Hence the importance of history. Napoleon learned that ‘Germany used to be part of the French empire.’ He studied a Hundred Years’ War in which there were no English victories: ‘At the battles of Agincourt, Crécy and Poitiers King Jean and his knights succumbed in face of the Gascon phalanxes.’ He saw living history in the village, where the Brienne family were rebuilding their ancestral château. Jean de Brienne had fought in the fourth Crusade, ruled Jerusalem from 1210 to 1225, and then the whole Latin Empire of the East; other members of the family, Gautier V and Gautier VI, had been Dukes of Athens. How far the French had travelled, how many lands they had ruled! Less attention was paid to recent defeats than to past victories, and the mockery of French institutions, the defeatism and decadence which were such a feature of Paris intellectual life had no place in Brienne. There Napoleon learned to have faith in France.
Whereas most of Napoleon’s schoolmates came from military families and so tended to reinforce still further this enclave of patriotism, in religion they tended to differ from the good Franciscans. During their long dispute with the Jansenists, the Jesuits had marked out large areas of life for the operation of reason, natural law and free will, areas within which man was not really a fallen creature and in which original sin did not require the counterweight of supernatural grace. They had anticipated many beliefs of the philosophes, at the cost, however, of making revealed religion seem an arbitrary, and in the eyes of some an unnecessary, addition to the natural world.
With this background the cadets introduced an element of disbelief into Brienne. For a Catholic his first Communion is the solemnest day of childhood, but at Brienne some of the boys on that day broke their fast by going out and eating an omelette. They had no intention of committing sacrilege; they simply did not believe that they were going to receive the body of Christ. Napoleon was to some extent influenced by the other boys’ attitude, specially since it chimed in with his father’s agnosticism, and he began to question what the friars said. The decisive moment came when he was eleven, and once again the operative factor was his sense of justice. Napoleon heard a sermon in which the preacher said that Cato and Caesar were in hell. He was scandalized to learn that ‘the most virtuous men of antiquity would burn in eternal flames for not having practised a religion they knew nothing about.’ From that moment he decided he could no longer sincerely call himself a believing Christian.
This was a turning-point in Napoleon’s life. But he had inherited his mother’s strong believing instinct, and he was already a person who needed ideals. The vacuum in his soul did not last long. It was filled by the cult of honour, which he had learned at home, by chivalry, which he had learned about in history classes, and by the notion of heroism, which he learned from Plutarch’s Lives of Famous Men, and above all from Corneille.
Corneille’s heroes are men faced with a choice between duty and personal interest or inclination. By exercising almost superhuman strength of will they eventually choose duty. Patriotism is the first duty of all, courage the chief virtue. As for death:
Mourir pour le pays n’est pas un triste sort: C’est s’immortaliser par une belle mort.
This attitude appealed to Napoleon. He too felt it shameful to die what the Norsemen called ‘a straw death’, that is, in bed, and on his first campaign as commander-in-chief he was to write of a young subaltern: ‘He died with glory in the face of the enemy; he did not suffer a moment. What sensible men would not envy such a death?’
When he was twelve Napoleon, who had grown up beside the sea, decided that he wanted to be a sailor. A taste for mathematics often goes with a liking for the sea and ships – so it was with the Greeks; and Napoleon had another motive too. England and France were at war, and it was being fought at sea; moreover the French admirals, Suffren and de Grasse, were actually winning victories. Napoleon naturally wanted to go into the arm which would see action. Along with other cadets bent on joining the navy, he even slept in a hammock.
That summer Napoleon received a visit from his parents. Carlo wore a fashionable horseshoe-shaped wig, and rather overdid the politeness; Napoleon noticed critically that he and Father Berton spent ages at a doorway, each attempting to bow the other through first. Letizia wore her hair in a chignon, a head-dress of lace, and a white silk dress with a pattern of green flowers. She had just come from Autun, where a boy recalled, ‘I can still feel her caressing hand in my hair, and hear her musical voice as she called me “her little friend, the friend of her son Joseph”’. At Brienne she turned the heads of all the cadets.
Letizia did not approve of Napoleon’s hammock and his plan to be a sailor. She pointed out that in the navy he would be exposed to two dangers instead of one: enemy fire and the sea. When she returned to Corsica, she and Carlo asked Marbeuf, whom Napoleon liked and respected, to use his influence in the same direction, but for the time being Napoleon remained set on the navy.
In 1783 the Chevalier de Kéralio inspected Brienne and reported on the cadets. After remarking that Napoleon had ‘an excellent constitution and health’ and giving the description of his character quoted earlier, he wrote: ‘Very regular in his conduct, has always distinguished himself by his interest in mathematics. He has a sound knowledge of history and geography. He is very poor at dancing and drawing. He will make an excellent sailor.’
Despite this good report, Napoleon was not passed in 1783 for entrance to the Ecole Militaire, the next stage in his schooling whether he entered the army or the navy. Evidently he was considered too young – he was just fourteen – but the news came as a blow, for Carlo had been counting on Napoleon graduating that year, so leaving his scholarship free for Lucciano, now eight years old.
Things had begun to go badly for Carlo Buonaparte. His health had broken. He was thin and drawn and blotchy in the face, no one knew why. He now had seven children, and after the birth of the last Letizia had contracted puerperal fever which had left her with a stiffness down her left side. It was to give his wife the benefit of the waters at Bourbonne that Carlo had visited France, stopping to see Napoleon on the way. After their initial burst of generosity the French were reducing school grants and subsidies, so that Carlo was finding it difficult to make ends meet. All this became evident to Napoleon. Already showing a young man’s responsibility, he looked for some way of graduating from Brienne and leaving his place free for Lucciano.
In 1783 England and France, putting an end to their six-year naval war, signed at Versailles a treaty of peace. It is probable, though not certain, that Napoleon now conceived the idea of entering the English naval college at Portsmouth as a cadet. Service under another flag was then quite usual: the great French strategist, Maréchal de Saxe, had been of German birth and, more modestly, Letizia’s Swiss stepfather had served the Genoese. In La Nouvelle Héloïse by Rousseau, one of Napoleon’s favourite authors, did not Saint-Preux sail with Anson’s squadron? Almost certainly Napoleon considered it a temporary expedient to ease his father’s financial difficulties. At any rate, with help from a master, Napoleon managed to write a letter to the Admiralty, asking for a place in the English naval college. He showed it to an English boy in the school, a baronet’s son named Lawley, who was later to become Lord Wenlock. ‘The difficulty I’m afraid will be my religion.’ ‘You young rascal!’ Lawley replied. ‘I don’t believe you have any.’ ‘But my family have. My mother’s people, the Ramolinos, are very rigid. I should be disinherited if I showed any signs of becoming a heretic.’
Napoleon posted his letter. It arrived, but whether he got a reply is unknown. Anyway, he did not go to England and next summer he was passed for the Ecole Militaire. Napoleon must have been pleased to give his father the news and to welcome him in June to Brienne, with young Lucciano, who entered the school now, though Napoleon would not be leaving until autumn. Carlo stayed a day, then went on to Saint-Cyr to place seven-year-old Marie Anne in the girls’ school there, she too on a State grant; to Paris in order