This content chronicles the early life and rise to power of Napoleon Bonaparte, detailing his Corsican origins, formative experiences in French military schools, and the pivotal events that propelled him to leadership during the French Revolution.
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On August Fifteenth, seventeen, sixty nine at noon,
at the height of summer in Ajaxo, in Corsica,
screams could be heard. Coming from the Buonaparte family household,
Leticia,
assisted by her husband Carlo,
gave birth on the living-room floor to her second son, Napoleone Buonaparte,
Ajaxio. It is in this quiet town, nestled at the back of one of the most beautiful bays of the Mediterranean,
that little Napoleon grew up, the future emperor of the French Napoleon I.
Ajaxio was a very small town with 3,000 inhabitants in the 18th century,
barely more than a village.
It was a small town that lived off fishing,
coral fishing,
and was like a small Naples.
Napoleone grew up in a well-respected family in Ajaxio.
Carlo Buonaparte,
his father,
came from the minor Aristocracy of the Genoa region in Italy.
The Buenapartes had been in Corsica for three centuries.
Genoese families were like Corsica's pieds noirs.
The Buenapartes held rather important functions in the town.
There was always a buenaparte on the municipal council in the
17th and
18th centuries.
The Buenapartes were a clan,
as they say in Corsica.
A powerful land-owning family who could afford the services and allegiance of the region's peasants.
The family had a very powerful social network.
Property,
it had land on which they grew olives,
vineyards and fruit,
and bred animals.
This also meant a great clientele in the Roman sense,
meaning that many people worked for them.
They were practically a small army,
if needs be.
Napoleon's mother,
the beautiful Laetitia,
ruled over the Buenaparte household, filled with grandmothers,
aunts,
nurses,
who helped her bring up her numerous children.
Laetitia had 12 children.
12!
She was a wonderful figure of a woman in the history of France.
The remarkable woman at the head of this family.
Had to handle everyday life.
Twelve children,
of whom eight survived.
Five boys and three girls.
You can imagine this house in the tiny streets of Ajaccio,
under a blazing sun,
with this string full of children.
It must have been fun.
At the same time,
they were left to their own devices.
Among the gang of children in the neighborhood,
Napoleone was the most boisterous.
Everyone nicknamed him Ribiglione,
the troublemaker.
He must have been a very unruly child and very self-willed.
I don't know whether he was temperamental,
but anyhow,
he wanted to impose his way of seeing things to the entire family.
Apparently, he used to beat his brother up and terrorized him from a very young age.
In the flower of tender childhood,
Joseph,
who was older than him,
lived under Napoleon's thumb.
A dominator with all his family,
Napoleone identified himself from very early on to masculine and virile figures.
Every evening,
when the drums could be heard,
he ran towards the Giacso's citadel,
which was a stone's throw away from the family home.
There,
the fascinated six-year-old boy watched his favorite show,
The Changing of the Guard.
Young Napoleon saw military men file through the citadel.
And was fascinated by the beautiful, sparkling uniforms,
by the drums that moved him.
All his life, he would be moved by drumming.
He stood in the middle and loved to march with them.
He wanted to taste the soldiers'
bread and found it very tasty.
He was interested in the army from a very early age.
Napoléon dreamed of becoming one of those handsome soldiers.
He drew them ready for battle.
On his bedroom walls.
He also started to eat their bread,
stale bread,
to get used to his future job.
He identified with what he saw from a very early age,
the French military occupying Corsica.
French soldiers that Napoleone admired so much were the new masters of Corsica,
an occupying army.
When he was seven years old,
Napoleone did not know that. The arrival of these soldiers, the year he was born, deeply disrupted the history of his family.
Everything happened seven years beforehand, in 1769,
the year Napoleone was born.
The Kingdom of France bought Corsica off the small republic of Genoa,
unable to manage the rebellious island.
This was unacceptable for the great patriot Pasquale Paoli,
who called all Corsicans to resist the new invader.
Determined to take the island by force,
the French soldiers faced Pasquale Paoli's troops in the battle of Ponte Nuovo on May 8,
1769,
three months before Napoleon's birth.
Carlo Buonaparte was one of the Corsican patriots fighting against the French in Ponte Nuovo.
A valiant warrior,
he was even one of Pasquale Paoli's lieutenants.
But the separatist troops were crushed, and the French officially took possession of Corsica in the name of French King Louis XV.
Pasquale Paoli went in exile in England to continue the fight.
