Napoleon I | Biography, Achievements, & Facts - Britannica

Early life and education

Napoleon was born on Corsica shortly after the island’s cession to France by the Genoese. He was the fourth, and second surviving, child of Carlo Buonaparte, a lawyer, and his wife, Letizia Ramolino. His father’s family, of ancient Tuscan nobility, had emigrated to Corsica in the 16th century.

Carlo Buonaparte had married the beautiful and strong-willed Letizia when she was only 14 years old; they eventually had eight children to bring up in very difficult times. The French occupation of their native country was resisted by a number of Corsicans led by Pasquale Paoli. Carlo Buonaparte joined Paoli’s party, but when Paoli had to flee, Buonaparte came to terms with the French. Winning the protection of the governor of Corsica, he was appointed assessor for the judicial district of Ajaccio in 1771. In 1778 he obtained the admission of his two eldest sons, Joseph and Napoleon, to the Collège d’Autun in Paris.

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A Corsican by birth, heredity, and childhood associations, Napoleon continued for some time after his arrival in Continental France to regard himself as a foreigner; yet from age nine he was educated in France. While remaining a Corsican in temperament, he was first and foremost, through both his education and his reading, a man of the 18th century, influenced by the intellectual currents of the Enlightenment.

Napoleon was educated at three schools: briefly at Autun, for five years at the military college of Brienne, and finally for one year at the military academy in Paris. It was during Napoleon’s year in Paris that his father died of a stomach cancer in February 1785, leaving his family in straitened circumstances. Napoleon, although not the eldest son, assumed the position of head of the family before he was 16. In September he graduated from the military academy, ranking 42nd in a class of 58.

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He was made second lieutenant of artillery in the regiment of La Fère, a kind of training school for young artillery officers. Garrisoned at Valence, Napoleon continued his education, reading much, in particular works on strategy and tactics. He also wrote Lettres sur la Corse (“Letters on Corsica”), in which he reveals his feeling for his native island. He went back to Corsica in September 1786 and did not rejoin his regiment until June 1788. By that time the agitation that was to culminate in the French Revolution had already begun. A reader of Voltaire and Rousseau, Napoleon believed that a political change was imperative, but, as a career officer, he seems not to have seen any need for radical social reforms.