conduct, has always distinguished himself by his interest in mathematics. He has a sound knowledge of history and geography. He is very poor at dancing and drawing. He will make an excellent sailor.’

Despite this good report, Napoleon was not passed in 1783 for entrance to the Ecole Militaire, the next stage in his schooling whether he entered the army or the navy. Evidently he was considered too young – he was just fourteen – but the news came as a blow, for Carlo had been counting on Napoleon graduating that year, so leaving his scholarship free for Lucciano, now eight years old.

Things had begun to go badly for Carlo Buonaparte. His health had broken. He was thin and drawn and blotchy in the face, no one knew why. He now had seven children, and after the birth of the last Letizia had contracted puerperal fever which had left her with a stiffness down her left side. It was to give his wife the benefit of the waters at Bourbonne that Carlo had visited France, stopping to see Napoleon on the way. After their initial burst of generosity the French were reducing school grants and subsidies, so that Carlo was finding it difficult to make ends meet. All this became evident to Napoleon. Already showing a young man’s responsibility, he looked for some way of graduating from Brienne and leaving his place free for Lucciano.

In 1783 England and France, putting an end to their six-year naval war, signed at Versailles a treaty of peace. It is probable, though not certain, that Napoleon now conceived the idea of entering the English naval college at Portsmouth as a cadet. Service under another flag was then quite usual: the great French strategist, Maréchal de Saxe, had been of German birth and, more modestly, Letizia’s Swiss stepfather had served the Genoese. In La Nouvelle Héloïse by Rousseau, one of Napoleon’s favourite authors, did not Saint-Preux sail with Anson’s squadron? Almost certainly Napoleon considered it a temporary expedient to ease his father’s financial difficulties. At any rate, with help from a master, Napoleon managed to write a letter to the Admiralty, asking for a place in the English naval college. He showed it to an English boy in the school, a baronet’s son named Lawley, who was later to become Lord Wenlock. ‘The difficulty I’m afraid will be my religion.’ ‘You young rascal!’ Lawley replied. ‘I don’t believe you have any.’ ‘But my family have. My mother’s people, the Ramolinos, are very rigid. I should be disinherited if I showed any signs of becoming a heretic.’

Napoleon posted his letter. It arrived, but whether he got a reply is unknown. Anyway, he did not go to England and next summer he was passed for the Ecole Militaire. Napoleon must have been pleased to give his father the news and to welcome him in June to Brienne, with young Lucciano, who entered the school now, though Napoleon would not be leaving until autumn. Carlo stayed a day, then went on to Saint-Cyr to place seven-year-old Marie Anne in the girls’ school there, she too on a State grant; to Paris in order to consult a doctor; and to Versailles, where he pleaded with Calonne in the Ministry of Finance for payment of promised subsidies for draining the salt-marshes near Ajaccio.

Carlo had yet another worry. Joseph, now aged sixteen and having scooped all the prizes at Autun, announced that he did not wish to enter Aix seminary. Evidently he felt no call to the priesthood. Lack of such a call did not deter many in this free-thinking age from taking orders, and it speaks well for the Buonaparte upbringing that Joseph should have acted as he did. Joseph and Napoleon wrote to each other, and perhaps it was the younger boy’s Cornelian descriptions of military life which made Joseph announce that he too wanted to become an officer.

Napoleon received this news from his father in June. In Corsica the eldest son enjoyed exceptional respect; his decisions were normally beyond criticism by juniors. Napoleon, however, felt no inhibitions here; his sense of responsibility came to the fore and he wrote to his uncle, Nicolò Paravicini, one of the few letters preserved from his schooldays. It is in French and begins:

My dear uncle,

I am writing to let you know that my dear father came to Brienne on his way to Paris to take Marie Anne to Saint-Cyr, and to try to recover his health … He left Lucciano here, nine years old, three foot eleven and a half inches tall … He is in good health, chubby, lively and scatterbrained, and he has made a good first impression.

Napoleon then turns to Joseph who, he says, now wishes to serve the King. ‘In this he is quite wrong for several reasons. He has been educated for the Church. It is late to go back on his word. My Lord Bishop of Autun would have given him an important living and he was sure of becoming Bishop. What advantage for the family! My Lord of Autun has done everything possible to make him persevere, and promised that he would not regret it. No good. He’s made up his mind.’ Having said as much, Napoleon then feels he may be doing Joseph an injustice. ‘If he has a real taste for this kind of life, the finest of all careers, then I praise him: if the great mover of human affairs has given him – like me – a definite inclination for military service.’ In the margin, reflecting perhaps on his father’s drawn, ill-looking face and on an officer’s slender pay, Napoleon adds that he hopes all the same Joseph will follow the Church career for which his talents suit him and be ‘the support of our family’.

The letter is interesting because it shows Napoleon taking the lead yet trying to see both sides of the problem. His doubts about Joseph’s military aptitude were eventually to be proved correct; for the present an unexpected event was soon to take Joseph back to Corsica.

In October 1784 the fifteen-year-old Napoleon prepared to leave Brienne. Unlike Joseph, he had won no prizes. But every year he had done well enough to be chosen to recite or answer questions on the platform at Speech Day. His best subject was mathematics, his second best geography. His weakest point was spelling. He wrote French by ear – la vaillance became, in one of his letters home, l’avallance – and all his life was to spell even simple words incorrectly.

On 17 October, his hair in a pigtail, powdered and tied with a ribbon, Napoleon boarded the mail coach at Brienne with Father Berton. At Nogent they transferred to the inexpensive passenger barge, drawn by four horses, which took them slowly down the Seine. On the afternoon of the 21st they arrived in Paris.

