Napoleone Buonaparte was born on 15 August 1769, the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady the Virgin Mary, in Ajaccio, Corsica, to Carlo and Letizia (née Ramolino) Buonaparte; he was their second surviving child, his brother Giuseppe having been born the previous year. Letizia returned from Mass at the cathedral and gave birth to him at home, with the help of her servant, Camilla Ilari, who became Napoleon’s nurse. Myth was spun around the birth – that Letizia had brought him into the world alone; that she had done so on the floor of the front room; that the new-born had first been laid down on a carpet woven with scenes from Homer’s Iliad (this according to his ardent admirer Stendhal) – all of which Letizia, in her own lifetime, dismissed as so much nonsense.1 No one had carpets in Ajaccio in 1769, certainly not the Buonaparte, and they were not for summer use in any case. Camilla could always be counted on, so Letizia was not alone.

There was a strange occurrence that day which was real enough, for a comet appeared in the skies over Ajaccio. People naturally saw it as a portent of something, but opinions varied about the momentous event it foreshadowed. Only a few days before Napoleon died on St Helena, in 1821, a comet appeared in the skies over that little island as well. For those who set store by such things, there was no doubt about what that one meant. The lesson is not that superstition has weight, but that there is never any need to mythologise the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. The truth is more than enough to cope with.

AJACCIO: A COLONIAL WORLD

The single most important circumstance of Napoleon’s birth, in trying to understand him, is not that he was born in Corsica, but that he was born in Ajaccio. It is not enough to say he was simply a ‘Corsican’, for there were two very distinct Corsicas in 1769, which did not mix with each other much, and neither respected nor trusted the other. Like everyone else, Napoleon belonged quite firmly to one of these Corsicas. Napoleon’s final nemesis, the Duke of Wellington – that self-appointed epitome of the English grandee – is reputed to have rebuffed a man who called him ‘Irish’, with the withering reply: ‘Just because a man was born in a stable, it does not make him a horse.’ Napoleon’s ancestors, to a man and woman, would have given the same rebuke to anyone who called them merely ‘Corsicans’. When a French historian of the mid-nineteenth century said of Napoleon that ‘Italian blood ran from vein to vein’ in him,2 he should not be dismissed, but ‘Italy’ was, and is, many things.

Corsica was, in most ways, part of ‘Italy’. This meant that, like most of Italy, its cultures divided sharply between the highland periphery and the lowland, coastal world of urban culture. The Genoese imported this division to Corsica when they acquired it in 1453, and compounded it by creating the new settlements of Bastia and Ajaccio. In this act, they simply took for granted that the indigenous people of the highland interior – the ‘insulars’ as they always called them – were alien. The Italian rulers of the island excluded the people of the interior from the outset; this division between urban and rural, highland and lowland, was brought from the mainland, and did not change as long as Genoa ruled Corsica. Napoleon belonged somewhere in this complicated heritage, but as with most parts of Europe, simple geographic labels serve little purpose.

The Buonaparte and all their friends and relations belonged to the small cities of the coasts and, when they looked up to the high, jagged peaks that led to the isolated interior, they felt the same mixture of contempt and dread known all across the Mediterranean by the dwellers of the towns and plains for the barbarians of the uplands, of the isolated, violent, unlettered world the Jesuits called ‘Our Indies’ – our American frontier – a feeling shared by English-speaking, Protestant ‘north Britons’ like David Hume, when he looked out from his study in Glasgow at the ‘Highland Line’, or by Wellington, when he contemplated his ‘fellow Irishmen’ beyond the English Pale of settlement. This was a common feeling, and in Corsica it expressed a very clear division. Genoese rule made of both Corsicas an immobile place, where individuals might – and did – seek advancement by leaving Corsica, prepared to go anywhere in the world. However, Corsicans remained bound to their roots, whether in the interior or the coastal towns, a fundamental division that did not change over three centuries. These roots were immutable, however varied the experiences of the Corsicans beyond the island. In Corsica, as in so many other peripheral parts of Europe, the past counted.

