2

Corsican Beginnings

Lapped by the warm waters of the Mediterranean, and with a landscape dominated by rugged mountains and precipitous ravines, Corsica could appear a secretive place, wild and even hostile, to the eighteenth-century traveller accustomed to the undulating hillsides of Tuscany or the Roman sites of the Midi or the Rhône valley. Clouds often obscured the mountain tops, and the rich scrubland vegetation of the interior provided natural cover for guerrillas and partisans, to say nothing of brigands and outlaws. The island, indeed, already enjoyed a somewhat lurid reputation for its fiery individualism, its lack of governability, and the people’s propensity to insurrection and rebellion. These were not just political affairs: violence between individuals, families and communities was endemic in eighteenth-century Corsican society – to which the persistently high murder rates bear witness – and vendetta and banditry had already become central to the popular image of the island.

In the early nineteenth century this image would be popularised in romantic literature, with French writers from Maupassant to Mérimée taking pleasure in describing the place of family honour in daily life in what they termed ‘the land of the vendetta’.¹ Court records confirm this image. The murder rate on the island was regularly four or five times that of departments in metropolitan France, and comparable only with those other heartlands of Mediterranean honour, Sicily and Sardinia. Long into the nineteenth century, Corsican society remained steeped in a tradition of blood vengeance which lingered, in defiance of all French attempts to punish honour killings and eradicate the culture of the vendetta. The central place of family honour was inscribed in proverbs and folklore; and the only way to repair dishonour, and wipe away the shame which it brought on the family, was to ‘wash it away by blood’.² It would take many decades to undermine values that were a central plank of Corsican culture. Indeed, Stephen Wilson suggests that France’s early attempts to control family feuding by introducing laws and state controls into the established system of blood vengeance only served to exacerbate violence, at least until policing and administration became sufficiently respected to replace the social controls imposed by family and clan loyalty.³

During its turbulent history, Corsica had been seized and annexed by successive states and empires, belonging at one time or another to the Etruscans, the Carthaginians, the Byzantines, the Saracens, and the Papacy. Yet none of these invaders had succeeded in imposing on Corsica any enduring tradition of administration, policing or justice; and since the middle of the sixteenth century their place had been taken by the republican city-state of Genoa on the west coast of Italy, which, after long years of strife, did manage to impose some semblance of order on the population in 1551. But it remained more of a semblance than a reality. Foreign government had never been easily accepted by the islanders. Corsica remained torn by faction-fighting and clan rivalries, a land of priests and warlords whose struggles were, by the eighteenth century, tinged by more than a suggestion of ideology in the form of Corsican nationalism. This was a place where it would never be easy to establish peace or achieve consensus, and with its strategic value clear to all its larger neighbours, it was never likely that they would leave the islanders to their own devices. Long before 1789 Corsica was an ideological battle-ground for more powerful neighbours; indeed, just as the ‘Eastern Question’ would engage the European powers in the nineteenth century, there was a ‘Corsican Question’ throughout much of the eighteenth: a question that would resurface every time the major European powers found themselves at war.⁴

Since at least the middle of the sixteenth century France had, unsurprisingly, been concerned to control Corsica. Indeed, with the long series of dynastic and colonial wars that characterised eighteenth-century Europe, it was perhaps inevitable that the island should once again become a pawn in relations between the great powers. Corsica was situated too close to the French coast and offered too good a vantage point across the western Mediterranean for French governments to leave it in the hands of potential rivals. Britain, in particular, was suspected of looking for further bridgeheads and naval bases in the Mediterranean and, as France’s most powerful commercial and colonial rival, would have been a threatening presence so close to France’s southern flank. Under the circumstances, Genoese ownership might almost have seemed to offer an acceptable solution in that it did not pose a threat to the French, yet usefully filled a potential power vacuum. Britain, in turn, viewed France’s interest in Corsica as deeply sinister, proof of designs in Versailles to build up French naval dominance in the Mediterranean, and hence to attack Britain’s position in India.