Here Napoleon felt very much the provincial; he was seen ‘gaping in all directions with just the expression to attract a pick-pocket’. And well he might, for Paris was a city of great wealth and also of great poverty. Noblemen’s carriages raced through narrow streets preceded by mastiffs to clear the rabble; their wheels sent the thick mud flying. There were smart shops selling osprey feathers and gloves scented with jasmine, but also many beggars thankful for a sou. One new feature was the street-lamps, suspended on ropes, which at dusk were lowered, lit and raised again: they were called lanternes.

The first thing Napoleon did in Paris was to buy a book. His choice fell on Gil Blas, a novel about a penniless Spanish boy who rises to become secretary to the Prime Minister. Father Berton took him to the church of Saint-Germain to say a prayer for their safe arrival, and then to the Ecole Militaire, Gabriel’s splendid building, its façade dominated by eight Corinthian columns, a dome and a clock framed with garlands. It had been open only thirteen years and was one of the sights of Paris.

Napoleon found everything very lavish. The classrooms were papered in blue with gold fleurs-de-lys; there were curtains at the windows and doors. His dormitory was heated by a faïence stove, his jug and wash-basin were of pewter, his bed hung with curtains of Alençon linen. He had a more elaborate blue uniform, with a red collar and silver braid, and he wore white gloves. The meals were delicious, and at dinner three desserts were served. The masters were picked men, highly paid. The cost to France of a subsidized cadet like Napoleon was 4,282 livres a year.

Life was much more like real army life. It pleased Napoleon that lights-out and reveille were signalled by the beating of drums, and the atmosphere was that of ‘a garrison town’. In winter the 150 cadets, graduates from the twelve provincial academies, took part in attacking and defending Fort Timbrune, a reduced but exact facsimile of a fortified town. Napoleon, because of his wish to join the navy, was placed in the artillery class, where he studied hydrostatics, and differential and integral calculus.

One day Napoleon was on the parade ground, drilling with his long unwieldy musket. He made a mistake, whereupon the senior cadet, who was instructing him, gave him a sharp rap over the knuckles. This was contrary to regulations. In a fury Napoleon threw his musket at the senior cadet’s head – never again, he swore, would he receive lessons from him. His superiors, seeing that they would have to handle this new cadet carefully, gave him another instructor, Alexandre des Mazis. Napoleon and Alexandre, who was one year ahead of him, at once struck up a lasting friendship.

The effeminate Laugier de Bellecour, once in Paris, definitely threw in his lot with the ‘queers’, indeed at one point the school authorities were so disgusted that they decided to send him back to Brienne, but were overruled by the Minister. When Laugier tried to renew relations Napoleon replied, ‘Monsieur, you have scorned my advice, and so you have renounced my friendship. Never speak to me again.’ Laugier was furious. Later he came on Napoleon from behind and pushed him down. Napoleon got up, ran after him, caught him by the collar and threw him to the floor. In falling Laugier hit his head against a stove, and the captain on duty rushed up to administer punishment. ‘I was insulted,’ Napoleon explained, ‘and I took my revenge. There’s nothing more to be said.’ And he calmly walked off.

Napoleon was evidently upset by Laugier’s relapse, which he linked with the luxury of his new surroundings. He sat down and wrote the Minister of War a ‘memorandum on the education of Spartan youth’, whose example he suggested should be followed in French academies. He sent a draft to Father Berton, but was advised by him to drop the whole affair, so his curious essay never reached its destination. This small episode is, however, important in two ways. As he later told a friend, Napoleon quite often felt physical attraction for men; it was because he had personal experience of homosexual urges that he was so eager to see them damped down. The other aspect of his essay is that it shows Napoleon for the first time sensing a national malaise. The malaise was real, but only a few, chiefly artists, sensed it. 1785, the year Napoleon wrote, was the year of the Diamond Necklace scandal, and the year when Louis David, reacting against the malaise, painted Le Serment des Horaces, in which after sixty years of lolling on beds and swings and scented cushions, the figures in French art suddenly snap to attention.

Napoleon spent his leisure moments, says Alexandre des Mazis, striding through the school, arms folded, head lowered – a posture for which he was criticized on parade. He thought often of his unsophisticated homeland and of exiled Paoli, who had modelled the Corsican constitution on Sparta’s. One of his friends made a funny drawing of Napoleon walking with long steps, a little Paoli hanging on to the knot at the back of his hair, with the caption, ‘Bonaparte, run, fly, to the help of Paoli and rescue him from his enemies.’

In the month after Napoleon entered the Ecole Militaire, his father came to the south of France to seek medical advice. He suffered from almost continual pain in the stomach, and a diet of pears prescribed in Paris by no less a man than Marie Antoinette’s physician had brought him no relief. At Aix he consulted Professor Turnatori, then went on to Montpellier, which had a famous medical faculty specializing in herbal remedies. Here he saw three more doctors, but they could do nothing to cure his pain or the vomiting which they described as ‘persistent, stubborn and hereditary’. Carlo had never been very religious but now he insisted on seeing a priest and during his last days he was comforted and given the sacraments by the vicar of the church of Saint-Denis. At the end of February 1785 he died of cancer of the stomach.

