Napoleon and Europe

Philip G. Dwyer, Philip G. Dwyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317882701
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Two hundred years ago, Napoleon was at the apogee of his power in Europe. This broad ranging reassessment explores the key themes presented by his extraordinary career: from his rise to power and the foundation of the imperial state, to the final defeat of his grand vision following the doomed invasion of Russia. It was a period of almost uninterrupted war in Europe, the consquences of victory or failure repeatedly transforming the political map. But Napoleon's impact reached much deeper than this, achieving the ultimate destruction of the ancien regime and feudalism in Europe, and leaving a political and juridical legacy that persists today.

Part I
Napoleon and French Society

Chapter 1
Napoleon’s Youth and Rise to Power

Harold T. Parker

Corsica and Corsicans

To understand Napoleon we must first try to understand the Corsicans of the eighteenth century among whom he spent his early years. Corsica, before it was spoiled by modern technology and tourism, was an enchanted island of bewitching beauty, a giant granite rock rising out of the sea to wooded foothills and snow-capped mountains, sparsely populated in 1769 by about 130,000 people. There were then three Corsicas: the rugged mountainous interior of hardy shepherds and subsistence-farming villagers; the small port towns, whose shopkeepers, merchants, lawyers and administrators were subject to the broadening influences of outside contacts; and Corsica abroad, made up of Corsicans whose extra energy and initiative had propelled them to leave the claustrophobic, shut-in life at home and seek their fortune abroad.

In all three Corsicas fidelity to the family was the dominant loyalty. In the eighteenth century a Corsican child was born into an elementary nuclear family. To the family and to the promotion of its interests they owed time, energy, loyalty and trust. There may have been sibling rivalries for attention, influence and position (in his own family Napoleon was an irrepressible climber), but the members of the family could trust each other not to cheat or lie to one another. The child was also a member of an extended family, to the fourth cousins perhaps. Within the extended family, there might be litigation, chiefly over property claims, but in a crisis they could count on each other for practical support. No wonder the wealth of a marriageable young woman was counted not only in property but also in how many cousins she had. Unrelated families and, more generally, the outside world were regarded with distrust and might be treated with calculated ruse, deceit and guile.

Violence was endemic in Corsican society. Relations between families were governed in principle by a strict honour code. Breaking the honour code by infringing upon property or violating a woman's honour was punished in the interior of the island by private, remorseless stalking and killing of the transgressor — blood vengeance that could grow into a vendetta lasting for generations. One thousand such murders, it is estimated, occurred each year. Like a public war between nations, the vendetta as a private war was institutionalised violence, legitimised killing of human beings by other human beings, governed in theory by honour. Corsicans accepted the obligations of the vendetta with a sense of being controlled by an inexorable destiny that was stronger than God, a belief that yielded impassive courage while sustaining self-assertive initiatives. In the port towns clan rivalry and violence took the form of frequent and prolonged litigation.

In addition to violence generated natively, Corsicans had been subjected for millennia to waves of foreign conquerors: the Etruscans, ancient Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Saracens, Aragonese, Pisans, Genoese and most recently the French. In 1768-69 the last named had bloodily crushed resistance in the latest episode of a violent history.

The French also ended a Corsican experiment in republican government that was far ahead of its time. It had arisen in this way. Except for the inhabitants of the few port towns, the Corsicans lived mostly in the interior, in villages whose natives were linked by ties of kinship and the Catholic religion and by acceptance of the leadership of the local chief. In their agricultural/pastoral culture much of the property was held communally: the gardens, vineyards and orchards immediately around the village were communally held by the village; the pasturages used by the shepherds in the forested uplands during the summer and in the plain during the winter were communally held by groups of villages. The Corsican insurrection against Genoa in 1729 had been triggered by the Genoese attempt to declare as private property land that had been communally held for centuries. As the uprising spread until Genoa retained tenuously only a few port towns, a Corsican central representative assembly drafted a written constitution in 1735. Modified in 1755 by Pasquale Paoli, a hero-statesman, in the light of his reading of Montesquieu and the practical need for a stronger executive, the document granted Corsica a representative constitutional government that guaranteed liberty and legal equality, recognised by implication the sovereignty of the people, and accorded with the basic customs of the people. The Corsicans did not need an enlightened Bourbon monarchy or even a French revolutionary assembly to endow them with a progressive, enlightened liberal government. They had one of their own, with its own flag, national hymn, coinage, army and navy, elective executive and legislature, and university.¹

