Napoleon Bonaparte was born in 1769 to a Notary public Carlo Bonaparte on the island of Corsica. His parents were Italian and therefore Napoleon was Italian and not French. His native Island Corsica was occupied by the French and was continually struggling to regain its independence from the French. For the first 20 years of his life Napoleon was a Corsican patriot trying to regain the Independence of Corsica from the French. But the French Revolution that took place in 1789 has recognized the claims of Corsicans and so he slowly got into the service of France in its armed forces.
Napoleon was a fast worker. His career hardly spanned 20 years, yet in that short period he rose right up to the top. In the process, he disturbed Europe more than either Alexander or Chenghiz could do.
He is small in stature and in the initial period of his
life, his health was not good. He never
impressed anyone with his looks and was always clumsy at public functions.
Neither did he have any advantage of either birth or riches. In fact, till he
rose, he was abjectly poor and had to go without a meal often.
Napoleon overcame all those
difficulties by his absolute and unshakable belief in his own destiny, and in
his own glorious future. Ambition was the main spring of his life. The absolute
will to make the name of Napoleon the most important thing in the world carried
Napoleon to a pinnacle of fame which no other man has ever reached.
Surprisingly Napoleon never had any
ethical or moral values and it is very difficult to decide whether he loved
anyone else except himself. For a few years he was fond of Josephine his Creole
wife, the daughter of a French Officer and the widow of a Baron. He later
divorced her as she could not give him a son.
During the siege of Toulon Napoleon
gained great fame as the commander of a battery. He studied Machiavelli well
and never kept his word when it was to his advantage to break it. There is no
word called gratitude in his personal dictionary. Neither did he expect any
from the others though. He was totally indifferent to human suffering. He
executed the prisoners of war in Egypt who had been promised their lives and
committed many other such deeds. He looked after every department of his army
with utmost care but neglected the medical service. He could never bear the
smell of sweat of his soldiers and used much Eau De Cologne to douse it.
Why did his armies revere such a man
who had no element of humanity in him? No one knows why, but a possibility is
Napoleon was the greatest of actors and the whole European continent was his
stage. At all times and under all circumstances he knew the precise attitude
that would impress the spectators most and what words would make the deepest
impression on them. At all times he was the master of the situation whenever and
wherever he spoke.
He was a great success in the first part of his career from 1789 to 1804. He was then the leader of the French revolution. He was fighting in the name of the people. He defeated Austria, England, Russia and Italy because he and his soldiers were the apostles of the revolution representing “Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality” and were the friends of the people. The entire European continent came under his influence.
In
1804 Napoleon crowned himself the hereditary Emperor of the French. Once there
he forgot about what he represented and kept his shooting squads ever ready to
execute anyone who went against his will. Ultimately, after all his successes in
battle his fleet was destroyed by Lord Nelson at Trafalgar and subsequently his
armies were defeated by Wellington at Waterloo.
While the French revolution had
spoken of Liberty, Fraternity and Equality, it gave the world Napoleon. When he
was active, people in the opposing countries shivered at the mention of his
name and that in the entire European continent. He got his army’s horses
stabled in the mighty Kremlin and treated the royalty of Europe as scum. A man
who came from nowhere, absolutely without any backing from either anyone or his
family but he managed to enforce himself on the entire European continent by
the mere force of his will. That is why he is called the “Man of Destiny”.
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