Short History Of... - Introducing: Napoleon

Episode Date: August 28, 2022

Noiser presents Napoleon, a new podcast examining the life and times of one of history’s most intriguing figures. You’ve heard the name Napoleon Bonaparte. But who was he, really? How did he become the most powerful man on Earth? And why didn't he stop, even once he had it all? A Noiser production, written by Jeff Dawson. Search ‘Napoleon’ wherever you get your podcasts and hit follow to listen to the rest of the Napoleon story. For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, Short History of fans. This week, we wanted to bring you something a little different. We're all about telling short histories, but some tales are so rich and engaging, they demand more detail. The story of Napoleon Bonaparte is utterly extraordinary. He became the most powerful man on Earth, then blew it all in the blink of an eye.

We've all heard of Napoleon, but who was he, really? And what makes his life so remarkable? Settle in for an audio blockbuster. The following Taster is part one of six. Search Napoleon wherever you catch your favorite shows and hit follow to never miss an episode. It's summer, 1816.

We're on the windswept island of St. Helena. Jagged cliffs of volcanic rock stab up from the breakers of the South Atlantic. The land is just ten miles long and six miles wide, a speck in a vast hostile ocean. St Helena is home to a small settlement of farmers and a modest army garrison. It is but a footnote in the portfolio of the British Empire. Lying midway between South West Africa and Brazil, this is one of the most remote spots on the planet,

over 5,000 miles from London, more pertinently, over 5,000 miles from Paris. Because the newest resident on St. Helena is French, he's quite dangerous, or so they say. The most famous or infamous Frenchman that ever lived. After twenty years of unprecedented glory, said gentleman is now a prisoner of King George III, someone to be detained at his majesty's pleasure. And what pleases his majesty is that monsieur be kept here, his majesty is that monsieur be kept here, exiled, cast away, with no chance of parole, let alone escape, though the Royal Navy has a frigate circling just in case he tries his luck. Under the tropical sun, the Frenchman spends his time gardening. With a wide-brimmed hat on his head, you can find him most days down on his knees, tending to the daisies in his allotment.

At night, he retires his stocky frame to Longwood House, a modest wooden dwelling of the kind you might find in suburban Surrey. There he reads, writes, pats his paunch, and grumbles about the pains within. Throw in the disputes with his neighbour, the humourless island governor, and he has been sentenced to a fate far worse than death. He has been condemned to the life of a bourgeois Englishman. I have worn the imperial crown of France, the iron crown of Italy, he records in his journal. England has now given me a greater and more glorious one,

for it is that worn by the saviour of the world, the crown of thorns. For someone of such colossal self-regard, let alone reputation, this is a spectacular fall from grace. Mere months ago, he was not just Emperor of France, but the master of continental Europe. The most brilliant general of his age, a virtual god, not to mention the lead player in a 20-year series of conflicts, the wars that bear his signature. In modern times, there's been something of a rehabilitation of his reputation. Some no longer see him quite as the ogre that the British and their allies painted at the time. But he still divides opinion, even in his homeland. Was he a freedom fighter? A champion of the oppressed? One whose enlightened influence shaped European destiny? Or was he a delusional

egomaniac? The reckless adventurer who left a trail of corpses from Lisbon to Moscow, three million of them. A would-be revolutionary who grew rather too fond of imperial grandeur. Whether feared or revered, of this there can be no dispute. In his time, he was not just the dictator of France, supreme overlord of Europe, but probably the most powerful man on earth. A man of such legend that the world is on first-name terms with him. Still, Napoleon. Since I was 10 years old, I've been utterly fascinated by Napoleon Bonaparte. He was one of the greatest lawgivers and soldiers and conquerors of all time. But also he was a dictator, a benign dictator, but nonetheless somebody who grasped power in a military coup

and held it without recourse to the people that he was ruling. I think I find almost everything about Napoleon compelling. and held it without recourse to the people that he was ruling. I think I find almost everything about Napoleon compelling. I think it was Wellington who said that the presence of Napoleon on a battlefield was worth 40,000 men, which is an extraordinary compliment from him. And adding to that capacity and to the undoubted intelligence, you've also got an ambition that is off the scale, completely off the scale. Napoleon was one of the greatest generals of all time. He won a surprisingly large percentage of all the major battles he fought. His campaigns really changed the shape of Europe forever. He completely dominated 19th century European culture, Western culture, as a symbol of human

