Napoleon's Italian campaign

In October 1797 the Directory presented the Army of Italy with an inscribed flag. This recorded that, the Army had taken 150000 prisoners, 170 enemy standards, 540 cannon and howitzers, five pontoon trains, nine 64-gun ships of the line, twelve frigates, eighteen galleys.  The french army fought sixty-seven actions and triumphed in eighteen pitched battles like Montenotte, Millesimo, Mondovi, Lodi, Borghetto, Lonato, Castiglione, Rovereto, Bassano, St George, Fontana Viva, Caldiero, Arcola, Rivoli, La Favorita, Tagliamento, Tarnis and Neumarcht.  Napoleon's luck & military genius made him win so many battles.

When contact was made with hostile forces, Napoleon ordered the sordiers nearest to the enemy to pin him down. Meanwhile the rest of the army would be engaged in forced marches to fall on the enemy flanks and Perfect timing and coordination were necessary to achieve outright victory by this method, and tremendous courage and planning on the part of the 'pinning' soldiers, which was sure to take heavy losses. Napoleon arranged for his various soldier to arrive at the battle at different times. The enemy would find to his consternation that he was fighting more and more Frenchmen.Napoleon had to work out through the smoke of battle exactly when the enemy commander committed his final reserves. The commander of the enveloping force had to keep his troops like greyhounds on the leash, lest a premature attack betray their presence.  Napoleon was launching a frontal attack, or he could opt for retreat - supremely perilous in the teeth of attacking forces. Napoleon liked to launch his final frontal attack at the 'hinge' of the enemy's weakened front so as to cut his army in two.
Napoleon defeated overall superior numbers by gaining local numerical superiority. He would then concentrate his forces, crash through the hinge and interpose himself between two armies. Forced apart and thus, in technical language, operating on exterior lines, the enemy would be at a natural disadvantage. Having selected which enemy force he would deal with first, Napoleon deployed two-thirds of his forces against the chosen victim while the other third pinned the other enemy army, usually launching assaults that looked like the prelude to a full-scale attack. After defeating the first army.
 Napoleon would detach half his victorious host to deal with the second enemy army, while the rest of his victorious troops pursued the remnants of the vanquished force. There were two snags to this strategy. The obvious one was that, since Napoleon himself could not be in two places at once, it was likely that a less skilled general would botch the operation Bonaparte was not supervising personally. The other, more serious, problem was intrinsic to the strategy itself: because he needed to divert half his victorious force to deal with the second enemy army, he did not have the resources to follow up the vanquished foe and score a truly decisive victory. For this reason the 'central position' as a strategy.
From the Italian campaign evolved certain military principles that Napoleon never altered. These are the army's lines of communication must always be kept open; the army must have a clear primary objective with no secondary distractions; the enemy army, not his capital or fortified towns, must always be the objective; always attack, never remain on the defensive; always remember the importance of artillery so that ideally you go into battle with four big guns for every thousand men; the moral factor is to the material as three is to one. Above all, Napoleon emphasized the importance of concentration of force, speed and the factor of time, and the cardinal principle of outflanking. 

napoleon's marriage with josephine

Once he had decided to marry Josephine, Napoleon's first task was to get out of his engagement with Desiree. As soon as the thought of marriage entered his mind, he started distancing himself from Desiree. The ending of a letter to Joseph in November is eloquent: he merely sent his regards to Desiree, no longer referring to her as 'Eugenie'. Once his mind was definitely made up, in January 1796, he informed Desiree that unless she got the consent of her family immediately, they must end their engagement. This was Machiavellian, for he knew perfectly well that Madame Clary opposed the match on grounds of her daughter's youth and would withhold her consent while she was still a minor. The next Desiree knew was the announcement that her beloved was married.

