Napoleon

The royal heraldist issued Napoleon’s certificate and the time came for the two brothers to part. Joseph cried profusely but only one tear ran down Napoleon’s cheek, and this he tried to hide. Afterwards, the assistant head-master, who had been watching, said to Joseph, ‘He didn’t show it, but he’s just as sad as you.’

In the second half of May Napoleon was taken by Bishop de Marbeuf’s vicar to the little town of Brienne, lying in the green part of Champagne, a countryside of forests, ponds and dairy farms. Here stood a plain eighteenth-century building in a garden of five acres approached by an avenue of lime trees. Brienne had been an ordinary boarding-school until two years before, when the Government, alarmed by France’s string of defeats, had turned it into one of twelve new military academies. But they had retained the old staff, so, paradoxically, Brienne Military Academy was run by members of the Order of St Francis, in brown habits and sandals. The head-master was Father Louis Berton, a gruff, rather pompous friar in his early thirties, and the second master was his brother, Father Jean Baptiste Berton, an ex-grenadier known as ‘the friar in ique’ because he used so many words ending in -ique. They were unremarkable men but they ran Brienne well and it was reckoned one of the better academies.

Napoleon was taken to a dormitory containing ten cubicles, each furnished with a bed, a bran mattress, blankets, a wooden chair and a cupboard on which stood a jug and wash-basin. Here he unpacked his three pairs of sheets, twelve towels, two pairs of black stockings, a dozen shirts, a dozen white collars, a dozen handkerchiefs, two nightshirts, six cotton nightcaps, and finally his smart blue cadet’s uniform. A container for holding powder to dress his hair and a hair-ribbon he laid aside, for until the age of twelve cadets had to keep their hair cut short. At ten o’clock a bell rang, candles were blown out and Napoleon’s cubicle, like the others, was locked. If he needed anything he might call to one of two servants who slept in the dormitory.

At six Napoleon was awakened and his cubicle unlocked. Having washed and put on his blue uniform with white buttons, he joined the other boys in his class – the ‘septième’ – for a talk on good behaviour and the laws of France. Then he went to Mass. After breakfast of crusty white bread, fruit and a glass of water, at eight he began lessons, the staple subjects being Latin, history and geography, mathematics and physics. At ten came classes in building fortifications and in drawing, including the drawing and tinting of relief maps. At noon the boys had their main meal of the day. It consisted of soup, boiled meat, an entrée, a dessert, and red burgundy mixed with one-third water.

After dinner Napoleon had one hour’s recreation, then more lessons in the staple subjects. Between four and six he learned, depending on the day, fencing, dancing, gymnastics, music and German, English being an alternative. He then did two hours’ homework and at eight supped off a roast, an entrée and salad. After supper he had his second hour’s recreation. Evening prayers were followed by lights out at ten. On Thursdays and Sundays he went to High Mass and Vespers. He was expected to go to Confession once a month, and to Communion once every two months. He had six weeks’ annual holiday between 15 September and 1 November: only rich pupils could afford to go home and Napoleon was not one of them. In winter the cubicles became very cold and sometimes water in the jugs froze. The first time this happened Napoleon’s puzzled exclamations caused much amusement: he had never before seen ice.

There were fifty boys at Brienne when Napoleon arrived but as he went up in the school numbers increased to a hundred. Most were his social superiors. Some boys had names famous in history, others had fathers or uncles who hunted with the King, mothers who attended Court balls. In Corsica he had been near the top socially; now he suddenly found himself near the bottom. Also, he was a state-subsidized boy, and although Louis XVI had stipulated that no distinction must be made, inevitably the fee-paying boys made the others feel it. Finally, he was the only Corsican. There were other boys from overseas, including at least two English boys, but Napoleon, with his Italian accent, inevitably stood out, and for a new boy that does not pay. Alone in a strange country, far from his family, speaking a new language, still feeling awkward in his blue uniform, he certainly needed the courage his mother had wished him. But at nine, boys are adaptable and soon he had settled in.

