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Another example relates to his father. Carlo from time to time liked to go to one of the Ajaccio cafés to have a drink with friends. Sometimes he played cards for money, and if he lost Letizia was left short for housekeeping. She would say to Napoleone, ‘Go and see if your father’s gambling,’ and off he would have to go. He hated the idea of spying, and what is more, spying on his own father: it revolted his sense of justice. He adored his mother but all his life this was one small thing he was to hold against her.
Under Genoese rule justice had been venal, so the Corsicans had taken the law into their own hands and evolved a kind of barbarian justice: revenge. The Corsican instructed his children to believe in God and the Church, but he omitted the precept about forgiving injuries; indeed, he told them that insults must be avenged. Since the Corsican was extremely sensitive to any reflection on his own dignity, vendettas quickly built up, and were the curse of the island. One observer noted that ‘a Corsican is deemed infamous who does not avenge the death of his tenth cousin.’ ‘Those who conceive their honour injured allow their beards to grow … until they have avenged the affront. These long beards they call barbe di vendetta.’ Revenge was the dark side of the Corsican’s manly pride and sense of justice; Carlo possessed it, and so did his son.
In this world of sudden killings on the mountainside people lived in terror of the evil eye, vampires, spells. Letizia, on hearing startling news, would cross herself very quickly and murmur ‘Gesù!’, a habit her son picked up. Then again, the Corsicans had a somewhat unhealthy obsession with violent death. Much of their sung poetry took the form of a sister’s dirges for her dear brother suddenly knifed or shot. There were many ghost stories, which Napoleone heard and remembered; there were haunting tales about death and its presages; when anyone was fated to die, a pale light over the house-top announced it; the owl screeched all night, the dog howled, and often a little drum was heard, beaten by a ghost.
Carlo meanwhile was adapting himself well to French rule. He crossed to Pisa to take his degree in law, and in 1771, when the French divided Corsica into eleven legal districts, Carlo got the job of assessor of the Ajaccio district. He had to help the judge both in civil and criminal cases, and to take his place when necessary. His salary was 900 livres a year. He promptly engaged a nurse for the boys, Caterina by name, and two servants to help Letizia with the cooking and laundry.
Carlo also earned money as a practising lawyer and even fought cases on his own behalf. He had never received all Letizia’s promised dowry and when Napoleone was five Carlo brought an action, which he won. He obtained the public sale in Ajaccio market-place of ‘two small barrels, two crates, two wooden jars for carrying grapes, a washing bowl and a tub, a large cask, four medium casks, six poor quality barrels, etc.’ A month later Carlo saw that he was still owed the price of an ox: seventy livres. After a new hearing, a new judgment was issued obliging the Ramolino estate to pay ‘the price of the value of an ox demanded by Carlo Buonaparte’.
Another time, Carlo, on the Corsican principle that if he did not stand up for his rights on small matters, he would soon lose them on large ones, brought a lawsuit against his cousins on the top floor ‘for emptying their slops out the window’, and spoiling one of Letizia’s dresses.
Carlo’s most important litigation concerned an estate at Mitelli. It had belonged to Paolo Odone, the brother of Carlo’s great-great-grandmother, who had died without issue and left it to the Jesuits. Since the Jesuit Order had recently been suppressed, Carlo considered it his, but the French authorities had seized the estate and used the revenues for schools. Carlo was constantly trying to prove in law his claim to Mitelli, but lacked documentary evidence and when in 1780 he began to keep a book of accounts and notable family dates, he urged ‘the best qualified of his children’ to continue the register in detail and, alluding to Mitelli, to ‘avenge our family for the tribulations and checks we have experienced in the past.’
Carlo was showing admirable energy but his life still followed the pattern of the past. Thanks to the French, it was now to take a wholly new direction. The French divided society into three classes – nobles, clerics and commoners – and this tidy system they brought to Corsica. If a Corsican wished to continue in politics, as Carlo did, he must do so no longer as an individual but as a member of one of the three classes. A Corsican whose family had lived on the island 200 years and who could prove that it had noble rank during that period was offered privileges similar to those of the French nobility, including exemption from taxes, and the right to sit as a noble in the island’s assembly.