possibility. People were just absolutely amazed to look at somebody like this. They saw him as having superhuman qualities in a way. He fascinates us because he reminds us of a world that has disappeared. He reminds us of values that arouse a certain nostalgia. He is a man who starts at the bottom of the social ladder and who climbed higher than anyone else to become the master of Europe and the conductor of history for a while. That makes a very solid legend,

whatever the judgment one may make of the work and of the man. He can be seen as somebody that stood up to those in power, to those who believed that they had a God-given right to rule. Now, of course, the paradox is that Napoleon turns into an emperor who is as authoritarian, as tyrannical, probably more so than his immediate predecessor, Louis XVI.

It's how you balance those various elements. But I think what is interesting is with Napoleon that you can have that kind of argument in a way that I hope most people wouldn't have an argument about whether Hitler was a good or bad thing. I think with Napoleon, you have got a for and you have got an against part of the argument. From Noisa, this is part one of the Napoleon story. Just as Napoleon's life will end on an island, so too it begins on one. An island set in the balmy waters of the Mediterranean. Corsica. It's spring, 1769.

French soldiers are scouring the hills, hunting down rebels. Until recently, Corsica was part of the Republic of Genoa, but it has just been ceded, or rather sold, to France. The Genoese government, near bankrupt and riddled with corruption, has cashed in its assets, and the locals are not happy about it. Corsica's people are poor but proud. The transfer to French control promises wealth,

but the Corsicans are fiercely patriotic, independent. Like those on their sister island, Sardinia, they are culturally Italian. They speak a local patois. They detest their foppish new occupiers with their powdered wigs and metropolitan ways. The resistance has been bitter. Partisans have been harassing French troops, conducting hit-and-run strikes, hiding out in the mountain caves and cedar forests of the island's rugged interior. The rebels include a young married couple.

Their names are Carlo and Letizia di Buonaparte, aged 23 and 19. Living rough has been particularly hard on Letizia, for she is heavily pregnant. Through their history, the islanders had given short shrift to the Romans and the Moors, but the might of Bourbon France proves too much. Outgunned and outsupplied, the Corsicans are forced to submit.

Amid the island's appalling poverty, the Buonapartes are some of the more fortunate ones. Carlo is educated, a lawyer, and they have two houses. One in the town of Ajaxio, another in the country. They have sheep, a vineyard, a nanny, a cook. They can even claim some noble blood, hailing from minor Florentine aristocracy. But it's all relative. Life on Corsica is still incredibly tough. Letizia will bear thirteen children in all, only eight of whom will survive.

Allowed home under their new French rulers, Laetitia will soon have her child, their second. Going into labour on her way back from church, she fails to scramble to the bedroom in time. She gives birth on a pile of carpets in the hallway. The baby, a boy, is born on August 15th, 1769. They name him after a great-uncle. Napoleone. Napoleone di Buonaparte. Andrew Roberts is author of the acclaimed bestseller, Napoleon the Great. Corsica had only been part of France for one year when Napoleon was born.

He didn't think of himself as French in his early years. He is an outsider. Like so many dictators, one thinks of Hitler and Stalin and others, they were outsiders from their actual countries. And this is true of Napoleon, despite the fact that he becomes Emperor of France, and for many people today, personifies France. Wisely, the French are merciful to the rebels, at least to the ones they deem useful to their new administration. With his noble lineage, sketchy as it may be, With his noble lineage, sketchy as it may be,