We have three authentic incidents from the Brienne years. The first is an early one, when Napoleon was nine or ten. He had broken some rule and the master on duty imposed the usual punishment: he was to wear dunce’s clothes and to eat his dinner kneeling down by the refectory door. With everyone watching, Napoleon came in, dressed no longer in his blue uniform but in coarse brown homespun. He was pale, tense and staring straight ahead. ‘Down on your knees, sir!’ At the seminarist’s command Napoleon was seized by sudden vomiting and a violent attack of nerves. Stamping his foot, he shouted, ‘I’ll eat my dinner standing up, not on my knees. In my family we kneel only to God.’ The seminarist tried to force him, but Napoleon rolled over on the floor sobbing and shouting, ‘Isn’t that true, Maman? Only to God! Only to God!’ Finally the Head-master intervened and cancelled the punishment.

On another occasion the school was having a holiday. Some of the boys were performing a verse tragedy – Voltaire’s La Mort de César – and Napoleon, older now, was cadet-officer of the day, when another cadet came to warn him that the wife of the school porter, Madame Hauté, was trying to push her way in without an invitation. When stopped, she started shouting abuse. ‘Take the woman away,’ said Napoleon curtly, ‘she is bringing licentiousness into the camp.’

All the cadets were allotted a small piece of land on which they could grow vegetables and make a garden. Napoleon, with his farming background, took a lot of trouble planting his piece of land and keeping it neat. Since his immediate neighbours were not interested in gardening he added their ground to his; he put up a trellis, planted bushes, and to keep the garden from being spoiled, enclosed it with a wooden palisade. Here he liked to read and think about home. One of the books he read there was Tasso’s epic of the Crusaders, Jerusalem Delivered, cantos from which the Corsican guerrillas used to sing, and another was Delille’s Jardins, one passage of which imprinted itself on his memory. ‘Potaveri,’ he recalled, ‘is taken from his native land, Tahiti; brought to Europe, he is given every attention and nothing is neglected in order to try to amuse him. But only one thing strikes him, and brings to his eyes tears of sorrow: a mulberry tree; he throws his arms round it and kisses it with a cry of joy: “Tree from my homeland, tree from my homeland!”’

The garden which reminded him of home became Napoleon’s retreat on holidays. If anyone poked a nose in then, Napoleon would chase him out. On 25 August, the feast of St Louis, which was celebrated as the King’s official birthday, every cadet over fourteen was allowed to buy gunpowder and make fireworks. In the garden next to Napoleon’s a group of cadets built a set-piece in the form of a pyramid, but when the time came to light it, a spark shot into a box of gunpowder, there was a terrific explosion, Napoleon’s palisade was smashed and the boys in their alarm stampeded into his garden. Furious at seeing his trellis broken and his bushes trampled down, Napoleon seized a hoe, rushed at the intruders and drove them out.

These three episodes were doubtless remembered because they show a small serious-minded boy standing up for his rights, or asserting himself, to an unusual degree. But they were exceptional occasions, and it must not be thought that Napoleon was stern or rebellious or a poor mixer. The contrary is true. When the Chevalier de Kéralio, inspector of military schools, visited Brienne in 1783 he had this to say of fourteen-year-old Napoleon: ‘obedient, affable, straightforward, grateful’.

Napoleon made two school-friends. One was a scholarship boy a year his senior: Charles Le Lieur de Ville-sur-Arce, who like Napoleon was good at mathematics, and stood up for the Corsican when he was teased. The other was Pierre François Laugier de Bellecour, son of Baron de Laugier. He was a fee-paying boy with a pretty face. Born, aptly enough, in Nancy, he began to show signs of becoming a nancy-boy or, to use Brienne slang, a ‘nymph’. Pierre François was in the class below Napoleon, who, noting these signs, one day took him aside. ‘You’re mixing with a crowd I don’t approve of. Your new friends are corrupting you. So make a choice between them and me.’ ‘I haven’t changed,’ replied Pierre François, ‘and I consider you my best friend.’ Napoleon was satisfied and the two continued on good terms.

Napoleon made two grown-up friends. One was the porter, the husband of the thrusting Madame Hauté, the other the curé of Brienne, Père Charles. He prepared Napoleon for his first Communion at the age of eleven, and the cure’s simple, holy life made a lasting impression on him.