Carlo decided to accept this offer. The Buonapartes had kept in touch with the Tuscan branch in Florence and Carlo was soon able to produce eleven quarters of nobility – seven more than the stipulated minimum. He was duly inscribed as a French nobleman and took his seat when the Corsican States-General met for the first time in May 1772. His fellows thought well of him, for they elected him a member of the Council of Twelve Nobles, which had a say in governing Corsica.
When he was three Napoleone would have noticed a change in his father’s appearance. Tall Carlo took to wearing a powdered curled wig decorated with a double black silk ribbon. He wore embroidered waistcoats, elegant knee-breeches, silk stockings and silver-buckled shoes. At his hip he carried the sword which symbolized his noble rank, and by the local people he came to be called ‘Buonaparte the Magnificent’. There were changes also in the family house. Carlo built on a room where he could give big dinner-parties, and he bought books, a rarity in Corsica. Soon he had a library of a thousand volumes. So it came about that Napoleone, unlike his forbears, grew up within reach of books, and their store of knowledge.
When Napoleone was seven, the Corsicans chose his father as one of three noblemen to convey the island’s loyal respects to King Louis XVI. So off went Buonaparte the Magnificent to the palace of Versailles, where he met the mumbling good-natured King and perhaps also Marie Antoinette, who imported flowering shrubs from Corsica for her garden in Trianon. During this and a second visit in 1779 Carlo tried unsuccessfully to get reimbursed for the Odone legacy, but he did succeed in obtaining a subsidy for the planting of mulberry trees – it was hoped to introduce silk production to Corsica. On his return Carlo could boast that he had spoken to His Majesty, but it was a costly boast. ‘In Paris’, he noted in his accounts book, ‘I received 4,000 francs from the King and a fee of 1,000 crowns from the Government, but I came back without a penny.’
Carlo might rank as a French nobleman, but he was still far from well-off. In 1775, when Napoleone was six, a third son was born, named Lucciano, and two years later a daughter, Maria Anna, so that he now had four children to support and educate on a salary of 900 livres. France, as he had found to his cost, was expensive: doubtless the best he could hope for was to keep his boys at Father Recco’s little school and at sixteen send them to Pisa, like so many generations of Buonapartes, to read law. Fortunately for Carlo and his sons, this problem was soon to be resolved in an unforeseen way.
Paoli had left Corsica, and his place as the most important man had been taken by the French civil and military commander, Louis Charles René, Comte de Marbeuf. Born in Rennes of an old Breton family in 1712, he had entered the army, fought gallantly and risen to brigadier. Then, being charming and witty, he had turned courtier and become gentleman-in-waiting to King Stanislas I, Louis XV’s Polish father-in-law. On his appointment as virtual ruler of Corsica, he had been told by the Minister of Foreign Affairs: ‘Make yourself loved by the Corsicans, and neglect nothing to make them love France.’
Marbeuf did just that. He reduced taxes to a mere 5 per cent of the harvest, he learned the Corsican pronunciation of Italian, so that he could speak with peasants, he sometimes wore their homespun and pointed velvet cap, he built himself a fine house near Corte and entertained generously – as indeed he could well afford, on a salary of 71,208 livres.
Bretons and Scotsmen have two things in common: bagpipes and a flair for administering colonies. When James Boswell toured Corsica, he stayed with Marbeuf, passing, he says, ‘from the mountains of Corsica to the banks of the Seine’, and admired the work of this ‘worthy, open-hearted Frenchman … gay without levity and judicious without severity’. Having fallen ill, Boswell was nursed by Marbeuf personally, on a diet of bouillon and books. Indeed, Marbeuf’s kindness so stands out in Boswell’s Tour that it rather mars the book’s purpose, which was to vaunt the ‘oppressed’ Corsicans.
Carlo liked Marbeuf also. Both of them wanted to improve agriculture. Marbeuf introduced the potato, and encouraged the growing of flax and tobacco. He helped Carlo get a grant of 6,000 livres in order to drain a salt-marsh near Ajaccio and plant barley. Carlo on his own arranged for a seed merchant to come from Tuscany and plant or sow certain French vegetables unknown in Corsica: cabbages, beetroot, celery, artichokes and asparagus. Both men wanted to reclaim and improve. A friendship ripened between them, and when Carlo went to Versailles in 1776 he spoke up for Marbeuf against certain critics at court.