But Carlo Buonaparte took a surprising decision.
He decided to stay in Corsica and join the French.
He understood that by collaborating with the new occupier,
he could get many advantages for his clan.
Carlo became Charles.
Charles was a man who placed all his ambition on the French.
In his house,
for his land,
for his family.
His family's success came first,
and success meant wealth and power.
In 1776,
Napoleone was seven years old.
Seeing his obvious predisposition for the army,
Charles decided to give him a soldier's career in the French army.
Charles Bonaparte thought,
I'm going to make the most of my skills and negotiate with the French.
What was this negotiation?
If you come on our side,
you accept to put your skills to serve the French governing of Corsica,
in exchange,
we will integrate you in our system.
Charles Bonaparte was a great negotiator.
In exchange of his clan's allegiance to the Kingdom of France,
his Nobility title was officially recognized,
the indispensable key that would enable him to ensure his children's ascent in French monarchy.
On May 10,
1779,
Charles de Buenaparte,
the representative of Corsican nobility,
went to Versailles to present King Louis XVI himself, with an homage from the island of Corsica.
A consecration for the little Nobleman, who obtained,
after this visit,
a royal scholarship grant for his two eldest son,
Joseph and Napoleon.
Thanks to his father's obstinacy,
Napoleon,
at only nine years old,
left his family and his island for France,
the Great kingdom,
which would make him a great soldier,
so he thought.
But left
to fend for himself and subject it to the iron discipline of French military schools,
Young Napoleon experienced terrific uprooting.
Napoleon left for champagne in the northeast of France.
There,
nothing looked like Corsica.
Going from Ajaccio to Brienne in Champagne was like changing worlds.
It was almost like changing planets in those days.
Nothing could have given him an idea of neither the scenery in champagne nor the climate.
So,
his first feeling was one of total disorientation.
He was torn away from his family,
from his mother.
Nine years old is very young,
he was still a small boy.
Whether you're a buona parte or not,
being torn away is always painful.
On May 15, 1779,
Napoleon joined the military school in Brienne,
near the city of Troyes.
For five years,
the young Corsican scholarship holder would rub shoulders with the sons of French nobility destined for army careers.
In Brienne,
he discovered a new world in which he had to make his place.
There was a social class problem,
which he must have felt for the first time.
Some young officer students belonged to very important French families and came with the arrogance that went with their social status.
He was confronted with this real French nobility,
to people who had titles dating back to the middle Ages,
and who mocked this
Napoleone Buonaparte,
who spoke French very incorrectly.
Correct this young man who had a first name. No one had ever heard of Napoleone
if he didn't speak French very well,
it was the subject of mocking.
Napoleone becomes la païonie.
They mocked his accent.
They made him understand that he would never be a true nobleman.
He would remain a foreigner,
a Corsican with an unpronounceable name.
Napoleon,
son of a very important Corsican family,
suddenly understood that in France he was no one.
These events build character.
This feeling of humiliation,
isolation,
the feeling that he would build himself against them to prove something.
I'm going to show them.
I will be the most hardworking,
I will get the best grades.
To avoid giving in to melancholy,
the young, uprooted Napoleone threw himself into studying.
He may have been mediocre in French and foreign languages,
he was very gifted in geography and mathematics. His quick mind solved the most complicated geometry problems. However, young Napoleon was extremely solitary.
He did not take part in rubriques and school kid tracts that are part of everyday life at school.
When class was over,
he went to the library,
which was very well stocked,
and he read like he would all his life,
everything in the most disorderly way.
literature,
geography,
Eastern history,
ancient history,
In his readings,
Napoleon found the models he would identify with all his life.
He was, like all the people of his generation,
fascinated and dominated by the greats,
Alexander the Great,
Julius Caesar.
The stories of these great military exploits were a revelation.
They all shared the love of glory.
Not glory like celebrity,
but glory in the sense it was given in the
18th century.
Meaning conquering glory,
as in living in people's minds forever and around the world.
Placing one's name higher than anything else,
writing it in history.
He was obsessed by this passion.
From then on, he imagined another future,
a future in war,
a future of conquest,
a future as head of state,
although he was still very young.
Like the greats,
Napoleon also dreamed of knowing glory.
And he would get a taste of it one day of the winter of 1783.
That morning,
the pupils found the schoolyard covered in snow.
Naturally,
the pupils got organized in two groups and attacked one another.
