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Carlo’s most important litigation concerned an estate at Mitelli. It had belonged to Paolo Odone, the brother of Carlo’s great-great-grandmother, who had died without issue and left it to the Jesuits. Since the Jesuit Order had recently been suppressed, Carlo considered it his, but the French authorities had seized the estate and used the revenues for schools. Carlo was constantly trying to prove in law his claim to Mitelli, but lacked documentary evidence and when in 1780 he began to keep a book of accounts and notable family dates, he urged ‘the best qualified of his children’ to continue the register in detail and, alluding to Mitelli, to ‘avenge our family for the tribulations and checks we have experienced in the past.’
Carlo was showing admirable energy but his life still followed the pattern of the past. Thanks to the French, it was now to take a wholly new direction. The French divided society into three classes – nobles, clerics and commoners – and this tidy system they brought to Corsica. If a Corsican wished to continue in politics, as Carlo did, he must do so no longer as an individual but as a member of one of the three classes. A Corsican whose family had lived on the island 200 years and who could prove that it had noble rank during that period was offered privileges similar to those of the French nobility, including exemption from taxes, and the right to sit as a noble in the island’s assembly.
Carlo decided to accept this offer. The Buonapartes had kept in touch with the Tuscan branch in Florence and Carlo was soon able to produce eleven quarters of nobility – seven more than the stipulated minimum. He was duly inscribed as a French nobleman and took his seat when the Corsican States-General met for the first time in May 1772. His fellows thought well of him, for they elected him a member of the Council of Twelve Nobles, which had a say in governing Corsica.
When he was three Napoleone would have noticed a change in his father’s appearance. Tall Carlo took to wearing a powdered curled wig decorated with a double black silk ribbon. He wore embroidered waistcoats, elegant knee-breeches, silk stockings and silver-buckled shoes. At his hip he carried the sword which symbolized his noble rank, and by the local people he came to be called ‘Buonaparte the Magnificent’. There were changes also in the family house. Carlo built on a room where he could give big dinner-parties, and he bought books, a rarity in Corsica. Soon he had a library of a thousand volumes. So it came about that Napoleone, unlike his forbears, grew up within reach of books, and their store of knowledge.
When Napoleone was seven, the Corsicans chose his father as one of three noblemen to convey the island’s loyal respects to King Louis XVI. So off went Buonaparte the Magnificent to the palace of Versailles, where he met the mumbling good-natured King and perhaps also Marie Antoinette, who imported flowering shrubs from Corsica for her garden in Trianon. During this and a second visit in 1779 Carlo tried unsuccessfully to get reimbursed for the Odone legacy, but he did succeed in obtaining a subsidy for the planting of mulberry trees – it was hoped to introduce silk production to Corsica. On his return Carlo could boast that he had spoken to His Majesty, but it was a costly boast. ‘In Paris’, he noted in his accounts book, ‘I received 4,000 francs from the King and a fee of 1,000 crowns from the Government, but I came back without a penny.’
Carlo might rank as a French nobleman, but he was still far from well-off. In 1775, when Napoleone was six, a third son was born, named Lucciano, and two years later a daughter, Maria Anna, so that he now had four children to support and educate on a salary of 900 livres. France, as he had found to his cost, was expensive: doubtless the best he could hope for was to keep his boys at Father Recco’s little school and at sixteen send them to Pisa, like so many generations of Buonapartes, to read law. Fortunately for Carlo and his sons, this problem was soon to be resolved in an unforeseen way.
Paoli had left Corsica, and his place as the most important man had been taken by the French civil and military commander, Louis Charles René, Comte de Marbeuf. Born in Rennes of an old Breton family in 1712, he had entered the army, fought gallantly and risen to brigadier. Then, being charming and witty, he had turned courtier and become gentleman-in-waiting to King Stanislas I, Louis XV’s Polish father-in-law. On his appointment as virtual ruler of Corsica, he had been told by the Minister of Foreign Affairs: ‘Make yourself loved by the Corsicans, and neglect nothing to make them love France.’
