The War of Wars (11 page)

After seducing a virgin he had to return to Corsica under a cloud and there his good looks secured him the post of secretary to the homosexual head of the Corsican independence movement, Pasquale Paoli. Paoli, a huge man with red hair and blue eyes, who wore an embossed green uniform, lived in Corte, a fortress in the interior. An overpowering personality who had served the King of Naples, he had taken up arms against Corsica’s rulers, the Genoese, since 1729, as the leader of an independence movement for this rocky backwater with its 130,000 people and the two small towns of Bastia, with 5,000 people, and Ajaccio, with 4,000. He captured the mountainous interior and drove the Genoese into the ports. Paoli secured the support of the peasantry as he fought for common pastoral land in the lowlands and primitive smallholdings in the highlands. He became admired throughout Europe, with Rousseau and James Boswell as his admirers, the former seeing him as an embodiment of the General Will, the latter as an expression of the traditional Scottish highlander.

In 1756, Corsica had been abruptly ceded by decadent Genoa to the French King, Louis XV: the Genoese had effectively lost control of the island and the newly expansionist French coveted it as a strategic point just off their coast. There was a general uprising against them not just in the mountains but in the towns. Paoli led the uprising, and Buonaparte, a young man with a good fortune from one of the best families in
Ajaccio, was an extremely useful supporter. Meanwhile Buonaparte’s wife had a son, Giuseppe (Joseph), the first to survive infancy. However, the French poured in troops and crushingly defeated the Corsicans on 8 May 1769 at the battle of Ponte Nuovo.

Carlo and Letizia, as prominent independence activists, had to flee into the mountains to join Paoli at Corte: she was heavily pregnant at the time. There Paoli had to accept the inevitable, surrendered and went into exile in England along with more than 300 of his supporters. Carlo chose to stay on the island. His return to Ajaccio along precipitous mountain paths, with the pregnant Letizia cradling the infant Joseph in her arms, was to be a memory for the rest of her life. She went into labour while at mass on the Feast of the Assumption at Ajaccio Cathedral. She was attended by her sister-in-law and the baby was born, big-headed but short-limbed and weak. He was named Napoleone after a much-loved great uncle who had died recently. It was an uncommon name deriving from a Greek saint who had died in Alexandria under the Emperor Diocletian.

The little Napoleone was what today would be called a ‘handful’. His elder brother Giuseppe was serious and quiet: but the infant Napoleone fought him fiercely. He was nicknamed Rabulione – the ‘meddler’ – and went to school at the age of five. His language was Italian. It was a mixed school run by nuns: he held hands with a girl called Giacominetta and a little verse ran:
Napoleone di mezza calzetta fa l’amore a Giacominetta:
Napoleone with his half socks makes love to Giacominetta. Maybe the boy was scruffy and wore his socks around his ankles, but in Italy
mezza calzetta
is the most common sneer towards those of a non-aristocratic background. Napoleone was extraordinarily fierce as a boy and was often in trouble for fighting. Afterwards, at the age of seven, he went to a Jesuit school.

Letizia was an extremely fierce and demanding mother. She was obsessed with cleanliness, forced him to attend mass with slaps, and would beat him with a whip on the slightest pretext, such as stealing food, bad behaviour in church or, on one occasion, laughing at a crippled grandmother. Worse, she was obsessed with outward show: ‘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.’ She would send her children to bed without supper sometimes so that they could learn ‘to bear discomfort without showing it’. Yet she lavished money on keeping the house looking smart.

She would force Napoleone to spy on his father, who liked to play cards for money with his friends in the town cafés; the boy hated the task. She believed in Corsican traditions, which were violent and based on revenge. The society was alive with vendettas, and Corsicans grew their beards –
barbe di vendetta
– until a perceived injustice was avenged. Corsican poetry was based on anguish about death from vendettas; and death was a local obsession. It was foreshadowed in folklore by owls screeching and dogs howling, a drum beating or a light shining on a house all night.