Napoleon was 14 years old.
He took the lead of one of the groups,
devised attack strategies,
launched ambitious maneuvers under the encouragement of teachers and neighbors.
That was when the leader was revealed.
And his fellow pupils acknowledged him,
which was important for him.
It was the first time his fellow pupils recognized him.
And that would stay.
It made a mark on him.
He realized that by his strategic prowess,
he could be the leader and the first.
Naturally authoritarian and cold-blooded,
Napoleon discovered he had all the qualities to command.
So,
in August 1784,
aged 15,
Napoleon left Brienne and joined Paris'
prestigious military school, where he mingled with the elite of the king's army,
the officers.
He was in Paris for the first time and discovered what an extraordinary city it was,
a town he could not have fathomed.
It probably had one million inhabitants,
a very big town.
But only a few months after he arrived in Paris,
Napoleon learned of his father, Charles Soudendere.
Despite being 15 years old,
Napoleon took on the role of new Bonaparte clan leader.
To provide for his family,
he had to take the school entrance exam as fast as possible,
become officer and get his first pay.
The military school was a great institution for Royal France of that time.
Over a very short period of time,
he would try to do what others did in three years.
Napoleon succeeded.
After seven months of relentless work,
at only 16 years old,
he successfully passed the military school exam,
an exploit that impressed one of his teachers.
A Corsican by nation and character,
this young man will go far if circumstances allow it.
He didn't finish in a great position.
He was among the 40th,
which isn't brilliant.
But when you do it in three times less time than the others,
it means something.
The officer student finished his training period in a rather brilliant way and
left to take on his first job in Valence.
Napoleon was proud.
He now wore the lieutenant uniform of King Louis XVI's army,
but he would soon become disillusioned because French monarchy would not let him satisfy his dreams of glory.
In his regiment in Valence,
Napoleon was terribly disappointed by the routine of Garrison life,
its chores,
and endless guard rounds.
But above all,
he realized that he had no career perspective.
The government took measures that limited the access to high grades,
to noblemen who could prove their nobility was ancient,
which was not his case.
Because he came from minor nobility,
Napoleon could never go above the rank of warrant officer,
very insufficient to satisfy his huge ambition.
He was absolutely convinced that there was no other possible future in France for him,
and sensing the capacities he had,
he looked for another place to shine,
a place to live and experience something and have a destiny.
You must also bear in mind the ideas that started to go around at the time.
It was the age of enlightenment,
ideas of equality,
ideas of rejecting privileges.
So obviously, when you put all of that together,
it made an explosive mixture in Napoleon's hair. Napoleon was seventeen. He had been cut off from Corsica and his family since he was nine and was inevitably caught up by homesickness. This
France was not for him, and he was convinced of that
it was in Corsica,
his homeland,
that he must write his destiny.
For Bonaparte,
it could not have been easy to take responsibility for the choices his father had made.
Because he saw himself as the most Corsican of Corsicans,
Bonaparte's hero in his youth was Paoli.
Napoleon dreamed of himself as the new liberator of Corsica.
What will we, unfortunate Corsicans become?
Will we continue to kiss the insolent hand that oppresses us?
He started to dream of becoming the new Paoli and ripping Corsica out of French domination's clutches,
the domination of a king to whom he had simultaneously taken an oath.
Corsica or
France?
Napoleon must choose.
And quickly.
On July 14,
1789,
Parisian crowds attacked the Bastille prison.
It was the beginning of the French Revolution,
an earthquake,
a political chaos that would shake up France for ten years,
in which young Napoleon would use skillfully to build his own destiny.
But on that day.
Young Napoleon XIX is far.
He's in his garrison near Valence and has no part in the events.
In 1789,
when the French revolution began,
Napoleon had only one idea,
one obsession,
Corsica.
So he completely missed the event that would provide him a future.
Napoleon learned that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen
announced by the Revolutionaries abolished nobility's privileges and installed equality in all citizens rights. The decree that stalled his career no longer existed. Napoleon could apply for the highest ranks in the army. But his Corsican dream was stronger than everything else It
was time for him to free his country, Corsica. An insane project with consequences he did not measure. In September, seventeen, eighty, nine, eight, twenty,
Napoleon returned to bustling Corsica.
Making the most of revolutionary agitation,
the independentist leader, Pascal Pauli, returned to seize power on the island.
Dazzled,
Napoleon met his childhood hero for the first time.
