page_title: Napoleon
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Napoleon / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Plaster statue, double of a plaster made as a template for a bronze statue erected in front of Brienne townhall. Français&#160;: Statue en plâtre, réplique d'un plâtre réalisé pour une statue de bronze érigée devant l'hôtel de ville de Brienne.
context_page_description: Napoleon Bonaparte, born Napoleone di Buonaparte, byname "Le Corse" or "Le Petit Caporal", was a French statesman and military leader who became notorious as an artillery commander during the French Revolution. He led many successful campaigns during the French Revolutionary Wars and was Emperor of the French as Napoleon I from 1804 until 1814 and again briefly in 1815 during the Hundred Days. Napoleon dominated European and global affairs for more than a decade while leading France against a series of coalitions during the Napoleonic Wars. He won many of these wars and a vast majority of his battles, building a large empire that ruled over much of continental Europe before its final collapse in 1815. He is regarded as one of the greatest military commanders in history, and his wars and campaigns are studied at military schools worldwide. Napoleon's political and cultural legacy has made him one of the most celebrated and controversial leaders in human history.
  Corsican by birth, Napoleon was born into a relatively modest family of Italian origin a few months after the island was annexed by the Kingdom of France.
context_section_description: The paternal ancestors of Napoleon, the Buonapartes, descended from a minor Tuscan noble family that emigrated to Corsica in the 16th century; while his maternal ancestors, the Ramolinos, descended from a minor Genoese noble family. "I am more of an Italian, or Tuscan, than a Corsican" Napoleon was to say and many descendants of the Italian colonists in Corsica considered themselves as such, but nothing in fact connected them to the villages they considered the "homeland", the land their ancestors had left to take up residence in Corsican cities. They may have presented themselves as continental out of a desire for honor and distinction, but this does not prove they really were as foreign as they themselves often imagined. We might say that they grew all the more attached to their Italian origins as they moved further and further away from them, becoming ever more deeply integrated into Corsican society through marriages. This was as true of the Buonapartes as of anyone else related to the Genoese and Tuscan nobilities by virtue of titles that were, to tell the truth, suspect. The Buonapartes were also the relatives, by marriage and by birth, of the Pietrasentas, Costas, Paraviccinis, and Bonellis, all Corsican families of the interior. His parents Carlo Maria di Buonaparte and Maria Letizia Ramolino maintained an ancestral home called "Casa Buonaparte" in Ajaccio. Napoleon was born there on 15 August 1769, their fourth child and third son. A boy and girl were born first but died in infancy. He had an elder brother, Joseph, and younger siblings Lucien, Elisa, Louis, Pauline, Caroline, and Jérôme. Napoleon was baptised as a Catholic. In his youth, his name was also spelled as Nabulione, Nabulio, Napolionne, and Napulione.
  Napoleon was born the same year the Republic of Genoa ceded Corsica to France. The state sold sovereign rights a year before his birth in 1768, and the island was conquered by France during the year of his birth and formally incorporated as a province in 1770, after 500 years under Genoese rule and 14 years of independence. Napoleon's parents fought against the French to maintain independence even when Maria was pregnant with him. But his father was an attorney who went on to be named Corsica's representative to the court of Louis XVI in 1777.
  The dominant influence of Napoleon's childhood was his mother, whose firm discipline restrained a rambunctious child. Later in life Napoleon stated, "The future destiny of the child is always the work of the mother." Napoleon's maternal grandmother had married into the Swiss Fesch family in her second marriage, and Napoleon's uncle, the cardinal Joseph Fesch, would fulfill a role as protector of the Bonaparte family for some years. Napoleon's noble, moderately affluent background afforded him greater opportunities to study than were available to a typical Corsican of the time.
  When he turned 9 years old, he moved to the French mainland and enrolled at a religious school in Autun in January 1779. In May, he transferred with a scholarship to a military academy at Brienne-le-Château. In his youth he was an outspoken Corsican nationalist and supported the state's independence from France. Like many Corsicans, Napoleon spoke and read Corsican (as his mother tongue) and Italian (as the official language of Corsica). He began learning French in school at around age 10. Although he became fluent in French, he spoke with a distinctive Corsican accent and never learned how to spell French correctly. He was, however, not an isolated case, as it was estimated in 1790 that fewer than 3 million people, out of France's population of 28 million, were able to speak standard French, and those who could write it were even fewer.
  Napoleon was routinely bullied by his peers for his accent, birthplace, short stature, mannerisms and inability to speak French quickly. Bonaparte became reserved and melancholy applying himself to reading. An examiner observed that Napoleon "has always been distinguished for his application in mathematics. He is fairly well acquainted with history and geogra
caption: Statue of Nepoleon as schoolboy in Brienne, aged 15
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