Letizia’s husband Carlo was not a prepossessing character. Having been Paoli’s devoted supporter, with remarkable speed he turned himself into a lackey for the French. As a lawyer he was petty-minded and ruthless, serving his own interests, seeking ownership of an estate for which his claim was dubious and then suing Letizia’s impoverished grandfather, aged eighty-four, for not delivering part of her dowry. He was appointed assessor of the Royal Jurisdiction of Ajaccio by the French ruler of Corsica, the Comte de Marbeuf.

Marbeuf was an old goat: he lived with a mistress, Madame de Varennes, known as the Cleopatra of Corsica, and when she died in 1776 he pursued the strong-willed Letizia, who by now had had her third son, Lucien. The following year he secured Carlo’s appointment as a deputy for the nobility representing Corsica at Versailles, and the young man spent two years away while his patron seduced his wife.

Although Letizia’s next child, her first daughter, Maria Anna Alisa, born in 1777, was Carlo’s, the next child, Louis, was almost certainly Marbeuf’s – physically resembling him and intemperate by nature. Carlo was probably aware of the relationship and acquiesced in it as the price for advancement – not that he was anyway faithful to Letizia. Marbeuf repaid Carlo for his compliance by securing a schooling for his two sons at Autun as a preliminary to Giuseppe’s being sent to a seminary at Aix and Napoleone to the military academy at Brienne in
May 1779 – the boy having evinced an early fascination for playing with toy soldiers.

Arriving there the boy had his eyes opened to a far wider world than his limited and strict Corsican childhood: travelling across the prosperous flatlands to Aix and then up the Rhône and the Saône rivers, the nine-year-old was awestruck. The château of Brienne was at the foot of a hill, and had recently been converted from a monastic seminary to a military one. It held around fifty pupils still under the control of two priests.

Napoleone was locked into a cubicle six-foot square at ten o’clock at night, to be awoken at 6 a.m. Life was tough, but Napoleone was an exemplary student, excelling in mathematics and learning French, at which he was not so good: his pronunciation was always to be Italianate. He was studious, devoting himself to the classics and to reading. Napoleone, being a Corsican whose first language was Italian, and olive-skinned by comparison with the other children as well as poorer than most, and being on a scholarship, was immediately subjected to bullying and snobbery by the mainland children; but his sheer toughness saw him through.

Four credible stories are told about his school career. When he was made to kneel in a dunce’s uniform to eat his dinner as punishment for some transgression, he threw a tantrum insisting that he would kneel ‘only to God’. On another occasion when fireworks exploded next to the plot Napoleone considered his own garden and other children rushed across it in alarm, he brandished a hoe at them and forced them out. He also organized a snowfight which turned serious when the boys started to coat stones with snow. At the age of eleven, he was horrified when he heard a priest proclaim that Caesar and Cicero were in hell as pagans. He recoiled from the idea that ‘the most virtuous men of antiquity would burn in eternal flames for not having practised a religion they knew nothing about’. The logic was faultless, and Napoleone was showing an early admiration for great men. His Christianity was now in doubt.

A year later he decided he wanted to become a sailor. The verdict from the inspector-general of scholars was largely favourable.

M. de Bonaparte (Napoleon), born 15 August 1769. Height 5′6″. Constitution: excellent health, docile expression, mild, straightforward, thoughtful. Conduct most satisfactory; has always been distinguished for his application in mathematics. He is fairly well acquainted with history and geography. He is weak in all accomplishments – drawing, dancing, music and the like. This boy would make an excellent sailor; deserves to be admitted to the school in Paris.

Napoleone’s mother Letizia opposed his naval ambitions and secured his entry into the École Royale Militaire de Paris. It was a giant step for him, and he travelled by barge along with three schoolfellows under his headmaster, Father Berton. He was astonished by the great city. He gaped ‘in all directions with all the expression to catch a pickpocket’. He bought a book,
Gil Blas
, about a boy who rises from a poor provincial background to become secretary to the prime minister.