Josephine needed a powerful protector and she needed money, and General Bonaparte proved to fit the bill under both circumstance. By this time, Barras was becoming tired of josephine and thought that an ingenious solution would be to get rid of her on to Napoleon, so that his two proteges would be bound to each other by sex and to him by gratitude. Yet it was Josephine who took the decision, and the deciding factor seems to have been her old lover Lazare Hoche.
Having defeated the Vendee rebels, Hoche returned to Paris to take over command of the projected invasion of Ireland - the one which came within an ace of success in 1796. Hoche stayed on in Paris,  regretting about his intemperate outburst to Josephine the year before. He did not mind sharing her with the powerful Barras. Josephine seems, would have been willing to take Hoche back. Josephine made a false move by telling Lazare she would use all her arts and influence to get him a top command. Hoche On 3 January 1796 Hoche left Paris.
Once it became clear that Josephine could never become Madame Barras, Josephine decided to marry  Napoleon. Josephine begged Barras not to tell Bonaparte the true situation. Josephine  felt she had a hold over Napoleon, which she never had over Barras, and only fleetingly with Hoche. On 7 February 1796 the marriage banns between Napoleon and Josephine were announced and on 9 March the wedding took place - but not before Napoleon had kept the bride waiting three hours. Barras, Tallien and her lawyer acted as the witnesses on Josephine's side, and an eighteen-year-old Army captain, Le Marois, played the role for Napoleon. Although Napoleon was twenty-six and Josephine rising thirty-three, they both declared themselves to be twenty-eight: according to the marriage certificate Josephine had been born in 1767 and Napoleon in 1768. The mayor was not present, possibly because of the wedding's extreme lateness, and the ceremony was conducted by Le Marois  his assistant, who had no legal authority to do so. Moreover, as a minor could not legally be a witness.

Australian Campaign

the 1796 campaign against Austria was the brainchild of Lazare Carnot and Napoleon not least. Including Kellermann's 20,000 soldier Army of the Alps and a reserve of 15,000 stationed in Provence and the Var, France could put 240,000 men into the field. The French offensive was three-pronged: 70,000 troops, then in the Lower Rhine under Jourdan's command, would strike along the Main valley, invest the fortress of Mainz and then advance into Franconia; another 70,000 under Moreau would advance into Serbia and the Danube valley; and the third, under Napoleon, would engage the Austrians in the Po valley.

The Italian campaign was designed as a sideshow, but if it proved unexpectedly successful, there was provision in Carnot's plan for an advance up the Adige valley to Trent and the Tyrol, there to link with Moreau for the coup de grace.
Two days after his wedding Napoleon left Paris with Junot and arrived in Marseilles on the night of 20 / 21 March. Along the road they had discussed Carnot's threefold intention in the great campaign against Austria: to divert growing unrest at home with a foreign adventure; to consolidate the Revolution and export its principles; and, most importantly, to stop the drain on the French treasury by getting the nation's armies to live off the soil or by plunder and thus in effect exporting France's military expenses. Napoleon has often been censured for turning the Italian campaign into a gigantic quest for booty, but this possibility was already implicit in the Directory's grand strategy.
At his headquarters Napoleon found 37,000 ill-fed, unpaid and demoralized troops, with which he was supposed to clear 52,000 Austrians out of half a dozen mountain passes between Nice and Genoa. He was fortunate to have at his side his old Corsican friend Saliceti, who raised a loan in Genoa to see to the Army's most pressing supply problems. Even so, Napoleon reported to the Directory on 28 March: 'One battalion has mutinied on the ground that it had neither boots nor pay,' and a week later wrote again: 'The army is in frightening penury ... Misery has led to indiscipline, and without discipline there can be no victory.
 Napoleon as a master of propaganda and already sedulously at work on his own legend , was quoted

Soldiers, you are naked, ill-fed; though the Government owes you much, it can give you nothing. Your patience, the courage you have shown amidst these rocks, are admirable; but they procure you no glory, no fame shines upon you. I want to lead you into the most fertile plains in the world. Rich provinces, great cities will lie in your power; you will find there honour, glory and riches. Soldiers of the Army of Italy, will you lack courage or steadfastness?

