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By Root 2512 0

support for his homeland was a useful means of expressing the instinctive desire of any sixteen-year-old to revolt against his father - he also remained the butt of both official disapproval and much coarse humour. Nor did it help that there was little improvement in either his looks or his stature: if the highly unreliable Laure Permon is to be believed, he looked so ridiculous that she nicknamed him ‘Puss-in-Boots’. As for the product of all this, it was a mixture of frustration, arrogance, pride, hauteur and ambition. And there was still the same brooding introversion: a young woman who met him on a felucca sailing between Ajaccio and Toulon in 1788 remembered ‘an ungracious little fellow’ with ‘an unpleasant face’ who had his nose stuck in a book the whole time and was so rude that a fellow passenger remarked that he should be thrown into the sea.11 Also present was a barely suppressed violence: apparently fancying himself as a man of letters, Napoleon wrote a series of stories in which gruesome murders alternated with wholesale bloodbaths. Lust after fame on the battlefield though he might, he was not just, to paraphrase Wilfred Owen, a young man eager for some desperate glory, but also a young man filled with hatred and resentment.

Whatever the impact of his years as a cadet may have been on his psychology, by the time that Napoleon was commissioned in the artillery as a sub-lieutenant in the autumn of 1785, he had fallen under the sway of the vague political radicalism that was beginning to grip much of educated opinion in France. After all, as a junior officer and a scion of the petty nobility, he was a member of not one but two groups that had serious concerns regarding their prospects and status in the France of the ancien régime, while, if only because of the Genevan writer’s eulogization of Paoli’s Corsica, he was also an avid reader of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Yet, still possessed of the closest ties with his homeland - in the three and a half years that passed before the coming of the Revolution, he had spent almost two on leave with his family - Napoleon remained a Corsican revolutionary rather than a French one, and was inclined to interpret reform in a way that reflected the needs of his homeland. For France, then, he cared not a whit except to the extent that revolution in Paris would spell freedom in Ajaccio. Nor were the so-called principles of 1789 of much concern to him. What mattered was rather the power of the state. In brief, to be free, Corsica would have to be strong, and if she wished to be strong, then she would also have to have a reformed administration in the style of that of Paoli, for only thus could she be guaranteed the men and resources necessary to defend herself. So much for Corsica, but what of Napoleon? In the short term he would fulfil the role of the ageing leader’s right-hand man, but Paoli would not live for ever - he had been born in 1725- and it is not difficult to see the direction in which the young artilleryman’s thoughts were heading. Napoleon would not just restore il babbo - ‘the grandfather’ - as he was called, but supplant him and even become him. In short, what really attracted him to the cause of revolution was the linked figures of the saviour and the enlightened absolutist: as the one, he would return in triumph to Corsica and liberate her from the rule of Paris, and as the other he would preside over a new regime that would put all to rights, in which guise he would rule as a benevolent dictator. Power, of course, was not to be abused - the new messiah would rule in accordance with a constitution and never exercise his might other than in the service of the people as a whole. But these disclaimers do not carry much weight: for all his denunciations of despotism, his heroes - aside from Paoli - remained Frederick the Great of Prussia, Julius Caesar and the Athenian soldier-statesman, Alcibiades. And, if he had indeed read and admired Rousseau, it is worth pointing out that the Genevan writer could be read as an apostle of darker creeds than democracy: implicit in