Marbeuf did just that. He reduced taxes to a mere 5 per cent of the harvest, he learned the Corsican pronunciation of Italian, so that he could speak with peasants, he sometimes wore their homespun and pointed velvet cap, he built himself a fine house near Corte and entertained generously – as indeed he could well afford, on a salary of 71,208 livres.
Bretons and Scotsmen have two things in common: bagpipes and a flair for administering colonies. When James Boswell toured Corsica, he stayed with Marbeuf, passing, he says, ‘from the mountains of Corsica to the banks of the Seine’, and admired the work of this ‘worthy, open-hearted Frenchman … gay without levity and judicious without severity’. Having fallen ill, Boswell was nursed by Marbeuf personally, on a diet of bouillon and books. Indeed, Marbeuf’s kindness so stands out in Boswell’s Tour that it rather mars the book’s purpose, which was to vaunt the ‘oppressed’ Corsicans.
Carlo liked Marbeuf also. Both of them wanted to improve agriculture. Marbeuf introduced the potato, and encouraged the growing of flax and tobacco. He helped Carlo get a grant of 6,000 livres in order to drain a salt-marsh near Ajaccio and plant barley. Carlo on his own arranged for a seed merchant to come from Tuscany and plant or sow certain French vegetables unknown in Corsica: cabbages, beetroot, celery, artichokes and asparagus. Both men wanted to reclaim and improve. A friendship ripened between them, and when Carlo went to Versailles in 1776 he spoke up for Marbeuf against certain critics at court.
The Marbeufs, like so many Bretons, had a romantic streak. Marbeuf’s father had fallen in love with Louise, daughter of Louis XV, and in public bestowed a kiss on that princess’s cheek – for which a lettre de cachet consigned him to prison. Marbeuf fils had had to make a mariage de raison with a lady much older than himself, and she did not accompany him to Corsica. There he fell in love with a certain Madame de Varesne, and kept her as his mistress until 1776. Then the liaison ended. Marbeuf was sixty-four, but still romantically inclined. At his parties he came to know Letizia, now in her twenties and described by a French eyewitness as ‘easily the most striking woman in Ajaccio’. Soon he fell ‘wildly in love’ with her. It was a Platonic affair, for Letizia had eyes only for Carlo, but it made all the difference to young Napoleone’s fortunes. Instead of merely helping Carlo from time to time with his mulberry plantations, now Marbeuf could not do enough for the beautiful Letizia and her children.
Marbeuf, aware of Carlo’s financial difficulties, informed him of an arrangement whereby the children of impoverished French noblemen might receive free education. Boys destined for the army could go to military academy, boys wishing to enter the Church could go to the seminary in Aix, and girls to Madame de Maintenon’s school at Saint-Cyr. Marbeuf would have to recommend any child, but if Carlo and Letizia wished to take advantage of the scheme, they could count on his support.
This offer was like an answer to prayer. Abandoned now were the vague schemes for making lawyers of the two older boys. It must be either soldiering or the priesthood. Carlo and Letizia decided that Giuseppe, quiet and good-natured, had the makings of a priest. Not so Napoleone, who had to be slapped to High Mass. Strong and mettlesome, he was more likely to have the Ramolino gift for soldiering. So they decided that Napoleone should try for military academy.
Marbeuf supported Carlo’s requests and sent the documents to Paris, with testimonies that Carlo could not afford the school fees. In 1778 the royal decisions arrived. Giuseppe could go to Aix, but only when he was sixteen. Until then he must clearly have some French schooling, and this Carlo could not afford. Again Marbeuf stepped in. His nephew was Bishop of Autun, and the college at Autun was an excellent school, the French Eton. Giuseppe could go there until he was old enough for Aix, and Marbeuf, who had no children of his own, would look after his fees. As for Napoleone, he was accepted in principle for the military academy at Brienne, though final confirmation had to await a new certificate of nobility, this time from the royal heraldist in Versailles. Court officials were notoriously slow, and the certificate might take months: perhaps it would be a good plan if Napoleone spent those months with his brother at Autun, again at Marbeuf’s expense. Carlo and Letizia gladly agreed.
