Napoleon
Page 5
Napoleon’s native language was Corsican, an idiomatic dialect not unlike Genoese. He was taught to read and write in Italian at school and was nearly ten before he learned French, which he always spoke with a heavy Corsican accent, with ‘ou’ for ‘eu’ or ‘u’, inviting all manner of teasing at school and in the army. The architect Pierre Fontaine, who decorated and refurbished many of the Napoleonic palaces, thought it ‘incredible in a man of his position’ that he should speak with such a thick accent.26 Napoleon was not very proficient in French grammar or spelling, though in the era before standardized spelling this mattered little and he never had any difficulty making himself understood. Throughout his life his handwriting, though strong and decisive, was pretty much a scrawl.
Napoleon’s childhood has often been portrayed as a maelstrom of anxieties, but his first nine years in Ajaccio were uncomplicated and happy, surrounded by family, friends and a few domestic servants. In later life he was generous to his illiterate nursemaid, Camilla Illari.27 It was only when he was sent away to France – ‘the continent’ as Corsicans called it – to become a French officer and gentleman that complications arose.
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As part of his active policy of Gallicization of the island’s elite, in 1770 Marbeuf issued an edict declaring that all Corsicans who could prove two centuries of nobility would be allowed to enjoy the extensive privileges of the French noblesse. Carlo’s father, Joseph, had been officially recognized as noble by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and subsequently obtained recognition from the archbishop of Pisa as ‘a patrician of Florence’.28 Although titles had little purchase in Corsica, where there was no feudalism, Carlo applied for the right of the Bonapartes to be recognized as one of the island’s seventy-eight noble families, and on September 13, 1771 the Corsican Superior Council, having traced the family back to its Florentine roots, declared its official admission into the noblesse.29
Carlo could now legally sign himself ‘de Buonaparte’ for the first time and sit in the Corsican assembly. He could also apply for royal bursaries for his sons, whom he was hard put to educate on his income. The French state was willing to provide for the education of up to six hundred sons of indigent French aristocrats, requiring each scholar to prove that he was noble, that he couldn’t pay the fees and that he was able to read and write French. The nine-year-old Napoleon already qualified for two of the three stipulations. For the last he was sent to Autun in Burgundy to begin, in January 1779, a rigorous course of French.
The Comte de Marbeuf personally expedited Carlo’s application through the French bureaucracy, a fact that later kindled the rumour that he was Letizia’s lover, and possibly Napoleon’s biological father – a libel sedulously spread by Bourbon and British writers. Just as Napoleon sought to magnify himself throughout his life, so his enemies found ingenious ways to detract from his myth. In 1797, when the first biographies of the twenty-eight-year-old military hero began to appear, a book entitled Quelques notices sur les premières années du Buonaparte was translated from an unknown English author by the Chevalier de Bourgoing. It made the claim that Letizia had ‘caught the attention’ of Marbeuf, and Sir Andrew Douglas, who had been with Napoleon at Autun, but who had not of course known any other members of the Bonaparte family, testified to its accuracy in a brief introduction.30
Napoleon paid little attention to this slur, although he did once point out to the distinguished mathematician and chemist Gaspard Monge that his mother had been in Paoli’s stronghold of Corte fighting Marbeuf’s forces when he was conceived. As emperor, he went out of his way to show generosity towards Marbeuf’s son and when Marbeuf’s daughter, Madame de Brunny, was robbed by a band of soldiers during one of his campaigns, he ‘treated her with the utmost attention, granted her a piquet of chasseurs of his guard, and sent her away happy and contented’ – neither of which he was likely to have done if Mme de Brunny’s father had seduced his mother and cuckolded his father.31 It was also said that Paoli was his biological father, a rumour similarly dismissed.
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Napoleon’s education in France made him French. Anything else would have been astonishing given his youth, the length of time he spent there and the cultural superiority the country enjoyed over the rest of Europe at that time. His bursary grant (the equivalent of a curate’s stipend) was dated December 31, 1778, and he started at the ecclesiastical seminary run by the bishop of Autun the next day. He wasn’t to see Corsica again for almost eight years. His name appeared in the school registry as ‘M. Neapoleonne de Bonnaparte’. His headmaster, the Abbé Chardon, recalled him as ‘a thoughtful and gloomy character. He had no playmate and walked about by himself . . . He had ability and learned quickly . . . If I scolded him, he answered in a cold, almost imperious tone: “Sir, I know it.”’32 It took Chardon only three months to teach this intelligent and determined lad, with a will to learn, to speak and read French, and even to write short passages.