Napoleon, who had loved and respected his father, certainly experienced a deep sense of loss. He was particularly saddened that Carlo should have died away from Corsica amid ‘the indifference’ of a strange town. But when the chaplain wished to take him for a few hours to the solitude of the infirmary, as the custom was, Napoleon declined, saying that he was strong enough to bear the news. He wrote at once to his mother – Joseph was going home to look after her – but his letter, like all cadets’ letters, was re-styled by an officer, and ended up a formal, rather stilted exercise in filial consolation. A better sign of his feelings is that when a family friend in Paris offered to lend him some pocket money, ‘My mother has too many expenses already,’ Napoleon said. ‘I mustn’t add to them.’

Paris, moreover, sometimes provided free amusements. One day in March 1785 Napoleon and Alexandre des Mazis went to the Champ de Mars to watch Blanchard prepare to ascend in a hot-air balloon. Ever since the Montgolfier brothers had seen a shirt drying and billowing in front of a fire and so conceived the principle of ballooning, this sport had caught the public’s fancy. For some reason Blanchard kept delaying his ascent. The hours passed and no balloon rose into the air. Napoleon grew impatient: it was one of his traits that he could not bear to hang around doing nothing. Suddenly he stepped forward, drew a knife from his pocket and cut the retaining cords. At once the balloon rose into the air, drifted over the Paris rooftops and was later found far away, deflated. For this escapade, says Alexandre, Napoleon was severely punished.

Napoleon worked hard at the Ecole Militaire. He continued to do very well in mathematics and geography. He liked fencing and was noted for the number of foils he broke. He was very poor at sketching plans of fortifications, at drawing and again, at dancing, and so hopeless at German that he was usually dispensed from attending classes. Instead he read Montesquieu, the leading panegyrist of the Roman Republic.

Normally a cadet spent two years at the Ecole Militaire, especially when following the difficult artillery course. But Napoleon did so well in his exams that he passed out after only one year. He came forty-second in the list of fifty-eight who received commissions, but most of the others had spent several years in the school. More significant is the fact that only three were younger than Napoleon. His commission being antedated to 1 September, Napoleon became an officer at the age of sixteen years and fifteen days.

In 1785 there was no intake of officers into the navy, so Napoleon did not realize his ambition to be a sailor. Instead he was commissioned in the artillery: an obvious choice, given his flair for mathematics. He was handed his commission, signed personally by Louis XVI, and at the passing-out parade received his insignia: a silver neck-buckle, a polished leather belt and a sword.

On free days Napoleon sometimes visited the Permon family. Madame Permon was a Corsican, knew the Buonapartes, and had been kind to Carlo in the south of France; married to a rich army commissary, she had two daughters, Cécile and Laure. Napoleon put on his new officer’s boots and insignia and proudly went round to the Permon house at 13 Place de Conti. But the two sisters burst out laughing at the sight of his thin legs lost in his long officer’s boots. When Napoleon showed some annoyance, Cécile reproved him. ‘Now you have your officer’s sword you must protect the ladies and be pleased that they tease you.’

‘It’s obvious you’re just a little schoolgirl,’ replied Napoleon.

‘What about you? You’re just a puss-in-boots!’

Napoleon took the quip in good part. Next day out of his scant savings he bought Cécile a copy of Puss-in-Boots and her younger sister Laure a model of Puss-in-Boots running ahead of the carriage belonging to his master, the Marquis de Carabas.

Five and three-quarter years ago Napoleon had arrived in France an Italian-speaking Corsican boy. Now he was a Frenchman, an officer of the King. He had done well. But the death of his father had left him with heavy responsibilities. At the moment he was the only financial resource of his mother, a widow with eight children. He was allowed to select his regiment and because he wanted to be as close as possible to his mother, and to his brothers and sisters, he chose the La Fère regiment; not only was it one of the very best, but it was stationed in Valence, the nearest garrison town to Corsica.

CHAPTER 3 The Young Reformer

VALENCE, on the River Rhône, in Napoleon’s day was a pleasant town of 5,000 inhabitants, notable for several fine abbeys and priories and for the strong citadel built by François I and modernized by Vauban. Officers lived in billets, and Napoleon found himself a first-floor room on the front of the Café Cercle. It was a rather noisy room, where he could hear the click of billiard balls in the adjoining saloon, but he liked the landlady, Mademoiselle Bou, an old maid of fifty who mended his linen, and he stayed on with her during all his time in Valence. As Second Lieutenant his pay was ninety-three livres a month; his room cost him eight livres eight sols.

For his first nine weeks Napoleon, as a new officer, served in the ranks and got first-hand experience of the ordinary soldier’s duties, including mounting guard. The rank and file were ill paid and slept two in a bed – until recently it had been three – but at least they were never flogged, whereas soldiers in the English and Prussian armies often were: indeed a sentence of 800 lashes was not unknown.

In January 1786 Napoleon took up his full duties as a second lieutenant. In the morning he went to the polygon to manœuvre guns and practise firing, in the afternoon to lectures on ballistics, trajectories and fire power. The guns were of bronze and of three sizes: 4-, 8-, and 12-pounders. The 12-pounder, which was drawn by six horses, had an effective range of 1,200 yards. All fired metal balls of three types: solid, red-hot shot, and short-range case-shot. The guns were new – they had been designed nine years earlier – and were the best in Europe. Napoleon soon became deeply interested in everything to do with them. One day, with his friend Alexandre des Mazis, who had also joined the La Fére regiment, he walked to Le Creusot to see the royal cannon foundry; here an Englishman, John Wilkinson, and a Lorrainer, Ignace de Wendel, had installed the most modern plant on English lines, using not wood but coke, with steam-engines and a horse-drawn railway.

