The War of Wars Page 8

  Letizia was an extremely fierce and demanding mother. She was obsessed with cleanliness, forced him to attend mass with slaps, and would beat him with a whip on the slightest pretext, such as stealing food, bad behaviour in church or, on one occasion, laughing at a crippled grandmother. Worse, she was obsessed with outward show: ‘When you grow up, you’ll be poor. But it’s better to have a fine room for receiving friends, a fine suit of clothes and a fine horse, so that you put up a brave show – even if you have to live off dry bread.’ She would send her children to bed without supper sometimes so that they could learn ‘to bear discomfort without showing it’. Yet she lavished money on keeping the house looking smart.

  She would force Napoleone to spy on his father, who liked to play cards for money with his friends in the town cafés; the boy hated the task. She believed in Corsican traditions, which were violent and based on revenge. The society was alive with vendettas, and Corsicans grew their beards – barbe di vendetta – until a perceived injustice was avenged. Corsican poetry was based on anguish about death from vendettas; and death was a local obsession. It was foreshadowed in folklore by owls screeching and dogs howling, a drum beating or a light shining on a house all night.

  Letizia’s husband Carlo was not a prepossessing character. Having been Paoli’s devoted supporter, with remarkable speed he turned himself into a lackey for the French. As a lawyer he was petty-minded and ruthless, serving his own interests, seeking ownership of an estate for which his claim was dubious and then suing Letizia’s impoverished grandfather, aged eighty-four, for not delivering part of her dowry. He was appointed assessor of the Royal Jurisdiction of Ajaccio by the French ruler of Corsica, the Comte de Marbeuf.

  Marbeuf was an old goat: he lived with a mistress, Madame de Varennes, known as the Cleopatra of Corsica, and when she died in 1776 he pursued the strong-willed Letizia, who by now had had her third son, Lucien. The following year he secured Carlo’s appointment as a deputy for the nobility representing Corsica at Versailles, and the young man spent two years away while his patron seduced his wife.

  Although Letizia’s next child, her first daughter, Maria Anna Alisa, born in 1777, was Carlo’s, the next child, Louis, was almost certainly Marbeuf’s – physically resembling him and intemperate by nature. Carlo was probably aware of the relationship and acquiesced in it as the price for advancement – not that he was anyway faithful to Letizia. Marbeuf repaid Carlo for his compliance by securing a schooling for his two sons at Autun as a preliminary to Giuseppe’s being sent to a seminary at Aix and Napoleone to the military academy at Brienne in May 1779 – the boy having evinced an early fascination for playing with toy soldiers.

  Arriving there the boy had his eyes opened to a far wider world than his limited and strict Corsican childhood: travelling across the prosperous flatlands to Aix and then up the Rhône and the Saône rivers, the nine-year-old was awestruck. The château of Brienne was at the foot of a hill, and had recently been converted from a monastic seminary to a military one. It held around fifty pupils still under the control of two priests.

  Napoleone was locked into a cubicle six-foot square at ten o’clock at night, to be awoken at 6 a.m. Life was tough, but Napoleone was an exemplary student, excelling in mathematics and learning French, at which he was not so good: his pronunciation was always to be Italianate. He was studious, devoting himself to the classics and to reading. Napoleone, being a Corsican whose first language was Italian, and olive-skinned by comparison with the other children as well as poorer than most, and being on a scholarship, was immediately subjected to bullying and snobbery by the mainland children; but his sheer toughness saw him through.

  Four credible stories are told about his school career. When he was made to kneel in a dunce’s uniform to eat his dinner as punishment for some transgression, he threw a tantrum insisting that he would kneel ‘only to God’. On another occasion when fireworks exploded next to the plot Napoleone considered his own garden and other children rushed across it in alarm, he brandished a hoe at them and forced them out. He also organized a snowfight which turned serious when the boys started to coat stones with snow. At the age of eleven, he was horrified when he heard a priest proclaim that Caesar and Cicero were in hell as pagans. He recoiled from the idea that ‘the most virtuous men of antiquity would burn in eternal flames for not having practised a religion they knew nothing about’. The logic was faultless, and Napoleone was showing an early admiration for great men. His Christianity was now in doubt.