Conflict simmered just below the surface. In 1731 English ships arrived carrying supplies for Corsican rebels; in 1738 London reacted swiftly when there were signs that the French might be preparing to invade the island; and in 1755, on the eve of the Seven Years War, Corsica again figured high in Great Power diplomacy. In response to an English attack on the French fleet, the French Marshal de Noailles sent advice to the French king that he must hit back strongly, attacking British shipping and fortifying Dunkirk and the colonies. Noailles added that it was vitally necessary to secure the Mediterranean, ‘to take early measures in order that the English do not seize Corsica’, which the French, with an eye to the Levant and to India, rightly saw as a pawn in a wider Anglo-French imperial struggle.⁵

Genoa did not have sufficient military authority to offer a sure defence of the island, and when the Genoese went on to become embroiled in European warfare Corsica was left to the mercy of others. Besides, Genoese rule did not go unopposed among the Corsicans themselves. Administration and justice were poorly enforced, policing was primitive, and the island was often left prey to warring factions. The threat of violence and rebellion was never far away. In 1729 the Corsicans had risen in revolt against the Genoese – a revolt that had matured into a full-blown, if unsuccessful, revolution – and years of warring and factionalism had followed until 1755, when both France and Genoa were distracted by the wider conflict of the Seven Years War. It was then that the Corsicans seized their independence by armed struggle. This was, quite naturally, a campaign waged not by modern, disciplined armies, but by armed bands, village guerrillas, brigands and smugglers turned freedom-fighters in support of a traditional warlord. Yet in Corsican history as it would be written and celebrated by the islanders, the struggle assumed the guise of a national awakening, embodied in the person of Corsica’s great national hero, Pascal Paoli. For the next thirteen years, until 1768, the Corsicans would have their own government, independent and liberal if somewhat paternalistic, under Paoli’s leadership. The guerrilla leader was rapidly transformed into a statesman and constitutionalist.

Paoli became lionised by his fellow Corsicans. They admired his military prowess as well as his gifts as a lawgiver, his courage in fighting both Genoese and French, and his role in establishing Corsica as an autonomous republic. He was seen, too, as a thinker and philosopher of European standing, who had mastered and adapted the key texts of the French Enlightenment.⁶ Corsicans were fascinated by the legend of one of their own who had risen to become the toast of the enlightened world, a man who had made Corsica a state and its people a nation; who had drafted a constitution that had attracted the admiration of Rousseau, and who had won plaudits from men of letters and from enlightened despots from across Europe. Frederick of Prussia, who was counted among Paoli’s more enthusiastic admirers, praised his work as a lawgiver and honoured him with the gift of a sword. Paoli was routinely described as having steeped himself in the democratic traditions of the Ancient World and as being a natural successor to the leaders of classical Athens and Sparta. His image entered popular culture, too: he was depicted in over a hundred and sixty paintings and etchings, always with his faithful dog at his side to signify his unquestioned status as a man of the people.⁷ And with Paoli’s image, that of Corsica also enjoyed a new vogue. For eighteenth-century Europeans, Corsicans were not only wild shepherds given to feuding and clan warfare, but also the kind of primitive savages who were so admired in salon society, whether in the Alps or the Apennines, in Ireland or the Scottish Highlands. They were characterised also by a strongly republican and constitutional tradition that marked them out as one of the most progressive countries in Europe.

Paoli enjoyed a particular cult following in Britain. No doubt this was partly because he was an Anglophile and an impediment to French expansionist ambitions; but partly also because of his close friendship with the biographer of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell. Boswell spent three years on the island during the 1760s, during which he developed an affection for and understanding of the Corsican people, and his Journal of a Tour to Corsica, which he published on his return, captured the mood of the moment for travel literature and for a taste of the wild and exotic. The Journal was an instant best-seller in Britain, going through three editions in 1768 and 1769 alone; there were also three Irish editions of the book, and translations followed in German, Italian, Dutch and, despite opposition from Versailles, French. Boswell did nothing to hide his love of Corsica or his admiration for the spirit of sturdy independence which, he made clear, was personified by Paoli. The book excited the imagination of a European readership that was more and more attracted to the ideal of the romantic hero. It ensured that Pascal Paoli became a household name across Great Britain and much of Western Europe, and his Corsica a beacon of hope and freedom in a world still dominated by power struggles and dynastic ambitions. In a period marked by revolution in the city-state of Geneva and violent colonial resistance in America, it made the cause of Paoli and Corsica synonymous with the desire of men everywhere for the pursuit of liberty and independence.