Having mastered the requisite French at Autun, in April 1779, four months shy of his tenth birthday, Napoleon was admitted to the Royal Military School of Brienne-le-Château, near Troyes in the Champagne region. His father left the next day, and as there were no school holidays they were not to see each other again for three years. Napoleon was taught by the Minim order of Franciscan monks as one of fifty royal scholars among 110 pupils. Despite being a military academy, Brienne was administered by the monks, although the martial side of studies were conducted by outside instructors. Conditions were spartan: students had a straw mattress and one blanket each, though they weren’t beaten. When his parents did visit, in June 1782, Letizia expressed concern at how thin he had become.
Although Brienne was not considered one of the most socially desirable of the twelve royal military schools founded by Louis XVI in 1776, it provided Napoleon with a fine education. His eight hours of study a day included mathematics, Latin, history, French, German, geography, physics, fortifications, weaponry, fencing, dancing and music (the last three an indication that Brienne was also in part a finishing school for the noblesse).33 Physically tough and intellectually demanding, the school turned out a number of very distinguished generals besides Napoleon, including Louis-Nicolas Davout, Étienne Nansouty, Antoine Phélippeaux and Jean-Joseph d’Hautpoul. Charles Pichegru, the future conqueror of Holland and royalist plotter, was one of the school’s instructors.
Napoleon excelled at mathematics. ‘To be a good general you must know mathematics,’ he later observed, ‘it serves to direct your thinking in a thousand circumstances.’34 He was helped by his prodigious memory. ‘A singular thing about me is my memory,’ he once boasted. ‘As a boy I knew the logarithms of thirty or forty numbers.’35 Napoleon was given permission to take maths classes earlier than the prescribed age of twelve, and soon mastered geometry, algebra and trigonometry. His weakest subject was German, which he never mastered; another weak subject, surprisingly for someone who so adored ancient history, was Latin. (He was fortunate not to be examined in Latin until after 1780, by which time it was clear that he would be going into the army or navy and not the Church.) Napoleon also excelled at geography. On the very last page of his school exercise book, following a long list of British imperial possessions, he noted: ‘Sainte-Hélène: petite île.’36
‘History could become for a young man the school of morality and virtue,’ read Brienne’s school prospectus. The monks subscribed to the Great Man view of history, presenting the heroes of the ancient and modern worlds for the boys’ emulation.37 Napoleon borrowed many biographies and history books from the school library, devouring Plutarch’s tales of heroism, patriotism and republican virtue. He also read Caesar, Cicero, Voltaire, Diderot and the Abbé Raynal, as well as Erasmus, Eutropius, Livy, Phaedrus, Sallust, Virgil and the first century BC Cornelius Nepos’ Lives of the Great Captains, which included chapters on Themistocles, Lysander, Alcibiades and Hannibal. One of his school nicknames – ‘the Spartan’ – might have been accorded h
im because of his pronounced admiration for that city-state rather than for any asceticism of character. He could recite in French whole passages from Virgil, and in class he naturally took the side of his hero Caesar against Pompey.38 The plays he enjoyed as an adult also tended to focus on the ancient heroes, such as Racine’s Alexandre le Grand, Andromaque, Mithridate and Corneille’s Cinna, Horace and Attila.
A contemporary recalled Napoleon withdrawing to the school library to read Polybius, Plutarch, Arrian (‘with great delight’) and Quintus Curtius Rufus (for which he had ‘little taste’).39 Polybius’ Histories chronicled the rise of the Roman Republic and offered an eyewitness account of the defeat of Hannibal and the sack of Carthage; Plutarch’s Parallel Lives included sketches of Napoleon’s two greatest heroes, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar; Arrian wrote the Anabasis of Alexander, one of the best sources for Alexander’s campaigns; Quintus Curtius Rufus produced only one surviving work, a biography of Alexander. A powerful theme thus emerges from Napoleon’s adolescent reading. While his contemporaries played sports outside, he would read everything he could about the most ambitious leaders of the ancient world. For Napoleon, the desire to emulate Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar was not strange. His schooling opened to him the possibility that he might one day stand alongside the giants of the past.
