I know this is a terrible thing to say, but the reason why I purchased Michael Broers NAPOLEON ~ SOLDIER OF DESTINY is because I find it difficult to sleep. And I have discovered that history books are the perfect way for me to find my slumber.
However, from the little that seeped through into my consciousness, I was able to discern that this biography was absolutely fascinating. And so I made myself listen to it properly.
It took me a month, but was well worth it.
What makes Michael Broers piece so interesting is that this is the first biography of Napoleon to use his uncensored words—rather than his memoirs—as a trove of correspondence from the man himself was recently released by the Napoleon Foundation of Paris.
Starting in 1769 in Ajaccio Corsica, the book traces the early life of Napoleon as a scion of an Italian family whose roots trace back to mercenary soldiers from Liguria (which today’s tourists know as the locale of the Cinque Terre.) In 1453, the Genoese took control of Corsica for strategic reasons, and then proceeded to rule it until 1768, the year before Napoleon’s birth, when they handed it over to France.
However, Corsica is not one place, or even one nation. It is really two societies which are at odds with each other. On the one hand you have the people of the Presidio, that is of the Genoese families who arrived after 1453 and proceeded to dominate the coastline. On the other hand, you have the people of the mountains, who have lived there forever. The mountain people are seen as wild, feral, and difficult-to-deal-with by their newcomer neighbors. Indeed, such was the animosity between the two groups that people like Napoleon and his family never even went into the interior. However, all of that changed in the late eighteenth century when enlightenment ideas came to Corsica, and some high-minded people tried to make life better for the impoverished mountain people.
Around 1779, Napoleon’s father Carlo Buonaparte decided to send his sons abroad to be educated in France. The eldest son Joseph was sent to a seminary, while Napoleon, at around the age of nine, was enrolled in a military academy. By this decision, Carlo changed the life of Napoleon forever. For from being an ardent and proud Corsican, he became French. Or rather, he became a person who didn’t really fit in anywhere. He was given a French education, but his peculiar way of pronouncing French (due to his thick Corsican accent) ensured that he was never completely accepted by the French, who (as we all know) are extremely sensitive to the way foreigners use their elegant and beautiful language.
Because Napoleon was unable to speak French in the elegant style demanded of him by his aristocratic classmates, it meant that people tended to dismiss him as a hick. (Obviously his problems with pronouncing French must mean that he was stupid.)
However, Napoleon was far from stupid, and he used his “disability” (if we can call it that) to quietly amass power both in what is now Switzerland and northern Italy during his rise to power. By the time people actually noticed that he was ruling these large areas as a despot, it was too late. For Napoleon seized power in the early 1800s, crowning himself Emperor of the French (with the pope in attendance) in December 1804.
This book is merely the first volume. It ends as Napoleon’s Grande Armée marches into the fog-filled forests of German states in late 1807.
What is going to happen next?
We will find out in Volume Two.
