Napoleon Bonaparte: Pasquale Paoli's Path To Success

While speaking to his men, a young Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “A consecutive series of great actions never is the result of chance and luck, it is always the product of planning and genius. Great men are rarely known to fail in their most perilous enterprises…Is it because they are lucky that they become great? No, but being great, they have been able to master luck.” Napoleon Bonaparte was certainly a master of luck. With the French Revolution ending around 1795 and a still uncertain government with no real leader, by 1799 it gave a young Italian named Napoleone di Buonaparte an easy gateway to become France’s new dictator. For the next 16 years, 1799-1815, he made it his task to make himself conquer and emperor of the France. You could

His path to success was laid out long before his was born. He was close friends with a man named Pasquale Paoli. Paoli proclaimed Corsica to be an independent state in 1755 and started a new kind a rebellion not familiar to the people of the island, Corsica having been back and forth between France and Genoese. He started a printing press and university in the capital. He decided he would lead them but teach them to run themselves. His new political and social rebuilding techniques were foreign the peasants of the time but they embraced it and called him Babbù, meaning father. The ideals that Paoli put into place during his time on the island fostered a young Napoleone in his own. The Genoese, from which Corsica was a part of, frowned upon the new republic and had France to back them up. In 1796, Genoa sold Corsica to the French. Napoleone di Buonaparte was born on Tuesday, August 15, 1769 to Carlo and Letizia Buonaparte on the island of Corsica off the coast of Italy. Just a few months before his birth, Hs father had sworn loyalty to the French King and became a French subject. Then on September 13, 1771, King Louis XV choose families from

Because Genoa had sold Corsica to France, it meant that the Bonaparte children could get scholarships and study there. Had this not happened, Napoleon probably would have attended a university in Italy, like his father and would go into business with very little room for advancement anywhere. While he excelled in his courses, Napoleon was not a very popular boy with his classmates. He was often made fun of because he did not learn to speak and write French until the age of ten and he spoke with a thick accent that he kept all his life. He would even say later in life about his schooling, “I lived separately from my schoolmates. I looked for a corner in the school garden and retired there to dream undisturbedly…I was not loved at school: it takes time to acquire people’s love…” In 1784, a 15 year old Napoleon entered France to begin his career as a cadet in the army. He wasa enrolled in the Ecole Royale Militaire (ERM). It has been said that the young Napoleon did not take well the new school. The students there were also of noble blood and as Napoleon would later say they were “infected”, imbeciles who hated all who were not ‘hereditary asses’ like themselves.” After final exams in 1785, He becomes the youngest, 16, and only Coriscan appointed as an officer, lieutenant of the artillery, as he tells his mother in a letter that he works almost nonstop. “I have no diversions here, except work. I wear the new uniform [that of