He naively suggested becoming his right-hand man,
like his father, Charles had been before joining the French.
Pauli had this type of Corsican virtue by which you never forget affronts.
So in his eyes,
Charles'
sons would be like Pauli, called them,
Charles'
sons.
They carried their father's mistakes forever.
Meaning that, despite all of Napoleon and Joseph's efforts,
Pauli would never accept them.
Charles'
unforgivable fault condemned the entire Bonaparte clan to flee Corsica to evade Pauli's revenge.
Thus ended three centuries of Corsican history for the Bonaparte family.
This wrenching from the motherland was incredibly brutal for Napoleon.
The fact that Napoleon then was something very serious psychologically,
he had to rule out this very deep-rooted Corsican identity,
this franul,
political and sentimental attachment.
In a way,
he had to cut his own arm off.
It was as if he tore out a part of himself.
Something emotional was sacrificed.
Napoleon dreamed of himself as the great liberator of Corsica,
but this political ideal was lost forever.
With his dream shattered,
he became a melancholic and disillusioned being.
From then on,
he observed the political passions stirring France with a foreigner's detached viewpoint.
Onwards,
he only got involved in places where he had been a political leader.
Where there were opportunities to make his career move forward.
Napoleon was 23 years old.
In 1793,
it was chaos in France.
Maximilien Robespierre had the power.
He had launched a revolutionary terror policy against all his political enemies.
The republic was proclaimed,
and to avoid any return to monarchy,
King Louis XVI was beheaded in public.
Europe is afraid.
Here is how English caricature artists
portrayed the French revolutionaries.
To end the young republic who cuts King's heads off,
Europe's rulers imposed a war that would last twenty years.
The country needed to be saved.
To defend itself,
the French Republic called a new generation of talented, young officers to command its armies.
War is an accelerator of history,
and Napoleon Bonaparte made the most of this exceptional moment that set the path for an entire new generation.
He was well positioned,
he was the right man at the right time.
Napoleon was re-engaged at 24 years old with a great promotion.
Artillery commander,
he was sent to Toulon to defend the town, besieged by the British fleet.
There,
Napoleon showed a real gift for war.
A gift that fascinated his entourage.
In Toulon,
he discovered war and immediately proved his quasi-unlimited aptitude for it,
as if he was born for it,
although he'd never known it,
as if he didn't need a learning or experimentation period.
He was ready for anything, to maintain his ideas of glory,
because he was a very,
very proud man.
And he was ready to die,
ready to face death.
death,
truly.
In battle,
Napoleon deployed astounding energy.
He seemed indifferent to the surrounding danger.
He had absolute physical courage.
He was not afraid of death,
and other people's death did not impress him either.
Napoleon was also an outstanding tactician.
Thanks to the millimetric use of his cannons,
he managed to push back the English fleet.
That was besieging Toulon,
a prowess that made him become brigade general.
In Toulon,
Napoleon impressed a certain Paul Barras.
He was a major politician,
a sworn enemy of Robespierre,
who was waiting for his time to take the lead of the revolution.
Barras saw the young general's extraordinary abilities,
and also,
as always,
there was his self-interest.
He thought this general might come in handy one day.
By putting his military talent to Paul Barat's service,
Napoleon Bonaparte's career rocketed to the summit.
Paris,
July 28,
1794.
Six months after the victory in Toulon,
Robespierre was guillotined.
Barras wanted to cease power,
but needed an armed wing to counter a royalist scheme that wanted to bar his progress and reinstall monarchy in France.
The royalists considered putting the count of Provence on the throne,
the future Louis XVIII.
The threat was real.
He remembered the young General Bonaparte, who impressed him so in Toulon.
One night,
as Napoleon was watching a show at the Comédie Française,
Barras went to get him and made him a surprising proposal to help him save the republic against the Royalists.
Napoleon was 26.
Like a gambler,
he wondered which side to take.
Would he take the side of convention or Royalists?
Where would the fortune be?
On October 5th,
1795,
at 9 o'clock in the morning,
Napoleon chose to defend the Republic.
Take aim.
Fire!
And he never went back.
With 5,000 men and 40 cannons,
he repelled 25,000 royalist mutineers, threatening the republic's assembly.
Result?
300 dead.
When he got home in the early hours of the morning,
he immediately wrote to his brother Joseph,
writing this sentence. Which is one of the gamblers who attempted to win.
The dice rolled on the green mat,
and fortune is on my side.
