68 The Transition to Dictatorship
23.1: The Transition to Dictatorship
23.1.1: Napoleon’s Upbringing
Napoleon came from a noble and moderately affluent Corsican family, which afforded him opportunities to gain quality education and marked his youth with commitment to Corsican nationalism.
Learning Objective
Summarize Napoleon’s childhood and the effects it had on him
Key Points
- Napoleon was born in 1769 to Carlo Maria di Buonaparte and Maria Letizia Ramolino, in his family’s ancestral home Casa Buonaparte in Ajaccio, the capital of the island of Corsica. This was a year after the island was transferred to France by the Republic of Genoa. The Corsican origins and Corsica’s history would play a very important role in Napoleon’s upbringing and shape his first political fascinations and activism. His first language was Corsican and he always spoke French with a marked Corsican accent.
- Napoleon’s father Nobile Carlo Buonaparte, an attorney, was named Corsica’s representative to the court of Louis XVI in 1777. The dominant influence of Napoleon’s childhood was his mother, Letizia Ramolino, whose firm discipline restrained a rambunctious child. Napoleon was piously raised as a Catholic but never developed much faith.
- Napoleon’s noble, moderately affluent background afforded him greater opportunities to study than available to a typical Corsican of the time. In 1779, he was enrolled at a religious school in Autun but the same year, he was admitted to a military academy at Brienne-le-Château.On completion of his studies at Brienne in 1784, Napoleon was admitted to the elite École Militaire in Paris.
- Upon graduating in 1785, Bonaparte was commissioned a second lieutenant in La Fère artillery regiment. He served in Valence and Auxonne until after the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, and took nearly two years’ leave in Corsica and Paris during this period. At this time, he was a fervent Corsican nationalist.
- He returned to Corsica and came into conflict with Paoli, who had decided to split with France and sabotage the French assault on the Sardinian island of La Maddalena. Bonaparte and his family fled to the French mainland in 1793 because of the split with Paoli.
- Historians emphasize the strength of the ambition that took Napoleon from an obscure village in Corsica to command of most of Europe. He was famously not very tall and thus not a physically imposing man, but his personality was described as “hypnotic.” Napoleon maintained strict, efficient work habits, prioritizing what needed to be done.
Key Terms
- deist
- An advocate of a theological/philosophical position that combines the rejection of revelation and authority as a source of religious knowledge with the conclusion that reason and observation of the natural world are sufficient to determine the existence of a single creator of the universe.
- Corsica
- An island in the Mediterranean Sea and one of the 18 regions of France. It is located west of the Italian Peninsula, southeast of