Corsica, in other words, had established its place in European consciousness and in the European imagination – a place it owed in part to the Enlightenment and in part to the spirit of romanticism which wallowed in its rugged landscape and tales of feuding and banditry. But independence proved short-lived; France found it impossible to stand by and allow such a strategic island to rally foreign support and become the plaything of European diplomacy. In 1769 thirty thousand French troops invaded Corsica to suppress the independence movement, winning a decisive battle over Paoli’s army at Ponte Nuovo and annexing Corsica to France. Corsican nationalists were dismayed at the demise of the independence project, lamenting the death of Paoli’s regime as the end of a democratic republican idyll. But with the French regime established in Bastia and Paoli himself forced into exile, the patriotic movement was effectively dead, abandoned to its romantic dreams and poetic nostalgia. The rest of Europe had not intervened to help, as some had idealistically hoped; from this point on Corsica would remain a part of metropolitan France, with no real prospect of regaining its independent status.

Not all Corsicans, however, viewed the annexation in a spirit of negativity, since for some it spelt access to the cultural and career opportunities which metropolitan France could offer, including postings in the army and service in the state administration. To take advantage of these it was, of course, necessary to be of noble stock, just as it was for the French themselves; for Corsica followed France in being a society stratified by legally defined estates that were accorded greater or lesser levels of privilege. The principal privileges were accorded to the nobility, who could not be taxed and who enjoyed a monopoly of offices in the army and the royal service. As in France, nobility did not have to be justified on grounds of merit or utility; it was self-evident to those who possessed it, and passed on down the generations. In William Doyle’s words, it was ‘a quality inherent in persons and their progeny, and inalienable except in clearly defined circumstances of forfeiture’. It was, he continues, ‘a genetic trait inherited at birth, and extinguished only with life itself’.⁸ Nowhere was this trait more consistently defended than in the officer corps of the army. In 1781, in an attempt to limit entry to officer rank to scions of old military families, these restrictions were further tightened, allowing access to the officer class only to those with four noble grandparents. France clearly offered opportunities, but these were reserved for an elite few within Corsican society, and for those who were prepared to trade their Corsican patriotism for a new metropolitan identity, a political price which bitterly divided the population and which many saw as unacceptable. And not all were. The cause of national independence was not confined to romantics and intellectuals; indeed, for many Corsicans, their status as a nation had been a matter of pride and honour, whose loss they continued to resent after the French annexation.

Men from all social backgrounds, including from some of the most prominent families on the island, were to be found among Paoli’s supporters. Among them was Napoleon’s father, Carlo Bonaparte, a lawyer in Ajaccio and a man of reasonably comfortable means, who had been one of Paoli’s closest confidants at Corte during the independence years. He had never doubted his Corsican roots or denied his strong cultural links with Italy, and had counted himself as a Corsican nationalist. He spelt his family name in the Italian manner, ‘Buonaparte’, as his son would continue to do throughout his adolescence, only amending it to a more characteristically French spelling in 1796.⁹ But like many others, Carlo had not followed Paoli into exile; he had preferred to stay on in Corsica, testing the political mood and attempting to further his legal career under French rule. He was not prepared to put a political cause above the material interests of his family, interests to which he devoted himself with commendable single-mindedness.