Off duty Napoleon enjoyed himself. He made friends with Monsignor Tardivon, abbot of Saint-Ruf in Valence, to whom Bishop de Marbeuf had given him an introduction, and with the local gentry, some of whom had pretty daughters. He liked walking and climbed to the top of nearby Mont Roche Colombe. In winter he went skating. He took dancing lessons and went to dances. He paid a visit to a Corsican friend, Pontornini, who lived in nearby Tournon. Pontornini drew his portrait, the earliest that survives, and inscribed it: ‘Mio Caro Amico Buonaparte’.

Both in Valence and in Auxonne, where he was posted in June 1788, Napoleon got on well with his fellow officers, and now that he was earning his own living seems to have been more relaxed. However, there were occasional discords. In Auxonne, in the room above his, an officer named Belly de Bussy insisted on playing the horn, and he played out of tune. Napoleon one day met Belly on the staircase. ‘My dear fellow, haven’t you had enough of playing that damned instrument?’ ‘Not in the least.’ ‘Well, other people have.’ Belly challenged Napoleon to a duel, and Napoleon accepted; then their friends stepped in and arranged the matter harmoniously.

To help out his mother, Napoleon offered to take his brother Louis to share his billet in Auxonne. Louis, then aged eleven, was Napoleon’s favourite in the family, just as Napoleon was Louis’s favourite. Napoleon acted as schoolmaster to the younger boy, gave him catechism lessons for his first Communion, and also cooked meals for them both, for money had become very scarce in the Buonaparte family. When he needed linen from home, Napoleon paid his mother the cost of sending it, and sometimes he had to keep his letters short, in order to save postage.

As a second lieutenant Napoleon spent much of his time reading and studying: indeed he put himself through almost the equivalent of a university course. In Valence he bought or borrowed books from Pierre Marc Aurel’s bookshop opposite the Café Cercle. Evidently Aurel could not supply all his needs, for on 29 July 1786 he wrote to a Geneva bookseller for the Memoirs of Rousseau’s protectress, Madame de Warens, adding, ‘I should be obliged if you would mention what books you have about the island of Corsica, which you could get for me promptly.’

Napoleon read so much partly because he hoped at this time to become a writer. A review of what he read and wrote will give an excellent indication of how he came to make his fateful choice when the French Revolution began.

To start with Napoleon’s lighter reading. One book he savoured was Alcibiade, a French adaptation of a German historical novel. Another was ‘La Chaumière Indienne, by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. It describes the healthy-mindedness of simple people living close to Nature; it is full of generous, humane and spontaneous feelings. Napoleon liked this sort of novel, as indeed did many of his contemporaries; they found in it an antidote to the cold calculating perversity of sophisticated society, as revealed by Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Even when reading for diversion, Napoleon aimed at self-improvement. He copied into a notebook unfamiliar words or names, such as Dance of Daedalus, Pyrrhic dance; Odeum – theatre – Prytaneum; Timandra, a famous courtesan who remained constantly faithful to Alcibiades in his misfortunes; Rajahs, Pariah, coconut milk, Bonzes, Lama.

Napoleon also liked The Art of Judging Character from Men’s Faces by the Swiss Protestant pastor and mystic, Jean Gaspard Lavater. In a popular style and with the help of excellent illustrations Lavater analysed the noses, eyes, ears and stance of various human types and of historical figures, with the purpose of tracing the effects on the body of spiritual qualities and defects. Napoleon thought so well of the book that he planned to write a similar study himself.

From other, more serious books – thirty in all – Napoleon took notes, at the rate of about one page of notes a day, 120,000 words altogether. He took notes chiefly on passages containing numbers, proper names, anecdotes and words in italics. For example, from Marigny’s History of the Arabs: ‘Soliman is said to have eaten 100 pounds of meat a day …’ ‘Hischam owned 10,000 shirts, 2,000 belts, 4,000 horses and 700 estates, two of which produced 10,000 drachmas …’ He was excited by large numbers and on the rare occasions when he made a slip it was usually to make the figure larger, as when he said the Spanish Armada comprised 150 ships, where his author had 130.

From Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle Napoleon took notes on the formation of the planets, and of the earth, of rivers, seas, lakes, winds, volcanoes, earthquakes, and, especially, of man. ‘Some men,’ he noted, ‘are born with only one testicle, others have three; they are stronger and more vigorous. It is astonishing how much this part of the body contributes to [his] strength and courage. What a difference between a bull and an ox, a ram and a sheep, a cock and a capon!’ Then he copied a long passage on the various methods of castration – by amputation, compression, and decoction of herbs, ending with the statement that in 1657 Tavernier claimed to have seen 22,000 eunuchs in the kingdom of Golconda. Like many young men, Napoleon seems for a time to have had a subconscious fear of castration.

Second Lieutenant Buonaparte never read lives of generals, histories of war or books of tactics. Most of his reading stemmed from a glaringly obvious fact: something was wrong with France. There was injustice, there was unnecessary poverty, there was corruption in high places. On 27 November 1786 Napoleon wrote in his notebook: ‘We are members of a powerful monarchy, but today we feel only the vices of its constitution.’ Napoleon, like everyone else, saw that reform was needed. But what sort of reform? In order to articulate his own feelings and to seek an answer, Napoleon began to read history and political theory.

