Napoleon's Wars_ An International History, 1803-1815 - Charles Esdaile [13]
Yet, for all that, we cannot entirely dispense with biographical detail. As is the case with many ‘great men’, the details that we have of Napoleon’s early life are not entirely reliable. Let us start, however, with what we know. Baptized as Napoleone Buonaparte, the future emperor of France was born in the Corsican capital of Ajaccio to a family of the petty nobility on 15 August 1769. Tales of the family’s poverty have probably been exaggerated: the house where Napoleon spent his early years was a substantial one and his mother, Letizia Remolino, brought his father, Carlo, a prominent legal official, a reasonable dowry. Money was not superabundant, but there was property and status: for two centuries the Buonapartes had been substantial members of the local oligarchy and in recent years they had acquired further weight by taking a leading role in the regime of Pasquale Paoli (see below). On St Helena, indeed, Napoleon was quite specific that his was not exactly a rags-to-riches story:
In my family . . . we spent practically nothing on food, except of course such groceries as coffee, sugar and rice, which did not come from Corsica. We grew everything else. The family owned a . . . mill to which all the villagers brought their flour to be milled, and they paid for this with a certain percentage of flour. We also had a communal bakehouse, the use of which was paid in fish . . . There were two olive groves in Ajaccio . . . One belonged to the Bonaparte family and the other to the Jesuits . . . The family also made its own wine.1
Even foreign conquest did not shake this prosperity. Carlo Buonaparte had no difficulty in ingratiating himself with the French when they annexed the island in 1768, not only retaining his various legal offices but also establishing himself as something of an interlocutor between his countrymen and their new masters. Though his children were numerous - Napoleon was the second of eight brothers and sisters, not to mention five more who died as infants or at a very early age - there was therefore no difficulty in procuring an adequate education for at least the five boys and, beyond that, the promise of service with the Bourbon state (indeed, even Elise, the eldest daughter, was found a place at an exclusive college outside Paris).
So much for the bare facts, but what of the young boy himself? Inevitably, no sooner had Napoleon risen to power, than all sorts of stories were going the rounds about his childhood, and from this distance it is quite impossible to separate fact from fiction. But from all the tales of the boy-tyrant who bullied everyone and vandalized every object that came to hand, the boy-general who led his playmates in mock-battle, the boy-womanizer who walked to school hand-in-hand with pretty girls, and the boy-patriot who criticized his father for not having followed Paoli into exile - tales, we are told, at which he ‘used to laugh heartily’2 - various things do stand out. First of all, Napoleon seems to have been starved of love by his parents (though affectionate enough, his father was often absent on official business, while his mother was a singularly austere woman, who treated her children with considerable harshness). Secondly, desperate for the approval and attention for which he had to compete with his numerous siblings, Napoleon expressed his frustration by turning to violence in an attempt to secure first place amongst them, the chief victim of this campaign being his unfortunate elder brother, Joseph. Thirdly, this same desire for recognition led to an ambition and hunger for success that was remarked on by all who met him. Fourthly, frequent beatings reinforced this obsession with power and at the same time encouraged him to become a habitual liar. And lastly, dissatisfaction and insecurity produced a dreamer: from an early age fascinated