The Bonapartes belonged to one of the oldest established families of Ajaccio, one that had produced a long line of lawyers and public office-holders in the city, and whose ‘nobility’ had been recognised since the middle of the sixteenth century – at least in terms that commanded respect on the island. It is indicative of the ambiguous status of Corsican nobility that it was only imprecisely defined in law and difficult for outsiders to interpret. After annexation, the France of Louis XV had been forced to face up to this problem, and insisted that those Corsicans wishing to claim privileged status must prove their claims and produce documentation that would satisfy French officials. Carlo had little difficulty in doing so; he was an established notable on the island, and recognised as such in Genoa and beyond. In 1768 he obtained from the Archbishop of Pisa the right to use the title ‘nobleman’ and was declared a ‘patrician of Florence’.¹⁰ And in 1771 his noble status was officially recognised by the upper council of Corsica, which allowed him to enjoy a noble’s privileges and to be elected to the Estates of Corsica¹¹ as a deputy for the nobility of Ajaccio.

This sounded grand, of course, but there is considerable doubt about what it meant in practice. Corsican definitions of nobility were not comparable to the French, and the Bonaparte family had neither the credentials, nor yet the resources, that would allow them to be recognised as nobles on the mainland. They belonged to an educated elite founded in judicial and military office in a society where such distinctions, combined with a degree of material comfort, were enough to define nobility. But they were not wealthy, certainly not to the degree that French high society would demand: Carlo was paid a salary of nine hundred livres a year as assessor for the royal jurisdiction of Ajaccio.¹² And the family certainly did not ‘live nobly’ according to the criteria demanded of the nobility in France. In reality, at various moments they fell deeply into debt, and Carlo expended a great deal of effort in petitioning the French authorities for grants and subsidies, most particularly in order to give his sons a respectable French education.

With a large family to support, and concerned to maintain appearances and mix in the right social circles, Carlo Bonaparte flagrantly lived beyond his means.¹³ Though he was not the irresponsible spend-thrift that some have made him out to be – family legend had it that to celebrate his doctorate he threw a party that cost nearly twice his annual income¹⁴ – by the time of his untimely death from stomach cancer in 1785, at the age of only thirty-eight, he left his family drained of resources and dependent on the support of others. Late in his life, Napoleon would himself join his father’s critics when he noted disapprovingly that Carlo had gone off on too many costly trips to Paris which further damaged the family’s somewhat precarious finances.¹⁵

This was the world into which the young Napoleon Bonaparte was born in 1769, in Ajaccio, one of only two or three towns of any size on the island. If we believe what he himself would later say about his Corsican upbringing, there is little reason to doubt that his early years were happy ones. His childhood was blessed by a natural playground in the Corsican landscape, and he was surrounded by a large and supportive extended family to which he later declared himself devoted. His mother was Letizia Ramolino, a woman of great conviction who would be one of the defining influences of his childhood, and a source of support and strength in the family that would be all the more necessary after the early death of his father. On Saint Helena his biographer Las Cases would claim that the young Napoleon learned from her everything he would ever know about pride and fortitude, and Napoleon continued to acknowledge throughout his life his debt to the qualities shown by ‘Madame Mère’. She was by all accounts a forceful woman, determined and passionate, and she instilled many of these qualities into her children. Levels of infant mortality in the eighteenth century remained high throughout the Mediterranean world: of Carlo and Letizia’s thirteen children, only eight survived childbirth.

Napoleon was the second child in the family, though two elder children had already died in infancy and the next two children (both girls), born in 1771 and 1773, did not live more than a few months. The other survivors were his older brother Joseph, born a year before him in 1768; three younger brothers, Lucien, Louis and Jérôme; and three sisters, Elisa, Pauline and Caroline. Of the younger children, Lucien was born in 1775, Elisa in 1777, and Louis the following year; the others did not arrive until the next decade, with Jérôme, the youngest, not born until 1784.¹⁶ The difference in their ages was such that the young Napoleon spent the greater part of childhood with Joseph, to whom he felt the greatest lingering loyalty; by the time the younger children were born he had already left Corsica for schooling in France. Family ties would prove strong, however, as was traditional in Corsican society, and once in power Napoleon would not forget the loyalty he owed to his family. He was concerned to maintain his sisters in style and comfort, while all four of his brothers would be promoted to duchies or kingdoms across Europe during the years of the First Empire.