He started with Plato’s Republic, about which his main conclusion was that ‘Every man who rules issues orders not in his own interest but in the interest of his subjects.’ From Rollin’s Ancient History he took notes on Egypt – he was shocked by the tyranny of the Pharaohs – Assyria, Lydia, Persia and Greece. Athens, he notes, was originally ruled by a king, but we cannot conclude from this that monarchy is the most natural and primordial form of government. Of Lycurgus he notes: ‘Dykes were required against the king’s power or else despotism would have reigned. The people’s energy had to be maintained and moderated so that they should be neither slaves nor anarchists.’ Of Marigny’s History of the Arabs he read three out of four volumes, and ignored the pages on religion. ‘Mahomet did not know how to read or write, which I find improbable. He had seventeen wives.’ China he glanced at in Voltaire’s Essai sur les Maurs, and quoted Confucius on the obligation of a ruler continually to renew himself in order to renew the people by his example.

In these and other notes two main attitudes stand out. Napoleon had a keen sympathy with the oppressed and a distaste for tyranny in any form, whether it was the Almighty inflicting eternal damnation on souls or Cardinal de Fleury boasting of having issued 40,000 lettres de cachet. But there are no sweeping condemnations. Although unsympathetic to the absolutism of Louis XIV’s court, he quotes approvingly the remark of Louis XIV’s grandson when declining a new piece of furniture for his house: ‘The people can get the necessities of life only when princes forbid themselves what is superfluous.’

The book which seems to have influenced Napoleon most and on which he took most notes was a French translation of John Barrow’s A New and Impartial History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Signing of Preliminaries of Peace, 1762. The French translation stopped in 1689, that is, safely before the long series of French defeats.

Napoleon’s notes on Barrow are devoid of any such chauvinism, save perhaps the very first: ‘The British Isles were probably the first peopled by Gallic colonists.’ The invasion of Caesar he skipped, probably because he already knew it well, but he copied out a long story of Offa’s repentance, and his institution of Peter’s pence. He gave much space to Alfred and to Magna Carta, noting that the Charter had been condemned by the Pope. All constitutional struggles Napoleon followed in detail, such as the arraignment of Edward II and Wat Tyler’s rebellion. At the end of Richard II’s reign Napoleon added a personal comment: ‘The principal advantage of the English Constitution consists in the fact that the national spirit is always in full vitality. For a long spell of years, the King can doubtless arrogate to himself more authority than he ought to have, may even use his great power to commit injustice, but the cries of the nation soon change to thunder, and sooner or later the King yields.’

Napoleon treated the Reformation in detail. Summing up the reign of James I, he noted with approval: ‘Parliament henceforward regained its ascendancy.’ Of Charles I Napoleon took a poor view. He made notes on Pym, the first Parliamentary demagogue, but saved his enthusiasm for Simon de Montfort and later the Protector Somerset, who had died in sterner ages to make possible the successes of Pym and Cromwell. Of Simon de Montfort he wrote: ‘There perishes one of the greatest Englishmen, and with him the hope his nation had of seeing the royal authority diminished.’

The French translation of Barrow’s history ended in 1689 with the triumph of constitutional monarchy. Barrow’s message was clear: only a constitution defending the people’s rights could check arbitrary government. In the light of this message Napoleon took a new look at the history of France. The original government of the Franks, he decided, was a democracy tempered by the power of the King and his knights. A new king was made by being lifted on a shield and acclaimed by his troops. Then bishops arrived and preached despotism. Pepin, before receiving the crown, asked permission from the Pope. Gradually the aura of kingship took hold of men’s minds, and kings usurped an authority never originally granted them. They no longer ruled in the interests of the people who had originally given them power. In October 1788 Napoleon was planning to write an essay on royal authority: he would analyse the unlawful functions exercised by kings in Europe’s dozen kingdoms. Doubtless he was thinking of Louis XVI’s power, with a stroke of the pen, to send any Frenchman to the Bastille. What was wrong with France, Napoleon decided, was that the power of the King and the King’s men had grown excessive; the reform Napoleon wanted – and the point is important in view of his future career-was a constitution which, by setting out the people’s rights, would ensure that the King acted in the interests of France as a whole.

To an impartial observer of Europe around the year 1785 the salient fact would have been the success of unconstitutional monarchies, the so-called enlightened despotisms. In Portugal, Spain and Sweden kings of this type were reforming and modernizing, while in Prussia Frederick II and in Russia Catherine II were ruling arbitrarily yet earning the epithet ‘Great’. It is interesting that Napoleon averted his gaze from these personal successes and fixed it on the odd country out – England, with her monarchy limited by law. He did so partly because he was an admirer of Rousseau, whose social contract theory derives from Locke, but even more because of his family background of respect for the law and his personal sympathy with the oppressed.

Napoleon, then, wanted reform in France. He wanted a constitutional monarchy which ruled in the interests of the people. This decision was strengthened by a new turn of events in Corsica. There the French had done an about-face. In September 1786 Marbeuf died, and the island was henceforth administered by the Ministry of Finance. A set of bureaucrats moved in, and since France was heading for bankruptcy, had orders to cut expenditure. They refused to pay subsidies due on past improvement schemes to Letizia, who found herself in financial difficulties, especially since the presence of French bureaucrats and troops had sent up the cost of living: corn doubled in price between 1771 and 1784.

Napoleon’s first reaction was to seek justice. He went to Paris in 1787 to see the man at the top, the Controller General. He specified the sum owing, but added with feeling that no sum ‘could ever compensate for the kind of debasement a man experiences when he is made aware at every moment of his subjection.’

