Chapter 1Ajaccio, August 1769

Foreword

Every historian of the long nineteenth century keeps one subject he does not write. Mine was Napoleon. For most of a working life I have written about the men he made and the men he unmade — the jurists who drafted his Code, the prefects who administered his departments, the marshals he raised out of the ranks and the kings he installed and removed, the generation of Romantics who spent the decades after Waterloo arguing over what he had been. I wrote about the institutions and I wrote about the argument. I did not write about him. He was the mass every one of my subjects orbited, and I had spent thirty years describing the orbit without once turning to look at what sat at the middle of it.

The avoidance was not accidental. A figure at the center of one's whole period is the hardest figure to see clearly, precisely because everything one already knows is arranged around him; he is less a subject than a set of coordinates. I came to him finally because I could no longer pretend that the thing I had been circling was a background condition rather than the subject itself. The modern political world — the administrative state, the career open to talent, the codified civil law a quarter of humanity still lives under — is in substantial part his handiwork, and a historian who has spent his life on that world owes it, eventually, the man at its source.

I expected, when I began, to write the general. That is the Napoleon the Anglophone tradition hands down: the battles, the bicorne, the campaigns from the Italian plain to the Russian snow. What I found in the record — the published memoirs of the men who shared the Saint Helena exile, the deliberative minutes of the Consulate, the surviving correspondence, the court and press archives of the imperial period — was that the general was the smaller half of him. The durable Napoleon was the administrator. Waterloo destroyed the empire in an afternoon; the Code Civil, the Bank of France, the prefectures, the lycées, the Légion d'Honneur, the cadastre have run for two centuries and are running still.

The record itself is a difficulty the book has had to work against. Much of what we possess of Napoleon he arranged. The Saint Helena dictations were composed for a posterity he intended to persuade, and they largely succeeded; the legend was under construction before the body was cold. The task with such a subject is not to catch him out, as though the biography were a prosecution, but to read the self-fashioning as itself part of the evidence — to treat the shape he wished to leave as a fact about him rather than a screen in front of him.

Pieter Geyl observed in 1949 that Napoleon was a figure large enough that any interpretation of him reflected the interpreter as much as the subject. I have found this to be exactly true, and it is not a reason to abandon the attempt. It is the reason to make it carefully. He is worth a book because two centuries of them have not settled him, and because the failure to settle him is not a defect of the scholarship but a property of the man: liberator and tyrant, modernizer and warlord, the Revolution's heir and the Revolution's undoing, all of it documented, none of it sufficient by itself.

So this is the book I circled for thirty years. It reconstructs the fifty-one years from the townhouse in Ajaccio to the volcanic island in the South Atlantic, and it holds throughout that the institutional architecture, not the military reputation, is the substantive legacy. I have tried to write the man at the center without either the celebration or the repudiation his figure has always invited. Whether that is possible I leave to the reader. The argument about him has not paused in two hundred years, and this book does not expect to end it. It only, at last, joins it.

— Edward Forrester, Princeton

Chapter 1 · Ajaccio, August 1769

The house stood at 30 Rue Malerba — later renamed 30 Rue Saint-Charles in the early nineteenth century, in honor of the future Emperor whose birthplace it was — in the central old quarter of Ajaccio, the principal town on the western coast of Corsica. It was a three-storey townhouse in the eighteenth-century Italianate Mediterranean style typical of the city's modest-aristocratic streets: pale-yellow stucco, brown-shuttered windows, a single iron-railed balcony on the second floor overlooking the narrow cobbles below. Inside, a central staircase climbed from the ground-floor reception rooms to the first-floor family bedrooms to the cramped servants' quarters above that a household of the family's standing was expected to keep.

On the morning of August 15, 1769, the master bedroom on the first floor was hot, the shutters open to whatever breeze came off the harbor a few streets away. Letizia Buonaparte had been in labor since dawn. She was eighteen. She had already lost two children in infancy — a first son, also named Napoleone, and a daughter, Maria Anna — and borne one surviving son, Giuseppe; the labor she was completing now was her fourth. The child, a boy, was delivered into the room sometime that morning. He would be christened, by the family's standard practice, Napoleone — the Italianate form that the subsequent decades of his life would file down into the French Napoleon the world would come to know.