Carlo was able to show his gratitude in one small way. Already guerrilla leader, lawyer, farmer and politician, he now turned poet, perhaps under the influence of his new library. When Marbeuf, on the death of his first wife, married a young lady called Mademoiselle de Fenoyl – without, however, growing any the less enamoured of Letizia – Carlo wrote and gave him a sonnet in Italian, which he proudly copied into his account book, beside the homely lists of farms, linen, clothes and kitchen utensils. It is quite a good sonnet, reflecting Carlo’s own love of children and hopes for his own sons. May Marbeuf and his wife, he says, soon be blessed with a son, who will bring tears of joy to their eyes, and, following his ancestors’ exalted career, shed lustre on the fleur-de-lys, and on his parents’ honour.
Napoleone aged nine had every reason to be pleased with life. He lived in a fine house in the prettiest town of a strikingly beautiful island. He was proud that his family had fought with Paoli, but too young to feel resentment against French troops or French officials, who in fact were pouring money into Corsica on modernization schemes. He had brothers and a sister, and, though not the eldest, he could get the better of Giuseppe if it came to a fight. He admired his father, who had risen in the world, and loved his mother who, as he put it, was ‘both tender and strict’. He doubtless disliked the idea of leaving home, but it was, everyone said, a great opportunity and he intended to make the most of it. When he went to school his mother would give him a piece of white bread for his lunch. On the way he exchanged it with one of the garrison soldiers for coarse brown bread. When Letizia scolded him, he replied that since he was going to be a soldier he must get used to soldier’s rations, and anyway he preferred brown bread to white.
Napoleone watched his mother, already busy with her baby daughter, as she prepared and marked the vast number of shirts and collars and towels prescribed by boarding-schools. In addition, Napoleone had to have a silver fork and spoon, and a goblet inscribed with the Buonaparte arms: a red shield crossed diagonally by three silver bands, and two six-pointed azure stars, the whole surmounted by a coronet.
On the evening of 11 December 1778 Letizia, following a Corsican custom, took Giuseppe and Napoleone to the Lazarists to be blessed by the Father Superior. Next day the boys said goodbye to their brothers and sister, to the gout-ridden Archdeacon, to the many aunts and countless cousins who composed a Corsican family, and to Camilla: tears ran down her cheeks to see ‘her Napoleone’ leave. Then they set out on horseback across the mountains, with mules for their luggage, as far as Corte, where Marbeuf had arranged for a carriage to take them on to Bastia. Also of the party was Letizia’s half-brother, Giuseppe Fesch, who, again with Marbeuf’s assistance, was entering Aix seminary: a pleasant fat pink lad of sixteen. In the south of the island there was always a cousin or uncle to stay with, but not so at Bastia, and they had to spend the night in a simple inn. An old man dragged mattresses into a chilly room but there were too few to go round, so the five of them huddled together and snatched what sleep they could. Next morning Napoleone boarded the ship for France, a boy of nine and a half leaving home for the first time. As his mother kissed him goodbye she sensed what he was feeling and spoke a last word in his ear: ‘Courage!’
* (#ulink_521fefa5-f07b-56a7-a485-64916ab3740c) Throughout the period covered by this book, save the inflationary years 1791–9, the purchasing power of the livre or franc was slightly in excess of £1 today.
CHAPTER 2 Military Academies (#ulink_da9a7cf9-0f86-5d00-9bc0-2f1f04693844)
ON Christmas Day 1778 at Marseille Napoleone Buonaparte set foot on French soil, and found himself among people whose language he could not understand. Happily his father was there, practical and speaking French, to organize the journey to Aix, where Giuseppe Fesch was dropped off, and then north, probably by boat, the cheapest way, up the rivers Rhône and Saône to the heart of this land eighty times the size of Corsica. At Villefranche, a town of 10,000 inhabitants in the wine-growing Beaujolais, Carlo said, ‘How silly we are to be vain about our country: we boast of the main street in Ajaccio and here, in an ordinary French town, there’s a street just as wide and just as handsome.’
