Napoleon: The Man Behind the Myth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4

Freedom (#ulink_15bdbd34-e121-5150-b6be-d5657d5a926a)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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