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NAPOLEON IN PRIVATE

He may have risen to become the most powerful man in the world, but Napoleon Bonaparte had humble beginnings.

Born in 1769 in Corsica after the French had colonised the area, Napoleon was one of eight children of island patriots and small-time aristocrats Letizia and Carlo Bonaparte. He spent his childhood hating France, the nation he would one day rule. His lawyer father, however, readily submitted to the new regime, for which Napoleon never forgave him, branding him as 'too fond of pleasure'.

Letizia Bonaparte, beautiful and strong-willed, attracted the real affections of her son. So obsessed was he that many experts talk of an Oedipus complex. He put all his success in life down to her training.

'She sometimes made me go to bed without supper,' Napoleon recalled, 'as if there were nothing to eat in the house. One had to learn to suffer and not let others see it. Even her tenderness was severe.'

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His father had enormous ambition for his children and secured Napoleon a scholarship to a school in France. Napoleon arrived in cold northern France for the first time in winter 1778, a thin nine-year-old used to Mediterranean warmth. He was a loner, surrounded by aristocrats at the Royal Military college at Brienne-le-Chateaux, and hardly able to speak French. Five years passed with no holidays or visits home.

Through years of planning and exploited opportunities, the young Napoleon rose quickly to become a general, but was still unsophisticated. This did not prevent him falling in love with the sensuous widow Marie-Joseph-Rose de Beauharnais, a Creole aristocrat from the French colony of Martinique, with two small children and deep in debt. To most of her friends she was Rose, to Bonaparte she was Josephine.

'I was naturally timid among women,' he said. 'Madame de Beauharnais was the first woman who gave me any degree of confidence.'

By contrast, Josephine knew men all too well. She had married young, her husband had died at the guillotine and it was well known that she had affairs with men high in French society. These included Paul Barras, the most powerful figure in the new government.

Josephine was not at all attracted to Bonaparte and told a friend later that she had to overcome a feeling of repugnance at his seriousness, unkempt appearance and lack of humour. Her looks were, however, fading and on 9 March 1796 the two were married.

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Josephine's former lover, Paul Barras, helped win Napoleon an appointment as supreme commander of all French forces in Italy and he was soon assigned to challenge the empire of Austria and its Italian allies. While away he sent a stream of passionate letters to his wife.

His wife was not so sincere. She was having an affair and when an aide dared to tell Bonaparte the truth, the general was crushed. Furious, he took the wife of one of his officers for a mistress. For a while, though, Josephine and Napoleon again ruled side by side, he separating only reluctantly when she was unable to bear him an heir.

'I want,'; he said, 'to marry a womb.' Archduchess Marie Louise, the 19 year old daughter of his old enemy, Emperor Francis I of Austria, had the misfortune to fit his bill. Despite objections, she accepted the wishes of her father, who wanted the union to bring peace to Austria. Marriage to Maria Louise, on 2 April 1810, allied Napoleon with the Hapsburgs, one of the great reigning families of Europe.

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One year later Marie Louise gave birth to a baby boy and Napoleon called him the King of Rome. The arrival of this good life numbed his cutting imagination and he began to lose his grip on affairs of state and military campaigns.

On 12 April, 1814, after crushing military defeats, Napoleon was forced to renounce his throne and attempted suicide. Eventually he was banished to St Helena where he died, aged 51, on 5 May 1821, deliriously whispering: 'France, army, chief of army, Josephine.'

The legacy of the great emperor lived on. When Bonaparte was defeated, the boy Napoleon II was taken to the court of his grandfather, Austrian emperor Francis I. He took the title of Duke of Reichstadt but died aged 21.

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Napoleon III (1808-1873) was born Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in Paris, the third and last son of King Louis and Queen Hortense of Holland The nephew of Bonaparte, he resurrected the Napoleonic empire in the mid-19th century and led France to defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-1871.

Like his uncle, Napoleon III was to some a tyrant and some a champion of democracy. He was strongly supported by peasants and, popularly elected, tried to alleviate poverty and encourage industrialisation while improving the country’s infrastructure. However, he crushed opposition ruthlessly.

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