Napoleon. Adam Zamoyski
had been planted, the government had decided to stop throwing good money after bad. On the other hand, the Buonaparte had won their case for compensation for the Odone legacy in the form of Les Milleli. It was a fine property with a small house and olive groves above Ajaccio. But Napoleone’s great-uncle Luciano was ill and incapacitated, and Joseph was proving incapable in practical matters. Aged seventeen, Napoleone was obliged to take over the management of the family’s affairs. He applied for leave, and on 15 September 1786 was back in Ajaccio. His mother and Joseph were on the quayside to greet him, but the place was unfamiliar. He was seeing Corsica after an absence of seven years and nine months. He had left as a child, and returned a young man. He met for the first time four younger siblings: Louis aged eight, Maria Paolina six, Maria Nunziata three, and Geronimo only two. He even found it difficult speaking to them, as he had not used his Corsican Italian while he was away.6
Luciano had resigned his post as archdeacon, which was taken by Napoleone’s half-uncle Joseph Fesch, but he had some money, which lent him weight in family affairs, and it was with Fesch and Joseph that he took charge of them. Napoleone applied for an extension of his leave and busied himself with the harvest, the family properties and other practical matters.
During that time he got to know his family, not only his mother, whom he had seen just once briefly since he was nine, but also his siblings and the extended network of cousins, uncles and aunts. He revisited his wet-nurse and others who had looked after him when he was little, and spent much time with the ailing Luciano, whom he revered. He developed a relationship with his brother Joseph, who recalled with fondness their long walks along the coast, breathing in the scent of myrtle and orange blossom, sometimes returning home only after dark.
Napoleone explored the island and tried to acquaint himself with its people and their lore, of which he had only dim childhood memories. He was taken aback by primitive aspects of Corsican life that had not struck him when he was a child, but convinced himself that his fellow islanders were noble savages whose vices were the consequence of the barbarous French occupation. He had brought with him a trunk full of books, which no doubt sustained him and provided the moral and emotional arguments which would enable him to construct an appropriate vision of Corsica.7
He spent almost a year on the island, and did not leave until 12 September 1787. He did not rejoin his regiment, but set off instead for Paris, where he hoped to obtain payment of the 3,000 livres of the subsidy still due for the Salines. It was a considerable sum, roughly equal to three years of his pay as a lieutenant. When he reached the capital he called on ministers and people of influence, probably including Loménie de Brienne, now minister of finances. He also went to great lengths to obtain a place at the seminary in Aix for his brother Lucien. An impecunious outsider in a city in which the aristocracy’s wealth and privilege were on display, the provincial subaltern’s social inhibitions could only have been aggravated by the need to beg for favour.8
When not petitioning ministers, he was reading, taking notes and writing draughts of essays which display a critical attitude to the political system. In one, he argued that while Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Machiavelli and others were undoubtedly great men, they were driven by the desire to win acclaim, which made Leonidas, who had set out to lay down his life for his country unconditionally at the battle of Thermopylae, superior to them, a typically Romantic value judgement showing the influence of Rousseau and a tendency to reject the practical. It sat uneasily with his own instincts, if his brother Joseph is to be believed. He recalled that during one of their walks on Corsica Napoleone had told him he wished he could perform some great and noble act which would be recognised by posterity, and that he could, after his death, witness a representation of it ‘and see what a poet such as the great Corneille would make me feel, think and say’. Such transference of the desire for recognition, normal in any teenager, suggests a disinclination or perhaps inability to engage with the world around him. A combination of awkwardness and disdain certainly marked his attitude to sex.9
On the evening of 21 November he went to see a play, and on leaving the theatre strolled through the Palais-Royal, the Paris residence of the Orléans branch of the royal family. It had extensive gardens at the back, flanked by arcades with shops, cafés and small premises in which whores plied their trade. The higher-class ones sat at their windows beckoning to the passers-by, the next degree down would sit in the cafés, and the cheapest would loiter under the colonnade or along the avenues of the garden.10
The following morning, Napoleone sat down and described what happened next as though he were writing up a scientific experiment. ‘My soul, agitated by the vigorous sentiments natural to it, made me bear the cold with indifference,’ he wrote, ‘but when my imagination cooled, I began to feel the rigours of the season and made for the arcades.’ There a young girl caught his eye. She was obviously a prostitute but did not have the brazen manner of the others, and returned his look with modesty. ‘Her timidity encouraged me and I addressed her … I who more than anyone else felt the horror of her kind, and had always felt myself sullied by a mere look from one …’ In his account, he makes it clear that he was looking for someone ‘who would be useful for the observations I wished to make’. He admits that previous attempts to pick up a prostitute had not been ‘crowned with success’, which might appear odd, as a young officer would not normally have difficulty carrying out such a transaction in the Palais-Royal. His record of their conversation goes some way to explain why: he began by asking how she came to her present condition, which was neither tactful nor to the point, and after more such banter on a freezing November night, it was she who suggested they go back to his lodgings, only to be asked what for. ‘Well, we could warm ourselves and you could satisfy your fancy,’ she answered. The clinical account does not mention whether the experience had been pleasurable or not.11
On 1 December, having obtained a six-month extension of his leave, Napoleone set off for Corsica once more. His efforts in Paris had come to nothing, which only contributed to his disenchantment with a state of affairs that seemed to exclude him as well as his native land, whose subjugation he was beginning to take personally. His vision of a noble nation oppressed by a wicked and corrupt France fitted well with a feeling that he and his family were being thwarted, or at least disrespected, by the regime in Paris.
He spent the next four and a half months in Corsica, and it was not until 14 June 1788 that he rejoined his regiment, now stationed at Auxonne, after an absence of twenty-one months. This was not unusual, as in peacetime officers were allowed to absent themselves for long periods.
Auxonne was a fortified town on the river Saône with an artillery school under the sixty-six-year-old lieutenant general baron Jean-Pierre du Teil, a clever and innovative commander who worked his men hard by setting them challenges that upset their routines. Du Teil took an immediate liking to Napoleone. He set him the task of designing and constructing earthworks, which involved calculations of firepower, resistance and ballistics, followed by ten days of physical work, with Napoleone marshalling 200 men with picks and shovels. ‘This extraordinary mark of favour earned me the ill-feeling of the captains who claimed it was insulting to them that a mere lieutenant be charged with such an important task and that if there were more than 50 men involved one of their rank should be in command,’ he wrote to Joseph Fesch on 29 August. He nevertheless pacified them and even gained their friendship; considering him an intellectual, they tasked him with drawing up the Calotte, a regimental code of conduct. He rose to the challenge and produced a document that was both reasoned and idealistic, very much in the spirit of Rousseau, which could have been the constitution for a popular dictatorship.12
From his essays and notes it is clear that he was already a republican, having, like Rousseau, come to the conclusion that existing systems of government were absurd and that kings had no right to rule. In the introduction to what was to be a dissertation on royal authority, he argued that this was entirely ‘usurped’, since sovereignty resided in the people, adding that ‘there are very few kings who have not deserved to be dethroned’. He also adopted Rousseau’s thesis that religion was destructive, since it was in competition with the state as it held out the promise of happiness in another world, when it was for the state to provide people with the means to achieve it in this.13
He continued to read, annotating and commenting as he went, on subjects as varied as ancient and modern history, geography, the fiscal systems of different