Corsica is mountainous, rugged and poor; to the Buonapartes France must have seemed its complete opposite, with soft rolling contours, trim fields and well-pruned vineyards, straight roads, big houses with park and lake and swans. A population of twenty-five million, by far the largest in Europe, enjoyed a high standard of living and exported almost twice as much as they imported. French furniture, tapestries, gold and silver plate, jewellery and porcelain graced houses from the Tagus to the Volga. Ladies in Stockholm, like ladies in Naples, wore Parisian dresses and gloves, and carried Paris-made fans, while their husbands took snuff from French snuff-boxes, laid out their gardens French style, and considered themselves uneducated if they had not read Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire. In coming to France the two Buonaparte boys had entered the centre of European civilization.
Autun was a slightly smaller town than Villefranche, but richer in fine buildings. There was more beautiful carving over one doorway of its Romanesque cathedral than in all Corsica. Carlo presented his sons to Bishop de Marbeuf and put them in charge of the head-master of Autun College. On the first day of 1779 he said goodbye to Joseph and Napoleon, as they were now being called, and set out for Paris to secure the certificate of Napoleon’s noble birth.
Napoleon’s first task was to learn French, which was also the language of educated Europe, the great universal language that Latin had once been. He found it difficult. He was not good at memorizing and reproducing sounds, nor did he have the flexible temperament of the born linguist. In his four months at Autun he learned to speak French, but retained a strong Italian accent, and pronounced certain words Italian style, for example ‘tou’ instead of ‘tu’, ‘classé’ instead of ‘classe’. At Autun in fact he was still very much the Corsican. This led one of his masters, Father Chardon, to speak of the French conquest. ‘Why were you beaten? You had Paoli, and Paoli was meant to be a good general.’ ‘He is, sir,’ replied Napoleon, ‘and I want to grow up like him.’
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.
One day Napoleon was on the parade ground, drilling with his long unwieldy musket. He made a mistake, whereupon the senior cadet, who was instructing him, gave him a sharp rap over the knuckles. This was contrary to regulations. In a fury Napoleon threw his musket at the senior cadet’s head – never again, he swore, would he receive lessons from him. His superiors, seeing that they would have to handle this new cadet carefully, gave him another instructor, Alexandre des Mazis. Napoleon and Alexandre, who was one year ahead of him, at once struck up a lasting friendship.
The effeminate Laugier de Bellecour, once in Paris, definitely threw in his lot with the ‘queers’, indeed at one point the school authorities were so disgusted that they decided to send him back to Brienne, but were overruled by the Minister. When Laugier tried to renew relations Napoleon replied, ‘Monsieur, you have scorned my advice, and so you have renounced my friendship. Never speak to me again.’ Laugier was furious. Later he came on Napoleon from behind and pushed him down. Napoleon got up, ran after him, caught him by the collar and threw him to the floor. In falling Laugier hit his head against a stove, and the captain on duty rushed up to administer punishment. ‘I was insulted,’ Napoleon explained, ‘and I took my revenge. There’s nothing more to be said.’ And he calmly walked off.
Napoleon was evidently upset by Laugier’s relapse, which he linked with the luxury of his new surroundings. He sat down and wrote the Minister of War a ‘memorandum on the education of Spartan youth’, whose example he suggested should be followed in French academies. He sent a draft to Father Berton, but was advised by him to drop the whole affair, so his curious essay never reached its destination. This small episode is, however, important in two ways. As he later told a friend, Napoleon quite often felt physical attraction for men; it was because he had personal experience of homosexual urges that he was so eager to see them damped down. The other aspect of his essay is that it shows Napoleon for the first time sensing a national malaise. The malaise was real, but only a few, chiefly artists, sensed it. 1785, the year Napoleon wrote, was the year of the Diamond Necklace scandal, and the year when Louis David, reacting against the malaise, painted Le Serment des Horaces, in which after sixty years of lolling on beds and swings and scented cushions, the figures in French art suddenly snap to attention.