  A year later he decided he wanted to become a sailor. The verdict from the inspector-general of scholars was largely favourable.

  M. de Bonaparte (Napoleon), born 15 August 1769. Height 5′6″. Constitution: excellent health, docile expression, mild, straightforward, thoughtful. Conduct most satisfactory; has always been distinguished for his application in mathematics. He is fairly well acquainted with history and geography. He is weak in all accomplishments – drawing, dancing, music and the like. This boy would make an excellent sailor; deserves to be admitted to the school in Paris.

  Napoleone’s mother Letizia opposed his naval ambitions and secured his entry into the École Royale Militaire de Paris. It was a giant step for him, and he travelled by barge along with three schoolfellows under his headmaster, Father Berton. He was astonished by the great city. He gaped ‘in all directions with all the expression to catch a pickpocket’. He bought a book, Gil Blas, about a boy who rises from a poor provincial background to become secretary to the prime minister.

  At the école, a fine building opened only thirteen years earlier, he was astonished by the luxury – the blue uniform with red collar and silver braid, the white gloves, the gold-and-blue décor of the classrooms, the lavish curtains, the pewter jug and washbasin, the excellent food and choice of puddings. He wrote: ‘We were magnificently fed and served, treated in every way like officers possessed of great wealth, certainly greater than that of most of our families and far above what many of us would enjoy later on.’ The number of teaching staff outnumbered the 215 cadets, and there were also 150 servants. The routine was, however, much more militaristic than in his previous school, involving drill, shooting practice and military exercises, and imprisonment with or without water for even minor infringements, although academic subjects still featured prominently in the curriculum. In winter the youths would simulate an attack on a much-fortified town, Fort Timbrune.

  Napoleone was by now adept at making friends and enemies. One who had come from Brienne, Pierre François Laugier de Bellecour, had already been upbraided by Napoleone for associating with the homosexual set there; he openly did so in Paris. Napoleone, who later confessed to homosexual feelings overcome with difficulty himself, was so angry at his friend’s behaviour that he once threw him to the floor. His instructor, Alexandre de Maxis, became another firm friend and would later describe his characteristic pose at school – head bowed, with his arms crossed, that would later become a trademark.

  Soon after Napoleone entered the school, his father died of cancer at the spa of Montpellier, where he had gone to seek a cure. Napoleone affected indifference – his hero was Paoli whom his father had betrayed by espousing the French invaders – but this may have been no more than a display of the self-discipline in which he was being trained. A furious rejection of his father is often cited. When later Montpellier Municipal Council sought to erect a monument to his memory he declared: ‘Forget it: let us not trouble the peace of the dead. Leave their ashes in peace. I also lost my grandfather, my great-grandfather, why is nothing done for them?’ But this can equally be seen as a sensible rejection of sycophantic hero-worship, and may have had little to do with his true feelings.

  Napoleone was now primarily concerned for his family because the bread-winner had been lost, and it would be years before he would earn a salary. He redoubled his efforts in the school of artillery, where he showed himself to be an outstanding mathematician. When tested by the Marquis de Laplane, one of the most brilliant astronomer
s of the age, he secured an unimpressive forty-second place in the artillery examination out of fifty-eight, but was one of the youngest cadets to pass. At the age of sixteen he became an army officer, second lieutenant in the artillery, because there was no room in the navy.

  Chapter 8

  ANGRY YOUNG OFFICER

  Napoleon, by now adopting the French style of his name, was appointed to the La Fère Regiment near Valence, conveniently close to Corsica, where he became convinced, regarding his older brother Joseph as too weak-minded, that he had prime responsibility to look after his mother and siblings after his father’s death. Sexually, he was curiously reticent for someone with rationalist doubts about Christianity: on the way to La Fère, he did not visit a brothel in Lyon as his fellow cadets did. He had already fended off the attempts of an older woman to seduce him. When on one occasion he did try to seduce two friendly young women, he was astonished to discover that they were lesbians.