The Ministry did not pay Letizia her money. Nor did the French hand back the Odone property, because one of the officials, a Monsieur Soviris, was an interested party. Again Napoleon took action. He wrote to the Registrar of the Corsican States-General, Laurent Giubega, who happened to be his godfather, protesting in strong language about unenergetic tribunals and offices, where the decision lies with one man, ‘a stranger not only to our language and habits but also to our legal system … envious of the luxury he has seen on the Continent and which his salary does not allow him to attain.’

Napoleon’s letter had no effect. These two cases of injustice, touching his widowed mother, changed Napoleon’s whole attitude to the French in Corsica. Formerly he had accepted their presence as beneficial; now he saw that it was oppressive. Their rule in Corsica was a particular example of the injustice inherent in the French system. That rule, he decided, must be ended and Corsica again be free.

But how? At first Napoleon did not know. ‘The present position of my country,’ meaning Corsica, he noted gloomily, ‘and the powerlessness of changing it is a new reason for fleeing this land where duty obliges me to praise men whom virtue obliges me to hate.’ It took Napoleon two years to find a way. The way was a book. He would write a History of Corsica, along the lines of Boswell’s, in order to touch the French people, to rouse their feelings of humanity. Once they knew the facts, they would demand freedom for the Corsicans.

Napoleon’s History focuses attention on Corsica’s fighters for freedom against the Genoese, men such as Guglielmo and Sampiero. Napoleon intended to make Paoli his central figure, but when he asked for documents Paoli replied that history should not be written by young men. So Napoleon never finished his book. But he did write several very compelling chapters and made the point that Corsicans would have escaped subjection if only they had built a navy.

Napoleon believed that Corsica must be freed by ‘a strong just man’; equally he believed that a brave man must speak up for the French people and instigate reforms. He did not identify them – he was still thinking generally – but he asked himself, What would happen to such men? What was the fate of the reforming hero? To answer his question he wrote a short story. It is based on an incident in Barrow, and therefore set in England, but Napoleon clearly intended it to apply to the present situation in France and Corsica.

The scene is London, the year 1683. Three men plot to limit the power of the frivolous Charles II: Essex, austere, with a strong sense of justice; Russell, kind and warm, adored by the people; Sidney, a genius who realizes that the basis of all constitutions is the social contract. The conspirators are caught, Russell and Sidney executed. But the people ask pardon for Essex and the judges merely imprison him.

‘Night. Imagine a woman troubled by sinister dreams, warned by frightening sounds in the middle of the night, distraught in the darkness of a vast bedroom. She goes to the door and feels for the key. A shudder runs through her body as she touches the blade of a knife. The blood dripping from it is powerless to frighten her. “Whoever you are,” she cries, “stop. I am only the wretched wife of the Earl of Essex.”’ Instead of swooning, as most women would have done, she again feels for the key, finds it and opens the door. Far off in the next room she thinks she sees something walking but is ashamed of her weakness, shuts the door and goes back to bed.

It is eleven in the morning and the Countess, troubled, pale and oppressed, is trying to fight off a worrying dream. ‘Jean Bettsy, Jean Bettsy, dear Jean.’ She lifts her eyes – for the voice has wakened her – and she sees – Oh God! – she sees a ghost approach her bed, draw back the four curtains and take her by the hand. ‘Jean, you have forgotten me, you are sleeping. But feel.’ He draws her hand to his neck. Oh dread! The Countess’s fingers sink into extensive wounds, her fingers are covered in blood; she utters a cry and hides her face; but when she looks again she sees nothing. Terrified and trembling, broken-hearted by these frightful forewarnings, the Countess takes a carriage and drives to the Tower. In the middle of Pall Mall she hears someone in the street say ‘The Earl of Essex is dead!’ At last she arrives and the prison door is opened. Oh horrible sight! Three great razor blows have ended the Earl’s life. His hand is on his heart. Eyes raised to heaven, he seems to implore eternal vengeance.

King Charles II and the Duke of York are the murderers. ‘Perhaps you think that Jean falls down in a swoon and dishonours with cowardly tears the memory of the most estimable of men? In fact she has the body washed, taken home, and shown to the people … But in her deadly grief, the Countess drapes her rooms in black. She blocks up the windows and spends her days grieving over her husband’s terrible fate.’ Not until three years later – Napoleon gets his dates wrong – when the King has died and the Duke of York has been dethroned does the Countess leave her house. She is ‘satisfied with the vengeance exacted by heaven and again takes her place in society.’

Such is Napoleon’s short story. Most of his other writings are so calm and reasonable, it is surprising to come on this gruesome piece. But it is a facet of his character, as blood-tragedy is of Greek civilization. If the ghost comes from Corsica, and the gore from horror novels then in vogue, the basic theme is Napoleon’s own. A nobleman decides to act on behalf of an oppressed people against the King. And what is the result? He loses his life. This, Napoleon sensed, was the invariable dénouement. In his Corsican book he wrote: ‘Paoli, Colombano, Sampiero, Pompiliani, Gafforio, illustrious avengers of humanity … What were the rewards of your virtues? Daggers, yes, daggers.’

But daggers are not quite the end. Six years later Charles II and his brother are gone and a law-abiding king sits on the throne. Though Essex did not live to see it, the constitutional monarchy for which he died ultimately triumphed. There is, Napoleon believed, a higher vengeance at work. Over human affairs broods a divine regulative justice.

We have seen the reforms Napoleon wished accomplished in France and in Corsica, and the tragic fate he envisaged for the reformers. But all these notes and writings, revealing though they are, lack the unique personal touch. What did Second Lieutenant Buonaparte want to do with his own life? What were his aspirations? The answer lies in a forty-page essay which he submitted for a prize of 1,200 livres offered by the Academy of Lyon in answer to the question ‘What are the most important truths and feelings to instil into men for their happiness?’