Napoleon spent his leisure moments, says Alexandre des Mazis, striding through the school, arms folded, head lowered – a posture for which he was criticized on parade. He thought often of his unsophisticated homeland and of exiled Paoli, who had modelled the Corsican constitution on Sparta’s. One of his friends made a funny drawing of Napoleon walking with long steps, a little Paoli hanging on to the knot at the back of his hair, with the caption, ‘Bonaparte, run, fly, to the help of Paoli and rescue him from his enemies.’
In the month after Napoleon entered the Ecole Militaire, his father came to the south of France to seek medical advice. He suffered from almost continual pain in the stomach, and a diet of pears prescribed in Paris by no less a man than Marie Antoinette’s physician had brought him no relief. At Aix he consulted Professor Turnatori, then went on to Montpellier, which had a famous medical faculty specializing in herbal remedies. Here he saw three more doctors, but they could do nothing to cure his pain or the vomiting which they described as ‘persistent, stubborn and hereditary’. Carlo had never been very religious but now he insisted on seeing a priest and during his last days he was comforted and given the sacraments by the vicar of the church of Saint-Denis. At the end of February 1785 he died of cancer of the stomach.
Napoleon, who had loved and respected his father, certainly experienced a deep sense of loss. He was particularly saddened that Carlo should have died away from Corsica amid ‘the indifference’ of a strange town. But when the chaplain wished to take him for a few hours to the solitude of the infirmary, as the custom was, Napoleon declined, saying that he was strong enough to bear the news. He wrote at once to his mother – Joseph was going home to look after her – but his letter, like all cadets’ letters, was re-styled by an officer, and ended up a formal, rather stilted exercise in filial consolation. A better sign of his feelings is that when a family friend in Paris offered to lend him some pocket money, ‘My mother has too many expenses already,’ Napoleon said. ‘I mustn’t add to them.’
Paris, moreover, sometimes provided free amusements. One day in March 1785 Napoleon and Alexandre des Mazis went to the Champ de Mars to watch Blanchard prepare to ascend in a hot-air balloon. Ever since the Montgolfier brothers had seen a shirt drying and billowing in front of a fire and so conceived the principle of ballooning, this sport had caught the public’s fancy. For some reason Blanchard kept delaying his ascent. The hours passed and no balloon rose into the air. Napoleon grew impatient: it was one of his traits that he could not bear to hang around doing nothing. Suddenly he stepped forward, drew a knife from his pocket and cut the retaining cords. At once the balloon rose into the air, drifted over the Paris rooftops and was later found far away, deflated. For this escapade, says Alexandre, Napoleon was severely punished.
Napoleon worked hard at the Ecole Militaire. He continued to do very well in mathematics and geography. He liked fencing and was noted for the number of foils he broke. He was very poor at sketching plans of fortifications, at drawing and again, at dancing, and so hopeless at German that he was usually dispensed from attending classes. Instead he read Montesquieu, the leading panegyrist of the Roman Republic.
Normally a cadet spent two years at the Ecole Militaire, especially when following the difficult artillery course. But Napoleon did so well in his exams that he passed out after only one year. He came forty-second in the list of fifty-eight who received commissions, but most of the others had spent several years in the school. More significant is the fact that only three were younger than Napoleon. His commission being antedated to 1 September, Napoleon became an officer at the age of sixteen years and fifteen days.
In 1785 there was no intake of officers into the navy, so Napoleon did not realize his ambition to be a sailor. Instead he was commissioned in the artillery: an obvious choice, given his flair for mathematics. He was handed his commission, signed personally by Louis XVI, and at the passing-out parade received his insignia: a silver neck-buckle, a polished leather belt and a sword.
On free days Napoleon sometimes visited the Permon family. Madame Permon was a Corsican, knew the Buonapartes, and had been kind to Carlo in the south of France; married to a rich army commissary, she had two daughters, Cécile and Laure. Napoleon put on his new officer’s boots and insignia and proudly went round to the Permon house at 13 Place de Conti. But the two sisters burst out laughing at the sight of his thin legs lost in his long officer’s boots. When Napoleon showed some annoyance, Cécile reproved him. ‘Now you have your officer’s sword you must protect the ladies and be pleased that they tease you.’
‘It’s obvious you’re just a little schoolgirl,’ replied Napoleon.