An opportunistic choice.
Napoleon may have saved the Republic,
but above all, he saved Paul Barr's career.
As thanks,
Barrus made Napoleon one of the most important figure of his new power.
At age 26,
Napoleon was now somebody important.
He lived in Paris, in a very beautiful private mansion on the place Vendôme.
He was one of the protégés of the new powerful man of the Republic,
Paul Barras.
With his new feathered king's appearance,
he was at the head of the Directory,
a corrupt regime supported by a bourgeoisie that made its fortune during the Revolution.
General Bonaparte was their armed wing.
He was the most important general inside the territory.
He commanded Paris and its region.
That was where things happened.
An important position,
but his task was unrewarding.
He was in charge of subduing the hunger revolts that burst out in the working-class areas of the capital.
One part of the population was starving.
People committed suicide every night,
jumping into the Seine.
And next to that...
There was astounding luxury for the revolution's profit years.
Ping Baras,
as he was now called,
introduced his protégé to the salons, where Directory High Society had a good time.
Baras threw these incredible parties at the Luxembourg War in his property in Surenne,
near Paris,
where he had a chateau and entertained a lot.
Mad parties.
A release for these bourgeois,
delighted to have survived the revolutionary terror.
It was also a type of catharsis,
a release after the terror.
Everyone had been afraid,
so now they enjoyed life.
There was a thirst for pleasure and delight.
Women's fashion was magnificent.
Silk tulle dresses,
extremely see-through muslins.
They didn't even wear bras.
Women's nipples were erect,
and this was extremely tempting for the men.
The women here are the most beautiful in the world.
They are the great occupation and the real business.
The future's uncertainty means one does not spare on the pleasures of the present.
Although Napoleon took everything in,
nobody in the directory high Society paid any attention to this young,
shy,
awkward military man.
Napoleon was 5'5",
which was a normal height for a man at the time,
But his frail physique and juvenile paleness did not give away the high function he occupied.
Jean Bonaparte was like a guest,
a cousin from out of town who was tolerated in the very luxurious salons,
although he did not have a very luxurious or chic appearance.
He was not well-dressed,
not very tidy.
Straight hair,
a little greasy,
his little ponytail,
skinny.
He was not very attractive.
King Barras then introduced him to one of the queens of Parisian salons,
Josephine de Beauharnais,
an elegant widow with a soft Creole accent and languorous charm.
He was someone who immediately lit up a room she was in.
She was extremely well brought up.
You could have a conversation,
write letters.
He was from the best of circles.
This woman was charming,
a very beautiful woman,
with a slight ragging tone,
an accent from the islands,
something indolent and voluptuous.
She was one of Barras's mistresses,
and of other men, too.
But Napoleon did not know this,
and he was immediately fascinated by this woman with such refined manners.
It was love at first sight for him.
Because she was a great lady.
Plus,
she was a great lady of the old regime.
He saw in Josephine the aristocrat of the old regime that fascinated him.
Although Josephine was not part of the court,
she was closely connected to all the aristocratic world,
which was like a fantasy for Napoleon.
He felt elevated with her.
Wow,
he thought,
now this is a woman of the world.
He would visit her,
rue Chantereine,
in her hotel Particulier.
It wasn't luxurious,
it wasn't pretentious,
but it was a pretty little mansion.
Bonaparte saw this and thought he was dealing with a great lady.
In Josephine's expert hands,
Napoleon,
aged 26,
discovered physical love, of which he knew nothing.
She made him discover things about which he had no idea.
She introduced him to real pleasure.
Seven o'clock in the morning,
I wake up full of you.
Gentle and incomparable,
Josephine.
How you affect my heart.
Mio dolce amore.
Find thousands of kisses,
but don't give me any,
for they make my blood burn.
The way in which he fell in love with Josephine reminds us of what our modern psychologists call dependency.
He was addicted to his Josephine, in a way.
Overwhelmed by his devouring passion,
Napoleon,
after a few weeks,
asked the beautiful aristocrat to marry him.
It was out of the question for Josephine.
The young general was just another lover.
But for Paul Barraze,
this marriage project was the perfect opportunity to get rid of a troublesome mistress.
And that was why he schemed and put pressure on for her to resign herself to get married,
claiming it was time she settled down.
And she may as well settle down in a grandiose way.
Although Bonaparte was not much yet,
Bonaparte would become something great very soon.