 Napoleon therefore decided to engage the Austrian right in the mountains and take out the war-weary Piedmontese, ensuring himself local superiority in numbers at all times. On 12 April he won his first victory, at Montenotte, employing Massena adroitly and using a combination of clouds of skirmishers with charges from battalion columns, which inflicted 3,000 casualties on the enemy. Further successful actions followed at Millesimo on 13 April against the Sards and Dego against the Austrians on 14 April. Having split the allies, Napoleon then turned to deal with the Piedmontese and broke them in the three battles of San Michele, Ceva and Mondovi . On 23 April Colli, the Piedmontese commander, requested an armistice. Within ten days Napoleon was in control of the key mountain passes and had destroyed a superior enemy force

 

napoleon's race with revolutionary political parties

The year I794 certainly ended Napoleon's flirtation with Jacobinism and other forms of political radicalism. The Thermidorean reaction meant that landowners and men of property were entrenched as the true beneficiaries of the Revolution, and that there would be no further pandering to the sans-culottes or other dispossessed groups. This hard line by Carnot and his colleagues, together with the famines, harvest failures, unemployment and price rises - for after Robespierre's fall there was a year of chaos with depreciating assignats,

unpaid armies and therefore zero recruitment - brought the old revolutionaries out on the streets again. The crowd stormed the Convention on I2 Germinal Year III (I April I795) and were dispersed by the National Guard. They tried again on May I795 and were again dispersed by the Guard. But the heart had gone out of the revolutionary crowd: these manifestations lacked the zeal and organization of previous post-1789 insurrections and were more like the old-fashioned ancien regime bread riots. Put down ruthlessly, these street revolts proved to be the last hurrah of the Revolutionary crowd, which was not seen in action again until after the Napoleonic era. The  Most of all, the new class was made up of those who had cornered large public monopolies or who had purchased what was euphemistically called 'national property' - in other words, confiscated Church lands or real estate previously belonging to exiled aristocrats. The Thermidorean alliance of the bourgeoisie with the upper peasantry gave Napoleon a valuable lesson in politics.

napoleon suspended from the army

A week later the ill-fated expedition anchored in the Gulf of Ajaccio but was fired upon by the fort. Since only thirty people rallied to their standard in Ajaccio, the coup was abandoned next day. Napoleon landed at Provenzale on 29 May and made rendezvous with his refugee family, getting them by longboat on to a three-masted xebec, which took them to Giralda.

 In late 1792 the anger against a man who would deliver the fatherland to foreigners was obviously directed by the Jacobin Napoleon against the perfidious Bourbon king. It is a characteristic of ambivalence to divide the love or hate object so that all negative feelings can be decanted against the 'Hyde' aspect and all positive ones retained for the 'Jekyll'. Put simply, in late 1792 Louis XVI attracted the fire that would later fall on Paoli

napoleon's early military campaign

Napoleon's financial mission began when he left Corsica on 2 September 1787. By the beginning of November he was installed at the Hotel de Cherbourg in the rue du Faubourg-St-Honore in Paris. Having been a virtual prisoner at the Ecole Royale, he used most of his time, visiting theaters. His audience with the Comptroller-General of Finance was abortive: nothing for the groves was offered. As if in compensation, Napoleon received the six-month extension of leave he had requested before leaving Corsica. This time he asked for prolongation on the ground that he wished to attend a meeting of the Corsican Estates; since he did not ask for pay, the request was granted.

