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By Root 2639 0

‘for a long time inspired something of a cult in him’.4 As the future emperor told his schoolfriend, Bourrienne, ‘Paoli was a great man; he loved his country.’5 Many years later, he was to use almost the same words, telling one of his visitors on St Helena that he was ‘a fine character’ who was ‘always for his country’.6 But Paoli was not just a patriot. An intensely charismatic figure, a gallant soldier and a wise legislator, he won the devotion of his followers, the respect of his enemies and the plaudits of the philosophes. At the same time Paoli was the archetypal saviour-figure: the great man who had come from nowhere to save the Corsican rebellion, lead it to glory and finally go down to defeat in the face of overwhelming odds. But, above all, the Corsican leader was also a man who manipulated his status as national hero for his own ends, stealthily increasing his own power while appearing at all times to be operating within the pseudo-democratic traditions of the insurrection which he headed. Even if much of this was not apparent to the young Napoleon until later years, it was, beyond doubt, a heady mix. Asked whether Paoli was a good general by one of his masters, the then schoolboy is supposed to have replied, ‘He is, sir, and I want to grow up like him.’7

Thus far, it has been difficult to write of the French ruler with much certainty. As his secretary later observed, ‘Each of us . . . without ceasing to be honest, can show a different Napoleon.’8 Beyond the early years, however, the story becomes clearer. In December 1778 he left his native island for the first time and sailed to France, where, after four months spent learning French at a clerical school at Autun, he entered the military academy at Brienne. Albeit largely in retrospect, at this point his life begins to be observed in more detail. His first chronicler was his fellow student, Louis de Bourrienne, who was to go on to serve Napoleon as his military secretary between 1798 and 1802. Like many memoirs of the period, Bourrienne’s recollections are notoriously unreliable, being not only ghostwritten but marred by personal enmity (dismissed from his position for embezzlement, Bourrienne developed a deep sense of resentment towards his former master). Published under the Bourbons, the memoirs were also marked by a desire to secure the favour of the Restoration and expunge the stain of service with Napoleon. Yet the picture that Napoleon’s schoolfellow paints of the boy who arrived at Brienne in May 1779 has a certain ring of truth to it, and all the more so as it is in large part confirmed by several less well-known memoirs. Relatively poor - he was only at the academy at all because his father had used his contacts with the occupying authorities to obtain a government bursary - intense, physically unprepossessing, desperately home-sick and barely able to speak French, Napoleone Buonaparte was a classic outsider. Nor did he help his own case, adopting a prickly manner and flying to the defence of the Corsican cause at the slightest provocation. ‘His conversation,’ wrote Bourrienne, ‘almost always bore the appearance of ill humour, and he was certainly not very sociable.’9 Hardly surprisingly, the result was that he was at first the butt of a great deal of insensitivity and bullying. Few of his teachers took much interest in him as a scholar and he was forever being teased. Nor was there any escape: not only were the students all boarders, but the six-year course was devoid of holidays. Whether the young Corsican really led his fellow students in a great snowball fight conducted on the lines of a mock-battle, or took on single-handed a group of older cadets who had trampled a vegetable garden he had cultivated, or threw a violent tantrum rather than submit to a particularly brutal punishment, or was sacked from the command of a company in the college’s cadet corps for his haughty demeanour, is beside the point. All that really matters is that once again we see a Napoleon for whom struggle was a psychological necessity, a Napoleon who was completely cut off