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?
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 profession’, 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
Napoleon continued to excel intellectually. At Brienne he had decided not to enter the navy, partly because his mother feared he would drown or be burned to death and she didn’t like the idea of his sleeping in hammocks, but mainly because his aptitude for mathematics opened the prospect of a career in the far more prestigious artillery. Of the 202 candidates from all of France’s military schools in 1784, a total of 136 passed their final exams and only 14 of these were invited to enter the artillery, so Napoleon had been selected for an elite group.53 He was the first Corsican to attend the École Royale Militaire, where a fellow cadet drew an affectionate caricature of the young hero standing resolutely in defence of Paoli, while an elderly teacher tries to hold him back by pulling on the back of his wig.54
Napoleon took classes from the distinguished trio of Louis Monge (brother of the mathematician-chemist Gaspard), the Marquis de Laplace, who later became Napoleon’s interior minister, and Louis Domairon, who taught him the value of ‘haranguing’ troops before battles. (Shorn of its English meaning, which implies a prolonged rant, a French harangue could mean an inspiring speech, such as Shakespeare puts in Henry V’s mouth or Thucydides in the mouth of Pericles, a skill at which Napoleon was to excel on the battlefield, but not always in public assemblies.) At the École, Napoleon encountered the new thinking in French artillery practice introduced by Jean-Baptiste de Gribeauval after the Seven Years War. (Defeat had been, as it is so often in history, the mother of reform.) He also studied General Comte Jacques de Guibert’s revolutionary Essai général de tactique (1770): ‘The standing armies, a burden on the people, are inadequate for the achievement of great and decisive results in war, and meanwhile the mass of the people, untrained in arms, degenerates … The hegemony over Europe will fall to that nation which becomes possessed of manly virtues and creates a national army.’55 Guibert preached the importance of speed, surprise and mobility in warfare, and of abandoning large supply depots in walled cities in favour of living off the land. Another of Guibert’s principles was that high morale – esprit de corps – could overcome most problems.
By the time Napoleon had spent five years at Brienne and one at the École Militaire he was thoroughly imbued with the military ethos, which was to stay with him for the rest of his life and was to colour his beliefs and outlook deeply. His acceptance of the revolutionary principles of equality before the law, rational government, meritocracy, efficiency and aggressive nationalism fit in well with this ethos but he had little interest in equality of outcome, human rights, freedom of the press or parliamentarianism, all of which, to his mind, did not. Napoleon’s upbringing imbued him with a reverence for social hierarchy, law and order, and a strong belief in reward for merit and courage, but also a dislike of politicians, lawyers, journalists and Britain.
As Claude-François de Méneval, the private secretary who succeeded Bourrienne in 1802, was later to write, Napoleon left school with ‘pride, and a sentiment of dignity, a warlike instinct, a genius for form, a love of order and of discipline’.56 These were all part of the officer’s code, and made him into a profound social conservative. As an army officer, Napoleon believed in centralized control within a recognized hierarchical chain of command and the importance of maintaining high morale. Order in matters of administration and education was vital. He had a deep, instinctive distaste for anything which looked like a mutinous canaille (mob). None of these feelings was to change much during the French Revolution, or, indeed, for the rest of his life.
On February 24, 1785, Carlo Bonaparte died, probably of stomach cancer but possibly of a perforated ulcer, at Montpellier in southern France, where he had gone to try to improve his health. He was thirty-eight. Napoleon, who was then only fifteen, had seen him twice in the previous six years, and then only briefly. ‘The long and cruel death of my father had remarkably weakened his organs and faculties,’ recalled Joseph, ‘to the point that a few days before his death [he was] in a total delirium.’57 Napoleon’s lifelong distrust of doctors might well have stemmed from this time, as his father’s doctor’s advice had been to eat pears. His father’s early death may also in part explain Napoleon’s own drive and boundless energy; he suspected, correctly, that his own lifespan would be short. A month later, Napoleon described his father in a letter to his great-uncle Luciano as ‘an enlightened, zealous and disinterested citizen. And yet Heaven let him die; and in what a place? A hundred leagues from his native land – in a foreign country, indifferent to his existence, far from all he held precious.’58 This letter is interesting not just for its laudable filial feeling, but for the fact that Napoleon still considered France ‘a foreign country’. After expressing his heartfelt commiserations, he sent his love to his godmother, cousin and even the family’s maid Minana Saveria, before adding a postscript: ‘The French Queen has gi
ven birth to a prince named the Duke of Normandy, on March 27th, at 7pm.’59 People then tended not to waste writing paper, which was expensive, but tacking on such a random message to so important a letter was bizarre.