Carlo is just the sort of man the new governors are looking for. Marked for special treatment, Carlo soon gets a seat on the island's assembly. The erstwhile rebel becomes a collaborator, or, at the very least, someone who can sense which way the wind is blowing. Perhaps with so many mouths to feed, he has little choice. In 1777, with French rule secure, Carlo was appointed to represent Corsica in the Royal Court at Versailles. For rapidly mobile Corsicans, like it or not,

mainland France presents the only way out. It is the land of opportunity. It's been suggested that Napoleone never forgave his father for betraying Corsica. This seems overplayed. He loved his father to the end. What is sure is that for some years to come, and with considerable irony, Napoleone simply detests the French and everything they stand for. I was born as the fatherland was dying, he would declare, with characteristic flourish. Thirty thousand Frenchmen vomited upon our coasts,

drowning the seat of liberty in torrents of blood. While Carla worms his way into the corridors of the establishment, Napoleone and his older brother Giuseppe, as a perk of the job, are assigned prestigious places in the French school system. And so, in late 1778, when he's just nine years old, Napoleone leaves Corsica to set foot on the mainland for the very first time. Their first stop is a religious school in Autun, in eastern France, where Giuseppe will remain.

Napoleone, meanwhile, proceeds to the Royal Military Academy at Brienne-le-Château in the Champagne region. At Brienne, the-Château in the Champagne region. At Brienne, the northern winter bites hard, particularly tough on a sun-blessed Mediterranean islander. Napoleone, not yet ten, is in an alien land and all alone. Patrice Genevieve is a biographer of Napoleon and director of the Raymond Aron Centre for Political Research in Paris. He would later explain how he was very surprised one day to see that his glass of water had frozen. There were very cold winters while he was at college in Champagne and the water had frozen in his glass.

He had never seen ice. He didn't know what ice was or snow. So he is an uprooted young man. With his coarse clothes and rough manners, small and irritable, and with his mouth full of an Italian name, he's bullied mercilessly. He's frequently caught up in playground scraps. David Bell is director of the Davis Center for Historical Studies and professor of history at

Princeton University. Corsica really did seem foreign to most of the French. And when Napoleon first arrived in France, he had to spend a year learning French first. He always had a fairly strong accent. And in fact, really until 1793, Napoleon's great ambition was to fight for Corsican independence against France. So it's really rather funny. He was serving in the French army, and there he was thinking that he wanted to lead Corsica to independence against the army he was serving. Napoleone de Buonaparte is an otherwise unremarkable student, though he excels at maths. At 15 he becomes eligible for a year's study at the École Militaire in Paris. He's a prime candidate for the artillery.

Napoleone will ultimately graduate near the bottom of his class. He's unimpressed with an education bent on nurturing gentlemanly skills, like fencing, drawing and dancing, over what he considers proper soldiering. And it seems there are arrogant nobles at every turn, determined to trip him up. In Corsican terms, actually, he was an aristocrat, but that didn't matter to his school colleagues, who were also aristocrats. And if anything, they looked down on him socially as much as being an outsider. So this toughened him. He was somebody who enjoyed his own company.

He would withdraw into himself. For Napoleone, there comes a realization. It's not necessarily France itself, or even the French, that he loathes. It's the whole rotten class system. Napoleone is far from alone in such thoughts. In the 1780s, the French economy has taken a nosedive. France may champion the American Revolution and present itself as a progressive force in the world, but there's little evidence of this at home. On the streets, people are growing hungry, restless. A palpable resentment is building towards the decadence of the monarchy, towards the king, Louis XVI, and his free-spending wife, Marie Antoinette.

But then Napoleone's studies come to an abrupt halt. As he is due to sit his final exams, he receives bad news. His father, Carlo, has died. Stomach cancer. He was just 38. It turns out Carlo had been blazing through the family's money, making reckless business investments, and now the Buonapartes are officially destitute.

Brother Giuseppe, who's changed his name to the more French-sounding Joseph, is 18 months older, but he has passed over. It is Napoleone who's designated as the new family guardian. Young as he is, still just fifteen, he is to take care financially of his mother and seven siblings. For the sake of his family, the soldiering must continue. In September 1785, now aged 16, Napoleone receives his first commission. He is one of the youngest officers in the French army. Officially now a professional soldier, he is made a second lieutenant in an artillery unit stationed at Valence in the Rhone Valley. As the months progress, he proves more than capable at commanding a battery.

