Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/204

192 NAPOLEON I. Date of Bona- parte s ltl Military tion. THE family Bonaparte (written by Napoleon s father and by himself down to 1796 Buonaparte, though the other spelling occurs in early Italian documents) was of Tuscan origin. A branch of it was settled in Corsica at least as early as the 16th century, from which time the Bonapartes appear as influential citizens of Ajaccio. They had an ancient title of nobility from the Genoese republic, and Napoleon s grandfather obtained letters of nobility also from the grand-duke of Tuscany. They had therefore the right to sign De Buonaparte, but ordinarily dropped the preposition of honour. Charles Marie de Buonaparte (born in 1746, studied law at the university of Pisa, where he took his doctor s degree in 1769) married at the age of eighteen Letitia Ramolino, who was not quite fifteen. The lady had beauty, but apparently neither rank nor wealth. In the children of this marriage the father, a somewhat indolent Italian gentleman with a certain taste for literature, seems traceable in Joseph, Jerome, and partly also in Lucien ; the energy of which Lucien had a share, which Caroline also displayed, and which astonished the world in Napoleon, seems attributable to the Corsican blood of the mother. Thirteen children were born, of whom eight grew up. The list is as follows : Joseph (king, first of Naples, then of Spain), Napoleon, Lucien, Eliza (Princess Bacciochi), Pauline (married, first to General Leclerc, afterwards to Prince Borghese), Caroline (married to Murat, became queen of Naples), Louis (king of Holland), Jerome (king of Westphalia). Of these the eldest was born in 1768, the youngest in 1784. See BONAPARTE. Besides his brothers and sisters, Napoleon raised to importance Joseph Fesch, half-brother of his mother, a Swiss on the father s side, who was afterwards known to the world as Cardinal Fesch. The accepted opinion is that Napoleon was born at Ajaccio on August 15, 1769. This opinion rests indeed on the positive statement of Joseph Bonaparte, but it is certain from documents that on January 7, 1768, Madame Letitia bore a son at Corte, who was baptized by the name of Nabulione. And even in legal documents we find contradictory statements about the time and place of birth, not only of Napoleon, but also of Joseph. All diffi culties disappear at once if we suppose that Napoleon and Nabulione were one and the same, and that Joseph was really the second son, whom the parents found it con venient to pass off as the first-born. This they may have found convenient when, in 1779, they gained admission for a son to the military school of Brienne. A son born in 1768 would at that date be inadmissible, as being above ten years of age. Thus it is conceivable that Napoleon was introduced by a fraud to that military career which changed the face of the world. Nevertheless it is certain from Lucien s memoir that of such a fraud nothing was known to the younger members of the family, who regarded Joseph as without doubt the eldest. After passing two or three months in a school at Autun for the purpose of learning French he had hitherto been a thorough Italian Napoleon entered Brienne on April 23, 1779, where he remained for more than five years, and then in September 1784 passed, as " cadet-gentilhomme," into the military school of Paris. In the next year, 1785, he obtained his commission of lieutenant in the regiment La Fere, stationed at Valence. He had already lost his father, who, undertaking a journey to France on business, was entertained at Montpellier in the house of an old Oorsican friend Madame Permon, mother of the celebrated memoir-writer Madame Junot, and died there of the dis ease which was afterwards fatal to Napoleon, on February 25, 1785, at the age of thirty-eight years. The fact principally to be noticed about Napoleon s extraction and boyhood is that he was by birth a noble, needy and provincial, and that from his tenth year his education was exclusively military. Of all the great rulers of the world none has been by breeding so purely a military specialist. He could scarcely remember the time when he was not a soldier living among soldiers. The effects of this training showed themselves too evidently when he had risen to the head of affairs. At the same time poverty in a society of luxurious noblemen, and the consciousness of foreign birth and of ignorance of the French language, made his school life at times very unhappy. At one time he demands passionately to be taken away, at another time he sends in a memorial, in which he argues the ex pediency of subjecting the cadets to a more Spartan diet. His character declared itself earlier than his talents. He was reported as "taciturn, fond of solitude, capricious, haughty, extremely disposed to egoism, seldom speaking, energetic in his answers, ready and sharp in repartee, full of self-love, ambitious, and of unbounded aspirations." So he appeared to his teachers, and an Englishman who re membered him at Brienne makes him a complete Timon, living as a hermit, and perpetually at war with his school fellows. His abilities do not seem to have excited wonder, but he was studious, and in mathematics and geography made great progress. He never, however, so Carnot tells us, became a truly scientific man. He had neither taste nor talent for grammatical studies, but was fond of books, and books of a solid kind. Of the writers of the day he seems to have been chiefly influenced by Raynal and Rousseau. He is now a lieutenant of artillery in the service of Louis XVI. The next years are spent mainly with his regiment at Valence, Lyons, Douai, Paris, Auxonne, Seurre, Auxonne again. But he takes long holidays with his family at Ajaccio, obtaining permission on the ground of ill-health. Thus he was at Ajaccio in 1787 from February to October, again from December 1787 to May 1788, again from September 1789 to February 1791. During this Early period he is principally engaged in authorship, being con- author- sumed by the desire of distinction, and having as yet no P 1 other means of attaining it. He produces Letters on the History of Corsica, which he proposes to dedicate first to Paoli, afterwards to Raynal; he competes for a prize offered by the academy of Lyons for the best essay written "to determine the truths and feelings which it is most important to inculcate on men for their happiness." Among his smaller compositions is The Narrative of the Masked Prophet. Of all these writings, which are to be distinguished from the pamphlets written by him with a practical object, it may be said that they show more character than literary ability. As the compositions of a boy they are indeed remarkable for their precocious seriousness, but what strikes the reader most in them is a sort of suppressed passion that marks the style, a fierce impatience, as if the writer knew already how much he had to get through in a short life. But his sentiments, love of liberty, of virtue, of domestic happiness, are hollow, and his affectation of tenderness even ridiculous. The essay, as a composition, is positively bad, and was natur ally unsuccessful. Meanwhile his active life had begun with the Revolution of 1789. The first chapter of it is separate from the rest,