Napoleon: A Biography

give myself up to all the force of my melancholy. What madness makes me desire my own destruction? Without doubt, the problem of ...

and significant both because it was heavily influenced by Rousseau and because Laclos, like Napoleon, was an artilleryman. The e ...

The most significant event in the eighteen-year-old Napoleon's so­ journ in Paris was that he lost his virginity. On the freezin ...

overwork and the cold and damp climate triggered physical exhaustion, which made his body prey to malaria. His only real friends ...

Napoleon into an artilleryman nonpareil. The one obstacle to rapid promotion under du Teil's benevolent eye was the nineteen-yea ...

of the La Fere regiment stood idly by and, a little later, caught the spirit of mutiny themselves. They marched to du Teil's hou ...

1790 Saliceti was instrumental in getting the Assembly to grant an amnesty to Paoli and invite him to return to the island. This ...

Napoleon advocated stern measures against the island's reactionaries; hounding them from office Napoleon justified under the for ...

new regime, the Assembly abolished the names of regiments, which were henceforth to be designated only by numbers. The La Fere b ...

programmes gave way to visits, to Grenoble, Tain, Tournu. One of his excursions had more point, for he visited General du Teil a ...

1786--<)1. What becomes clear is that Napoleon wrote under a dual stimulus: he was still a fanatical Corsican nationalist and ...

Croix's Geographie and wrote in his notebook 'St Helena, small island'. He was at one time totally absorbed in John Barrow's His ...

offered a prize of 1,2 00 livres (a year's salary) for an essay answering the question: 'What are the most important truths and ...

my blood, they are written in my sinews, my heart; indispensable to my existence and, above all, to my happiness.' Coursing thro ...

The tacking between contradictory polarities also explains Napoleon's ambiguous political persona. He was deeply committed to th ...

likely that Napoleon's sexual difficulties lay along quite other lines, which involved the island of his birth. The key psycholo ...

CHAPTER FOUR By the time Archdeacon Lucien died, leaving the Bonaparte family comfortably off, Napoleon's ambitions had moved on ...

independent and separate Corsica. Paoli, at first the champion of the Revolution against the old regime, increasingly emerged as ...

accept. What is certain is that Napoleon added intimidation to the bribery he had already employed. Three commissioners had been ...

town with four companies of republican volunteers, in full knowledge of the hatred that existed between the pious, royalist town ...