Napoleon begins his essay with the epigraph: ‘Morality will exist when governments are free,’ an echo, not a quotation as Napoleon claimed, of Raynal’s dictum, ‘Good morals depend upon good government.’ Man, says Napoleon, is born to be happy: Nature, an enlightened mother, has endowed him with all the organs necessary to this end. So happiness is the enjoyment of life in the way most suitable to man’s constitution. And every man is born with a right to that part of the fruits of the earth necessary for subsistence. Paoli’s chief merit lies in having ensured this.

Napoleon turns next to feeling. Man experiences the most exquisitely pleasant feelings when he is alone at night, meditating on the origin of Nature. Sentiments such as this would be his most precious gift had he not also received love of country, love of wife and ‘divine friendship’. ‘A wife and children! A father and mother, brothers and sisters, a friend! Yet some people find fault with Nature and ask why they were ever born!’

Feeling makes us love what is beautiful and just, but it also makes us rebel against tyranny and evil. It is the second aspect we must try to develop and protect from perversion. The good legislator must therefore guide feeling by reason. At the same time he must allow complete and absolute freedom of thought, and freedom to speak and write except where this would damage the social order. Tenderness, for instance, must not degenerate into flabbiness, and we must never stage Voltaire’s Alzire, in which the dying hero instead of execrating his assassin pities and pardons him. It is reason that distinguishes genuine feeling from violent passion, reason that keeps society going, reason that develops a natural feeling and makes it great. To love one’s country is an elementary feeling, but to love it above everything else is ‘the love of beauty in all its energy, the pleasure of helping to make a whole nation happy’.

But there is a perverted kind of patriotism, engendered by ambition. Napoleon saves his most cutting language in order to denounce ambition, ‘with its pale complexion, wild eyes, hurried footsteps, jerky gestures and sardonic laugh’. Elsewhere, in his notebooks, he returns to the same theme: Brutus he calls an ambitious madman, and as for the fanatical Arab prophet Hakim who preached civil war and, having been blinded by an illness, hid his sightless eyes with a mask of silver, explaining that he wore it in order to prevent men being dazzled by the light radiating from his face, Napoleon scornfully comments: ‘To what lengths can a man be driven by his passion for fame!’

Napoleon concludes his essay by contrasting with the ambitious egoist the genuine patriot, the man who lives in order to help others. Through courage and manly strength the patriot attains happiness. To live happily and to work for others’ happiness is the only religion worthy of God. What pleasure to die surrounded by one’s children and able to say: ‘I have ensured the happiness of a hundred families: I have had a hard life, but the State will benefit from it; through my worries my fellow citizens live calmly, through my perplexities they are happy, through my sorrows they are gay.’

Such is the essay written by Second Lieutenant Buonaparte in his cramped billet in Auxonne between parades and sentry duty. He was doubtless disappointed when it did not win the prize: in fact none of the essays was deemed prizeworthy. But the essay had been well worth writing, for it is in some respects a life’s programme. The patriot is clearly Napoleon himself. His aim in life is to work for others’ happiness. The heroism and chivalry he had prized as a cadet are now eclipsed by patriotism of a more workaday kind. He has lost his admiration for the Cornelian hero standing on his rights; instead he sees himself as a member of a community, working for ‘a hundred families’. And he is not now a soldier, but a civilian.

Napoleon does not include Christianity as a factor in happiness, and in this respect is typical of his age. As he wrote in his notebook, Christianity ‘declares that its kingdom is not of this world; how then can it stimulate affection for one’s native land, how can it inspire any feelings but scepticism, indifference and coldness for human affairs and government?’

Napoleon’s trust in feeling was also typical of his age, beginning to weary of cynicism and masks. Where Napoleon is original is in recognizing that a dangerous confusion may arise between true feeling – virtue – and passion masquerading as sentiment. He is original in making reason, not the intensity of the feeling, the judge of the feeling’s worth. If pressed to list the criteria whereby reason acts, Napoleon would doubtless have named patriotism and values like truthfulness and generosity (but not forgiveness) learned from his parents, in other words some at least of the values of Christianity excluded from his essay.

While Second Lieutenant Buonaparte in a small garrison town studied, planned reforms and envisaged the life he would like to lead, the larger world of France was moving towards a crisis. Perhaps the root trouble was that no one any longer possessed the power to act. The well-meaning, still popular Louis XVI tried to make much-needed tax reforms, but the lawyers who composed the Parlements consistently refused to register them. As one young Counsellor in the Paris Parlement explained to a visitor: ‘You must know, sir, that in France the job of a consellour is to oppose everything the King wants to do, even the good things.’ At every level France consisted of groups ossified in opposition, and the strong French critical spirit ridiculed any proposed reform. Lack of confidence crept over the nation, hitting trade hard in 1788. Then came an exceptionally severe winter in 1788–9. The Seine and other rivers froze; trade was impeded; cattle and sheep died. After many years of stability the price of bread, meat and goods rose sharply, and this at a time when many workshops were laying off men. Across France swept the fear of hunger.

At the end of March 1789 in the small town of Seurre a barge was being loaded with wheat. The wheat had been bought by a Verdun businessman and was to be shipped to that town. The people of Seurre, convinced that their food was being bought up, rioted and prevented the barge sailing. The 64th was then stationed in Auxonne, twenty miles from Seurre, and its colonel, Baron Du Teil, sent a detachment of one hundred soldiers, with Napoleon among the officers, to restore order.