The Bonaparte family, as we have seen, enjoyed considerable prestige in Corsica, partly through Carlo’s role in public life and his friendship with Paoli. His social ambition was not without a suspicion of political opportunism, and after the annexation it would be among the French, not the Corsican nobility, that he sought to establish the reputation of his family. By 1779 he had committed himself politically to France, dropping the Italian ‘Carlo Buonaparte’ in favour of the aristocratic French ‘Charles de Bonaparte’, in the hope that his claims to nobility would be recognised in metropolitan France as well as on the island. He did not hesitate to seek out powerful French patrons to further his ambitions, the most notable of whom was the Comte de Marbeuf, the French military governor of Corsica, whose brutal repression of any vestige of rebellion against French rule in 1769 left a long legacy of bitterness and anti-French sentiment on the island.

From 1770, Marbeuf and Napoleon’s father appear to have become friends and political allies, the governor recognising in Carlo the kind of Corsican nobleman who might be ripe for integration into the French nobility. It is clear that Marbeuf made generous gifts to Carlo and his family; that he visited their home in Ajaccio; and that he was a particular admirer of his young wife. Indeed, there were strong rumours that he had an affair with Letizia, who was nearly forty years his junior, and in whose presence he was noted taking the air, playing card games, and attending social gatherings, among them receptions at the governor’s house in Corte.¹⁷ The inevitable gossip followed.

Marbeuf would continue to take an interest in the family’s education after Carlo’s death; indeed, it was his intervention that finally provided Napoleon with the royal bursary that would take him to the cadet school at Brienne, near Troyes, where his military career could be said to have begun. But that still lay in the future. Carlo sorely needed Marbeuf’s patronage, since his family’s prestige would not in itself have opened doors for him in France. His relative prominence in the closed society of Ajaccio counted for little outside Corsica. It would have been insufficient, for instance, to get his son a place in the royal administrative service or entry to officer rank in the infantry or the cavalry – a social disadvantage of which the future Emperor was only too well aware. For this reason Carlo directed Napoleon towards the artillery, since this was the one branch of the military where a firm mastery of mathematics and engineering was indispensable, and where educational attainment could compensate for a lack of legal privilege or noble status.

Officer rank in the artillery was a career to which men of bourgeois backgrounds might legitimately aspire, even before 1789, always provided that their ambition was backed by real ability. To take one distinguished example, Lazare Carnot, the future revolutionary general and Minister of War, was a prize-winning mathematician in provincial Dijon who succeeded in making a solid career in the artillery of Louis XVI, gaining successive promotions but still failing to rise to the very top, something that he himself attributed to his status as a commoner. But at least Carnot could enjoy a career as an artillery officer at a time when he could not even have imagined being received into an infantry or a cavalry regiment. In the event, he had to wait till 1789 and the legal abolition of privilege under the early Revolution before his career really took off.¹⁸

It was in the artillery and in the service of France that Carlo Bonaparte sought a career for his second son. To this end the youth had to be given a good French education, which his father saw as far superior to anything that was available in Corsica itself at that time. And so in 1778, still less than ten years old, young Napoleon set sail for the mainland – ‘the continent’, as it was referred to in Corsica – accompanied by his father and his brother Joseph. For Carlo the mission was part political, part financial. As a deputy for the nobility of Ajaccio, he went to Versailles to press Corsican interests on the French government, while at the same time trying to obtain scholarships to cover the cost of his sons’ education in France. Both boys were admitted to the local college in Autun, where Joseph was to start his studies for the priesthood and Napoleon to prepare for entry to military academy. He did not have to stay there for long. Within three months his scholarship application was successful, and the brothers were parted. Joseph stayed on at Autun in the care of the priests, while Napoleon moved to the more prestigious surroundings of the military academy at Brienne – one of the twelve provincial cadet schools established by Saint-Germain in 1776 – to begin his secondary education and work towards a commission in the royal corps of artillery.