On March 9,
1796,
Napoleon married Josephine.
The wedding ceremony was soon over.
The beautiful aristocrat was hardly conquered,
that Napoleon sped off towards another conquest.
What he desired above all else.
Glory.
At age 26,
and thanks to Paul Barr's intervention,
Napoleon was awarded the mission he had hoped for,
commanding an army.
Sixty thousand men under his command.
His mission?
To push back the Austrian and Piedmontese armies that threatened to invade France at the Italian border.
But Napoleon discovered that the army he was given was in a sorry state.
His men were under-equipped and malnourished.
It seemed impossible to accomplish his dreams of glory with such an army.
But the young officer's motivation was stronger than all else,
and he was determined to realize an exploit.
So he started to re-motivate his poor soldiers in rags.
Soldiers.
You are naked,
malnourished.
The government owes you.
I want to take you to the most fertile plains in the world.
You will find honor,
glory,
and wealth.
These formidable orations,
you will manage to win victories,
and when you return to France,
you will be welcomed like victors.
Napoleon motivated his soldiers.
Asking them to accomplish miracles and accept many sacrifices.
To fight a superior number and better equipped enemy,
he decided to transgress all the rules of war.
With Napoleon,
it was no longer a question of the art of war,
what they had known before with Louis XIV and Louis XV.
Napoleon broke away from traditional methods.
Bonaparte applied new techniques,
and his technique was shock.
He needed a shock as quick as possible.
He needed a battle.
Attack from the sides,
from the rear,
surrounding armies by bluff.
During 18 days,
Napoleon led his men in ultra-quick attacks that surprised the other side.
He went around them and beat them on a specific area and dispersed them, and went on to the next army and the next one.
It was very simple,
but no one had thought about it before him.
Napoleon wanted a spectacular victory.
It was the blitzkrieg ahead of its time.
For the Sardinian armies and Austrian armies,
it was something they really were not expecting.
In just a few weeks,
everything was atomized.
On May 10,
1796,
the French...
At one against two,
knocked down the Austrians on the Lodi Bridge.
A furious,
savage assault that cost the French soldiers 1,000 men.
Napoleon finally held his prestigious victory.
And two days later,
he entered Milan,
the capital of northern Italy.
He was 26 years old.
It was a triumphant entrance,
almost like a Roman emperor's,
especially since Milan's population was very pro-french at that time.
On this wit Sunday,
all of Milan's population was out to cheer for the Bonaparte phenomenon.
For the first time,
Napoleon would feel what he discovered in his readings at military school,
the powerful feeling that elevates one off the ground.
Glory.
At that moment,
he saw himself as part of history.
He said,
I felt swept up in the air,
and I saw the world flee below me.
The idea of being lifted off the earth by this triumphant entrance in Milan was the key event in his life.
It was almost an upheaval.
Napoleon Bonaparte now had glory.
Next,
he wanted power.
To seize power.
But how?
Napoleon is 28 years old.
On October 17,
1797,
he returns to Paris as a politician.
He gives Paul Barras,
the head of government,
the Treaty of Campo Formio,
which put an end to the war against Austria.
He negotiated a loan with the Austrians without consulting Paul Barras.
It was the impressive list of all his conquests.
Thanks to him,
the French Republic laid its hands on the duchy of Savoie,
the county of Nice,
northern Italy,
and also Belgium and the part of Germany that was left of the Rhine.
In all its history,
the French territory had never been this spread out.
Horbaras was frightened by the political dimension Napoleon now took on.
His little protégé had become the greatest threat to his power.
So,
to move him away,
he had an insane idea.
Sent him 5,000 kilometers away from France to seize Egypt from the sultan of Constantinople,
a trap that Napoleon would turn into a springboard towards power.
On July 1,
1798,
at the head of an expeditionary corps by 50,000 men,
Napoleon set foot in the Port of Alexandria to conquer Egypt,
on the land of the pharaohs.
Age 29,
Napoleon Bonaparte would write the best pages of his legend.
In Egypt,
he acquired an almost mythological stature because he marched in the footsteps of Alexander the Great.
Soldiers,
consider that from the top of these pyramids,
40 centuries are gazing at you.
At the Battle of the Pyramids,
in only two hours,
Napoleon, the conqueror, atomized the 20,000 Mamelukes of the Sultan of Constantinople.
The new master of Egypt also wanted to be the civilizer of Middle Eastern people.
