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from both his family and the outside world, and a Napoleon who sought solace in books which assuaged his bitterness and frustration. To quote Bourrienne again, ‘Bonaparte was not liked by his companions . . . He associated but little with them, and rarely took part in their amusements . . . During play-hours he withdrew to the library, where he read with great eagerness works of history, particularly Polybius and Plutarch.’10

All this made the Brienne years an important period in Napoleon’s early life. Only at mathematics did he really shine as a scholar, but his voracious reading gave him sufficient general knowledge to acquire a certain sense of superiority over his classmates. Added to this, of course, was the fact that he was a Corsican, and therefore in his eyes a cut above the rest of humanity. For this we must thank Rousseau and Boswell, both of whom he devoured enthusiastically, but these were not the only authors who shaped his adolescent thinking. Fascinated by the ancients, he read all the works on Greece and Rome that he could find and, thanks in part to the works of Plutarch, became more and more impressed by the caesars. Dazzled by the concept of absolute power - significantly, he is recorded as having regarded the murderers of Julius Caesar not as heroes but as traitors - he also became obsessed by the concept of patriotism, as expounded by the French dramatist Corneille. It was very much the stuff of dreams, and the result was a youthful messiah complex: in company with Paoli, whom he still idolized, Napoleon would return to Corsica and free it from the hated French. But if he did so, it would not be as a believing Catholic: though taught by priests, the future emperor increasingly came to challenge their doctrines. What sense, for example, could be made of a creed that automatically condemned the great men of Greece and Rome to eternal damnation? Was the result of this loss of faith, as some have argued, a void that Napoleon needed to fill with some other deity? If so, then the fatherland was an obvious candidate, and all the more so given his exposure to Rousseau’s notions of the ‘general will’. But to argue that the young Corsican needed an ideal seems foolhardy: already a confirmed misanthrope by the time that he graduated from Brienne in 1784, he had all the stimulus he needed in his own ambition and sense of self-worth.

Brienne was followed by just under a year at the École Royale Militaire in Paris. This academy was the very pinnacle of ancien régime military education and at the same time an institution which gave very strong preference to the sons of army officers and denied entry to anyone who could not prove that their forebears had been noble for at least four generations. The issue of nobility was not a problem - the Buonapartes had excellent credentials - but that of service in the officer corps was quite another, and as such it seems likely that here at least the legend is true: as Buonaparte senior had never been an officer, his son can be assumed to have obtained his position at the École Militaire by means of his intellectual prowess alone. As with his years at Brienne, Napoleon’s experiences in Paris are shrouded in legend. All that is known for certain is that the young Corsican’s father died of stomach cancer a few months after he was admitted to the École Militaire, and that, with his family now in some financial difficulty, he decided to attempt to cram the normal two full years of study into just one (a fact that may explain why he eventually graduated as the forty-second in his class). But, if many of the anecdotes told about this period are again distinctly dubious, there seems little doubt that the impact of Napoleon’s early years went unredeemed. If his father died, for example, it merely heightened his ambition: distrusting the easy-going Joseph - the ‘gentle Buonaparte’ - he saw the loss as an opportunity to take over the role of head of the household and restore the fortunes of his family. As obsessed with the cause of Corsican independence as ever - apart from anything else,