The five years he spent at Brienne were to prove critical both for Napoleon’s intellectual development and for his sense of identity: a sense of who he was and of where his future loyalties lay. The broad-ranging curriculum included three languages (French, Latin and German), and a number of artistic and cultural subjects that prepared the young students for some of the social demands of the officers’ mess (music, dancing and fencing).¹⁹ Napoleon is portrayed to us as having been an enthusiastic student, at least in those subjects that fired his imagination. He enjoyed reading history and geography and excelled in mathematics; his teachers, members of an order of Franciscan friars, were universally complimentary about his work, while several of his contemporaries recalled his commitment to his studies and his voracious appetite for reading.

But the school was not noted for its high academic standards or its outstanding teaching, and Napoleon’s education remained limited. The Third Republic schoolbooks that portrayed him alone in the school yard, holding back from the games of his classmates to devour some classical text, may have been exaggerated for educational effect, as schoolmasters tried to persuade their reluctant charges of the crucial importance of their schoolwork;²⁰ but his studious image did spell out one essential truth. The young Bonaparte had made his way in life and in his military career through hard work as much as through family ties or his father’s assiduous social networking. At Brienne there were suggestions that he was something of a loner, a rather sullen and depressive young man who preferred the company of his books to that of his fellows; others claimed that the young Corsican remained taciturn and angry. But these accounts were generally written many years after the event, most often after the fall of the Empire, by which time few commentaries on his formation and personality were neutral or unbiased. Suffice it to say that he survived his school years, performing adequately in most subjects and showing promise in some. And he won the highest accolades from his teachers when, in 1784, he left Brienne and gained entry to the prestigious École Militaire in Paris, at which point he was replaced at the school by his younger brother, Lucien.²¹

The decision to seek a military career in the service of the French crown was in no sense an innocent one. For the Bonaparte family it represented a conscious choice as they prepared their sons for honour and advancement in France. It was a choice that would have momentous consequences for both Joseph and Napoleon; and a decision that would lead them both to assume new identities as Frenchmen, in the process abandoning the cause of Corsican nationalism. There was, of course, an alternative for young men of good Corsican families born around the end of the 1790s, which the Bonaparte brothers could have chosen: they could, as their father had done in his youth, have asserted their Corsican roots and joined Paoli’s resistance to France’s imperial ambitions. And there is plenty of evidence in Napoleon’s own youthful writings that the choice he was making was a difficult and, at times, a painful one; that he remained deeply Corsican in his emotions and his psychology, deeply aware of what distinguished his island from the rest of France. In particular, he remained resentful of the elitism of French society, especially the society he encountered at Brienne, with its sneering contempt for his impulsiveness, his emotionalism, and his fractured French. He felt pangs of homesickness in a France which, to his eyes, never wholly accepted him. His experience was not always easy. It separated him from his family and his childhood friends. It presented him with new challenges but also exposed him to jeers and ridicule, not least on account of his imperfect French and his Mediterranean accent. The sons of the French aristocracy who passed through Brienne were overwhelmingly from the provinces of central and northern France and could be unremitting in their mockery.

Napoleon continued to study the history of Corsica both from exile in France and during his sojourns on the island. He read Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to Corsica with evident enjoyment – the book had achieved a new popularity in its French translation²² – and in 1786 he wrote to a bookseller in Geneva, Paul Barde, beseeching him to send him the later volumes of the Histoire des révolutions de Corse by Abbé Germanes, adding rather plaintively that ‘I would be obliged if you would let me know of any works you have on the island of Corsica or which you would be able to get for me promptly.’²³ He showed a passionate interest in his Corsican roots – indeed, his first known piece of writing, in 1786, was a sketch on the history of Corsica in which he aligned his loyalties firmly with his own people. The Corsicans, he declared, ‘had been able, by pursuing all the laws of justice, to shake off the yoke of Genoa, and they can do the same to that of the French’.²⁴

The ambivalence in Napoleon’s loyalties at this stage of his life is clear, and it is at least plausible that the pain and resentment of these early years were important factors in developing his personality and deepening his commitment to his new nation. Not many men get to choose the state they will serve, and they rarely do so with such deliberation, or such consequence, as the future Emperor. Though he never rejected his origins and retained deep affection for both the island and the members of his immediate family, he made no secret of the fact that he now saw his future in France. His ambition to be an army officer, to hold command and seek personal glory, was one that required him to commit himself to his adoptive country. It could not be satisfied in an independent Corsica.