The mountains of the Corsican interior did, indeed, merit being called ‘our Indies’ by the Jesuit and Franciscan fathers who were the only outsiders who took a real interest in these upland regions. Ajaccio was founded in 1492 by the Genoese, in the same year that Genoa’s most famous citizen crashed into the New World. The first Genoese settlers of Ajaccio may not have been in ‘first contact’ with the people they called ‘the insulars’, but they ventured less far, less fast into the interior of their new home than did those Genoese and Spaniards who followed Columbus across the Atlantic. The founders of Ajaccio clung to the coast, always. That was their job. They were part of a deliberate plan by the Genoese for Corsica, which they had acquired in 1453 for purely strategic reasons. The Republic of St George, with its capital in Genoa and its small hinterland spread out along the coast of Liguria – the modern Italian Riviera – was a commercial and banking power, with a considerable merchant fleet, and its only real interest in Corsica was to use it to secure the sea lanes. To this end, the Genoese destroyed most of the native aristocracy in ruthless wars in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, leaving only three families with noble status and any estates of note in the south of the island, the Bozzi, Ornano and Colonna-Istria houses.

The other prong of Genoese colonialism was the creation of new towns on the coasts, to serve as bases to protect shipping and to contain the ‘insulars’ of the interior. Ajaccio was one such foundation; the major town and capital was Bastia, in the north of the island, founded in 1476. Neither Ajaccio, on its large harbour, in the south-centre, nor Bastia, had any economic or commercial purpose: they were simply military colonies. There were other settlements that came to little, such as that attempted at Porto Vecchio, and the two older towns of the coasts – Bonifacio in the south-west and Calvi to the north-west – dated from before the Genoese, but they had been created purely as defensive positions, and contracted as Ajaccio and Bastia grew. Henceforth, Genoa ignored the interior as long as it got its taxes, and it dealt ruthlessly with the ‘insulars’ when it did not, or when they tried to ally with dangerous outsiders – usually the Turks, French or Milanese – against the Republic. Its manner of government in the mountains was one of manipulation, not control. The early destruction of the great nobles had left the natives leaderless at all but local level. In this way, highland Corsica became a world of petty clan chieftains, whom Genoa could use to collect taxes and then ignore.

Genoese indifference is brought home by a simple fact: they neither knew nor cared about the geography of the interior in any detail. They were indifferent to anything but the most rudimentary idea of where its settlements were or their size. Genoa did not care what went on there, only what came out of it, in taxes. When they had to deal with serious unrest on the relatively accessible lands of the southern nobles in the early seventeenth century, it emerged that no one in authority really knew the size of the local population; when a serious revolt broke out in the highlands in 1735, it emerged there was no map of the interior in the offices of the island’s governor in Bastia, although a Tuscan, Pinelli, had made one in 1729. Official distances to the interior were calculated on how long the trip took to and from the coast.3 This attitude changed little between 1453 and 1768. As a result, the highland interior did not change, either. It remained the world of an uneducated, ill-disciplined clergy who were, first and foremost, part of their clans’ elites; of a vendetta culture that soaked many areas in blood for generations; of ancient superstitions; of ‘honour’ and little formal learning; of shepherds who lived in almost complete solitude for most of the year. It was the Corsica of the bandits, who lurked in the passes that led from the coast to the hills. Only the very poorest of the Catholic religious orders, the humble Franciscans, remained among these people long enough to win their trust, for only they could share their hard lives on such barren land. The Jesuits came, looked, investigated, and went back to the coastal towns to found colleges for the education of the Ligurian settlers. This was the Corsica of legend, and of stereotype. It had nothing at all to do with the Buonaparte.

Napoleon’s world was that of small urban settlements, clinging to the seaboard, proud but wary behind their walls, whose more ambitious denizens looked out to sea for advancement and gain, not inland, while all of them allied and vied with each other to hold the narrow ground they called...