 On New Year's Day 1788 he arrived back in Ajaccio. The family's financial situation had worsened if anything and Letizia still had four children entirely dependent on her; in 1788 Louis had his tenth birthday, Pauline her eighth, Caroline her sixth and Jerome his fourth, and in addition there were fees payable for Lucien at the Aix seminary and Joseph at the University of Pisa. It is remarkable how quickly Napoleon, as the only breadwinner, was accepted as the head of the family, and how Joseph was quite prepared to defer to him. But by the time Napoleon departed from Ajaccio on 1 June 1788 he had at least had the pleasure of seeing Joseph return from Pisa with the coveted title of Doctor of Laws.
 Napoleon's leave was granted from  October but, given the usual month's 'long-distance' travelling time, he left for Corsica on 9 September. He accompanied the Baron du Teil as far as Lyons, then continued alone to Valence, where he took the river coach to the mouths of the Rhone. In Marseilles he visited his hero the Abbe Raynal before crossing to Ajaccio, where he arrived at the end of September 1789. On this leave, Napoleon began his career as Corsican politician - or troublemaker, as his critics would have it. Learning that the new military commander in Corsica, the Vicomte de Barrin, was a timid and irresolute man with just six battalions at his call, Napoleon trimmed and temporized with the Revolutionary faction, now dominant on the island. The politics of Corsica were of quite extraordinary complexity, with personal politics and class conflict overlying clan loyalties and ideological struggle. Early in 1789, the situation had been reasonably clear. To the famous meeting of the Estates-General in Versailles went the comte de Buttafuoco, who had asked Rousseau to write a constitution for Corsica, representing the nobility; Peretti della Rocca for the clergy; and for the Third Estate Colonna Cesari and X Saliceti.
On 16 April 1790 Napoleon wrote to du Teil to request a prolongation of his leave, on the grounds that he was suffering from anaemia and needed to take the waters of Orezza. The request was so clearly bogus that it is surprising that du Teil granted an extension of four-and-a-half months with pay until October, but we must remember that by this time he was something of a cynosure with his commanding officer. It was not the water at Orezza Napoleon was interested in, but the hot air of political disputation, for between 9 and 27 September he and Joseph were in daily attendance at the Paolistas 'party conference'. The sessions were dominated by Paoli, who, aged sixty-six and whitehaired, had made a triumphant return to Corsica, landing at Bastia on 17 July, where Napoleon met him.
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. 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.
On 5 May Napoleon was at Corsacci, trying to persuade some Corsican delegates not to attend Paoli's convention at Corte. But he was already in enemy territory, for the local magnates were his old enemies the Peraldis. Marius Peraldi secured the help of the Morelli brothers to place Napoleon under arrest. It was lucky for him that he still had many friends and that some of them were resourceful. Two of them, Santo Ricci and Vizzavona by name, cooked up an ingenious plan and persuaded the Morellis to bring their prisoner to Vizzavona's house for a meal. Once there, they spirited Napoleon away down a secret staircase to a waiting horse. He and Santo Ricci then made their way back to Ajaccio by backtracks and entered Ajaccio in secret on 6 May. three days later Napoleon was able to secure sea passage to Macinaggio, from where he travelled overland to Bastia. In Bastia he was reunited with Joseph, Saliceti, Lacombe St-Michel and the principals of the anti-Paolista party. After two weeks of plotting and preparing, the conspirators sailed from St Florent in two ships with 400 men and a few guns. Ironically, on the very day of departure the Bonaparte house in Ajaccio was being sacked by the Paolistas and their farms gutted. Letizia fled with her daughters and hid in bushes near the ruined tower of Capitello, across the bay from Ajaccio, while the Paolistas looked for them. Once again Letizia experienced the pendulum of fortune and was forced to become a fugitive.

the impact of Carlo's death on napoleon

 Carlo Buonaparte died and the family was in straitened circumstances. he sustained pain and vomiting had led the ailing Carlo to consult physicians in Paris, Montpellier and Aix-en-Provence, but they were powerless against cancer. Carlo died on 24 February 1785, leaving Napoleon in financial crisis. He wrote to his uncle Lucien, the archdeacon, asking him to sustain the family until he qualified as an officer, and set to work to cram two or three years' work into as many months.
Napoleon immersed himself in his studies, now desperate to make the grade as an artillery officer. Entry to the elite corps of the artillery was normally a two-stage process. First came an examination on the first volume of Etienne Bezout's Cours de Mathematiques, the artilleryman's bible. There then followed a year in artillery school, after which cadets were examined on the next three volumes of Bezout; if successful, candidates were then commissioned as second lieutenants. Oustandingly gifted boys could take a single examination on all four volumes of Bezout and go straight into a regiment with a commission. Only a very few attempted this feat every year, but among them in 1785 was Napoleon Buonaparte.