He begins to attract the attention of his superiors. But, as ever, there's that glass ceiling, a limit on how far the poor little Corsican can rise. At night, in his billet, Napoleone records his woes in his diary, even talks of suicide. And he reads voraciously, getting lost in the exploits of Alexander the Great, Hannibal and Julius Caesar, men whose achievements he fantasizes he will one day emulate.

In September 1786, Napoleone di Buonaparte is given leave to return to his island home. He's not seen Corsica in eight years. There are younger siblings he's never even met. Officers are allowed to spend up to six months a year on furlough. He will continue to shuttle back and forth from France, still eulogising Corsica, still hopeful one day of a permanent return. By the July of 1789,

Napoleone's regiment has been posted to Auxon in Burgundy. It is there, while not yet twenty years of age, that dramatic news filters back. Paris is in open revolt. The mob has finally cracked. On the 14th of the month, they stormed an old fortress where some of their comrades were being detained. The Bastille. It is the inciting incident of an event that will upturn the entire European order, the French Revolution.

There is a romantic notion today of rebels manning the barricades, crying Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. But the truth is that France has been sucked into a vortex of anarchy, despair, and, above all, violence that will last for years. Napoleon de Bonaparte, the man, may have sympathy with the revolutionaries' cause, but, as a soldier, his job is to protect the regime, to provide security. Military units across France are placed on high alert. Napoleone duly does his bit, maintaining public order, quelling dissent, arresting rioters. In truth, he's a bit of an obsessive-compulsive.

He detests disorder, the chaos, the anarchy of mob rule. But, ultimately, he is unconvinced that this is his struggle. He spends more and more time back in Corsica. He fabricates an extended sick leave to add to his already generous holiday entitlement. He comes dangerously close to a charge of going AWOL. In June 1791, the royal family is caught trying to flee France. They're brought back to the Tuileries Palace and placed under virtual house arrest. In the summer of 1792, Napoleone is sitting in a Parisian tea house just across the way from the royal residence.

From his vantage point, he can hear the angry rumble of a crowd growing closer, until the baying mob rounds the corner. The rioters storm the building. They hack the royal bodyguard to pieces. They drag out the king and place a red revolutionary cap on his head. Napoleone feels nothing but revulsion at this ritual of humiliation. But it is the end of the hated monarchy all the same. In September, a republic is proclaimed.

Lieutenant Buonaparte is no longer a defender of the crown, but of a political ideal. All through his to-ing and fro-ing to Corsica, Napoleone has never once swerved from his belief in his island's self-determination. He has even, in his spare time, written a lovingly crafted history of the place. His brother, Joseph, has also returned and is now the mayor of Ajaccio.

Napoleone gets himself a secondment as a lieutenant colonel in Corsica's National Guard. It seems as if the Buonaparte brothers might be able to effect some real change. They've been spurred on by the re-emergence of a significant Corsican character, a man named Pasquale Paoli. Ever since Napoleone can remember, Paoli has been the dominant figure in Corsican politics, a hero, so much so that the islanders simply refer to him as Babu, Daddy. In 1755, Paoli secured Corsica its de facto independence from the Genoese, and during the French occupation,

it was Paoli who led the resistance, with Carlo di Buonaparte serving under him. As Corsica came under Bourbon French rule, Paoli was exiled. Now the new rulers in Paris have granted him a return, but there's a problem. Aged 67 now, Paoli has spent the last 20 years in London, being feted in the Soho coffeehouses, a member of Dr. Johnson's literary circle. He's developed a fondness for British ways, its governance, and its constitutional monarchy. A Corsican nationalist he may be, but he's certainly no Republican. A Corsican nationalist he may be, but he's certainly no republican. Corsica soon divides between those backing Paoli and others like the Buonapartes who

envision a free Corsica within the framework of a modern French republic. Things soon turn sour. Paoli condemns the Buonaparte brothers as ragazzoni inesperti, inexperienced little boys. As factional violence breaks out across Corsica, the Buonapartes' Ajaccio home is ransacked. Paoli reaches out to his old British pals and invites their military presence on his island. A protectorate is formed, the short-lived Anglo-Corsican kingdom. As Paoli gains the upper hand, history comes full circle. The Buonapartes are the rebels once more, on the run, this time cast out of their homeland. So at that point, all of the Bonaparte family,

not just Napoleon and his brothers, but even his mother and really the whole clan, had to run very quickly to leave Corsica, and they washed up basically in southern France. At that point, Napoleon basically said, all right, I'm done with Corsica. I'm going to make my career as a French officer. They set up temporary home in the southern port of Marseille. It's a Republican stronghold. The year before, the city sent men to Paris to defend the revolution. Their marching song became a popular ditty. In time, it will become the national anthem, the Marseillaise. On the mainland, the Buonapartes find this same revolution has now taken a dark turn.

