Napoleon: The Man Behind the Myth - Adam Zamoyski

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of 150,000 prisoners, 170 flags and over a thousand pieces of artillery, as well as some fifty ships; the conclusion of a number of armistices and treaties with various Italian states; the liberation of the people of most of northern Italy; and the acquisition for France of masterpieces by Michelangelo, Guercino, Titian, Veronese, Correggio, Caracci, Raphael, Leonardo and other works of art. Scherer praised the soldiers of the Army of Italy and particularly their commander, who had ‘married the audacity of Achilles to the wisdom of Nestor’.14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      2

       Insular Dreams

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Where Gabriele came from remains uncertain. The most convincing filiation is to minor gentry of the same name from the little town of Sarzana on the borders of Tuscany and Liguria, some of whom took service with the Genoese and were sent to Corsica. Recent DNA tests have shown that the Corsican Buonaparte belonged to the population group E, which is found mainly in North Africa, Sicily and particularly the Levant. This does not

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