Every summer an examiner came to the military school to test artillery candidates. Only fifty-eight candidates were taken into the artillery from all schools and colleges in France. The Ecole Royale Militaire in Paris should have had the edge but, of the seventeen boys put in for the examination, only four featured among the successful fifty-eight. Among them was Napoleon, placed forty-second, Des Mazis, placed fifty-sixth and Napoleon's bitter student rival Le Picard de Phelipeaux, who was fortyfirst. To be forty-second out of fifty-eight does not sound distinguished, and this fact has contributed to the persistent idea that Napoleon was not a particularly brilliant student, but it must be remembered that he was up against students who in some cases had had two years' more study than he.
In September, just sixteen, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant. He and Des Mazis had expressed a wish to join the same regiment, and the request was granted; the two friends were gazetted to join the La Fere regiment at Valence in the Rhone valley. Napoleon's education was now complete and his personality formed in all essentials. He entered the Army prepared for military life, at least by modern standards. Knowing nothing of the real conditions he might encounter on a battlefield, and still less of Army regulations.

napoleon's army academy

In 1782 Napoleon announced he wanted to devote his life to science - either producing a general theory of electricity or inventing a model of the cosmos to replace the Newtonian system. By 1782 Napoleon had decided that he wanted to join the Navy. It was conceivable that, the following year, he could have been sent either to the naval training school in Paris or to the Ecole Militaire in Paris, but the royal Inspector-General decided he had not yet spent enough time at Brienne to be transferred.
In 1783 the Inspector-General, M. de Keralio, kept the boy's options open.