Although Joseph was Carlo’s eldest son, Napoleon quickly established himself as the new head of the family. ‘In his family he began to exercise the greatest superiority,’ recalled Louis, ‘not when power and glory had elevated him, but even from his youth.’60 He took his final examinations early, coming forty-second out of fifty-eight candidates – not so poor a result as it may seem given that he sat the exams after only one year rather than the normal two or three. He could now dedicate himself to his military career, and to the serious financial problems Carlo had left. Napoleon later admitted that these ‘influenced my state of mind and made me grave before my time’.61
Carlo had earned 22,500 francs per annum as Ajaccio’s assessor. He had topped up his income by suing his neighbours over property (including at one point his wife’s grandfather) while holding down various minor posts in the local administration. His great scheme for making his fortune, however, was a nursery of mulberry trees (a pépinière), a project that was to give his second son much anxiety. ‘The mulberry grows well here,’ wrote Boswell in his Account of Corsica, ‘and is not so much in danger from blights and thunderstorms as in Italy or the south of France, so that whenever Corsica enjoys tranquillity it may have an abundance of silk.’62 In 1782, Carlo Bonaparte obtained the concession for a mulberry pépinière on land previously given to his ancestor Gieronimo Bonaparte. Thanks to a royal grant of 137,500 francs, repayable without interest over ten years, and to considerable investment of his own money, Carlo was able to plant a large orchard of mulberries. Three years later, the Corsican parliament revoked his contract on the grounds that he had not fulfilled his obligations regarding maintenance, which he strenuously denied. The contract was formally severed on May 7, 1786, fifteen months after Carlo’s death, leaving the Bonapartes heavily encumbered by the need to repay the grant, as well as by the regular management of the orchard, for which they continued to be responsible.
Napoleon took an extended leave from the regiment that he was about to join in order to resolve the pépinière affair, which threatened to bankrupt his mother. The bureaucratic miasma persisted for several years, and was so consuming that the initial rumblings of the French Revolution were regarded by the family through the prism of whether the political changes in Paris were more or less likely to relieve the Bonapartes of their debts, and whether they might perhaps be granted a further agricultural subsidy by the state to help make the pépinière a going concern.63 Napoleon never seems more provincial than during ‘l’affaire de la pépinière’, as it was known; it threatened his family with bankruptcy and he pursued the case vigorously. He lobbied everyone he could in Corsica and Paris, sending many letters in his mother’s name as he tried to find a way out of the problem. Dutifully, he also sent home as much as possible of the 1,100 francs per annum that he earned as a second-lieutenant. Letizia, ‘Widow of Buonaparte’ as Napoleon described her in their many letters to France’s comptroller-general, came close to having to sell family silver after borrowing 600 francs from a French officer whom she needed to reimburse.64 Archdeacon Luciano saved the Bonapartes from the bailiffs on that occasion, but the family were chronically short of money until the archdeacon’s death in 1791, when they inherited his estate.
On the first day of September 1785, Napoleon was commissioned into the Compagnie d’Autume of bombardiers of the 5th Brigade of the 1st Battalion of the Régiment de la Fère, stationed at Valence, on the left bank of the Rhône. It was one of the five oldest artillery regiments, and highly prestigious.65 At sixteen he was one of the youngest officers, and the only Corsican to hold an artillery commission in the French army. Napoleon always recalled his years at Valence as impecunious – his room had only a bed, table and armchair – and sometimes he had to skip meals in order to afford books, which he continued to read with the same voracious appetite as before. He existed partly on charity; as First Consul he asked one of his interior ministers for news of a café owner who had often treated him to coffee at Valence, and upon hearing that she was still alive said, ‘I fear that I did not pay for all the cups of coffee that she served me; here are 50 louis [1,000 francs] that you will give to her on my behalf.’66 He was also slow in picking up restaurant bills. A contemporary recalled: ‘Persons who had dined with him at taverns and coffee-houses when it was convenient to him not to pay his reckoning, have assured me that though the youngest and poorest, he always obtained without exacting it a sort of deference or even submission from the rest of the company. Though never parsimonious, he was at that period of his life extremely attentive to the details of expense.’67 He could not afford to forget the nightmare of the pépinière.
The list of books from which Napoleon made detailed notes from 1786 to 1791 is long, and includes histories of the Arabs, Venice, the Indies, England, Turkey, Switzerland and the Sorbonne. He annotated Voltaire’s Essais sur les moeurs, Machiavelli’s History of Florence, Mirabeau’s Des lettres de cachet and Charles Rollin’s Ancient History; there were books on modern geography, political works such as Jacques Dulaure’s anti-aristocracy Critical History of the Nobility, and Charles Duclos’ gossipy Secret Memoirs of the Reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV.68 At the same time, he learned verses of Corneille, Racine and Voltaire by heart, perhaps to charm a pretty girl called Caroline de Colombier. ‘It will seem very difficult to believe,’ he later recalled of the innocence of their relationship as they walked through meadows at dawn, ‘but we spent the entire time eating cherries!’69 Napoleon continued with dancing lessons at Valence, possibly recognizing how important it was for an officer to be socially presentable.* When, in December 1808, his by-then-destitute former dancing master, Dautel, wrote to him to say ‘Sire, the one who gave you the first steps in polite society is calling upon your generosity’, Napoleon found him a job.70
It was at Valence on April 26, 1786 that Napoleon wrote his first surviving essay, about the right of Corsicans to resist the French. He had finished his schooling, so it was written for himself rather than for publication – an unusual pastime for French army officers of the day. Celebrating Paoli’s sixty-first birthday, it argued that laws derived either from the people or from the prince and for the sovereignty of the former, concluding: ‘The Corsicans, following all the laws of justice, have been able to shake off the yoke of the Genoese, and may do the same with that of the French. Amen.’71 It was a curious, indeed treasonous, document for an officer in the French army to write, but Napoleon had idolized Paoli since his schooldays, and from the ages of nine to seventeen he had been largely alone in France, recalling an idealized Corsica.
