1786--<)1. What becomes clear is that Napoleon wrote under a dual
stimulus: he was still a fanatical Corsican nationalist and partisan of Paoli
whom he worshipped only just this side of idolatry; and he took his
immediate inspiration from his undisciplined and eclectic reading.
The 1786 composition Sur le Suicide reveals a mixture of Napoleon as
fervent Paolista and young Werther. It evinces a hatred of France and his
immediate physical surroundings, a barely suppressed eroticism and a
ruthless desire for pleasures either forbidden or unaffordable, a thirst for
fame and, as ever with the young Napoleon, the gallery touch. Napoleon
so far seemed to have derived from his reading of the classical authors
only the tawdry tricks of fustian rhetoric, as in the following:
'Frenchmen! Not content with bereaving us of all we cherish, you have,
besides, corrupted our morals.'
His next significant composition was Sur !'Amour de Ia Patrie, written
in Paris in 1787. The basic notion of love of a fatherland is illustrated
entirely from antiquity or the history of Corsica, and France features
merely as the personification of hubris or overweening ambition. But the
most significant thing about this essay is that it was composed just five
days after he lost his virginity to the Breton prostitute in the Palais Royal.
Napoleon's guilt about sexuality is evident, for he pitches into modern
woman and suggests that the female sex should emulate the women of
Sparta. 'You, who now chain men's hearts to your chariot wheels, that
sex whose whole merit is contained in a glittering exterior, reflect here
upon your triumph [i.e. in Sparta] and blush at what you no longer are.'
This essay is a priceless clue to Napoleon's inner psychic development. In
thrall to a 'mother complex', Napoleon clearly found the encounter with
the prostitute traumatic, as it threatened his ties to Letizia. At the
unconscious level, therefore, the Spartan matron content to see her dead
son brought home on a shield is conflated with the idealized picture of the
'Spartan' Letizia carrying Napoleon in the womb while fleeing in the
maquis.
Usually, however, the spur for Napoleon's writings lay nearer the
surface, in the books he had just devoured. His taste in reading was
catholic, embracing a historical novel about Alcibiades, the back-to
nature novel La Chaumiere Indienne by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, a
popular psychology book The Art of Judging Character from Men's Faces
by Jean Gaspard Lavater, Buffon's Histoire Naturelle, Marigny's History
of the Arabs, Voltaire's Essai sur les M11?urs, Rollin's Ancient History,
Lavaux's biography of Frederick the Great, Plato, Machiavelli and Coxe
on Switzerland. The famous example of dramatic irony, which all
biographers comment on, occurred when he was perusing the Abbe de Ia
marcin
(Marcin)
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