‘What about you? You’re just a puss-in-boots!’
Napoleon took the quip in good part. Next day out of his scant savings he bought Cécile a copy of Puss-in-Boots and her younger sister Laure a model of Puss-in-Boots running ahead of the carriage belonging to his master, the Marquis de Carabas.
Five and three-quarter years ago Napoleon had arrived in France an Italian-speaking Corsican boy. Now he was a Frenchman, an officer of the King. He had done well. But the death of his father had left him with heavy responsibilities. At the moment he was the only financial resource of his mother, a widow with eight children. He was allowed to select his regiment and because he wanted to be as close as possible to his mother, and to his brothers and sisters, he chose the La Fère regiment; not only was it one of the very best, but it was stationed in Valence, the nearest garrison town to Corsica.
CHAPTER 3 The Young Reformer (#ulink_851a6c30-9ce8-5e15-a3aa-d4c239dd5897)
VALENCE, on the River Rhône, in Napoleon’s day was a pleasant town of 5,000 inhabitants, notable for several fine abbeys and priories and for the strong citadel built by François I and modernized by Vauban. Officers lived in billets, and Napoleon found himself a first-floor room on the front of the Café Cercle. It was a rather noisy room, where he could hear the click of billiard balls in the adjoining saloon, but he liked the landlady, Mademoiselle Bou, an old maid of fifty who mended his linen, and he stayed on with her during all his time in Valence. As Second Lieutenant his pay was ninety-three livres a month; his room cost him eight livres eight sols.
For his first nine weeks Napoleon, as a new officer, served in the ranks and got first-hand experience of the ordinary soldier’s duties, including mounting guard. The rank and file were ill paid and slept two in a bed – until recently it had been three – but at least they were never flogged, whereas soldiers in the English and Prussian armies often were: indeed a sentence of 800 lashes was not unknown.
In January 1786 Napoleon took up his full duties as a second lieutenant. In the morning he went to the polygon to manœuvre guns and practise firing, in the afternoon to lectures on ballistics, trajectories and fire power. The guns were of bronze and of three sizes: 4-, 8-, and 12-pounders. The 12-pounder, which was drawn by six horses, had an effective range of 1,200 yards. All fired metal balls of three types: solid, red-hot shot, and short-range case-shot. The guns were new – they had been designed nine years earlier – and were the best in Europe. Napoleon soon became deeply interested in everything to do with them. One day, with his friend Alexandre des Mazis, who had also joined the La Fére regiment, he walked to Le Creusot to see the royal cannon foundry; here an Englishman, John Wilkinson, and a Lorrainer, Ignace de Wendel, had installed the most modern plant on English lines, using not wood but coke, with steam-engines and a horse-drawn railway.
Off duty Napoleon enjoyed himself. He made friends with Monsignor Tardivon, abbot of Saint-Ruf in Valence, to whom Bishop de Marbeuf had given him an introduction, and with the local gentry, some of whom had pretty daughters. He liked walking and climbed to the top of nearby Mont Roche Colombe. In winter he went skating. He took dancing lessons and went to dances. He paid a visit to a Corsican friend, Pontornini, who lived in nearby Tournon. Pontornini drew his portrait, the earliest that survives, and inscribed it: ‘Mio Caro Amico Buonaparte’.
Both in Valence and in Auxonne, where he was posted in June 1788, Napoleon got on well with his fellow officers, and now that he was earning his own living seems to have been more relaxed. However, there were occasional discords. In Auxonne, in the room above his, an officer named Belly de Bussy insisted on playing the horn, and he played out of tune. Napoleon one day met Belly on the staircase. ‘My dear fellow, haven’t you had enough of playing that damned instrument?’ ‘Not in the least.’ ‘Well, other people have.’ Belly challenged Napoleon to a duel, and Napoleon accepted; then their friends stepped in and arranged the matter harmoniously.
