As I continued my critical evaluation of sources – which appears as Appendix A – I was able to clear up many of the contradictions that had puzzled me. But in the process I found that I had to modify my previous opinion of Napoleon. Different qualities, different defects began to emerge, and it was then that I decided to try to write a new Life of Napoleon, one of the first to be based on a critical evaluation of sources, which would also combine the new material I have spoken about earlier. It would be more concerned with civil than with military matters, because Napoleon himself gave more time to civil matters. Even as a second lieutenant Napoleon cared more about social improvements at home than conquests abroad, and though circumstances caused him to fight during most of his reign, he always insisted that he was primarily a statesman. In describing Napoleon’s constructive work, and even his thwarted intentions, I have drawn wherever possible on the diaries or Memoirs of the men who knew him best: such as Desaix in Italy, Roerderer during the Consulate, Caulaincourt during the last years of Empire.
Napoleon once dreamed he was being devoured by a bear. That, and two other dreams – one about drowning, the other about Josephine – are all we know about his dream life. But Napoleon was, among other things, a bookworm. During his leisure moments, whether at Malmaison or on campaign, he could usually be found deep in a book, and we know exactly which books and plays moved him. These I discuss in some detail, believing that, like dreams, they throw light on his longings and fears.
I have used the following manuscripts in public collections: in the Bibliothèque Thiers the rich collection formed by Frédéric Masson, including the journal of Dr James Verling, who lived in Longwood from July, 1818 to September, 1819, and the unexpurgated copy of Gourgaud’s diary: both provide valuable details about Napoleon’s health and morale; in the Institut de France, the Cuvier papers, which show how Napoleon organized education; in the Public Record Office, Lowe’s dispatches to Lord Bathurst and the Foreign Office papers relating to Switzerland, which clarify the rupture of the Treaty of Amiens; in the British Museum, two short Napoleon autographs; the Windham Papers, which show how closely the English ruling class was involved with French émigrés; the Liverpool Papers, particularly Add. MS. 38,569, the volume of cipher letters from Drake, in Munich, to Hawkesbury, keeping him abreast of the plot to overthrow Napoleon; and the diary and reports of Captain Nicholls in St Helena.
A word about spelling. I have followed English usage in omitting the accents from Napoleon, Josephine and Jerome, and the hyphen from double Christian names, such as Marie Louise. For places in France I have used French spelling; for places elsewhere I have adopted English versions.
I wish to thank for their generous help Dr Frank G. Healey, Dr Paul Arrighi, Monsieur Etienne Leca, Conservateur of the Bibliothèque Municipale in Ajaccio, Monsieur J. Leblanc of the Musée d’Ajaccio, Mr Nigel Samuel, who kindly allowed me to use his manuscript of part of ‘Clisson et Eugénie’, Madame L. Hautecoeur of the Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, Mademoiselle Hélène Michaud of the Bibliothèque Thiers, Miss Banner of the Royal College of Music, Mrs Barbara Lowe, who typed the book, and, for a number of Napoleonic details, my friend Mr Basil Rooke-Ley.
ON the morning of 2 June 1764 the bronze bells of Ajaccio cathedral began to peal and the little town’s important people – landowners, army officers, judges and notaries – with their ladies in silk dresses, climbed the five steps leading to the sober-fronted cathedral, passed through the doorway, and took their places for the most fashionable wedding of the year. Carlo Buonaparte of Ajaccio, a tall, slim lawyer aged eighteen, was marrying the beautiful fourteen-year-old Letizia Ramolino, also of Ajaccio. As everyone knew, it was a love match. Carlo had been studying law at Pisa University and suddenly, without taking his degree, he had sailed home to propose to Letizia, and had been accepted. On the Continent upper-class marriages were affairs of birth and money, but in unsophisticated Corsica they were usually affairs of the heart. Not that the present wedding was unsatisfactory from the point of view of lineage and property. Far from it.
The Buonapartes lived originally in Tuscany. An army officer named Ugo is mentioned in an act of 1122 as fighting beside Frederick the One-Eyed, Duke of Swabia, to subdue Tuscany, and it was Ugo’s nephew, when he became a member of the Council governing Florence, who took the surname Buonaparte, meaning ‘the good party’. By ‘the good party’ he designated the Emperor’s men, believers in knightly prowess and the unity of Italy, over against the papal party, which included the new business class. But the ‘good party’ lost power and Ugo Buonaparte had to leave Florence. He went to live in the seaport of Sarzana. In the troubled first half of the sixteenth century one of Ugo’s descendants, a certain Francesco Buonaparte, sailed from Sarzana to seek his fortune in Corsica, which had begun to be colonized by Genoa, and here Francesco’s family had made a good name for themselves, chiefly as lawyers active in local government.
The Ramolinos were descended from the Counts of Collalto in Lombardy and had been established in Corsica for 250 years. Like the Buonapartes, they had married mainly into other long-established families of Italian origin, and sons went into the army. Letizia’s father had commanded the Ajaccio garrison, and later became Inspector General of Roads and Bridges, an unexacting post since Corsica was practically devoid of both. He died when Letizia was five, and two years later her mother married Captain Franz Fesch, a Swiss officer serving in the Genoese navy. It was her Swiss stepfather who gave Letizia away.
From the material point of view also the couple were well matched. Carlo, whose father had died four years earlier, brought his wife the family house in the Via Malerba, two of the best vineyards near Ajaccio, and some pasture and arable land, while Letizia’s dowry consisted of thirty-one acres, a mill and a big oven for baking bread, valued altogether at 6,705 livres. With Carlo’s property probably worth about the same, the young couple could expect an annual income of about 670 livres, mainly in kind, equivalent to £700 today.*
So the dashing young lawyer married the army officer’s beautiful daughter and when the last guest had gone took her to live on the first floor of his big house with shutters in a narrow street near the sea. On the ground floor lived Carlo’s mother and his rich, gout-ridden Uncle Lucciano, Archdeacon of Ajaccio; on the top floor lived cousins, who could sometimes be difficult, and now to the household was added Letizia. She was slender and petite – only five feet one. Her eyes were dark brown, her hair chestnut, her teeth white, and she possessed two features of the thoroughbred: a slender, finely bridged nose and long white hands. Despite her beauty, she was extremely shy, sometimes to the point of awkwardness. She was also, even for a Corsican, unusually devout. She went to Mass every day, a practice she was to retain all her life.
Corsica at this time was attracting attention by her efforts to become independent. In 1755 a twenty-nine-year-old ensign in the Corsican Guard serving the King of Naples, Pasquale Paoli by name, returned to the island, put himself at the head of guerrillas and drove the Genoese out of all central Corsica, bottling them up in a few ports, of which Ajaccio was one. He then gave the Corsicans a democratic constitution, with himself as