In Paris at the École Militaire Napoleon’s education became more technical, more focused, in preparation for a career as an army officer. He was no longer a schoolboy: the students were taught about the science of fortification, and their studies were supplemented by classes on drill, musketry, and horsemanship. At first sight his results might appear unremarkable. There were two hundred and two candidates in his year from the various military schools in France, of whom one hundred and thirty-six passed the final examination, fourteen of them for the artillery. Fifty-eight were admitted to the rank of second lieutenant – in most officers’ eyes the real proof of quality – and Napoleon was among them, classed forty-second in the promotion.²⁵ This was an impressive achievement for a young man who had spent so little time in classes and on the training-ground. Whereas it took most cadets two or three years of study to qualify for a commission, the young Bonaparte passed out at the end of his first year, at the age of only sixteen.²⁶

On 10 January 1786, less than eight years after he had first arrived in France, he passed out as a commissioned officer, a second lieutenant in the artillery regiment of La Fère. His first army postings involved fairly routine peacetime work – garrison duties in modest provincial towns like Auxonne and Valence, postings which inevitably brought their share of lethargy and tedium. Nor do his duties there seem to have been particularly exacting, as he was absent from his regiment for lengthy periods. Within months of assuming his post he received permission to return home to Corsica to deal with family matters that had lain unresolved since his father’s death. He would stay there for over a year, only returning to his regiment in September 1787. But again his service was of short duration, as he was granted a further six-month leave in December and immediately went back to Corsica.

He would return to the island for a third visit from September 1789 till February 1791, visiting family and immersing himself in writing, and again, for a fourth and final time, from September 1791 to May 1792. During these later visits he took an interest in thepolitical situation in Corsica – he had not yet at this stage of his life lost his youthful passion for Corsica and its history – writing both to Paoli and to the royalist leader, Matteo de Buttafoco, and attempting to gain Paoli’s confidence. He took part in the electoral campaign of 1790, and manoeuvred, unsuccessfully, to get his brother Joseph elected to the Legislative Assembly the following year. He took his place in the battalion of the National Guard in Ajaccio, where he was elected lieutenant-colonel and second-in-command. But there, any vestiges of sympathy for Corsican autonomy ceased. His Guard battalion, called out to defend the citizenry of Ajaccio and their property against violent attack, was forced to confront riots in the city, and the memory of his using violence against his own people finally destroyed any lingering bond he may have had with the Corsican people. Of his first six years in the French army he spent nearly four back in Corsica.²⁷ These years proved a formative period in his life and left him disillusioned with Paoli and the nationalist cause, which he increasingly dismissed as romantically unrealistic in its ambitions. They cemented the earlier decision by his family to throw in their lot with France.

Throughout his youth Napoleon’s reading reflected his wider interests in philosophy and political sovereignty – he read and reread Rousseau during the later 1780s – and most especially in history. In pre-revolutionary France he could not but be affected by the literary and political tastes of the times, and his early writings include short works of political philosophy of a generally radical and enlightened persuasion. This outlook distinguished him from most of the young noblemen he encountered at school at Brienne. Whereas they expressed royalist beliefs and obedience to the Catholic Church, the future emperor was already expressing humanist sentiments and anti-clerical prejudices. He savoured the great classical authors like Cicero and Caesar, and enlightened works by Voltaire, Diderot, and the Abbé Raynal, often adding his own responses to their texts and praising the virtues of patriotism. In all these early reflections he showed consistency in arguing the need for a strong state to protect the weak from the exploitation of the rich and powerful, and demonstrated a healthy scepticism of the clergy and their teachings.