In the January of 1793, King Louis XVI was executed. In October, Marie Antoinette will follow. There has been a wave of judicial killings in the aftermath, some 40,000 or so. The beheadings are coming so thick and fast that a new apparatus has been deployed to keep up with demand, the guillotine. There is a new dictatorial government under the puritanical Maximilian Robespierre. France has entered a period of horrific violence,

known simply as the Terror. Robespierre's fundamentalists, known as the Jacobins, are purging anyone suspected of royalist or anti-republican sympathies. The Buonapartes must tread carefully. They may be Corsican and impoverished, but they are still technically nobility. Napoleone must do as his brothers have done and give himself a makeover. He will be, from now on, spoken in the French manner,

Napoleon Bonaparte. It's really only in 1793 in the course of the French Revolution that he finally decided to hitch his star to France itself rather than to Corsica. But this perspective as an outsider, of course, it gave him great advantages in France in some ways. He was not always taken seriously enough until,

for some of his opponents, it was simply too late. He had the outsider's perspective, which allowed him to see, I think, some of the political maneuvers a bit more clearly and even a bit more cynically than others did. Napoleon's attitude to Robespierre is a case in point. Bonaparte might deplore the carnage of the terror, but he also has a begrudging respect for the Jacobin clarity of purpose. He had a real friendship for Robespierre's brother,

and it's probably one of the few friends he had had in his life. And I think he saw in Robespierre a revolutionary of order whose project was to finish the revolution by the guillotine. Robespierre did not have an army to do this. He had the scaffold. The excesses of the revolution have proven too much for some. The destruction of the Ancien Régime has been conducted on an industrial scale. French life has been completely reordered.

There's a new calendar with months renamed, a ten-day week, each day divided into ten hours of 100 decimal minutes. And there are new years, with the beginning of the Republic, 1792, reset to year one. Robespierre has even done away with God. There is now a new religion, the cult of the Supreme Being. In parts of the country, like the Vendee in the West, there are already armed uprisings against the extremism of this new regime. Michael Rowe is reader in European history at King's College, London. France is confronted with a civil war, and it's a civil war which claims tens of thousands of lives. They try and reshape time itself, you know, with this revolutionary calendar, they abolish religious holidays.

And for a lot of people, this isn't just about wrecking your life on earth, but it's condemning you to eternal damnation. So these things are incredibly, profoundly important. And these are the kind of issues which, you know, people are actually going to take up arms to defend. In the capitals of Europe, the crowned heads look on with alarm. With revolutionary sympathizers among their own chattering classes, there's a very real risk of contagion.

The execution of France's king and queen, to whom some of them were related, has caused them to rub their own necks reflexively. If it can happen in the most powerful, the richest country in Europe. Put simply, the French Revolution can no longer be tolerated. Not merely contained, it must be snuffed out. It must be snuffed out. In April 1792, an alliance is formed between the European powers to exploit the turmoil. Britain, Austria, Prussia, Spain, plus the Italian kingdoms of Naples and Sardinia, instigate what is known as the War of the First Coalition.

Europe is in the middle of a conflict in 1789. You have a war in the east, you know, between Russia on the one side with its ally Austria against the Ottoman Empire. It looks as if other powers will be drawn into that conflict. I mean, in retrospect, we tend to see the storming of the Bastille as the big event. But, you know, if you're around in Europe at that time, actually, there's something else going on, which in many ways looks far more serious. Actually, this is as much about great power competition. Geopolitics trumps ideology. Taking the fight to the revolutionaries, Allied armies bear down on France through Flanders and the Rhineland.

