Napoleon Bonaparte
Born at Ajaccio in Corsica in 1769, from the start he was lucky. The island had been given to France by Genoa the previous year, so Napoleon was born a French subject. For a time, his father opposed the French, but then switched sides and became a prominent administrator.
Early years
Claiming a Corsican noble heritage, his father sent Napoleon to the exclusive royal military academies in France. In 1778, the nine-year-old Napoleon enrolled at Brienne, where fellow pupils mocked him because of his pride and poor French. His first language was Italian, he spoke French with a heavy accent and never learned to write it properly.
Thanks to a scholarship from Louis XVI, he completed his education at the Ecole Militaire in Paris, where his sharp mind and remarkable powers of concentration meant that he passed the highly competitive exam to become an artillery officer in one year rather than the usual two or three. He graduated in 1785, aged 16, to join the......
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