In 1817, he would tell Bertrand on Saint Helena that his crisis of faith had come early, when he had listened to a Catholic sermon at school which declared that Cato, Caesar and other great figures of Antiquity were condemned to eternal damnation. He was, he said, no more than eleven years old, but it had left an indelible mark. ‘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.’²⁸ The clergy he held in disdain for their condemnation of the Enlightenment and of men whom he regarded as progressive and patriotic, men whose opinions he respected and cherished. For Napoleon already thought of himself as a writer, and of his early works as contributions to a broader humanist debate. At the age of eighteen he wrote to the fiercely anti-clerical Raynal, whom he regarded as something of a mentor, introducing himself as a young author, a philosopher who needed advice in order to get established. He claimed to share many of Raynal’s views and went on to submit one of his more serious youthful works, his Corsican Letters, to him for advice and feedback.²⁹

Though in later life Napoleon undoubtedly exaggerated the extent of his belief in enlightened ideas, there seems little doubt that he read widely in the philosophy of the day and formulated his own views on public events. In his early writings we find him declaiming against the Church and the iniquities of the clergy, denouncing religion as a force for tyranny whose ideas ran counter to the liberties of the people and obstructed the will of the people, and declaring his belief in, and love for, his patrie, whether French or Corsican, with all the passion of the late eighteenth century. He declared that the clergy were independent of the state and destructive of its unity. Moreover, he argued, ‘from the fact that Christianity breaks the unity of the state should we not conclude that it has been at the root of the many troubles that have destabilised Christian countries?’³⁰ These ideas were not uncommon in the eighteenth century, and Bonaparte may not have been the most original of writers – many of his political views seem highly derivative – and the views he expressed were often shared by a large number of the educated youth of his generation. But he was largely consistent in his opinions. He was impatient with the world around him, radical and often angry in his denunciation of the elites and their reluctance to seize the initiative, their tendency to lassitude. He was critical of authority where he thought it had failed, but was no friend to anarchy or disorder. In this he shared the views of many who lost patience with the Bourbon regime.

In one of his best-known tracts, his ‘Dissertation on Royal Authority’, written in 1788, he repeated Rousseau’s view that for a State to enjoy authority it must represent the general will; and, more memorably, he declared that monarchy was, almost of necessity, a flawed system on which to construct the government of a people. ‘There are’, he declared with a certain flourish, ‘very few kings who have not deserved to be overthrown.’³¹ Already the young Bonaparte had evolved a confident rhetorical style, born of the rationalism of the Enlightenment and turned against his enemies, a rhetoric that would continue to serve him well in the years ahead.³²

He had also developed a suspicion of established elites and a scorn for their prudence that led him to praise men of action like Frederick the Great, to identify with the new revolutionary regime after 1789, and to hitch his star to the Jacobin cause. This he would do most explicitly in 1793, in Souper de Beaucaire, a play he published about the political friction that had developed in the South, in which he did nothing to conceal his republican sympathies.³³ But it would be rash to go further, or to suggest that he was in any way a committed Jacobin. There is no evidence that he joined any political club, or declared his specific affiliations, during the republican moment of 1792–94.

Already in his writings during the last years of the Old Regime we can see the limitations of his political vision and his impatience with the accepted views of others. Bonaparte was neither a committed republican nor a terribly original thinker, but as an avid reader with a capacity to devour whole libraries – which Annie Jourdan has colourfully described as ‘bulimic’³⁴ – once he had made up his mind on an issue he would defend his opinion with a consistency that at times approached stubbornness. Above all, he showed an early interest in the sorts of issues that would dominate the political agenda during the revolutionary decade: in particular, questions of constitutional rights and the role of government in the pursuit of a fairer society and a universally respected law. To that extent, his early writings are suggestive both of his political ideas and of the restless temperament that lay behind them. But they do not add up to a political manifesto. Many of his youthful outpourings before the Revolution wisely steered away from politics, concentrating instead on the safer world of ancient history and the Classics. Once in the army he continued to write about those things that affected him or where he felt he had expertise – Corsica, of course, but also military regulation and the deployment of the artillery. But it did not go beyond that, and years of absence meant that he was only superficially informed of the nuances of the new political situation.

Now that he was back in France he had to decide how he would align himself with the new politics of the French Revolution.