More important than these friendships were the values Napoleon imbibed. They were emphatically not the values of Paris. The scoffers and sneerers of Paris drawing-rooms, Beaumarchais, Holbach and the rest, if they were known at all, counted for little at Brienne. Tucked away in the depths of the country, it belonged to an older, less superficial France, which had never played shepherds and shepherdesses at the Trianon, never accompanied Watteau on the voyage to Cythera. The purpose of Brienne, according to its founder, War Minister Saint-Germain, was to fashion an élite within a framework of heroism. Cadets should have ‘a great zeal to serve the King, not in order to make a successful career, but in order to fulfil a duty imposed by the law of nature and the law of God.’ The whole emphasis of the teaching was on military service to the King, as the embodiment of France, and on the greatness of his kingdom.

Hence the importance of history. Napoleon learned that ‘Germany used to be part of the French empire.’ He studied a Hundred Years’ War in which there were no English victories: ‘At the battles of Agincourt, Crécy and Poitiers King Jean and his knights succumbed in face of the Gascon phalanxes.’ He saw living history in the village, where the Brienne family were rebuilding their ancestral château. Jean de Brienne had fought in the fourth Crusade, ruled Jerusalem from 1210 to 1225, and then the whole Latin Empire of the East; other members of the family, Gautier V and Gautier VI, had been Dukes of Athens. How far the French had travelled, how many lands they had ruled! Less attention was paid to recent defeats than to past victories, and the mockery of French institutions, the defeatism and decadence which were such a feature of Paris intellectual life had no place in Brienne. There Napoleon learned to have faith in France.

Whereas most of Napoleon’s schoolmates came from military families and so tended to reinforce still further this enclave of patriotism, in religion they tended to differ from the good Franciscans. During their long dispute with the Jansenists, the Jesuits had marked out large areas of life for the operation of reason, natural law and free will, areas within which man was not really a fallen creature and in which original sin did not require the counterweight of supernatural grace. They had anticipated many beliefs of the philosophes, at the cost, however, of making revealed religion seem an arbitrary, and in the eyes of some an unnecessary, addition to the natural world.

With this background the cadets introduced an element of disbelief into Brienne. For a Catholic his first Communion is the solemnest day of childhood, but at Brienne some of the boys on that day broke their fast by going out and eating an omelette. They had no intention of committing sacrilege; they simply did not believe that they were going to receive the body of Christ. Napoleon was to some extent influenced by the other boys’ attitude, specially since it chimed in with his father’s agnosticism, and he began to question what the friars said. The decisive moment came when he was eleven, and once again the operative factor was his sense of justice. Napoleon heard a sermon in which the preacher said that Cato and Caesar were in hell. He was scandalized to learn that ‘the most virtuous men of antiquity would burn in eternal flames for not having practised a religion they knew nothing about.’ From that moment he decided he could no longer sincerely call himself a believing Christian.

This was a turning-point in Napoleon’s life. But he had inherited his mother’s strong believing instinct, and he was already a person who needed ideals. The vacuum in his soul did not last long. It was filled by the cult of honour, which he had learned at home, by chivalry, which he had learned about in history classes, and by the notion of heroism, which he learned from Plutarch’s Lives of Famous Men, and above all from Corneille.

Corneille’s heroes are men faced with a choice between duty and personal interest or inclination. By exercising almost superhuman strength of will they eventually choose duty. Patriotism is the first duty of all, courage the chief virtue. As for death:

Mourir pour le pays n’est pas un triste sort: C’est s’immortaliser par une belle mort.

This attitude appealed to Napoleon. He too felt it shameful to die what the Norsemen called ‘a straw death’, that is, in bed, and on his first campaign as commander-in-chief he was to write of a young subaltern: ‘He died with glory in the face of the enemy; he did not suffer a moment. What sensible men would not envy such a death?’

When he was twelve Napoleon, who had grown up beside the sea, decided that he wanted to be a sailor. A taste for mathematics often goes with a liking for the sea and ships – so it was with the Greeks; and Napoleon had another motive too. England and France were at war, and it was being fought at sea; moreover the French admirals, Suffren and de Grasse, were actually winning victories. Napoleon naturally wanted to go into the arm which would see action. Along with other cadets bent on joining the navy, he even slept in a hammock.

