Napoleon advocated stern measures against the island's reactionaries;
hounding them from office Napoleon justified under the formula salus
populi suprema lex. By the time of his departure in January 1791 he was
both founder member and leading light of the Ajaccio Jacobin Club and
was commissioned to write a philippic denouncing Paoli's enemy
Buttafuoco.
At the end of the month Napoleon left Corsica, taking with him his
twelve-year-old brother Louis, in order to ease the financial pressure on
his mother. After spending a few days in Valence, he arrived in Auxonne
on 11 February 1791. Technically he had overstayed his leave and was
therefore liable to lose pay since the end of October, but he brought with
him certificates from the municipal council at Ajaccio, stating that
repeated and sustained storms in the Mediterranean had made a sailing
impossible all that time. Colonel de Lance accepted this and put in a
request, rubber-stamped by the Ministry of War, that the back salary be
paid.
Napoleon's relations with Louis at Auxonne seem to have been largely
a rerun of the disastrous overlap with Lucien at Brienne in 1784. The
twelve-year-old slept on a mattress in a cabinet adjoining Napoleon's
room and was taken aback at his brother's poverty: here was just a single
room, poorly furnished, without curtains, a bed and two chairs and a
table in the window covered with books and papers, at which Napoleon
worked for fifteen to sixteen hours a day. Napoleon did his best to look
after the lad, cooking him meals, including a cheap but nourishing broth,
and teaching him a smattering of French, geography and mathematics.
But the two were ill-matched in temperament, sensibility and intellect,
and Louis was an ingrate. Napoleon wrote to Fesch that Louis had
acquired some social graces and was a favourite with women, who wanted
to mother him, but Louis himself hinted in a letter to Joseph that he
hated it at Auxonne and wanted to go home.
If Napoleon still retained his favour with du Teil and his regimental
colonel, he seems by his new-found Jacobin sympathies to have alienated
the largely royalist officers in the mess. After one particularly acrimoni
ous altercation a group of his brother officers tried to throw him in the
Saone; this was reported to the commanding officer, who did his best to
pour oil on troubled waters. Perhaps for this reason he was judiciously
'kicked upstairs' with a promotion to first lieutenant and a transfer at the
beginning of June to the 4th Artillery Regiment at Valence.
Another factor in Napoleon's transfer was the general reorganization of
artillery following a decree of the National Assembly in early 1791. To
break down the old allegiances and substitute 'rational' solidarity with the
marcin
(Marcin)
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