The Marbeufs, like so many Bretons, had a romantic streak. Marbeuf’s father had fallen in love with Louise, daughter of Louis XV, and in public bestowed a kiss on that princess’s cheek – for which a lettre de cachet consigned him to prison. Marbeuf fils had had to make a mariage de raison with a lady much older than himself, and she did not accompany him to Corsica. There he fell in love with a certain Madame de Varesne, and kept her as his mistress until 1776. Then the liaison ended. Marbeuf was sixty-four, but still romantically inclined. At his parties he came to know Letizia, now in her twenties and described by a French eyewitness as ‘easily the most striking woman in Ajaccio’. Soon he fell ‘wildly in love’ with her. It was a Platonic affair, for Letizia had eyes only for Carlo, but it made all the difference to young Napoleone’s fortunes. Instead of merely helping Carlo from time to time with his mulberry plantations, now Marbeuf could not do enough for the beautiful Letizia and her children.
Marbeuf, aware of Carlo’s financial difficulties, informed him of an arrangement whereby the children of impoverished French noblemen might receive free education. Boys destined for the army could go to military academy, boys wishing to enter the Church could go to the seminary in Aix, and girls to Madame de Maintenon’s school at Saint-Cyr. Marbeuf would have to recommend any child, but if Carlo and Letizia wished to take advantage of the scheme, they could count on his support.
This offer was like an answer to prayer. Abandoned now were the vague schemes for making lawyers of the two older boys. It must be either soldiering or the priesthood. Carlo and Letizia decided that Giuseppe, quiet and good-natured, had the makings of a priest. Not so Napoleone, who had to be slapped to High Mass. Strong and mettlesome, he was more likely to have the Ramolino gift for soldiering. So they decided that Napoleone should try for military academy.
Marbeuf supported Carlo’s requests and sent the documents to Paris, with testimonies that Carlo could not afford the school fees. In 1778 the royal decisions arrived. Giuseppe could go to Aix, but only when he was sixteen. Until then he must clearly have some French schooling, and this Carlo could not afford. Again Marbeuf stepped in. His nephew was Bishop of Autun, and the college at Autun was an excellent school, the French Eton. Giuseppe could go there until he was old enough for Aix, and Marbeuf, who had no children of his own, would look after his fees. As for Napoleone, he was accepted in principle for the military academy at Brienne, though final confirmation had to await a new certificate of nobility, this time from the royal heraldist in Versailles. Court officials were notoriously slow, and the certificate might take months: perhaps it would be a good plan if Napoleone spent those months with his brother at Autun, again at Marbeuf’s expense. Carlo and Letizia gladly agreed.
Carlo was able to show his gratitude in one small way. Already guerrilla leader, lawyer, farmer and politician, he now turned poet, perhaps under the influence of his new library. When Marbeuf, on the death of his first wife, married a young lady called Mademoiselle de Fenoyl – without, however, growing any the less enamoured of Letizia – Carlo wrote and gave him a sonnet in Italian, which he proudly copied into his account book, beside the homely lists of farms, linen, clothes and kitchen utensils. It is quite a good sonnet, reflecting Carlo’s own love of children and hopes for his own sons. May Marbeuf and his wife, he says, soon be blessed with a son, who will bring tears of joy to their eyes, and, following his ancestors’ exalted career, shed lustre on the fleur-de-lys, and on his parents’ honour.
Napoleone aged nine had every reason to be pleased with life. He lived in a fine house in the prettiest town of a strikingly beautiful island. He was proud that his family had fought with Paoli, but too young to feel resentment against French troops or French officials, who in fact were pouring money into Corsica on modernization schemes. He had brothers and a sister, and, though not the eldest, he could get the better of Giuseppe if it came to a fight. He admired his father, who had risen in the world, and loved his mother who, as he put it, was ‘both tender and strict’. He doubtless disliked the idea of leaving home, but it was, everyone said, a great opportunity and he intended to make the most of it. When he went to school his mother would give him a piece of white bread for his lunch. On the way he exchanged it with one of the garrison soldiers for coarse brown bread. When Letizia scolded him, he replied that since he was going to be a soldier he must get used to soldier’s rations, and anyway he preferred brown bread to white.
Napoleone watched his mother, already busy with her baby daughter, as she prepared and marked the vast number of shirts and collars and towels prescribed by boarding-schools. In addition, Napoleone had to have a silver fork and spoon, and a goblet inscribed with the Buonaparte arms: a red shield crossed diagonally by three silver bands, and two six-pointed azure stars, the whole surmounted by a coronet.