The British give military support by sea to the revolt in the Vendée. Crucially, in the south, with local royalist assistance, the Royal Navy also seizes the key strategic port of Toulon. Toulon is not just any old place. It's the headquarters, it's the main base of France's Mediterranean fleet. It's taken over by rebels who then hand over the keys, if you like, of the city to the British, who come in with Spanish allies as well and Sardinian forces and occupy Toulon. It shows you, I think, how desperate things are for France, that your main naval base in the Mediterranean

isn't just sort of captured by the enemy, but it's actually handed over to the enemy by rebels. For Republican France, Toulon is a humiliation. As an artillery captain now, Napoleon Bonaparte is dispatched there as part of the military mission to oust the invaders. It was essential for the revolutionaries to get the British out of Toulon. And the key aspect of doing that was to rain fire down upon them. It had to be done by cannon.

And the person who was in charge of the artillery was Napoleon. So he was, for a key moment, the absolutely vital figure in this tremendously important military action that ultimately might decide on whether or not the revolution was going to succeed or fail. Napoleon's superiors are sceptical of his suggestion that the French can seize a key hill fortress overlooking the port. Nicknamed Little Gibraltar, it's proving impregnable. All military planning thus far has involved skirting around it. But Napoleon is insistent. If it can be taken, and its cannon turned around, with further artillery dragged up the hills,

they can bombard the warships in the harbour. It's a risky plan. It needs to be signed off in Paris. But Napoleon has found himself an ally in a Robespierre confederate, a fellow Corsican named Antoine Salicetti. Pressure is applied. Napoleon is given the go-ahead. As Republican troops launch their assault on the city's defences, Napoleon is right in the mix. He even takes the British bayonet to the thigh. But soon his bombardiers are raining down shells on the British warships,

with Napoleon in the thick of it again, working the cannon alongside his men. Ten ships are set on fire during the assault. On December 18th, the British naval commander, Admiral Hood, beats a strategic withdrawal. And incidentally, most of the French fleet is destroyed in Toulon. The British don't just leave and leave the French fleet intact. They sort of wreck it when they leave. So it's a quasi-French victory, let's put it that way. Still, the optics are good.

After recapturing Toulon, young Napoleon Bonaparte, aged 24, is a rising star. He is duly promoted. Within three months, he's gone from a captain to a brigadier general. The only way that Napoleon could have become a general at the age of 24 was because of the French Revolution. It did three things. Firstly, of course, it got rid of all the aristocrats from the French army. Secondly, it provided a huge need for officers because there were wars that started immediately the French Revolution broke out. And thirdly, it gave him personally a opportunity because he was fairly well connected to the politicians of the day. So without the

revolution, there would have been no Napoleon general at 24. There might have been later, but certainly not at that stage. As the saying goes, revolutions eventually devour their own children. In the summer of 1795, the Robespierre government falls. Robespierre's neck will soon be feeling the same guillotine blade that he has brought down on so many others. Not so long ago, he was having to downplay his noble origins.

But now, as someone identified with Robespierre's regime, Napoleon must tread carefully once again. Indeed, he actually spends a few days in prison in Antibes, interrogated as to his sympathies. He contemplates transferring his military skills elsewhere, as a mercenary with the Russians or the Turks, perhaps. Even in India, God forbid, with the British. But the new French government, the Directory, is a constitutional one. It's more moderate than its predecessor, more forgiving.

Soon, Napoleon is out of the slammer and back in Paris, figuring out his next move. There's something really quite funny about Napoleon that at the beginning of the revolution, he actually sent in an essay to a contest that was being held by a learned academy in France. The theme of it was happiness, and he wrote a discourse on happiness. One of the things he condemned in this essay of his, this youthful essay, was ambition. He said, it's a terrible thing to be ambitious. It sort of destroys everything in its path.

Well, I mean, for Napoleon, of all people, to be condemning ambition is really very funny. Despite war on France's borders, after six years of turmoil, things seem relatively calm for once. There is life, music, laughter, ladies. There is life, music, laughter, ladies. For all his battlefield explosiveness, Napoleon has been a bit of a damp squib when it comes to the fairer sex. Shabbily dressed, scrawny, lank-haired, all dealings have been characterized by a deep awkwardness and insecurity. He is a young man of pale and livid complexion, as one official describes him, stooped, looking frail and sickly. As a young officer in the south of France, he had a brief relationship with a merchant's daughter named Désirée Clary. It ultimately ended in her rejection of him.