  There have been innumerable studies of Napoleon’s personality: one of the more curious developments in modern historiography is that at the same time as a Marxist school has obsessed itself with the impersonal, primarily economic forces that shape history, a kind of sub-Freudian view has sprung up attaching all kinds of psychological motives to the men who, according to the previous school, have little real impact upon history. Napoleon was variously said to have developed a mother complex in his youth, to have detested his father, to be a repressed homosexual, and to be a deeply embittered dwarf. There was just enough truth in these allegations for the mud to have stuck.

  In fact, three more significant points about Napoleon stand out as he embraced manhood. First, he was highly intelligent and a born mathematician; second, he was highly self-disciplined and regarded himself as the natural heir of his father after his death; and, third, he laboured under a huge burden of personal injustice (a so-called inferiority complex, or, in British terms, a ‘chip on his shoulder’). This last had little to do with his height. At five foot six inches, he was on the short side, but not strikingly so: most ordinary people were little taller, and an average for a well-fed Frenchman aristocrat of the time was five foot nine. His bitterness stemmed from more understandable sources: he came from the newest acquisition of the French empire and, in spite of his schooling in France, fiercely believed in the cause of Corsican independence. He had been despised throughout his school career on account of his Corsican nationality and olive skin, an insult felt all the more strongly because he regarded himself as a high aristocrat in a way only a provincial from a tiny sea-port can.

  Among the French aristocrats’ sons who were his fellow pupils he was almost beneath contempt. This he reciprocated, referring to aristocrats as ‘imbeciles’, ‘asses’ and ‘the curse of the nation’. He considered himself high born, with adequate reason, and yet was not treated as part of them – an explosive combination. Tough, surly and from an island background where slights were met by a vendetta and even death, he had reason enough for harbouring resentment and deep ambition. Being able and having the luck to be educated at France’s most prestigious military academy, he had the perfect means to prove himself: by becoming a leader in the very nation that had annexed his homeland: that would be a triumph of vendetta indeed.

  However, none of this early background explains either his rise to power or later actions: there must have been hundreds of officers in the French army with similarly complex lives and motives. He had been promoted, partly through luck, partly through ability, so that he had the potential to reach the top of French society; he had no reason to feel ungrateful to the French.

  With the death of his father, he was forced to take lodgings in a noisy first floor café, next door to a billiard room and send back most of his pay to his mother, who had now lost not just a husband but a patron, the randy Comte de Marbeuf, who had married an eighteen-year-old. Yet countless other young officers were in similar financial straits. There was not much that marked out Napoleon from his peers – except his intelligence and overweening curiosity. He was not even especially ambitious at that stage: he wanted to become a writer.

  He was certainly unhappy and depressed during these penurious times. He wrote miserably:

  Life is a burden to me because I feel no pleasure and because everything is affliction to me. It is a burden to me because the men with whom I have to live, and will probably always live, have ways as different from mine as the light of the moon from that of the sun. I cannot then pursue the only manner of living which could enable me to put up with existence, whence follows a disgust for everything.

  Later the same pessimism surfaced in a letter to his hero, Paoli:

  As the nation was perishing I was born. Thirty thousand Frenchmen were vomited on to our shores, drowning the throne of liberty in waves of blood. Such was the odious sight which was the first to strike me. From my birth, my cradle was surrounded by the cries of the dying, the groans of the oppressed and tears of despair. You left our island and with you went all hope of happiness. Slavery was the price of our submission. Crushed by the triple yoke of the soldier, the law-maker and the tax inspector, our compatriots live despised.

