roasting in Hell because they were pagans. This idea seemed spectacu
larly absurd to the young Napoleon. We might add that although
Napoleon believed, along with the Catholic Church, in original sin, he
was a thoroughgoing pessimist about human nature and did not believe in
redemption in any form.
At this stage Rousseau was still the lodestone Napoleon steered by. It is
easy to see the appeal: Napoleon in his teens was also a fanatical Corsican
nationalist and Rousseau had praised Corsica as the one society in Europe
where true freedom and equality might emerge. The visionary view of
Corsica as a society where Spartan simplicity, civic virtue, equality and
austerity contrasted with the corruption of mainland France, almost as
though Rousseau's Social Contract had been given physical form, was
reinforced by his worship of Paoli, who by the later years in Brienne had
already displaced Carlo as father-figure. Napoleon's critics then and since
have argued that his Francophobia was deeply illogical, given that he was
drawing on French funds to obtain an education and had obtained the
place at Brienne solely because he was accepted as belonging to the French
nobility. One senior officer at the military school in Paris finally got a
bellyful of Paoli and Corsica and rounded on Napoleon sternly: 'Sir, you
are a King's cadet; you must remember this and moderate your love for
Corsica, which is after all part of France.'
Slighted for his low-grade Corsican nobility, regarded as a bore for his
island nationalism, Napoleon had further reason to believe, on the
evidence of his school years, that he was an Ishmael, with every man's
hand turned against him. He experienced severe difficulty in making
friends, was let down by most of those he did make, but on the other
hand seemed to make bitter enemies by the mere fact of his existence. At
Brienne he was taken up by Fauvelet de Bourrienne, who later painted an
idyllic picture of the two supposed friends bathing in the ice-cold waters
of the Aube. Bourrienne's Army career was a failure but in 1797
Napoleon appointed him as his secretary. His reward was to find that
Bourrienne cheated him at every opportunity. Bourrienne was a
fraudster, embezzler, defalcator and money launderer on a grand scale.
Napoleon treated him with great indulgence, but again received scant
recompense. Bourrienne's ghosted memoirs - a cynical moneymaking
exercise - were a work of blatant propaganda, still uncritically used by
Napoleon's critics as an authentic picture of the man.
Another Brienne schoolfriend was one of those who accompanied
Napoleon to the military school in Paris: Laugier de Bellecour, the son of
a baron. Laugier had flirted with the homosexual set at Brienne, but
Napoleon warned him that if he succumbed to their blandishments, that
marcin
(Marcin)
#1