To help out his mother, Napoleon offered to take his brother Louis to share his billet in Auxonne. Louis, then aged eleven, was Napoleon’s favourite in the family, just as Napoleon was Louis’s favourite. Napoleon acted as schoolmaster to the younger boy, gave him catechism lessons for his first Communion, and also cooked meals for them both, for money had become very scarce in the Buonaparte family. When he needed linen from home, Napoleon paid his mother the cost of sending it, and sometimes he had to keep his letters short, in order to save postage.
As a second lieutenant Napoleon spent much of his time reading and studying: indeed he put himself through almost the equivalent of a university course. In Valence he bought or borrowed books from Pierre Marc Aurel’s bookshop opposite the Café Cercle. Evidently Aurel could not supply all his needs, for on 29 July 1786 he wrote to a Geneva bookseller for the Memoirs of Rousseau’s protectress, Madame de Warens, adding, ‘I should be obliged if you would mention what books you have about the island of Corsica, which you could get for me promptly.’
Napoleon read so much partly because he hoped at this time to become a writer. A review of what he read and wrote will give an excellent indication of how he came to make his fateful choice when the French Revolution began.
To start with Napoleon’s lighter reading. One book he savoured was Alcibiade, a French adaptation of a German historical novel. Another was ‘La Chaumière Indienne, by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. It describes the healthy-mindedness of simple people living close to Nature; it is full of generous, humane and spontaneous feelings. Napoleon liked this sort of novel, as indeed did many of his contemporaries; they found in it an antidote to the cold calculating perversity of sophisticated society, as revealed by Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Even when reading for diversion, Napoleon aimed at self-improvement. He copied into a notebook unfamiliar words or names, such as Dance of Daedalus, Pyrrhic dance; Odeum – theatre – Prytaneum; Timandra, a famous courtesan who remained constantly faithful to Alcibiades in his misfortunes; Rajahs, Pariah, coconut milk, Bonzes, Lama.
Napoleon also liked The Art of Judging Character from Men’s Faces by the Swiss Protestant pastor and mystic, Jean Gaspard Lavater. In a popular style and with the help of excellent illustrations Lavater analysed the noses, eyes, ears and stance of various human types and of historical figures, with the purpose of tracing the effects on the body of spiritual qualities and defects. Napoleon thought so well of the book that he planned to write a similar study himself.
From other, more serious books – thirty in all – Napoleon took notes, at the rate of about one page of notes a day, 120,000 words altogether. He took notes chiefly on passages containing numbers, proper names, anecdotes and words in italics. For example, from Marigny’s History of the Arabs: ‘Soliman is said to have eaten 100 pounds of meat a day …’ ‘Hischam owned 10,000 shirts, 2,000 belts, 4,000 horses and 700 estates, two of which produced 10,000 drachmas …’ He was excited by large numbers and on the rare occasions when he made a slip it was usually to make the figure larger, as when he said the Spanish Armada comprised 150 ships, where his author had 130.
From Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle Napoleon took notes on the formation of the planets, and of the earth, of rivers, seas, lakes, winds, volcanoes, earthquakes, and, especially, of man. ‘Some men,’ he noted, ‘are born with only one testicle, others have three; they are stronger and more vigorous. It is astonishing how much this part of the body contributes to [his] strength and courage. What a difference between a bull and an ox, a ram and a sheep, a cock and a capon!’ Then he copied a long passage on the various methods of castration – by amputation, compression, and decoction of herbs, ending with the statement that in 1657 Tavernier claimed to have seen 22,000 eunuchs in the kingdom of Golconda. Like many young men, Napoleon seems for a time to have had a subconscious fear of castration.
Second Lieutenant Buonaparte never read lives of generals, histories of war or books of tactics. Most of his reading stemmed from a glaringly obvious fact: something was wrong with France. There was injustice, there was unnecessary poverty, there was corruption in high places. On 27 November 1786 Napoleon wrote in his notebook: ‘We are members of a powerful monarchy, but today we feel only the vices of its constitution.’ Napoleon, like everyone else, saw that reform was needed. But what sort of reform? In order to articulate his own feelings and to seek an answer, Napoleon began to read history and political theory.