That summer Napoleon received a visit from his parents. Carlo wore a fashionable horseshoe-shaped wig, and rather overdid the politeness; Napoleon noticed critically that he and Father Berton spent ages at a doorway, each attempting to bow the other through first. Letizia wore her hair in a chignon, a head-dress of lace, and a white silk dress with a pattern of green flowers. She had just come from Autun, where a boy recalled, ‘I can still feel her caressing hand in my hair, and hear her musical voice as she called me “her little friend, the friend of her son Joseph”’. At Brienne she turned the heads of all the cadets.

Letizia did not approve of Napoleon’s hammock and his plan to be a sailor. She pointed out that in the navy he would be exposed to two dangers instead of one: enemy fire and the sea. When she returned to Corsica, she and Carlo asked Marbeuf, whom Napoleon liked and respected, to use his influence in the same direction, but for the time being Napoleon remained set on the navy.

In 1783 the Chevalier de Kéralio inspected Brienne and reported on the cadets. After remarking that Napoleon had ‘an excellent constitution and health’ and giving the description of his character quoted earlier, he wrote: ‘Very regular in his conduct, has always distinguished himself by his interest in mathematics. He has a sound knowledge of history and geography. He is very poor at dancing and drawing. He will make an excellent sailor.’

Despite this good report, Napoleon was not passed in 1783 for entrance to the Ecole Militaire, the next stage in his schooling whether he entered the army or the navy. Evidently he was considered too young – he was just fourteen – but the news came as a blow, for Carlo had been counting on Napoleon graduating that year, so leaving his scholarship free for Lucciano, now eight years old.

Things had begun to go badly for Carlo Buonaparte. His health had broken. He was thin and drawn and blotchy in the face, no one knew why. He now had seven children, and after the birth of the last Letizia had contracted puerperal fever which had left her with a stiffness down her left side. It was to give his wife the benefit of the waters at Bourbonne that Carlo had visited France, stopping to see Napoleon on the way. After their initial burst of generosity the French were reducing school grants and subsidies, so that Carlo was finding it difficult to make ends meet. All this became evident to Napoleon. Already showing a young man’s responsibility, he looked for some way of graduating from Brienne and leaving his place free for Lucciano.

In 1783 England and France, putting an end to their six-year naval war, signed at Versailles a treaty of peace. It is probable, though not certain, that Napoleon now conceived the idea of entering the English naval college at Portsmouth as a cadet. Service under another flag was then quite usual: the great French strategist, Maréchal de Saxe, had been of German birth and, more modestly, Letizia’s Swiss stepfather had served the Genoese. In La Nouvelle Héloïse by Rousseau, one of Napoleon’s favourite authors, did not Saint-Preux sail with Anson’s squadron? Almost certainly Napoleon considered it a temporary expedient to ease his father’s financial difficulties. At any rate, with help from a master, Napoleon managed to write a letter to the Admiralty, asking for a place in the English naval college. He showed it to an English boy in the school, a baronet’s son named Lawley, who was later to become Lord Wenlock. ‘The difficulty I’m afraid will be my religion.’ ‘You young rascal!’ Lawley replied. ‘I don’t believe you have any.’ ‘But my family have. My mother’s people, the Ramolinos, are very rigid. I should be disinherited if I showed any signs of becoming a heretic.’

Napoleon posted his letter. It arrived, but whether he got a reply is unknown. Anyway, he did not go to England and next summer he was passed for the Ecole Militaire. Napoleon must have been pleased to give his father the news and to welcome him in June to Brienne, with young Lucciano, who entered the school now, though Napoleon would not be leaving until autumn. Carlo stayed a day, then went on to Saint-Cyr to place seven-year-old Marie Anne in the girls’ school there, she too on a State grant; to Paris in order to consult a doctor; and to Versailles, where he pleaded with Calonne in the Ministry of Finance for payment of promised subsidies for draining the salt-marshes near Ajaccio.

Carlo had yet another worry. Joseph, now aged sixteen and having scooped all the prizes at Autun, announced that he did not wish to enter Aix seminary. Evidently he felt no call to the priesthood. Lack of such a call did not deter many in this free-thinking age from taking orders, and it speaks well for the Buonaparte upbringing that Joseph should have acted as he did. Joseph and Napoleon wrote to each other, and perhaps it was the younger boy’s Cornelian descriptions of military life which made Joseph announce that he too wanted to become an officer.

