cynical view is that he realized that there was no future in Corsica for an
ambitious young man, that Paoli had already snatched anything that was
valuable in the way of power and prestige, and that the 'glittering prizes'
were to be found only in France. The conventional view is simply that
both men backed different horses in the Corsican power struggle and
thus ended up as enemies; an additional factor was Paoli's personal dislike
of the young man. Another view is that when Napoleon became a Jacobin
he lost his faith in Rousseau and came to despise him. But it was
Rousseau's Social Contract that had inspired his original visionary view of
Corsica as a society of Spartan simplicity, civic virtu, social equality,
poverty and nobility of soul. Simultaneous with his loss of faith in
Rousseau, and possibly a contributory factor, was the extreme factional
ism and in-fighting in Corsica in the early 1790s, which Napoleon
witnessed at close quarters. As Masson put it: 'Just as France had made
him Corsican, so Corsica made him a Frenchman.'
Yet it seems unlikely that it was merely the contingent circumstances
during February-March 1793 that turned the Paolista Napoleon into
Paoli's enemy or that a negative attitude to the Bonapartes alone could
have turned off such an oil-gusher of adulation as that from Napoleon to
Paoli. The psychologist C.G. Jung has warned us that 'lightning
conversions' are seldom that and even coined the word 'enantiodromia' to
describe the process whereby Saul becomes Paul - not, on this view,
through seeing the light on the road to Damascus but because the
experience crystallized a process of gradually dawning illumination. If
Napoleon's violent breach with Paoli had in fact been brewing for years,
we may ask another question of more general import. Was Napoleon
simply boundlessly ambitious, in the way Brutus hinted Caesar was, and
was his ambition an irreducible and dominant psychological factor in his
makeup? Or was his ambition a more complex manifestation reducible to
other factors, which in turn might give us the clue to the deep dynamic of
the quarrel with Paoli?
The key may lie in two apparently insignificant remarks. To one of his
close friends Napoleon once confided that at some time in the Corsican
period he had surprised Paoli having intercourse with his (Napoleon's)
godmother. And in the anti-Paoli essay he wrote in July 1793 Le Souper
de Beaucaire he said that Paoli's greatest fault was that he had attacked the
fatherland with foreigners; by uniting Corsica to France in 1790 without
thinking through all the implications he had in fact lost any chance of an
independent Corsica. We may, then, reasonably infer that Napoleon was
deeply worried about three things: illicit sexual relations, the attempt to
fuse Corsica and France, and the idea of a fatherland invaded.
marcin
(Marcin)
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