Napoleon was taught to appreciate France’s greatest moments under Charlemagne and Louis XIV, but he also learned about her recent defeats in the Seven Years War at the battles of Quebec, Plassey, Minden and Quiberon Bay and ‘the prodigious conquests of the English in India’.40 The intention was to create a generation of young officers who believed implicitly in French greatness, but who were also determined to humiliate Britain, which was at war with France in America for most of Napoleon’s time at Brienne. Too often Napoleon’s virulent opposition to the British government has been ascribed to blind hatred, or a Corsican spirit of vendetta; it could more accurately be seen as a perfectly rational response to the fact that in the decade of his birth the Treaty of Paris of 1763 had cut France out of the great continental landmasses (and markets) of India and North America, and by the time he was a teenager Britain was busily colonizing Australia too. At the end of his life Napoleon twice asked to live in Britain, and he expressed admiration for the Duke of Marlborough and Oliver Cromwell, but he was brought up to think of Britain as an implacable enemy. When he was studying at Brienne, his only living hero seems to have been the exiled Paoli. Another dead hero was Charles XII of Sweden, who from 1700 to 1706 had destroyed the armies of four states joined in coalition against him, but then marched deep into Russia, only to be catastrophically defeated and forced into exile.
Napoleon was also deeply fond of literature. (He reminisced in later years about how he was attacked by a Cossack in 1814 during the battle of Brienne very close to the tree under which as a schoolboy he had read Jerusalem Delivered, Tasso’s epic poem about the First Crusade.)41 He idolized Rousseau, who wrote positively about Corsica, writing a paean to On the Social Contract at seventeen and adopting Rousseau’s beliefs that the state should have the power of life and death over its citizens, the right to prohibit frivolous luxuries and the duty to censor the theatre and opera.42 Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, one of the biggest bestsellers of the eighteenth century, which had influenced him so much as a boy, argued that one should follow one’s authentic feelings rather than society’s norms, an attractive notion for any teenager, particularly a dreamer of ferocious ambition. Rousseau’s draft of a liberal constitution for Corsica in 1765 reflected his admiration for Paoli, which was fully reciprocated.
Napoleon read Corneille, Racine and Voltaire with evident pleasure. His favourite poet was Ossian, whose bardic tales of ancient Gaelic conquest thrilled him with accounts of heroism among misty moors and epic battles on stormy seas. He took the Ossian poem Fingal on his campaigns, commissioned several Ossianic paintings, and was so impressed with the opera Ossian by Jean-François Le Sueur, with its twelve orchestral harps, that he made the composer a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur at the premiere in 1804. That same year, assuming as most people then did that the Celts and Ancient Gauls had been closely connected, Napoleon founded the Académie Celtique for the study of Gallic history and archaeology, which in 1813 became the Société des Antiquaires de France and today is based at the Louvre. He appears not to have been particularly disconcerted when it was discovered that the epic poem had in fact been written by its self-styled ‘discoverer’, the literary fraudster James Macpherson.43
In 1781, Napoleon received an outstanding school report from the Chevalier de Kéralio, the under-inspector of military schools who, two years later, recommended him for the prestigious École Militaire in Paris with the words, ‘Excellent health, docile expression, mild, straightforward, thoughtful. Conduct most satisfactory; has always been distinguished for his application in mathematics . . . This boy would make an excellent sailor.’44 His clear intellectual superiority is unlikely to have helped his popularity with his classmates, who nicknamed him La Paille-au-Nez (‘straw up the nose’), which rhymed with ‘Napoleone’ in Corsican.45 He was teased for not speaking refined French, for having a father who had had to certify to his nobility, for coming from a conquered nation, for having a relatively large head on a thin frame and for being poorer than most of his school contemporaries. ‘I was the poorest of my classmates,’ he told a courtier in 1811, ‘they had pocket-money, I never had any. I was proud, I was careful not to show it . . . I didn’t know how to smile or play like the others.’46 When he spoke in later life about his schooldays, he remembered individual teachers he had liked, but few fellow pupils.
