Napoleon I.
(From the portrait by P. Delaroche.)
In the Corsican deputation sent to Paris to arrange terms with the conquerors was Carlo Bonaparte, a member of a noble Tuscan family, whose ancestors had established themselves in Ajaccio 200 years before. Some time before this visit to Paris his wife, Maria Letitia, had given birth to a son, Napoleon. There has recently been a question raised whether the traditionally accepted date, August 15, 1769, is correct, and some French investigators are in favor of antedating it by one year. There were eight surviving children, five of them boys, out of a family of thirteen. Napoleon describes himself as an unruly child despite the iron discipline exercised in the home by his mother. “I was,” he says, “self-willed and obstinate, nothing awed me; nothing disconcerted me. I was quarrelsome, exasperating; I feared no one, I gave a blow here and a scratch there. Everyone was afraid of me. My brother Joseph was the one with whom I had most to do. He was beaten about and scolded; I complained that he did not get over it soon enough.”
The father, a lawyer by profession, was engaged in unending litigation in his own behalf, which required frequent trips to Paris, where he was well known on account of his efforts to recover an estate, deeded by some relative to the Jesuit order, and also as a representative deputy of the Corsican nobility. On one of these trips the head of the house died in 1785; seven years before that date he had been successful in getting a scholarship for Napoleon at the military school of Brienne, where the young soldier had just completed his course and received his commission as lieutenant at the time of his father’s death. At school Napoleon had made little reputation as a scholar; he stated himself later on that it was the general opinion that he “was fit for nothing except geometry.” He was unsociable, with an imperious temperament that parted everyone from him. One of his schoolfellows writes of his characteristics as follows: “Gloomy and even savage, almost always self-absorbed, one would have supposed that he had just come from some forest, and unmindful, until then, of the notice of his fellows, experienced for the first time the sensations of surprise and distrust; he detested games and all manner of boyish amusements. One part of the garden was allotted to him and there he studied and brooded, and woe to him who ventured to disturb him. One evening the boys were setting off fireworks and a small powder-chest exploded. In their fright the troop scattered in all directions, and some of them took refuge in Napoleon’s domain, whereat he rushed upon the fugitives in a passion and attacked them with a spade.”
He had wished to enter the navy after his studies were finished, but there was some delay until, as his family were in straitened circumstances, he decided to enter the artillery, where the applications for admission were fewer. So he passed from Brienne to Paris, where he again seems to have made no very favorable impression, except on the mathematical instructor at the military school, Monge, whose report on Bonaparte at the time he was leaving school reads as follows: “Reserved and studious, he prefers study to amusement of any kind, and takes pleasure in reading the works of good authors; while diligent in his study of abstract science, he cares little for any other; he has a thorough knowledge of mathematics and geography. He is taciturn, preferring solitude, capricious, haughty, and inordinately self-centered. While a man of few words, he is vigorous in his replies, ready and incisive in retort; he has great self-esteem, is ambitious with aspirations that stop at nothing. He is a young man worthy of patronage.”
The new officer, who was assigned to duty at Valence, found garrison life very tedious; promotion was slow, there were no drills, camp life, nor manœuvers; he spent, he says, a good deal of his time reading novels, planned even to write one, and took some part in the local life of the town, making friends among the society of petty officials, lawyers, and other persons of middle-class station. He did some solid reading also, making himself acquainted with Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Raynal, the last having so much influence over him, that he acknowledged himself as Raynal’s disciple in his views as to the need of social reform in France, which, among other things, implied the abolition of class privileges and the purification of administration. His literary attempts were various; he was prompted to make them because his pay of 100 livres a month, though adequate for himself, was not sufficient to help out his relatives in Corsica, where his mother and the rest of the family were in a position of financial difficulty.
During the early years of the revolutionary movement in France, Napoleon spent a large part of the time in Corsica, where the nationalist party hoped to take advantage of the civil disturbances of their new rulers, and reclaim their independence. For a time he made their cause his own, and developed a scheme for driving the French from the island. But conditions soon changed after Paoli returned to Corsica. Napoleon, who hoped for high military command among his own people, failed to secure the support of the old leader, who suspected the young officer, on account of the radical sympathies he manifested for the revolutionary party in France. Paoli believed in a constitutional monarchy, and refused to side with the Convention which had put Louis XVI to death. Most of the Corsicans followed their conservative statesman, and in May, 1793, Napoleon and the whole Bonaparte family were declared outlaws.
After an unsuccessful attempt to take Ajaccio from the Paolists Napoleon, with the rest of his family, abandoned the island and withdrew to Toulon. His scheme of self-advancement at home had failed; he had now only France to look to as the field of his ambition. It was fortunate for him that during this period his irregular connection with the French army, in which he still held the rank of officer, was tolerated. He had made himself marked by his openly declared sympathies with the anti-monarchical party, and for this reason, his independent action in visiting Corsica and remaining there as long as he liked was passed over without criticism from his superiors in Paris; indeed, his captain’s commission was dated February 6, 1792, a time when he was devoting his attention altogether to Corsican affairs, in his own interest.
His arrival in France coincided with the establishment of the Reign of Terror, and the government at Paris had on their hands an insurrection in the southern part of the country which sided with the Girondins, many of whose leaders had been put to death by the Jacobins. Napoleon resumed his military service at Nice, and immediately took part in repressing the Girondin insurrection. He also expressed his full agreement with the Jacobins in a dialogue entitled the Souper de Beaucaire, a pamphlet intended to win adherents to the cause of the Terrorists at Paris. His apology called public attention to him,—the dialogue was printed at the expense of the state, and its author was soon on friendly terms with the younger Robespierre, one of the commissioners of the Convention in southern France.