tasted real power. He entered the Army shockingly ill-prepared for
military life, at least by modern standards. Knowing nothing of the real
conditions he might encounter on a battlefield, and still less of Army
regulations, he was rather like the nineteenth-century English gentleman
with a classical education sent out to administer India; he was to learn the
craft of soldiering on the job. Cynics have claimed that the Ecole Royale
Militaire was little more than a finishing school, but that even so it left
Napoleon as much of a primitive savage as when he entered it.
If the military schools at Brienne and Paris had been designed to
promote social inequality, as was claimed, they failed miserably with
Napoleon. The experience of being a poor boy among rich cadets
embittered him and left him cynical. If the idea of racial and cultural
equality had been taken seriously at Brienne, he would not have been
bullied for his Corsican origins. At the Ecole Royale in Paris the official
lip service paid to equality between the eighty-three paying students and
the 132 scholarship boys simply resulted in a kind of crude 'levelling up'
where the poor were trapped by peer pressure into living beyond their
means. Napoleon grew to hate aristocrats whose only 'virtue' was that
they had been born in the right bedroom. He referred to them as 'the
curse of the nation ... imbeciles ... hereditary asses', and his hatred was
compounded by the aristocratic contempt for those of lesser breeding,
even if they were a hundred times more talented. Actually, in the context
of the ancien regime, Napoleon was luckier than he knew for the artillery,
to be entered only by those of great mathematical talent, was the only
branch of the Army where a career genuinely was open to talent.
It may be that contempt for an organized religion that could condone
blatant injustices contrary to its own official teachings was what finished
Catholicism for Napoleon. Certainly by the time he left Brienne he had
lost his faith, though still obliged to make public obeisance to its forms.
Napoleon's later explanation for his alienation from the Church was
threefold. First there was the hypocritical force-feeding of rote-learned
religious doctrine at Brienne, often inculcated by monks, like the Bertons,
whose own credentials as believers were open to doubt. Then there was
his reading of Rousseau, who believed in a civil religion that was the
ideology of the State, and loathed Catholicism for forming a middle layer
between the citizen and society. Additionally, Rousseau, like Machiavelli,
believed in the old civic virtue of Ancient Rome and Sparta, and in line
with this theory believed Christianity turned out effete, emasculated
soldiers and citizens. Finally, Napoleon's love of the ancient world was
affronted by the bigotry of the monks at Brienne who taught that the
classical authors, for all the brilliance and elegance of their writings, were
marcin
(Marcin)
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