On the evening of 11 December 1778 Letizia, following a Corsican custom, took Giuseppe and Napoleone to the Lazarists to be blessed by the Father Superior. Next day the boys said goodbye to their brothers and sister, to the gout-ridden Archdeacon, to the many aunts and countless cousins who composed a Corsican family, and to Camilla: tears ran down her cheeks to see ‘her Napoleone’ leave. Then they set out on horseback across the mountains, with mules for their luggage, as far as Corte, where Marbeuf had arranged for a carriage to take them on to Bastia. Also of the party was Letizia’s half-brother, Giuseppe Fesch, who, again with Marbeuf’s assistance, was entering Aix seminary: a pleasant fat pink lad of sixteen. In the south of the island there was always a cousin or uncle to stay with, but not so at Bastia, and they had to spend the night in a simple inn. An old man dragged mattresses into a chilly room but there were too few to go round, so the five of them huddled together and snatched what sleep they could. Next morning Napoleone boarded the ship for France, a boy of nine and a half leaving home for the first time. As his mother kissed him goodbye she sensed what he was feeling and spoke a last word in his ear: ‘Courage!’
* Throughout the period covered by this book, save the inflationary years 1791–9, the purchasing power of the livre or franc was slightly in excess of £1 today.
CHAPTER 2 Military Academies
ON Christmas Day 1778 at Marseille Napoleone Buonaparte set foot on French soil, and found himself among people whose language he could not understand. Happily his father was there, practical and speaking French, to organize the journey to Aix, where Giuseppe Fesch was dropped off, and then north, probably by boat, the cheapest way, up the rivers Rhône and Saône to the heart of this land eighty times the size of Corsica. At Villefranche, a town of 10,000 inhabitants in the wine-growing Beaujolais, Carlo said, ‘How silly we are to be vain about our country: we boast of the main street in Ajaccio and here, in an ordinary French town, there’s a street just as wide and just as handsome.’
Corsica is mountainous, rugged and poor; to the Buonapartes France must have seemed its complete opposite, with soft rolling contours, trim fields and well-pruned vineyards, straight roads, big houses with park and lake and swans. A population of twenty-five million, by far the largest in Europe, enjoyed a high standard of living and exported almost twice as much as they imported. French furniture, tapestries, gold and silver plate, jewellery and porcelain graced houses from the Tagus to the Volga. Ladies in Stockholm, like ladies in Naples, wore Parisian dresses and gloves, and carried Paris-made fans, while their husbands took snuff from French snuff-boxes, laid out their gardens French style, and considered themselves uneducated if they had not read Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire. In coming to France the two Buonaparte boys had entered the centre of European civilization.
Autun was a slightly smaller town than Villefranche, but richer in fine buildings. There was more beautiful carving over one doorway of its Romanesque cathedral than in all Corsica. Carlo presented his sons to Bishop de Marbeuf and put them in charge of the head-master of Autun College. On the first day of 1779 he said goodbye to Joseph and Napoleon, as they were now being called, and set out for Paris to secure the certificate of Napoleon’s noble birth.
Napoleon’s first task was to learn French, which was also the language of educated Europe, the great universal language that Latin had once been. He found it difficult. He was not good at memorizing and reproducing sounds, nor did he have the flexible temperament of the born linguist. In his four months at Autun he learned to speak French, but retained a strong Italian accent, and pronounced certain words Italian style, for example ‘tou’ instead of ‘tu’, ‘classé’ instead of ‘classe’. At Autun in fact he was still very much the Corsican. This led one of his masters, Father Chardon, to speak of the French conquest. ‘Why were you beaten? You had Paoli, and Paoli was meant to be a good general.’ ‘He is, sir,’ replied Napoleon, ‘and I want to grow up like him.’
The royal heraldist issued Napoleon’s certificate and the time came for the two brothers to part. Joseph cried profusely but only one tear ran down Napoleon’s cheek, and this he tried to hide. Afterwards, the assistant head-master, who had been watching, said to Joseph, ‘He didn’t show it, but he’s just as sad as you.’