The house was the family's. They had owned it, by their own later genealogical reconstruction, since the early seventeenth century, when an ancestor named Geronimo Buonaparte acquired the property through the ordinary inheritance arrangements that organized property among Tuscan and Corsican families of the period. The Buonapartes were not — and modern French historians have been unanimous on this — wealthy by the standards of the broader European aristocracy. Theirs was the modest hereditary nobility common to the Italian Mediterranean: the kind that conferred a formal title and formal recognition while withholding the property and revenue base on which European feudal aristocrats built their actual political weight.

For two generations the family had been engaged with the political administration of the Genoese Republic — the Italian city-state that had governed Corsica since the early fourteenth century and had, over those centuries, tied the island's economic and administrative life to the Genoese mainland's wider Mediterranean trading network. The Buonaparte ancestors had served the Genoese government as part of the local Corsican intermediary class through which Genoa governed the island. Their nominal Italian noble status was the credential that allowed the role.

By the early-to-mid eighteenth century, the Genoese hold on Corsica had begun to come apart. The mainland economy was weakening in the face of rising British and French commercial and naval power; internal Corsican resistance to Genoese administration was building; the European powers were increasingly willing to back the Corsican independence movements that had been organizing themselves on the island for decades. The result, across the late 1750s and 1760s, was a period of Corsican independence under Pasquale Paoli — a Corsican-born military and political leader who, from roughly 1755 through 1769, ran a functioning independent Corsican Republic with its own constitution, its own administration, its own military, and its own diplomatic relationships with the Mediterranean powers.

Paoli's republic was, in the European political context of the mid-eighteenth century, an unusual and widely respected experiment. James Boswell, the Scottish writer whose 1768 Account of Corsica introduced Paoli to the English-language reading public, had visited the island in 1765 and returned to Britain as one of Paoli's most prominent international advocates. Enlightenment readers across Europe took the Corsican republic as a working test case for the political principles Rousseau and his contemporaries had been working out in print.

It had not, however, been backed by any European power strong enough to keep it alive. The Genoese, having concluded they could no longer govern the island, sold their formal sovereignty over Corsica to the French Crown in the spring of 1768 for about two million livres. The transfer was conducted through the Treaty of Versailles of May 15, 1768. Louis XV then organized a substantial military expeditionary force to occupy the island and replace the Paoli republic with French royal administrative control.

The French expedition landed in the spring of 1768. The Paoli republic resisted militarily for fifteen months. The decisive engagement, the Battle of Ponte Novu on May 8 and 9, 1769, ended in the defeat of the Paoli forces by the French army under the Comte de Vaux. Paoli escaped the field with a small group of his closest supporters and fled the island for Britain, where he would spend the next two decades in political exile until the French Revolution briefly allowed him to return to Corsica in the early 1790s.

The French royal administration, in the months after Ponte Novu, folded Corsica into the French royal system. The incorporation was complete by late summer 1769.

The Buonaparte family, in the spring and summer of 1769, had been on the Paoli side of the conflict.

Carlo Maria Buonaparte, the father of the future Emperor, was a young Corsican lawyer of substantial political ambition who, from his early twenties through the spring of 1769, had been aligned with the Paoli movement. He had served, in the years immediately before the French military intervention, as one of the Paoli administration's senior legal and administrative officers. By the testimony of those who knew him he was articulate and charismatic, a young man of considerable intelligence and considerable political and personal ambition. He was twenty-three in the spring of 1769.

Maria Letizia Ramolino, his wife, was eighteen that spring. They had been married in 1764, when Carlo was eighteen and Letizia thirteen, in an arrangement worked out by their respective families through the standard Corsican aristocratic marriage network. Both households were modest-noble, with sustained political and personal ties going back several generations of island life. By early summer 1769 the marriage had produced one surviving son, Giuseppe — the future Joseph Bonaparte, eventually King of Naples and of Spain — born in 1768, and two earlier children who had died in infancy: a first son also named Napoleone, who lived only the day of his August 1765 birth, and a daughter, Maria Anna, who lived from January 1767 to January 1768.