He started with Plato’s Republic, about which his main conclusion was that ‘Every man who rules issues orders not in his own interest but in the interest of his subjects.’ From Rollin’s Ancient History he took notes on Egypt – he was shocked by the tyranny of the Pharaohs – Assyria, Lydia, Persia and Greece. Athens, he notes, was originally ruled by a king, but we cannot conclude from this that monarchy is the most natural and primordial form of government. Of Lycurgus he notes: ‘Dykes were required against the king’s power or else despotism would have reigned. The people’s energy had to be maintained and moderated so that they should be neither slaves nor anarchists.’ Of Marigny’s History of the Arabs he read three out of four volumes, and ignored the pages on religion. ‘Mahomet did not know how to read or write, which I find improbable. He had seventeen wives.’ China he glanced at in Voltaire’s Essai sur les Maurs, and quoted Confucius on the obligation of a ruler continually to renew himself in order to renew the people by his example.
In these and other notes two main attitudes stand out. Napoleon had a keen sympathy with the oppressed and a distaste for tyranny in any form, whether it was the Almighty inflicting eternal damnation on souls or Cardinal de Fleury boasting of having issued 40,000 lettres de cachet. But there are no sweeping condemnations. Although unsympathetic to the absolutism of Louis XIV’s court, he quotes approvingly the remark of Louis XIV’s grandson when declining a new piece of furniture for his house: ‘The people can get the necessities of life only when princes forbid themselves what is superfluous.’
The book which seems to have influenced Napoleon most and on which he took most notes was a French translation of John Barrow’s A New and Impartial History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Signing of Preliminaries of Peace, 1762. The French translation stopped in 1689, that is, safely before the long series of French defeats.
Napoleon’s notes on Barrow are devoid of any such chauvinism, save perhaps the very first: ‘The British Isles were probably the first peopled by Gallic colonists.’ The invasion of Caesar he skipped, probably because he already knew it well, but he copied out a long story of Offa’s repentance, and his institution of Peter’s pence. He gave much space to Alfred and to Magna Carta, noting that the Charter had been condemned by the Pope. All constitutional struggles Napoleon followed in detail, such as the arraignment of Edward II and Wat Tyler’s rebellion. At the end of Richard II’s reign Napoleon added a personal comment: ‘The principal advantage of the English Constitution consists in the fact that the national spirit is always in full vitality. For a long spell of years, the King can doubtless arrogate to himself more authority than he ought to have, may even use his great power to commit injustice, but the cries of the nation soon change to thunder, and sooner or later the King yields.’
Napoleon treated the Reformation in detail. Summing up the reign of James I, he noted with approval: ‘Parliament henceforward regained its ascendancy.’ Of Charles I Napoleon took a poor view. He made notes on Pym, the first Parliamentary demagogue, but saved his enthusiasm for Simon de Montfort and later the Protector Somerset, who had died in sterner ages to make possible the successes of Pym and Cromwell. Of Simon de Montfort he wrote: ‘There perishes one of the greatest Englishmen, and with him the hope his nation had of seeing the royal authority diminished.’
The French translation of Barrow’s history ended in 1689 with the triumph of constitutional monarchy. Barrow’s message was clear: only a constitution defending the people’s rights could check arbitrary government. In the light of this message Napoleon took a new look at the history of France. The original government of the Franks, he decided, was a democracy tempered by the power of the King and his knights. A new king was made by being lifted on a shield and acclaimed by his troops. Then bishops arrived and preached despotism. Pepin, before receiving the crown, asked permission from the Pope. Gradually the aura of kingship took hold of men’s minds, and kings usurped an authority never originally granted them. They no longer ruled in the interests of the people who had originally given them power. In October 1788 Napoleon was planning to write an essay on royal authority: he would analyse the unlawful functions exercised by kings in Europe’s dozen kingdoms. Doubtless he was thinking of Louis XVI’s power, with a stroke of the pen, to send any Frenchman to the Bastille. What was wrong with France, Napoleon decided, was that the power of the King and the King’s men had grown excessive; the reform Napoleon wanted – and the point is important in view of his future career-was a constitution which, by setting out the people’s rights, would ensure that the King acted in the interests of France as a whole.
