Napoleon Bonaparte: Pasquale Paoli's Path To Success

While speaking to his men, a young Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “A consecutive series of great actions never is the result of chance and luck, it is always the product of planning and genius. Great men are rarely known to fail in their most perilous enterprises…Is it because they are lucky that they become great? No, but being great, they have been able to master luck.” Napoleon Bonaparte was certainly a master of luck. With the French Revolution ending around 1795 and a still uncertain government with no real leader, by 1799 it gave a young Italian named Napoleone di Buonaparte an easy gateway to become France’s new dictator. For the next 16 years, 1799-1815, he made it his task to make himself conquer and emperor of the France. You could

say that Napoleon became, himself, a master of luck.
Napoleon’s luck did not begin with the French Revolution.

His path to success was laid out long before his was born. He was close friends with a man named Pasquale Paoli. Paoli proclaimed Corsica to be an independent state in 1755 and started a new kind a rebellion not familiar to the people of the island, Corsica having been back and forth between France and Genoese. He started a printing press and university in the capital. He decided he would lead them but teach them to run themselves. His new political and social rebuilding techniques were foreign the peasants of the time but they embraced it and called him Babbù, meaning father. The ideals that Paoli put into place during his time on the island fostered a young Napoleone in his own. The Genoese, from which Corsica was a part of, frowned upon the new republic and had France to back them up. In 1796, Genoa sold Corsica to the French. Napoleone di Buonaparte was born on Tuesday, August 15, 1769 to Carlo and Letizia Buonaparte on the island of Corsica off the coast of Italy. Just a few months before his birth, Hs father had sworn loyalty to the French King and became a French subject. Then on September 13, 1771, King Louis XV choose families from

Corsica as representatives in Court, the Buonaparte family was on the list. With Carlo Buonaparte gone for most of Napoleon’s childhood, he credits his mother Letizia, for the success of his many accomplishments. He says about her, “Her tenderness was severe…Here was the head of a man on the body of a woman.” It is said that of all the Bonaparte children, Napoleon was her favorite. He would tell people that, “She [Letizia] was on her way home from church when she felt labour pains and only had time to get into the house, when I was born, not on a bed, but on a heap of tapestry.” When it was time for schooling, Carlo wrote to his wife wishing for his two oldest boys to be educated in France, in April of 1779 Napoleon had enrolled into the Royal Military College in Brienne. Thus began his military career.
As said before, history was on Napoleon’s side.

Because Genoa had sold Corsica to France, it meant that the Bonaparte children could get scholarships and study there. Had this not happened, Napoleon probably would have attended a university in Italy, like his father and would go into business with very little room for advancement anywhere. While he excelled in his courses, Napoleon was not a very popular boy with his classmates. He was often made fun of because he did not learn to speak and write French until the age of ten and he spoke with a thick accent that he kept all his life. He would even say later in life about his schooling, “I lived separately from my schoolmates. I looked for a corner in the school garden and retired there to dream undisturbedly…I was not loved at school: it takes time to acquire people’s love…” In 1784, a 15 year old Napoleon entered France to begin his career as a cadet in the army. He wasa enrolled in the Ecole Royale Militaire (ERM). It has been said that the young Napoleon did not take well the new school. The students there were also of noble blood and as Napoleon would later say they were “infected”, imbeciles who hated all who were not ‘hereditary asses’ like themselves.” After final exams in 1785, He becomes the youngest, 16, and only Coriscan appointed as an officer, lieutenant of the artillery, as he tells his mother in a letter that he works almost nonstop. “I have no diversions here, except work. I wear the new uniform [that of

a lieutenant of artillery] but once week…I go to bed at ten and get up at four; I eat only once a day which is very beneficial to my health.” During this time he also struggled with his identity as a Corsican, he became frustrated in the fact that he knew was French but was annoyed that the French society was preventing his progress. It’s said that while at school, he called out “I shall do these French [noblemen] all the harm I can.” In that same year, Carlo, his father died of a stomach illness and left the Buonaparte family with deep financial trouble gained from his during his life and even after his death. This worried Napoleon to end. He tried to return home but he was not granted leave because his training had been finished. Instead he was reassigned to the La Fère regiment on Valence, France. He lived on his small 1,100 francs a year military alone and even tried to send money home to help his mother. This gave Napoleon the opportunity in 1786 to travel home after nearly eight years of absence. He had planned to stay only for a few months but then asked for an extended leave for the “recovery of his health”, which records show that he wasn’t sincerely ill, but he had provided his commanding officer with the proper medical documents. He stayed in Corsica for nearly a year. He would continue to make four more trips between the years 1786 and 1793.
Simultaneously, while Napoleon is moving up in the military and taking time to take care of his family, the young Napoleon, still only about 15-18 years old right now, is starting to create his own ideals and values. In 1786, he started to write a dissertation about how a military regime is better than a monarch saying “There are very few kings who would not deserve to be dethroned.” He was going to have it published but the current atmosphere at France was hostile and given the dissertation’s authoritarian view, publishing would get the author in trouble and he withdrew the paper. That same year, he wrote an essay defending the Corsicans right to the French occupation. He believed it was time to “shake off the yoke” of the French and become, yet again, her own nation. Luckily, this a writing he had written for himself and not to be published. If he had, the young French officer was playing with what could be considered treason.