In the second half of May Napoleon was taken by Bishop de Marbeuf’s vicar to the little town of Brienne, lying in the green part of Champagne, a countryside of forests, ponds and dairy farms. Here stood a plain eighteenth-century building in a garden of five acres approached by an avenue of lime trees. Brienne had been an ordinary boarding-school until two years before, when the Government, alarmed by France’s string of defeats, had turned it into one of twelve new military academies. But they had retained the old staff, so, paradoxically, Brienne Military Academy was run by members of the Order of St Francis, in brown habits and sandals. The head-master was Father Louis Berton, a gruff, rather pompous friar in his early thirties, and the second master was his brother, Father Jean Baptiste Berton, an ex-grenadier known as ‘the friar in ique’ because he used so many words ending in -ique. They were unremarkable men but they ran Brienne well and it was reckoned one of the better academies.
Napoleon was taken to a dormitory containing ten cubicles, each furnished with a bed, a bran mattress, blankets, a wooden chair and a cupboard on which stood a jug and wash-basin. Here he unpacked his three pairs of sheets, twelve towels, two pairs of black stockings, a dozen shirts, a dozen white collars, a dozen handkerchiefs, two nightshirts, six cotton nightcaps, and finally his smart blue cadet’s uniform. A container for holding powder to dress his hair and a hair-ribbon he laid aside, for until the age of twelve cadets had to keep their hair cut short. At ten o’clock a bell rang, candles were blown out and Napoleon’s cubicle, like the others, was locked. If he needed anything he might call to one of two servants who slept in the dormitory.
At six Napoleon was awakened and his cubicle unlocked. Having washed and put on his blue uniform with white buttons, he joined the other boys in his class – the ‘septième’ – for a talk on good behaviour and the laws of France. Then he went to Mass. After breakfast of crusty white bread, fruit and a glass of water, at eight he began lessons, the staple subjects being Latin, history and geography, mathematics and physics. At ten came classes in building fortifications and in drawing, including the drawing and tinting of relief maps. At noon the boys had their main meal of the day. It consisted of soup, boiled meat, an entrée, a dessert, and red burgundy mixed with one-third water.
After dinner Napoleon had one hour’s recreation, then more lessons in the staple subjects. Between four and six he learned, depending on the day, fencing, dancing, gymnastics, music and German, English being an alternative. He then did two hours’ homework and at eight supped off a roast, an entrée and salad. After supper he had his second hour’s recreation. Evening prayers were followed by lights out at ten. On Thursdays and Sundays he went to High Mass and Vespers. He was expected to go to Confession once a month, and to Communion once every two months. He had six weeks’ annual holiday between 15 September and 1 November: only rich pupils could afford to go home and Napoleon was not one of them. In winter the cubicles became very cold and sometimes water in the jugs froze. The first time this happened Napoleon’s puzzled exclamations caused much amusement: he had never before seen ice.
There were fifty boys at Brienne when Napoleon arrived but as he went up in the school numbers increased to a hundred. Most were his social superiors. Some boys had names famous in history, others had fathers or uncles who hunted with the King, mothers who attended Court balls. In Corsica he had been near the top socially; now he suddenly found himself near the bottom. Also, he was a state-subsidized boy, and although Louis XVI had stipulated that no distinction must be made, inevitably the fee-paying boys made the others feel it. Finally, he was the only Corsican. There were other boys from overseas, including at least two English boys, but Napoleon, with his Italian accent, inevitably stood out, and for a new boy that does not pay. Alone in a strange country, far from his family, speaking a new language, still feeling awkward in his blue uniform, he certainly needed the courage his mother had wished him. But at nine, boys are adaptable and soon he had settled in.
We have three authentic incidents from the Brienne years. The first is an early one, when Napoleon was nine or ten. He had broken some rule and the master on duty imposed the usual punishment: he was to wear dunce’s clothes and to eat his dinner kneeling down by the refectory door. With everyone watching, Napoleon came in, dressed no longer in his blue uniform but in coarse brown homespun. He was pale, tense and staring straight ahead. ‘Down on your knees, sir!’ At the seminarist’s command Napoleon was seized by sudden vomiting and a violent attack of nerves. Stamping his foot, he shouted, ‘I’ll eat my dinner standing up, not on my knees. In my family we kneel only to God.’ The seminarist tried to force him, but Napoleon rolled over on the floor sobbing and shouting, ‘Isn’t that true, Maman? Only to God! Only to God!’ Finally the Head-master intervened and cancelled the punishment.