Napoleon received this news from his father in June. In Corsica the eldest son enjoyed exceptional respect; his decisions were normally beyond criticism by juniors. Napoleon, however, felt no inhibitions here; his sense of responsibility came to the fore and he wrote to his uncle, Nicolò Paravicini, one of the few letters preserved from his schooldays. It is in French and begins:

My dear uncle,

I am writing to let you know that my dear father came to Brienne on his way to Paris to take Marie Anne to Saint-Cyr, and to try to recover his health … He left Lucciano here, nine years old, three foot eleven and a half inches tall … He is in good health, chubby, lively and scatterbrained, and he has made a good first impression.

Napoleon then turns to Joseph who, he says, now wishes to serve the King. ‘In this he is quite wrong for several reasons. He has been educated for the Church. It is late to go back on his word. My Lord Bishop of Autun would have given him an important living and he was sure of becoming Bishop. What advantage for the family! My Lord of Autun has done everything possible to make him persevere, and promised that he would not regret it. No good. He’s made up his mind.’ Having said as much, Napoleon then feels he may be doing Joseph an injustice. ‘If he has a real taste for this kind of life, the finest of all careers, then I praise him: if the great mover of human affairs has given him – like me – a definite inclination for military service.’ In the margin, reflecting perhaps on his father’s drawn, ill-looking face and on an officer’s slender pay, Napoleon adds that he hopes all the same Joseph will follow the Church career for which his talents suit him and be ‘the support of our family’.

The letter is interesting because it shows Napoleon taking the lead yet trying to see both sides of the problem. His doubts about Joseph’s military aptitude were eventually to be proved correct; for the present an unexpected event was soon to take Joseph back to Corsica.

In October 1784 the fifteen-year-old Napoleon prepared to leave Brienne. Unlike Joseph, he had won no prizes. But every year he had done well enough to be chosen to recite or answer questions on the platform at Speech Day. His best subject was mathematics, his second best geography. His weakest point was spelling. He wrote French by ear – la vaillance became, in one of his letters home, l’avallance – and all his life was to spell even simple words incorrectly.

On 17 October, his hair in a pigtail, powdered and tied with a ribbon, Napoleon boarded the mail coach at Brienne with Father Berton. At Nogent they transferred to the inexpensive passenger barge, drawn by four horses, which took them slowly down the Seine. On the afternoon of the 21st they arrived in Paris.

Here Napoleon felt very much the provincial; he was seen ‘gaping in all directions with just the expression to attract a pick-pocket’. And well he might, for Paris was a city of great wealth and also of great poverty. Noblemen’s carriages raced through narrow streets preceded by mastiffs to clear the rabble; their wheels sent the thick mud flying. There were smart shops selling osprey feathers and gloves scented with jasmine, but also many beggars thankful for a sou. One new feature was the street-lamps, suspended on ropes, which at dusk were lowered, lit and raised again: they were called lanternes.

The first thing Napoleon did in Paris was to buy a book. His choice fell on Gil Blas, a novel about a penniless Spanish boy who rises to become secretary to the Prime Minister. Father Berton took him to the church of Saint-Germain to say a prayer for their safe arrival, and then to the Ecole Militaire, Gabriel’s splendid building, its façade dominated by eight Corinthian columns, a dome and a clock framed with garlands. It had been open only thirteen years and was one of the sights of Paris.

Napoleon found everything very lavish. The classrooms were papered in blue with gold fleurs-de-lys; there were curtains at the windows and doors. His dormitory was heated by a faïence stove, his jug and wash-basin were of pewter, his bed hung with curtains of Alençon linen. He had a more elaborate blue uniform, with a red collar and silver braid, and he wore white gloves. The meals were delicious, and at dinner three desserts were served. The masters were picked men, highly paid. The cost to France of a subsidized cadet like Napoleon was 4,282 livres a year.

Life was much more like real army life. It pleased Napoleon that lights-out and reveille were signalled by the beating of drums, and the atmosphere was that of ‘a garrison town’. In winter the 150 cadets, graduates from the twelve provincial academies, took part in attacking and defending Fort Timbrune, a reduced but exact facsimile of a fortified town. Napoleon, because of his wish to join the navy, was placed in the artillery class, where he studied hydrostatics, and differential and integral calculus.