In the spring of 1769, Letizia was heavily pregnant with what would be her fourth child.

The pregnancy had been difficult, by the family's later recollections. She had spent the preceding months traveling with Carlo across the eastern and central Corsican mountains where the Paoli resistance was organizing itself against the French. She had taken on the practical resistance work that women on the Paoli side did — food, shelter, the medical and logistical support the fighters needed. In the spring and early summer of 1769 she rode extensively on horseback through difficult mountain terrain, in late-stage pregnancy, under the guerrilla conditions that marked the republic's final months.

The family later traced the difficulty of the pregnancy to that ride.

After Ponte Novu in early May, when the republic's defeat had become certain, Carlo Maria Buonaparte had to make a decision.

The choice was: keep faith with the Paoli resistance and follow Paoli into the exile that defeat would require, or accept the new French royal regime and pursue the political and administrative career that the new regime would offer former Paoli supporters who transferred their loyalty to the Crown.

After a brief period of weighing the two, Carlo chose the second.

The choice was controversial in its time, weighed against the Corsican loyalty traditions the Paoli resistance had organized itself around. Many of Carlo's contemporaries — particularly those who had been most engaged with the Paoli cause in the years just past — would in later decades describe his switch as the act of a political opportunist who had judged that his own future and his family's future would be better served by accommodation with the new French regime than by continued resistance. The description was, on the evidence, accurate. Carlo had concluded that the Paoli resistance had no realistic chance of restoration and that his family's circumstances required the accommodation. The judgment was, by the course of events that followed, correct.

The accommodation produced formal French recognition of the Buonaparte family's noble status. It produced Carlo's appointment, in the months after Corsica's incorporation into the Crown, as the local representative of French administration in Ajaccio. It produced the modest but real improvement in the family's economic position that the new arrangement allowed.

It also produced the political setting into which the fourth child of Carlo and Letizia Buonaparte was born — on August 15, 1769, three months after Ponte Novu and about two months after the family's loyalty-transfer to the French Crown — in a Corsica that, in the preceding twelve months, had been transformed from a Genoese dependency into a Paoli republic into a French royal province.

The infant in the master bedroom on Rue Malerba that morning — the fourth child, the second surviving son after Giuseppe — was the future Emperor.

He was named Napoleone.

The Buonaparte family had been French citizens for about twelve months when he was born. He was, by the political and administrative status of the moment, a French citizen by birth, born to a French-citizen father and a French-citizen mother, in the French department of Corse, on the morning of August 15, 1769.

The Bonaparte–Buonaparte tension — the question of whether the family was Italian or French — would be the personal and political problem that organized his identity across the next fifty-one years. He had been born Italian by ancestry. He had been born French by political status. He had been raised Italian-speaking in the Buonaparte household. He would be educated in French at the Brienne military academy he would attend from the spring of 1779 through the autumn of 1784. And he would be formed politically by the French Revolution that, across the years from his twentieth through his thirtieth, would transform the administrative system he had entered as a junior artillery officer into the political stage on which, over the next two decades, he would rise from junior officer to general to First Consul to Emperor.

On the morning of August 15, 1769, he was an infant in the master bedroom of the Buonaparte townhouse at 30 Rue Malerba in Ajaccio.

He had not yet seen the world beyond the room. He did not yet have the bicorne hat that the post-Egyptian-campaign caricaturists would attach to him. He had not yet developed the strategic and political instincts that would, over the next fifty years, produce the European transformation the rest of this biography exists to reconstruct.

He had only what he had been born into. The mother Letizia. The father Carlo. The older brother Giuseppe. The Italian-Mediterranean cobblestones outside the window. The new French royal administration that, in the prior six months, had replaced the Paoli republic that, in the prior decade, had replaced the Genoese administration that, for four centuries, had governed the island.

He had only the position into which he had been born.

The rest he would build himself.

The next chapter takes up Brienne in the spring of 1779, when the nine-going-on-ten-year-old Napoleone arrived at the French military academy that would, over the following five years, complete his transition from Corsican-aristocratic childhood into the French officer's training that became the foundation of his entire career.