For the emotionally fragile Napoleon, it was an experience so profound that he was compelled to write a novel about it. The newly emancipated Paris is drunk on a sense of liberation. The parties and balls are populated by single young women dressed revealingly, hungry for male company. Many have a macabre adornment a red ribbon worn around their necks a sign that they are available courtesy of their husbands having been guillotined. Even in this spirit of hedonism and free love

and with his newly acquired rank Napoleon does not break his run of bad luck. He seeks comfort elsewhere. After a desperate fumble with a prostitute, he writes it up the next day as if it were a routine science experiment. A dialogue on the nature of love, as he titles it. But things are about to change for Napoleon. He's about to become a poster boy.

A big catch. The heady summer of 1795 presents a calm before yet another storm. There is a counter-revolution brewing. On October the 5th, a mob bowls through the streets of the capital calling for the restoration of the monarchy. There are 30,000 people massed in central Paris, intent on storming the Tuileries Palace, which is now the seat of republican government. The business of stamping out this unrest falls to Napoleon. This time, he must turn his cannon not on the British, but on the French. The clash will become known as the Battle of Très-Vendémiaire,

after its date in the new revolutionary calendar. After a two-hour street brawl near the church of Saint-Roch, the insurrectionist headquarters, Napoleon wheels up his guns. He will treat the rabble, as he puts it, to a whiff of grape shot. He does not mess about. He blasts the mob at near point-blank range, killing hundreds. The counter-revolution is over before it's really begun. There will not be another. If you treat the mob with kindness, Napoleon muses, these creatures fancy themselves invulnerable.

He is decisive. He acts quickly. He makes decisions. He takes risks. The government in Paris, the Directory, is not stable. The Civil War is maybe not as intense as it had been in 1793, but essentially you've got two sort of factions of French people that loathe each other, and the Directory tries to occupy some kind of centrist position, but is attacked from the right, from monarchists. They want the old king back or one of his successors back. And then you've got these neo-Jacobins on the extreme left, and you have this sort of disorder. And increasingly, the army is essential to maintain order. And that means troops, and it means generals. It means people

like Napoleon Bonaparte. They become increasingly indispensable, I guess, when it comes to domestic politics, as well as fighting all these enemies of France, which, you know, they're still there. Michael Rapport is reader in modern European history at the University of Glasgow. Napoleon's not consistent in his relationship with the revolution. His guiding principle is ultimately his own ambition. So I think there is some sincere attachment to the revolution. His guiding principle is ultimately his own ambition. So I think there is some sincere attachment to the revolution there. But ultimately, I think he is an opportunist. He sees the chances, he seizes them,

and he does that to enhance his career. No matter his motivation, Napoleon is no longer just the hero of Toulon. He is the saviour of Paris. On October 26th, 1795, Napoleon Bonaparte is made a full general, the head of the Army of the Interior. With a salary of 48,000 francs per year, Napoleon is now a serious player. He spruces up his wardrobe, begins wearing expensive eau de cologne. He throws away the shabby old boots he's worn ever since artillery school. He rides in a flashy carriage. He frequents the salons. For his brother, Joseph, he wangles a job as a diplomat. Together they do some off-the-books trading in luxury goods,

find silks, sugar, coffee. Napoleon's latest champion is the executive leader of the Directory, a man named Paul Barras. And Barras has something else for Napoleon, a lady he might be interested in. She's actually Barras' mistress, or rather, his ex-mistress. He's been putting her up in a little house, but, to be frank, he's got rather fed up with her. Marie-Joseph Rose de Beauharnais is an aristocrat.