 Napoleon's fate was a downturn in his family's fortunes. Since Napoleon last saw his father, Carlo had not fared well. Once in Paris in 1779, he tried to press to have the Odone estate returned to him or at least to be compensated for it, but in vain. With a letter of introduction from Marbeuf he was granted audience with Louis XVI who, impressed by the Governor of Corsica's patronage of the supplicant, granted him his secondary request: a subsidy for the planting of mulberry trees which, it was hoped, would eventually make Corsica a silk producing center.
 Napoleon went to Brienne he was already the second child in a family of five but by the time he next saw his father there had been two additions Marie Pauline, born in 1780 and Maria Annunciata Caroline in 1782. At the same time Carlo had declined in health and lost weight - clearly the first signs of the stomach cancer that would carry him off in 1785. This reduced carlo's earning at the very time his financial resources were declining, for in 1784 Marbeuf ceased to be the generous patron of old. A man of exceptional sexual vigour, he married an eighteen-year-old and began keeping Letizia at arm's length.
 Carlo hoped Napoleon would be promoted either to Toulon or Paris in 1783 and, with this in mind, had had Lucien brought over from Corsica to slot into Napoleon's vacant cadetship. Keralio's report ended his hopes, but he decided to visit Brienne anyway, in hopes of getting the Bertons to take on the eightyear-old Lucien. Carlo's visit is described in some detail in the first authentic letter written by Napoleon, on 25 June 1784, to his uncle Nicolo Paravicini. Napoleon was outraged by Joseph's ambition to join the artillery after leaving the seminary, for the notorious inter-service rivalry meant that was probably the end of his own ambitions to enter the Navy.
Inspector of military schools. On 22 September Des Monts examined Napoleon and found him qualified to enter the military school in Paris.  Napoleon did not rate his chances highly, as he thought his lack of the classical languages would stand between him and the Ecole Royale Militaire in Paris. Fortunately, at this very juncture the Ministry of War authorized a special intake of candidates outstanding in mathematics. Early in October word came through that Napoleon and three schoolfellows had been selected for the school in Paris; Lucien could have the Brienne berth after all.
Napoleon and his three schoolfellows left Brienne on 17 October by water coach and, after joining the Seine at Pont Marie, began to enter the suburbs at 4 p.m. on the 19th. The cadets were allowed to linger until nightfall before entering the military school, so Napoleon bought a novel from one of the quayside bookstalls, allowing his comrade Castries de Vaux to pay. The choice of book was surely significant: Gil Bias was the story of an impoverished Spanish boy who rose to high political office. Then their religious chaperon insisted they say a prayer in the church of St-Germain-des-Pres before entering the Ecole Royale Militaire. The luxury at the military school rather shocked Napoleon, and when he came to power he insisted on Spartan austerity at military academies. On St Helena Napoleon told Las Cases of three delicious meals every day, with choice of desserts at dinner and said: 'We were magnificently fed and served, treated in every way like officers possessed of great wealth, certainly greater than that of most of our families and far above what many of us would enjoy later on.'
 Cadets began their studies at 7 a.m. and finished at 7 p.m. - an eighthour day with breaks. Each lesson lasted two hours, each class contained twenty to twenty-five students, and each branch of study was taught by a single teacher and his deputy. Accordingly, there were sixteen instructors for the eight subjects on the curriculum: mathematics, geography, history, French grammar, fortification, drawing, fencing and dancing. Three days a week were spent on the first four subjects and three days on the second four, so there were six hours' instruction in each discipline. On Sundays and feastdays the cadets spent four hours in the classroom, writing letters or reading books.
 There was drill every day as well as, on Thursdays and Sundays, shooting practice and military exercises. Punishment for infraction of the rules was severe: arrest and imprisonment with or without water. The most common misdemeanours committed were leaving the building without official permission and receiving unauthorized pocketmoney from parents. Napoleon's academic progress closely mirrored his years at Brienne. He was outstanding in mathematics, was an enthusiastic fencer, but poor at drawing and dancing, and hopeless at German.
For the first time in his life Napoleon made a true friend. Alexandre Des Mazis, was an ardent royalist from a military family in Strasbourg, who was in the year ahead of him and a senior cadet in charge of musketry training. He needed to draw on the resources of this friendship when news came that Carlo Buonaparte had died and the family was in straitened circumstances. Sustained pain and vomiting had led the ailing Carlo to consult physicians in Paris, Montpellier and Aix-en-Provence, but they were powerless against cancer. Carlo died on 24 February 1785, leaving Napoleon in financial crisis. He wrote to his uncle Lucien, the archdeacon, asking him to sustain the family until he qualified as an officer, and set to work to cram two or three years' work into as many months.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon Bonaparte was born at Ajaccio, Corsica, on 15 August 1769. On 2 June I764 Carlo Buonaparte of Ajaccio, an eighteen-year-old law student, married the fourteen-yearold Marie-Letizia Ramolino, also of Ajaccio. Both families were descended from Italian mercenaries in Genoese pay who settled in Corsica at the beginning of the sixteenth century.  Buonaparte family, a lawyer, as a member of the Council of Ancients in Ajaccio in I6I6; several more Buonaparte lawyers served on this council in the eighteenth century. The Buonapartes like the Ramolinos were part of the Corsican nobility, but it must be remembered that Corsican 'nobles' were as common as 'princes' in Czarist Russia.
Carlo Buonaparte, born on 27 March I746, had been studying law at Pisa University but left to marry Letizia without taking his degree.The Ramolinos were a cadet branch of the distinguished Collalto family, well entrenched in Lombardy since the fourteenth century; the Ramolinos themselves had been established in Corsica for 250 years. Where the Buonapartes were a family of lawyers, with the Ramolinos the tradition was military: Letizia's father was an army officer with expertise in civil engineering, who commanded the Ajaccio garrison and held the sinecure office of Inspector-General of Roads and Bridges. The newly-weds' fathers had died young. Carlo's father, a lawyer, died in 176o when his son was fourteen.
Marie-Letizia Ramolino born in early 1750. Her father died when she was five, after which her mother Angela Maria turned for consolation to Fesch, a Swiss captain in the French garrison forces at Ajaccio. Angela Maria married Fesch in 1757 and persuaded him to convert to Catholicism, but his father, a banker in Basle, responded by disinheriting him. From the marriage of Fesch and Letizia's mother came Joseph born 1763, the future cardinal and Napoleon's uncle. Unfortunatily Fesch died in 1770, gave Letizia away; her dowry comprised thirty-one acres of land, a mill, and an oven for baking bread.
Carlo, a tall young man  and Letizia gave birth to thirteen children in all, of whom eight survived. A son, named Napoleon, was born and died in 1765. Pregnant again almost immediately, Letizia next brought forth a girl who also died. Carlo again impregnated Letizia, who this time bore him a lusty son in the shape of Joseph originally named Giuseppe, who was born on 7 July 1768.
 Carlo spoiled his children, but Letizia was a fearsome mother and had a natural love of power. A stern task mistress who always punished for the slightest fault. Letizia laid about her with gusto when her second son misbehaved. She drove him to Mass with slaps and blows, whipped him when he stole fruits. Letizia was also cunning and devious. When her son was eight and an altar boy, she vowed to mete out punishment for his less than reverent behaviour on the altar, but faced the problem that she would find it hard to lay hands on the agile and fully-clothed Napoleon. To lull his suspicions, she told him she would not beat him for his offence. But when he took his clothes off she pounced on him with the whip.Napoleon never cried out under the lash, but fear and respect for his mother replaced genuine love.