Egypt, he was like a mighty king,
an Eastern king.
But facing a very hostile local population,
the civilizing mission of General Bonaparte would swing into extreme violence.
And it was in this violence that Napoleon found the strength and determination to later cease power in France.
At the beginning of 1799,
leading a detachment of 13,000 men,
Napoleon Bonaparte set off to conquer Palestine.
On March 7,
he took the town of Jaffa.
After 10 days of intense fighting.
In Egypt,
he learned the art of ruling.
In Jaffa,
he learned absolute violence.
In Jaffa,
Napoleon ordered a massacre of prisoners to subdue the population that resisted him.
Napoleon gave the order to Berthier to take everyone on the beach and execute all the prisoners.
Figures vary between two and four thousand.
He proved that he could make a mark on...
People's minds,
even with a massacre.
To save ammunition,
prisoners were killed with bladed weapons.
The bloodbath lasted three days.
And at the same time,
Napoleon went to Jaffa Hospital.
To relieve around 60 French soldiers suffering from the Bubonic plague.
One day he inflicted death,
and the next, he saved people by touching the pestiferous.
As such,
he acquired a type of inner strength that people did not know of before,
but that people would notice when he returned from the East.
There was something implacable in him that could be felt,
something hard. That was related to the fact that now they knew what he was capable of doing of this.
Extreme violence,
he could do anything.
There was no limit to what he could do.
Napoleon knew that it was time for him to go back to France.
News from Paris told him that the situation was disastrous for Paul Barras.
The war in Europe had started again,
and the lands Napoleon had conquered were lost one after the next,
notably Italy and the county of Nice.
Exhausted by years of revolutionary upheaval and disgusted by Paul Barra's corruption,
the French people demanded the return of their hero,
Bonaparte.
He knew France was facing a delicate situation.
He could sense she may be ready to give in.
He thought it was the right time to be the savior.
And so,
on August 23,
1799,
behind his men's backs,
he embarked for France,
alone.
At 29,
he felt ready to overturn the rascal,
as he now called Barras and his entourage.
He felt his time had come and that nothing could get in his way because he was convinced of his destiny at that point.
He risked a lot.
He abandoned his army.
That was punished by death under the revolution.
Napoleon took all the risks,
but he had flair.
One month later,
he was greeted in France like a godsend.
When Napoleon returned from Egypt,
he was cheered on from the moment he disembarked up to his arrival in Paris.
He was acclaimed,
people wrote poems,
etc.
His coming up from Egypt was his rise to power.
If Bonaparte had doubts about the possibility of taking power,
after Egypt,
he had none at all.
The problem was, he did not have the required age to take power legally in France.
Never mind,
he would cease it by force.
This was the coup of Eighteenth Brumaire. On November Ninth, Seventeen, Ninety Nine, Napoleon burst into the council of five hundred, where the Republic deputies seized. He
demanded power to defend the country, which he said was threatened of great danger.
He had no idea of what parliamentary life was and tried to speak to them.
Obviously,
he could not get a word in edgeways.
The deputies shouted,
outlaw,
outlaw.
Napoleon was about to fail his coup d'etat.
He went out to call the soldiers waiting for him outside and asked his right-hand man,
Murat,
to evacuate the room by force.
Then it was Long Live, Bonaparte and so on.
Napoleon shook off the cobwebs and asked General Murat to have the room evacuated.
And then
Murat said something which could have become historic.
He entered the room and shouted to the deputies,
Citizens,
you are dissolved.
What a wonderful phrase.
But he thought it wise to add,
throw this lot out of here.
And that ruined everything.
That day,
Napoleon Bonaparte,
the child of Ajaccio,
descendant of a Corsican family of Genoese origins,
seized power in France.
He was only 30 years old.
Napoleon Bonaparte seizing power,
it's like if a young man of Algerian descent suddenly took the power in France after a military coup.
Although he was the most popular military man of the country,
deep down,
Napoleon still felt like a foreigner,
an immigrant in this France he was about to govern.
And deep down,
he never really felt French.
He always felt like an outsider.
But that was his strength,
because,
by feeling outside,
he had the ability to understand the French very well,
and their passion.
And because he did not share their passion,
he had the ability to reconcile them.
That
would be his strength.
By taking power at the dawn of the
19th century,
Napoleon Bonaparte would write 15 years of France's history.
15 years, sometimes flamboyant,
sometimes tragic.
France would be transformed forever.
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