Napoleon was a writer manqué, penning around sixty essays, novellas, philosophical pieces, histories, treatises, pamphlets and open letters before the age of twenty-six.72 Taken together they display his intellectual and political development, tracing the way he moved from a committed Corsican nationalist in the 1780s to an avowed anti-Paolist French officer who by 1793 wanted the Corsican revolt to be crushed by Jacobin France. Late in life, Napoleon called Paoli ‘a fine character who neither betrayed England nor France but was always for Corsica’, and a ‘great friend of the family’ who had ‘urged me to enter into the English service, he then had the power of procuring me a commission … but I preferred the French because I spoke the language, was of their religion, understood and liked their manners, and I thought the start of the Revolution as a fine time for an enterprising young man’.73 He also claimed, with perhaps less truth, that Paoli had paid him the ‘great compliment’ of saying: ‘That young man will be one of Plutarch’s ancients.’74
In early May 1786, aged sixteen, Napoleon wrote a two-page essay entitled ‘On Suicide’ which mixed the anguished cry of a romantic nationalist with an exercise in classical oratory. ‘Always alone and in the midst of men, I come back to my rooms to dream with myse
lf, and to surrender myself to all the vivacity of my melancholy,’ he wrote. ‘In which direction are my thoughts turned today? Toward death.’75 He was then prompted to consider: ‘Since I must die, should I not just kill myself?’ ‘How far from Nature men have strayed!’ he exclaimed, echoing a classic Romantic trope. Exhibiting a Hamlet-like combination of arrogance and self-pity, he then mixed in some self-indulgent philosophizing with Rousseauian Corsican nationalism: ‘My fellow-countrymen are weighed down with chains, while they kiss with fear the hand that oppresses them! They are no longer those brave Corsicans who a hero animated with his virtues; enemies of tyrants, of luxury, and vile courtesans. You Frenchmen,’ he continued, ‘not content with having robbed us of everything we held dear, have also corrupted our character. A good patriot ought to die when his fatherland has ceased to exist … Life is a burden to me, because I enjoy no pleasure and because everything is painful to me.’76 Like most tortured young teenagers attracted by romantic hyperbole Napoleon decided not to kill himself, but the essays give us a glimpse into his evolving sense of self. His essays tended to be written within the classical conventions of the day, filled with exaggerated bombast and rhetorical questions, and in them he began to hone the literary style that was later to characterize his proclamations and speeches.
At the age of seventeen, Napoleon’s religious views started to coalesce, and they did not change much thereafter. Despite being taught by monks, he was never a true Christian, being unconvinced by the divinity of Jesus. He did believe in some kind of divine power, albeit one that seems to have had very limited interaction with the world beyond its original creation. Later he was sometimes seen to cross himself before battle,77 and, as we shall see, he certainly also knew the social utility of religion. But in his personal beliefs he was essentially an Enlightenment sceptic. In September 1780, aged eleven, he had been given a public oral examination, during which he was asked to expound upon Christ’s four major miracles and was questioned on the New Testament. He later recalled of that test: ‘I was scandalised to hear that the most virtuous men of Antiquity would be burned in perpetuity because they did not follow a religion of which they had never heard.’78 When a priest had offered his services to help him through his father’s death, the fifteen-year-old Napoleon had refused. Now, in another unpublished paper, he attacked a Protestant minister from Geneva who had criticized Rousseau, and accused Christianity of permitting tyranny because its promises of an afterlife detracted from Man’s desire to perfect this life by insisting on a government designed ‘to lend assistance to the feeble against the strong, and by this means to allow everyone to enjoy a sweet tranquillity, the road to happiness’.79 Only the Social Contract – that is, agreement between the people and state authority – could secure happiness. Alongside that 15,000-word treatise, Napoleon wrote The Hare, the Hound and the Huntsman, a short comic fable in verse form echoing La Fontaine and featuring a pointer called Caesar who is shot by a huntsman just before he is about to kill a hare. The last couplet goes:
Napoleon the Great Page 4