In February 1771 Carlo was appointed assessor of the Royal Jurisdiction of Ajaccio, one of eleven on the island. Certainly not coincidentally, in the same year, on 13 September 1771, Carlo obtained patents from the authorities declaring the Buonaparte family noble. Corsican nobility did not confer many advantages: there were no feudal privileges, no exemption from taxes, not even any particular deference from other classes; but the advantages of the declaration of nobility for the Buonapartes were significant in the long term.
 On 19 July 1778, granting Napoleon a place at the military academy at Brienne and Joseph his indentures at the Aix seminary. However, there were conditions: the two Buonaparte sons had to be clear that they could not both be trained for the same profession; they had to pass the entrance examinations; and final confirmation had to await a new certificate of nobility from the royal heraldist in Versailles. Final confirmation of Napoleon's place at a military school was not received from the Minister of War until 31 December 1778.
Three weeks after Carlo's sons had started school, Carlo was notified by the War Ministry that Napoleon had, in principle, been assigned to the military school at Tiron, but that some final formalities concerning the title to nobility had still to be cleared up. However on 28 March 1779 Montbarrey informed Carlo that Napoleon was actually being sent to the military school at Brienne in Champagne. Since Carlo was by now in Versailles and detained on business, he asked Marbeuf, the Bishop of Autun, to take Napoleon up to Brienne to begin his education proper. Napoleon did not actually commence his schooling at Brienne on 23 April, official school records notwithstanding. A certain captain Champeaux, on leave from his regiment in Nice, arrived in Autun to convey his son from the school to Brienne. Learning that the Champeaux boy was going to the same place as the young Buonaparte, bishop Marbeuf decided to save himself a journey and prevailed on Champeaux to take Napoleon with him .
Napoleon arrived in Brienne on 15 May 1779. The military college there, originally a monastery, stood at the foot of a hill dominated by the chateau. A religious academy from 1730, it had become a military school in 1776, one of ten such schools set up to replace the Ecole Royale Militaire in Paris, which had collapsed on grounds of cost. It was still run by monks and the religious ethos was dominant, the Brienne school was underfunded so could not afford to engage top-class teachers, was the lowest-ranked of all ten military colleges and had the lowest student enrolment as against a top military school like La FU:che. Its aim was to prepare the sons of the nobility for eventual cadetships in the armed services but, apart from a course in fortification in the final year, the education was not remotely military, but rather a variant of the standard training of the eighteenthcentury gentleman. The theory was that the best pupils would be selected for the artillery, the engineers and the navy, and the mediocre ones for the infantry; only those too stupid even for the cavalry would be sent back in disgrace to their families.