consciously in 'civilized' society. This is not so very strange when we
consider the backward and primitive nature of eighteenth-century
Corsican life, where even the everyday sights, smells and sounds were
primordial. Contemporary accounts speak of the streets of Ajaccio as
suffused with the stench of animals slaughtered outside butchers' shops
and the animal hides stretched out to tan in the sun. The noisome foetor
in the streets was exacerbated by the clouds of flies, the stifling summer
climate, and the acute shortage of water. There are grounds for believing
that Napoleon's later addiction to lying in hot baths was compensation for
a childhood marked by water shortage.
The other quintessentially primitive aspect of Corsica, noted by all
travellers and visitors to the island, was the vendetta. The tradition of
blood vengeance was handed down to the seventh generation, and a girl
had the number of her cousins reckoned as part of her dowry so that
wrongs done to the clan would never be forgotten; the males in the clan
refused to shave and went about bearded until the affront to the family
honour was avenged. It was this aspect of the Corsicans that ancien regime
statesmen like the due de Choiseul particularly hated. Rousseau, Boswell
and other admirers might praise the Corsicans as shrewd, verbose,
voluble, highly intelligent and as interested in politics as the inhabitants
of an ancient Greek city-state. But against this, said the critics, was the
fact that the Corsicans were also proud, prickly, arrogant, vindictive,
unforgiving, implacable, vengeful and alarmingly quick to take offence or
construe words and actions as insults.
The institution of vendetta knew no boundaries of class or status, only
of family and clan. Napoleon himself clearly surmounted the tradition
of vendetta, as he always killed his enemies for reasons of state not out of
personal grievance; indeed he can be faulted for being absurdly tolerant of
inveterate personal enemies. His enemies in Corsica, however, did not
have his forbearance: the rival family of Pozzo di Borgo pursued the
Buonapartes with vendetta to Napoleon's grave and beyond. They
intrigued with his enemies, manipulated Czar Alexander and were among
the first to suggest St Helena as a place of exile. Only after the fall of
Louis-Napoleon in 1870 and the death of the Prince Imperial in the Zulu
War of 1879 did the Pozzo di Borgos relax and build the castle of
LaPunta as a monument to their final victory.
Far more important than the influence of Corsica on Napoleon was the
impact of his family. It is quite clear from his later career, as indeed from
the tenuous record of his first nine years, that Napoleon was obsessed by
rivalry with Joseph and yearned to supplant him. The later political
history of Napoleon the emperor is sometimes inexplicable without taking
marcin
(Marcin)
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