Napoleon

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.’