 |
Napoleon I
 Encyclopædia
Britannica Article |
born Aug. 15, 1769 ,
Ajaccio, Corsica
died May 5, 1821 , St. Helena Island
Napoleon in His
Study, by Jacques-Louis David, 1812. In the National Gallery of
Art, ...
By courtesy of the
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Samuel H. Kress
Collection; ... |
|
French in full
Napoléon Bonaparte, original Italian Napoleone Buonaparte,
byname The Corsican, or The Little Corporal, French
Le Corse, or Le Petit Caporal French general, First
Consul (1799–1804), and emperor of the French (1804–1814/15), one of the
most celebrated personages in the history of the West. He revolutionized
military organization and training; sponsored the Napoleonic Code; the
prototype of later civil-law codes; reorganized education; and
established the long-lived Concordat with the papacy.
Napoleon's many reforms left
a lasting mark on the institutions of France and of much of western
Europe. But his driving passion was the military expansion of French
dominion, and, though at his fall he left France smaller than it had
been at the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he was almost
unanimously revered during his lifetime and until the end of the Second
Empire under his nephew Napoleon III as one of history's great heroes.
Napoleon was born on
Corsica shortly after the island's cession to France by the Genoese.
He was the fourth, and second surviving, child of
Carlo Buonaparte , a lawyer, and his wife, Letizia Ramolino. His
father's family, of ancient Tuscan nobility, had emigrated to Corsica in
the 16th century.
Carlo Buonaparte had married
the beautiful and strong-willed Letizia when she was only 14 years old;
they eventually had eight children to bring up in very difficult times.
The French occupation of their native country was resisted by a number
of Corsicans led by
Pasquale Paoli . Carlo Buonaparte joined Paoli's party, but when
Paoli had to flee, Buonaparte came to terms with the French. Winning the
protection of the governor of Corsica, he was appointed assessor for the
judicial district of Ajaccio in 1771. In 1778 he obtained the admission
of his two eldest sons, Joseph and Napoleon, to the Collège d'Autun.
A Corsican by birth,
heredity, and childhood associations, Napoleon continued for some time
after his arrival in Continental France to regard himself a foreigner;
yet from the age of nine he was educated in France as other Frenchmen
were. While the tendency to see in Napoleon a reincarnation of some
14th-century Italian condottiere is an overemphasis on one aspect
of his character, he did, in fact, share neither the traditions nor the
prejudices of his new country: remaining a Corsican in temperament, he
was first and foremost, through both his education and his reading, a
man of the 18th century.
Napoleon was educated at
three schools: briefly at Autun, for five years at the military college
of Brienne, and finally for one year at the military academy in Paris.
It was during Napoleon's year in Paris that his father died of a stomach
cancer in February 1785, leaving his family in straitened circumstances.
Napoleon, although not the eldest son, assumed the position of head of
the family before he was 16. In September he graduated from the military
academy, ranking 42nd in a class of 58.
He was made second
lieutenant of artillery in the regiment of La Fère, a kind of training
school for young artillery officers. Garrisoned at Valence, Napoleon
continued his education, reading much, in particular works on strategy
and tactics. He also wrote Lettres sur la Corse, in which he
reveals his feeling for his native island. He went back to Corsica in
September 1786 and did not rejoin his regiment until June 1788. By that
time the agitation that was to culminate in the French Revolution had
already begun. A reader of Voltaire and of Rousseau, Napoleon believed
that a political change was imperative, but as a career officer he seems
not to have seen any need for radical social reforms.
Next
Contents of this
article:
|
|
