Napoleon and His Parents by Dorothy Carrington

Author:Dorothy Carrington [Carrington, Dorothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2015-12-07T02:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six – Efforts and Rewards

‘I’m not Corsican. I was brought up in France, therefore I’m French; my brothers too.’

With this statement, firmly in line with the modern faith in the pre-eminence of nurture over nature, Napoleon insisted on the transformation he and his brothers underwent in their French schools. Born just before and after a bitter conquest he and Joseph, at least, must have thought of themselves in early childhood as the involuntary subjects of an alien king. Their years at school in the land of the victor turned them into Frenchmen, proud of their new nationality, French in their behaviour, attitudes and values. Or so Napoleon liked to say. In the light of hindsight they appear unmistakably marked by their Corsican origin. Their characters had already taken shape before they were thrust into the new environment, to be forced into a foreign mould. Each reacted according to temperament. Joseph adapted himself, not without unhappiness, by using his gift to please. Napoleon’s predicament was more painful: the impact of French civilization stirred a deep, resentful, vindictive love of his conquered homeland which lasted well into his early adult years.

Their first and cruel realization was that Corsica was a rather miserable place. According to Napoleon their father drummed this in before they had even set foot in France. ‘You see what a stupid pride we take in our country!’ he exclaimed, as they sailed past Ville-franche, coasting towards Marseilles. ‘We boast of the Grande Rue in Ajaccio, and there’s a street in an ordinary French town quite as fine and wide.’[30]

The object lesson would have been less needed had Carlo and his sons travelled, as Napoleon maintains, by way of Florence; for if the Florentine streets are narrow they certainly have a magnificence unimagined in Ajaccio. Napoleon states that they were received there by the Grand duke Leopold, who gave Carlo an introduction to his sister, Marie-Antoinette. But here Napoleon, wittingly or not, was adding an item to the Bonaparte legend. A detour via Florence seems unlikely, given, the time spent on the journey; at all events research has shown that the grand-duke was not in Florence at that moment. And had he been there, would he have done so much for Carlo, or even received him? In a period when lineage was of supreme importance, it was gratifying for an obscure Corsican to be accepted as kinsman by the Tuscan Buonaparte; but this by no means implied moving up into princely circles. Though a number of the Florentine Buonaparte — at least twenty according to an Italian author — had held eminent public office under the Medici, to whom they were apparently related, they seem never to have been granted a title of count or marquis. Moreover their line had died out, perhaps as long as two centuries before Carlo undertook his mission. In San Miniato Buonaparte had distinguished themselves in learning and letters, but nothing in their record entitled them to court favours. By 1779 they were anyhow diminished, in numbers and in status.

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