On another occasion the school was having a holiday. Some of the boys were performing a verse tragedy – Voltaire’s La Mort de César – and Napoleon, older now, was cadet-officer of the day, when another cadet came to warn him that the wife of the school porter, Madame Hauté, was trying to push her way in without an invitation. When stopped, she started shouting abuse. ‘Take the woman away,’ said Napoleon curtly, ‘she is bringing licentiousness into the camp.’
All the cadets were allotted a small piece of land on which they could grow vegetables and make a garden. Napoleon, with his farming background, took a lot of trouble planting his piece of land and keeping it neat. Since his immediate neighbours were not interested in gardening he added their ground to his; he put up a trellis, planted bushes, and to keep the garden from being spoiled, enclosed it with a wooden palisade. Here he liked to read and think about home. One of the books he read there was Tasso’s epic of the Crusaders, Jerusalem Delivered, cantos from which the Corsican guerrillas used to sing, and another was Delille’s Jardins, one passage of which imprinted itself on his memory. ‘Potaveri,’ he recalled, ‘is taken from his native land, Tahiti; brought to Europe, he is given every attention and nothing is neglected in order to try to amuse him. But only one thing strikes him, and brings to his eyes tears of sorrow: a mulberry tree; he throws his arms round it and kisses it with a cry of joy: “Tree from my homeland, tree from my homeland!”’
The garden which reminded him of home became Napoleon’s retreat on holidays. If anyone poked a nose in then, Napoleon would chase him out. On 25 August, the feast of St Louis, which was celebrated as the King’s official birthday, every cadet over fourteen was allowed to buy gunpowder and make fireworks. In the garden next to Napoleon’s a group of cadets built a set-piece in the form of a pyramid, but when the time came to light it, a spark shot into a box of gunpowder, there was a terrific explosion, Napoleon’s palisade was smashed and the boys in their alarm stampeded into his garden. Furious at seeing his trellis broken and his bushes trampled down, Napoleon seized a hoe, rushed at the intruders and drove them out.
These three episodes were doubtless remembered because they show a small serious-minded boy standing up for his rights, or asserting himself, to an unusual degree. But they were exceptional occasions, and it must not be thought that Napoleon was stern or rebellious or a poor mixer. The contrary is true. When the Chevalier de Kéralio, inspector of military schools, visited Brienne in 1783 he had this to say of fourteen-year-old Napoleon: ‘obedient, affable, straightforward, grateful’.
Napoleon made two school-friends. One was a scholarship boy a year his senior: Charles Le Lieur de Ville-sur-Arce, who like Napoleon was good at mathematics, and stood up for the Corsican when he was teased. The other was Pierre François Laugier de Bellecour, son of Baron de Laugier. He was a fee-paying boy with a pretty face. Born, aptly enough, in Nancy, he began to show signs of becoming a nancy-boy or, to use Brienne slang, a ‘nymph’. Pierre François was in the class below Napoleon, who, noting these signs, one day took him aside. ‘You’re mixing with a crowd I don’t approve of. Your new friends are corrupting you. So make a choice between them and me.’ ‘I haven’t changed,’ replied Pierre François, ‘and I consider you my best friend.’ Napoleon was satisfied and the two continued on good terms.
Napoleon made two grown-up friends. One was the porter, the husband of the thrusting Madame Hauté, the other the curé of Brienne, Père Charles. He prepared Napoleon for his first Communion at the age of eleven, and the cure’s simple, holy life made a lasting impression on him.
More important than these friendships were the values Napoleon imbibed. They were emphatically not the values of Paris. The scoffers and sneerers of Paris drawing-rooms, Beaumarchais, Holbach and the rest, if they were known at all, counted for little at Brienne. Tucked away in the depths of the country, it belonged to an older, less superficial France, which had never played shepherds and shepherdesses at the Trianon, never accompanied Watteau on the voyage to Cythera. The purpose of Brienne, according to its founder, War Minister Saint-Germain, was to fashion an élite within a framework of heroism. Cadets should have ‘a great zeal to serve the King, not in order to make a successful career, but in order to fulfil a duty imposed by the law of nature and the law of God.’ The whole emphasis of the teaching was on military service to the King, as the embodiment of France, and on the greatness of his kingdom.
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.