At the école, a fine building opened only thirteen years earlier, he was astonished by the luxury – the blue uniform with red collar and silver braid, the white gloves, the gold-and-blue décor of the classrooms, the lavish curtains, the pewter jug and washbasin, the excellent food and choice of puddings. He wrote: ‘We were magnificently fed and served, treated in every way like officers possessed of great wealth, certainly greater than that of most of our families and far above what many of us would enjoy later on.’ The number of teaching staff outnumbered the 215 cadets, and there were also 150 servants. The routine was, however, much more militaristic than in his previous school, involving drill, shooting practice and military exercises, and imprisonment with or without water for even minor infringements, although academic subjects still featured prominently in the curriculum. In winter the youths would simulate an attack on a much-fortified town, Fort Timbrune.

Napoleone was by now adept at making friends and enemies. One who had come from Brienne, Pierre François Laugier de Bellecour, had already been upbraided by Napoleone for associating with the homosexual set there; he openly did so in Paris. Napoleone, who later confessed to homosexual feelings overcome with difficulty himself, was
so angry at his friend’s behaviour that he once threw him to the floor. His instructor, Alexandre de Maxis, became another firm friend and would later describe his characteristic pose at school – head bowed, with his arms crossed, that would later become a trademark.

Soon after Napoleone entered the school, his father died of cancer at the spa of Montpellier, where he had gone to seek a cure. Napoleone affected indifference – his hero was Paoli whom his father had betrayed by espousing the French invaders – but this may have been no more than a display of the self-discipline in which he was being trained. A furious rejection of his father is often cited. When later Montpellier Municipal Council sought to erect a monument to his memory he declared: ‘Forget it: let us not trouble the peace of the dead. Leave their ashes in peace. I also lost my grandfather, my great-grandfather, why is nothing done for them?’ But this can equally be seen as a sensible rejection of sycophantic hero-worship, and may have had little to do with his true feelings.

Napoleone was now primarily concerned for his family because the bread-winner had been lost, and it would be years before he would earn a salary. He redoubled his efforts in the school of artillery, where he showed himself to be an outstanding mathematician. When tested by the Marquis de Laplane, one of the most brilliant astronomers of the age, he secured an unimpressive forty-second place in the artillery examination out of fifty-eight, but was one of the youngest cadets to pass. At the age of sixteen he became an army officer, second lieutenant in the artillery, because there was no room in the navy.

Napoleon, by now adopting the French style of his name, was appointed to the La Fère Regiment near Valence, conveniently close to Corsica, where he became convinced, regarding his older brother Joseph as too weak-minded, that he had prime responsibility to look after his mother and siblings after his father’s death. Sexually, he was curiously reticent for someone with rationalist doubts about Christianity: on the way to La Fère, he did not visit a brothel in Lyon as his fellow cadets did. He had already fended off the attempts of an older woman to seduce him. When on one occasion he did try to seduce two friendly young women, he was astonished to discover that they were lesbians.

There have been innumerable studies of Napoleon’s personality: one of the more curious developments in modern historiography is that at the same time as a Marxist school has obsessed itself with the impersonal, primarily economic forces that shape history, a kind of sub-Freudian view has sprung up attaching all kinds of psychological motives to the men who, according to the previous school, have little real impact upon history. Napoleon was variously said to have developed a mother complex in his youth, to have detested his father, to be a repressed homosexual, and to be a deeply embittered dwarf. There was just enough truth in these allegations for the mud to have stuck.

In fact, three more significant points about Napoleon stand out as he embraced manhood. First, he was highly intelligent and a born mathematician; second, he was highly self-disciplined and regarded himself as the natural heir of his father after his death; and, third, he
laboured under a huge burden of personal injustice (a so-called inferiority complex, or, in British terms, a ‘chip on his shoulder’). This last had little to do with his height. At five foot six inches, he was on the short side, but not strikingly so: most ordinary people were little taller, and an average for a well-fed Frenchman aristocrat of the time was five foot nine. His bitterness stemmed from more understandable sources: he came from the newest acquisition of the French empire and, in spite of his schooling in France, fiercely believed in the cause of Corsican independence. He had been despised throughout his school career on account of his Corsican nationality and olive skin, an insult felt all the more strongly because he regarded himself as a high aristocrat in a way only a provincial from a tiny sea-port can.