Schoolchildren are quick to seize upon and mock marginal differences, and they swiftly spotted that Napoleon’s Achilles heel was his inordinate pride in his native land. (The Abbé Chardon also commented on it.) He was an outsider, a foreigner among the scions of a governing class that he believed to be oppressing his countrymen. The teasing had precisely the effect one might expect in a spirited boy, and turned him into a proud Corsican nationalist who never failed to stand up for his motherland. ‘His natural reserve,’ recalled Bourrienne, ‘his disposition to meditate on the subjugation of Corsica, and the impressions which he had received in his youth respecting the misfortunes of his country, and of his family, led him to seek solitude, and rendered his general demeanour somewhat disagreeable.’47 The first book ever written on Napoleon was by Cuming de Craigmillen, a monk who taught at Brienne, writing under the name ‘Mr C. H., one of his schoolfellows’. Published in 1797 in English, the book presented a reserved and anti-social child who, in the words of one reviewer, was ‘blunt in his manners, bold, enterprising and even ferocious’ – four adjectives that would serve to describe him for the rest of his life.48
Much the most famous anecdote of Napoleon’s schooldays, of a snowball fight involving the whole school, was probably an invention. In the freezing winter of 1783, Napoleon supposedly organized mass mock-battles around ice-forts that he had designed, in which he commanded the attacking forces on one day and the defending ones the next.49 This hardly fits with the unpopularity he is supposed to have experienced among his fellow pupils, and the anecdote does not appear in the notes Bourrienne gave his memoirs’ ghost-writers and could easily have been a complete invention of theirs. ‘This mimic combat was carried on during a period of fifteen days,’ the memoirs state, ‘and did not cease until, by gravel and small stones having got mixed up with the snow, many of the pupils were rendered hors de combat.’50 Would a school really have let a game that was injuring many of its pupils continue for over two weeks?
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On June 15, 1784, Napoleon wrote the first of over 33,000 surviving letters, to his step-uncle Joseph Fesch, Letizia’s mother’s second husband’s son. In it, he argued that his brother Joseph should not become a soldier as ‘the great Mover of all human destiny has [not] given him, as to me, a distinct love for the military professi
on’, adding ‘He has not the courage to face the perils of action; his health is feeble . . . and my brother looks on the military profession from only a garrison point of view.’51 If Joseph chose to go into the Church, he opined, Marbeuf’s kinsman, the bishop of Autun, ‘would have given him a fat living and he would have been sure to become a bishop. What an advantage for the family!’ As for Joseph joining the infantry, Napoleon asked: ‘What is a wretched officer of the infantry? Three-quarters of his time he is a good-for-nothing.’ The three-page letter, now at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, has a spelling mistake in almost every line – ‘Saint Cire’ for ‘Saint-Cyr’, ‘arivé’ for ‘arrivé’, ‘écrie’ for ‘écrit’, and so on – and is packed with grammatical errors. But his handwriting is clear and legible and he signed the letter ‘your humble and obedient servant Napolione di Buonaparte’. In a postscript he wrote ‘Destroy this letter,’ an early indication of his own concern for careful editing of the historical record.
Napoleon took his final exams at Brienne on September 15, 1784. He passed easily, and late the following month he entered the École Royale Militaire in Paris, on the left bank of the Seine. This was a far more socially elevated institution than Brienne. There were three changes of linen a week, good meals and more than twice as many servants, teachers and staff – including wigmakers – as students. There were also three chapel services a day, starting with 6 a.m. Mass. Although strangely the history of warfare and strategy weren’t taught, the syllabus covered much the same subjects as at Brienne, as well as musketry, military drills and horsemanship. It was in fact one of the best riding schools in Europe. (Many of the same buildings survive today, grouped around seventeen courtyards over 29 acres at the opposite end of the Champ de Mars from the Eiffel Tower.) Apart from the Champ de Mars and the École itself, Napoleon saw little of Paris in the twelve months he spent there, although of course he knew a good deal about the city and its monuments, defences, resources and architectural splendours from his reading and his fellow officers.52