A Corsican Childhood

The Bonaparte clan stood nowhere near the top in Ajaccio, a Corsican port town of nearly four thousand people. Ever since their remote ancestor had migrated from Tuscany (Italy) in the sixteenth century, the Bonapartes had been content to acquire a house, a vineyard or two, and other bits of land, and to serve modestly as members of the Ajaccio municipal council of Anciens. Meanwhile rival families were pulling ahead. The Peraldis, for example, were gaining control of the coral-fishing fleet, the basis of the Ajaccian economy, and the Pozzo di Borgos were acquiring a fortune in land and a substantial house in Ajaccio. However, in Charles Bonaparte, Napoleon's father, the Bonapartes acquired an ambitious and resourceful climber. Born in 1746, he grew up to be a superbly handsome young man, with a gift for charming influential and powerful men. In obedience to clan calculations he married in 1764 not the woman he loved but Letizia Bonaparte, a local beauty of not quite 14 years who brought a satisfactory dowry and the not unimportant consideration of fifty cousins.²

After a playboy year in Rome, Charles enrolled in the University of Corte, which Paoli had founded in his mountain capital to win Corsican young men to the national republican ideal. Charles invited Letizia to join him. Together, they charmed Paoli, and Charles became his part-time secretary. In this idyllic dream of republican idealism, Letizia gave birth on 7 January 1768 to their first child to live, Joseph, a pretty and amiable baby who smiled at everyone and at whom everyone smiled back.

However, the republican dream was broken when on 15 May 1768 Genoa ceded to the French monarchy its rights over Corsica. To be sure, Corsican militia would defeat a contingent of invading French troops at the battle of Borgo on 7 October. In the joyful aftermath of that moment Charles and Letizia conceived Napoleon, during early November. But the next spring the French monarchy returned with an overwhelming force of 22,000 regular soldiers. Commanded by the comte de Vaux, an able general and administrator, they crushed the brave Corsican fighters at the battle of Ponte Novo on 9 May 1769. After accompanying the fleeing Paoli to an English frigate that departed Corsica on 13 June, Charles Bonaparte returned to Corte to conduct Letizia across the mountains of central Corsica to Ajaccio, while the French were still mopping up pockets of Corsican resistance. It was a terrible journey. Walking or riding on muleback up and down rocky mountain trails, crossing a swollen stream, sleeping in a cave, carrying one child (Joseph) and bearing another in her womb (Napoleon), who was kicking to get out, Letizia survived but never forgot the trip's ordeal. When finally, at Ajaccio, her time came, she gave birth to Napoleon on 15 August 1769. A scrawny baby with spindly legs and a disproportionately large head, he repelled those who viewed him. Letizia tried to nurse him but for the first and only time her milk failed, and he was committed to a wet-nurse and slept with her in a back room. From her other children Letizia knew the mutual tenderness and bonding that develops between a nursing mother and a suckling infant, but not from Napoleon.³

Today, in an age when pregnant women are warned to choose with care their television programmes because the infant in the womb is listening too and when psychologists speak of the individualising innate temperament (emotionality, activity level, sociability and impulsivity) of each newborn baby, we may be permitted to speculate that Napoleon's hard ride in the womb may have been the most significant event in his life. It may have affected his physique, his unimpressive appearance, and his hyper-energetic, hyper-active, always-on-the-move personality before there was a chance for sibling rivalry or Oedipus complex. At the end of his life, on St Helena, reflecting on what had gone wrong and why, he remarked: 'J' ai trop d'ambition, et un esprit enflammé' — 'I have too much ambition and a spirit afire.' His fantasising ambition, as we shall see, expanded with opportunity and age, but his inner intensity was there from the start.

Corsica was a clan-oriented society, and each clan had its own inner dramas. The ambivalent relationships within the Bonaparte family were to be reflected in the developing complexity of Napoleon's personality. Essential was his trustful relationship with the wet-nurse, Camille Ilari, who loved him and gave the infant Napoleon a fundamental self-assurance that would sustain him in later events. When after two years she weaned him and he entered the full life of the family, he discovered that the Bonaparte house was filled with a crowd of women - grandmothers, aunts and servants - who came and went, and who doted on the two boys, Joseph and Napoleon. Later, when he was away at school or on garrison duty, he always remembered them with affection. To him they were home.

However, at 2 years old he also had discovered that he was a member of two triangles (Napoleon, Letizia, Joseph; Napoleon, Letizia, Charles) in which Letizia, the beauteous mother, had a warm and close relationship with Joseph and with Charles of the type from which Napoleon was excluded. In this situation Letizia was the key figure. By Corsican clan custom the father conducted the 'foreign' relations of the family, whereas the mother was in complete charge at home. Charles loved his children and pampered them when he was at home, but he was often away and it is difficult to discern what influence, if any, he had on Napoleon. But Letizia took her domestic duties seriously. She curtailed her time at religious festivities because, she said, as the responsible chief of the family she was needed at home to serve as a check (frein) and keep the children in line.⁴ Joseph, a quiet, obedient little boy, presented no difficulty. According to Corsican custom he as eldest son enjoyed special consideration. During the two years that Napoleon was relegated to the back room, Joseph continued to sleep in the parents' room. Napoleon, in contrast, was a problem child. Whether it was because of the hard ride over the mountains, or the withdrawal of the mother's milk, or the final weaning from the wet-nurse, or the special privileges of Joseph, or all four, he came out into household society bellicose and fighting. In 1813 the Emperor Napoleon smilingly chided his 2-year-old son: 'Lazybones, when I was your age I was already beating up Joseph.' In 1817 on St Helena he recalled how he had been the terror of his elementary school's playground. Observing the 'tenacity' of young Bertrand, the son of an aide, he remarked:

I was as stubborn as he at his age; nothing stopped or disconcerted me. I was a quarreller, a fighter; I feared nobody, beating one, scratching another, making myself redoubtable to all. It was my brother Joseph who most often had to suffer. He was slapped, bitten, scolded, and I had already complained against him before he had time to recover himself. But my quickness was to no avail with Mama Letizia, who soon repressed my bellicose humour.... She was both tender and severe; she punished wrongdoing and rewarded good conduct; she recognised impartially our good and bad actions.... She was all her life an excellent woman, and as a mother was without an equal.⁵

These are richly revealing passages about the young Napoleon - quick, active, aggressive, creating by his aggressions challenging situations and then violently and deceptively fighting them; for him deception was a technique, amorally applied, to get his way and enjoy the pleasures of victorious domination. The passages also suggest much about Letizia and her allies, the teaching nuns, who together were innovative and resourceful in channelling Napoleon's aggressive drives into socially acceptable forms. When the nuns discovered his analytical gift for arithmetic, they dubbed him 'the mathematician' and rewarded him with treats of jam. As a good Corsican mother Letizia whipped him for the slightest transgression (beatings that the child Napoleon accepted without a whimper or cry), but she also in his eighth year built for him on the family's terrace a special, private bower where he could work in proud seclusion. In addition, she applauded him when, on one of his walks, 'he observed with great attention the functioning of a watermill. Having noted how much grain was milled in an hour he dumbfounded the farmer by calculating how much he could expect in a day and a week.'⁶ Analytical thinking and zeal for work were to be two of the salient traits of Napoleon's evolving personality. However, Letizia, truthful herself, was never able to curb Napoleon's inveterate lying. That, too, was becoming one of the enduring features of his character.

Letizia, obviously, was an important factor in Napoleon's growth. Was Joseph? Let us think about that. Napoleon's sense of rivalry with Joseph did continue. When in 1804 Camille Ilari, the wet-nurse, attended the imperial coronation in Paris she let slip the remark: 'Joseph était un joli enfant.'⁷ The Emperor, now master of France and certainly ahead of Joseph, blackened with rage. Yet even in childhood the two siblings had become close friends. The story was told that when in Ajaccio the two boys were attending a Jesuit primary school, the master divided the class into Romans and Carthaginians. He naturally placed the elder brother Joseph with the Romans. The little Napoleon stormed that he had to be on the winning side. Joseph amiably yielded and sat on the Carthaginian bench. To him it was no big deal. But afterwards on the way home the little Napoleon was deeply upset by the thought that he had been unfair to Joseph, whom he now liked.⁸ The story suggests that Joseph, mild, amiable and charming, was too different for Napoleon to learn anything from him and still be Napoleon. Yet later the difference helped Napoleon to define himself in contrast: 'Joseph can't be a good artillery officer - he won't work, but I do.' 'I have the habit of command. I was born with it. Joseph does not have it.'Joseph 'likes to cajole people and obey their ideas; Moi, I want them to please me and obey mine.'

A French Education

When we think of education, schools and books usually come to mind. But there is also an education that comes with experience as we pass through events. That was true of the young Napoleon. Before he ever attended a French school, events at home educated him in how to deal with a conquered people. 'I learned how to handle a conquered people through having been a member of a conquered society.'

To subjugate the Corsicans the French Bourbon monarchy appealed to fear and to self-interest, two motives that were later to be at the core of Napoleon's policy. The French royal government also employed specific procedures that Napoleon was to use. It brought in the overwhelming force of regular soldiers. After the stunning defeat of the Corsican raw militia at Ponte Novo it sent out mobile columns to hunt down and execute last-ditch resisters, until not a village was unaware of French military power and terror. In each village the inhabitants were disarmed and their oaths of loyalty and obedience to the king were accepted. A strong French garrison, 7,744 men in all, was permanently stationed in the island. Later, in 1774, when revolt flared in the Niolo district, the French government and military snuffed it out brutally: families of individual rebels were held hostage; rebels, when caught, were shot, hanged or broken on the wheel; on the principle of collective responsibility, hundreds of Corsicans who had aided them were imprisoned in France or sent to the galleys; entire villages were burned to the ground and their crops destroyed. Bourbon terror became legendary in the memory of Corsicans, including the Bonapartes, Charles, Letizia, Joseph and Napoleon.

Meanwhile, the royal government was introducing improved French institutions. It deliberately did this in such a way as to involve Corsicans in thei...