Napoleon: The Man Behind the Myth - Adam Zamoyski

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      3

       Boy Soldier

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

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

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

      His new environment must have presented a challenge for the young Napoleone at many levels. He was by all accounts a puny child, showing signs of a delicate constitution. He had an olive complexion,

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