  This was remarkable as an expression of his open hatred for the French. He had acquired this when, after Marbeuf’s death, Corsica was ruled by spendthrift bureaucrats who had cut back payments to his mother for agricultural improvements. During this period, he was given leave to visit his home, where he was shocked to find his mother virtually unaided, and he soon procured a servant for her, Severia, who remained with her for forty years. Joseph, who was now studying law in Pisa, returned and the two old playground antagonists got on famously. Napoleon travelled to Paris to lobby for a financial grant, which failed. But at the age of eighteen he slept with a girl for the first time in his life, a Breton prostitute.

  He returned to his regiment, which was now stationed at Auxonne. There he had a very relaxed work regime, needing to attend parades just once a week, and made up for it by reading and writing. He was a furious worker, rising at 4 am and going to bed at 10 p.m., which brought on physical exhaustion. He filled no fewer than thirty-six notebooks with his thoughts in just fifteen months. He contracted malaria. During his studies he read extensively about his own specialist subject, artillery: the main contemporary exponent of this was Jean de Beaumont du Teil, who urged a sudden massing of guns in battle, rather as Pierre Bouret, another tactician, urged separating army units to help them move at speed, then massing them before a battle. Both of these ideas were to feature hugely in Napoleon’s military campaigns. Du Teil’s brother, Jean-Pierre, was Napoleon’s commanding officer and quickly spotted his abilities.

  So the historic year of 1789 dawned in France, with the nineteen-year-old officer of promise in a provincial posting. His first awareness of tumultuous change came in April, when he was ordered to join a small force to put down a grain riot in Seurre, twenty miles away. The riot was quelled before he arrived, but not before du Teil’s country house had been set on fire and mutinous soldiers had seized funds. Napoleon, with his strong sense of discipline, strongly disapproved of this, although he sympathized with the burgeoning Revolution. Napoleon’s studies had led him to admire Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that a ‘social contract’ was the sole means by which monarchy could justify itself.

  Although clearly reform-minded, he was horrified when in July the local mob rose up and burned the tax register as well as the offices of a provincial official. The La Fère regiment caught the contagion and mutinied against du Teil, forcing officers to submit to indignities. Napoleon and other officers restored order, but he was appalled by the indiscipline and claimed later that he was ready to fire upon the mutineers if so ordered.

  Soon afterwards, as the revolt got under way in earnest, he obtained leave again to return to Corsica. It seems almost certain this was the right moment to adopt the mantle of Paoli and launch a new war of independence for his country: he saw his future as the island’s leader – not unreasonably, as Paoli
was ageing and his father had originally been one of his helpers. With the outbreak of the French Revolution, the island had embraced the cause of radical reform and Paoli had been invited back to the island.

  At this stage Napoleon was still torn between loyalty to his own provincial people and the French oppressor which had nevertheless recognized his talents and promoted him. Shortly after his arrival a popular uprising had taken place in Bastia, the capital. Napoleon threw himself into the political fray on the island with vigour and on 17 July – shortly after the fall of the Bastille – he met his hero face to face: Paoli stooped and white-haired at sixty-six, but still a great bull of a man, arrived in Bastia. Napoleon, who had joined the Ajaccio Jacobin Club, became a firm supporter. The local governor complained bitterly that ‘this young officer was educated at the École Militaire. His sister is at St-Cyr and his mother has received countless kindnesses from the government. This officer had much better be with his regiment since he spends all his time stirring up trouble.’

  Under orders, he tried to return to the mainland, but appalling weather drove him back and it was not until the end of January 1791 that he reached the mainland with his twelve-year-old brother Louis. The boy, far from being impressed by Napoleon’s spartan living quarters at Auxonne, hated them and begged to return to Corsica. Meanwhile Napoleon’s radical views made him deeply unpopular with many of his royalist brother officers, who threatened at one stage to throw him into the Saône. He was promoted by du Teil to first lieutenant and sent to the Fourth Artillery Regiment at Valence. There he became a member of the Society of Friends of the Constitution, and in July he openly criticized the King’s attempted flight to Belgium. He was in the forefront of the sale of confiscated clerical and noble property.