In Seurre Napoleon came to know at first hand the mood of the French people, frightened and angry, as they clamoured not only for food but for social justice. What Napoleon thought and felt in 1789 is much less well documented than what he was reading and writing, but we do know that he believed every Frenchman had a right to subsistence, and sympathized with them over the high price of bread. On the other hand, he hated riots and mob action. When men of the 64th broke into headquarters and seized regimental funds; when Baron Du Teil’s country house was set on fire, Napoleon certainly disapproved. Lawyer’s son that he was, he wanted this popular movement to express itself constitutionally within the States-General.

This in time happened. In February 1789 a certain Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, an ex-priest from Fréjus, published a pamphlet which swept the country. ‘What is the Third Estate?’ Sieyès asked. ‘Everything. What has it been in the political order up to now? Nothing. What does it ask? To become something.’ The common people had found a pen, and presently found a voice, that of Mirabeau. Mirabeau was a nobleman with southern blood in his veins, and, like Napoleon, steeped in English history. Rejected by his fellow noblemen, he had been elected by the Third Estate of Aix, and it was in their name that Mirabeau spoke, ‘the defender,’ he said, ‘of a monarchy limited by law and the apostle of liberty guaranteed by a monarchy’.

On 14 July 1789 a group of Parisians stormed the Bastille, but to Napoleon, far from Paris, this would have been an event comparable to the riots in Seurre. What interested him were the decrees of the Constituent Assembly, as the States-General now called itself. The Assembly abolished certain of the privileges of nobles and clergy, gave the vote to more than four and a half million men who possessed at least a little land or property, and in 1791 presented France with her first Constitution, thought up by Mirabeau, prefaced by a ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’, of which the two key articles are the first and fourth: ‘Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be based only upon public utility …;’ ‘Liberty consists in the power to do anything that does not injure others.’

What was Napoleon’s reaction to these laws? He was a French nobleman. His friends and fellow officers were also French noblemen, and their brothers as likely as not on their way to becoming bishops or even cardinals. Because, as nobles, they shed, or were ready to shed, their blood for the King, they paid no taxes. They belonged to an élite, perhaps half a million among twenty-five million. Napoleon as a nobleman could rise to be marshal of France, and the fact that commoners could not, vastly increased his chances of getting to the top. Now these privileges were suddenly swept away, and many resented it. More than half of Napoleon’s fellow officers refused to accept the new situation and many, including his best friend, Alexandre des Mazis, decided to emigrate.

Napoleon did not see the situation in terms of self-interest. What he saw was a Constitution which limited the monarchy by law. This was something he had been hoping for for years. He saw also power passing to the French people, and, the smaller patriotism now engulfed in the larger, he believed that would help Corsica: the French people, he felt sure, would sympathize with the Corsican people and end colonial rule. If, in the ferment of the new popular movement, he lost his privileges, that was a small price to pay. He did not dream of going abroad to join Princes of the blood determined to save the old régime. Sovereignty had been transferred by the Assembly from the King to all the citizens; so his allegiance now was not to Louis XVI but to the French people.

Napoleon could very well have nodded silent approval to the Constitution and left it at that. As an artillery officer, he had his daily duties to perform. But in his essay on Happiness he had stated the obligation to become involved, to act on behalf of his fellow men. The Constitution was under attack from the nobles and clergy; from the kings of Europe; Napoleon decided to act in its defence.

He did so with great energy. He was one of the first to join the Society of Friends of the Constitution, a group of 200 Valence patriots, and he became secretary. On 3 July 1791 he played a leading part in a ceremony at which twenty-three popular societies of Isère, Drôme and Ardèche solemnly condemned the King’s attempted flight to Belgium. Three days later he swore the oath demanded of all officers, ‘to die rather than allow a foreign power to invade French soil’. On 14 July he swore an oath of loyalty to the new Constitution and, at a banquet the same evening, proposed a toast to the patriots of Auxonne.

Property began to be confiscated from the clergy and nobility and put up for sale by the Government under the name of biens nationaux. At first people were frightened to buy, fearing a counter-Revolution. Finally, in the dèpartment of the Drôme a man plucked up courage, put down money and made a purchase. Napoleon again stepped forward and publicly congratulated the buyer for his ‘patriotism’.

The Assembly had passed a decree known as the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which declared the French clergy independent of Rome and that future clergy and bishops must be elected by their congregations. This decree was denounced by Pius VI. Napoleon promptly bought a copy of Duvernet’s anti-clerical History of the Sorbonne, studied the question of papal authority and noted down those occasions when French churchmen dared to say that a Pope was above the King. Napoleon thought Pius a meddler, but not everyone in Valence agreed. So Napoleon arranged for a priest named Didier, formerly a Recollect friar, to address his Society of Friends of the Constitution, where, amid applause, the priest assured the audience that clergy like himself who swore the oath of loyalty to the Civil Constitution acted in good faith, whatever Rome might say.

That was Napoleon’s position in the summer of 1791. The officer of noble birth, great-nephew of Archdeacon Lucciano, was taking a lead in the sale of property confiscated from the nobles and clergy. He was rallying support to a Constitution which stripped sovereignty from the King who had paid for his education and signed his commission. But these were the by-products of an essentially positive course of action. Napoleon, at twenty-one, was a contented man, burning with enthusiasm for a popular movement which embodied many of his aspirations, a movement which, he believed, was bringing justice to France, an end to oppression, and possibly also benefits to Corsica.

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