She's 32, a widow, and has two small kids. She's 32, a widow, and has two small kids She's also broke, dependent on the kindness of strangers oft found ingratiating herself with officers and politicians Her husband, a royalist general, died on the guillotine She was lucky to avoid the same grisly end She spent months in a squalid jail awaiting what she assumed was the inevitable. Napoleon can't thank Barras enough for the introduction. When he meets de Boisne,

he falls head over heels. Her friends may call her Rose, but Napoleon prefers a pet name, a variant on her middle one. Perhaps in tribute to his brother, she will only ever be, to him, Josephine. Her family own a plantation on the Caribbean island of Martinique, and she grew up there. She has stubs of blackened teeth from the sugar cane she used to suck as a child, though she's learned to smile with her lips clamped together, especially when being rendered on canvas. Dr. Catherine Callie-Gallitz is an art historian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Françoise Jachar painted a portrait of Josephine that was shown in Paris,

and in this portrait she looks very elegant, very languorous, kind of reclining on this velvet sofa. It's a very flattering, very attractive portrait. Flattery was a big part of the job of a portraitist. It's the subject on their best day, kind of like doing a little bit of photoshopping. One of the contemporaries of Gerard, of Josephine, wrote down in his journal, basically something along the lines of, well, if you actually see the portrait first and then you meet her afterwards, you're bound to be disappointed

because the portrait made her out to be much more attractive than she actually was, or so said this description. She is the first woman, Napoleon sighs, to ever give me confidence. He writes to her several times a day. I awake with my thoughts full of you, he scrolls in one typical early missive. Your portrait and the remembrance of the delirious evening of yesterday have not allowed rest to my senses. Sweet and incomparable Josephine, what a strange influence you have on my heart. Meanwhile, my sweet love,

accept a thousand kisses, but do not give me any, for they burn up my blood. If Napoleon's blood is boiling, Josephine's unfortunately remains quite tepid, while he pours his heart out in a stream of puppy-dog yearnings and schoolboy eroticism, she amuses herself and her friends by reading them all out loud. Josephine tolerates Napoleon at best.

She dislikes his fondness for sitting on her lap, curling up like an infant. For her, General Napoleon, all five feet five of him, average height for the day, by the way, is a meal ticket, a means to an end. Even for poor, lovelorn Napoleon, there is a quid pro quo. He now has an inn with the Parisian movers and shakers. Josephine had been married to an aristocrat and she moved in very high circles in Paris. And what she effectively did for Napoleon was to knock the rough Corsican edges off him and to teach him how to behave in high society.

edges of him and to teach him how to behave in high society. At 10pm on March 9th, 1796, after six months together, Napoleon and Josephine are married. He is 26, six years her junior. On the wedding certificate, to fudge the age gap, they both declare themselves to be 28. It's hardly a fairytale wedding. In the town hall of the Second Arrondissement Josephine wears a plain dress with a republican sash. There are no guests. Napoleon turns up three hours late and has to wake up the presiding official who's fallen asleep in his chair.

But there is good reason for these hasty nuptials, as well as Napoleon's delay. Paul Barras, perhaps as a thank you for taking Josephine off his hands, has just appointed Napoleon supreme commander of the French army in Italy. There, the Austrians are amassing a huge force. In just 48 hours, Napoleon Bonaparte is to lead his troops into war. Napoleon gives Josephine a wedding present, a gold medallion. On it are inscribed two words. Au destin. To destiny.

Next time, in the next part of the Napoleon story. In a devastating display of battlefield brilliance, Napoleon drums the Austrians out of Italy. Headquartered in Milan, he gets a taste for political rule and artistic finery. Pushing hard on Vienna, he will defeat the First Coalition and dictate the peace terms. He will return to Paris both as a military hero and a budding statesman.

That's next time. Next time on Short History Of, we'll bring you a short history of the War of the Roses. The issue comes when the Duke of Somerset comes on the scene, who has his own personal problems with the Duke of York, and influences Henry and Margaret against the Duke of York. And there's so much backstory here, but effectively the Duke of Somerset has been wronged by Henry's regime in previous occasions. So to try and make things right with the Duke of Somerset, they make things wrong with the Duke of York.

Henry is so poor a judge of what is the best thing to do that he's consistently offending people when he's trying to just be nice to them. He just gives people what they want without really thinking about whether it's the best thing to do. And that actually is one of the worst things you can do as a medieval king.

That's next time on Short History Off.