After reading Dr. Dorothy Carrington's book, The Dream-Hunters of Corsica (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995; Trafalgar Square Publishers, 1997), Dr. Harold T. Parker (Professor Emeritus, Duke University) wrote the author a letter of inquiry about the relationship of the substance of her book to the formation of Napoleon's personality. Her answer, which alludes to Professor Parker's articles as well as to her own books, follows. (Dr. Carrington has made her own translations of quotations, and a bibliography of her sources concludes the article.)

It can reasonably be supposed that Napoleon was aware of the traditional beliefs described in my The Dream-Hunters of Corsica [reviewed in the issue], but probably not in detail. It is certain that he did not share, nor on the whole approve of them. We do, however, know that he was deeply affected by the underlying ancestor cult, which might be described as the natural Corsican religion, stretching back into the depths of prehistory. His reactions to it were ambivalent: while he adhered to the cult of family solidarity, though not without reservations, he was violently opposed to the vendetta code of the duty to avenge the dead. These conflicting attitudes are apparent in his personal life and in his government of Corsica, and amount to what might be called a love-hate relationship with his fellow countrymen.

It must be remembered that the beliefs I have studied belong to the least educated sectors of Corsican society: that of the peasants and particularly of the shepherds, and that Napoleon had little experience of Corsican rural life. He was born and spent his first nine years in Ajaccio, a fortified city founded by Genoese colonists in the late 15th Century and for a considerable time exclusively inhabited by people of Genoese origin, among them the first Bonaparte (Buonaparte) to settle in Corsica.

At the time of Napoleon's childhood, however, a number of Corsicans from the interior had obtained permission to live in the town. They mostly came from families of big landowners, like the Pozzo di Borgo, and in Ajaccio practiced professions in the law. Daughters of such families were sought after by Ajaccio citizens with a view to acquiring land in the interior by the dowry system. The Bonapartes, for instance, intermarried in several generations and, advantageously, with the Corsican Bozzi.

Limited Contacts

Napoleon, therefore, in his childhood, had only limited contacts with the Corsican country people. He recalled that peasants came into town to deliver supplies to his family or to bring their olives to the oil press installed on the ground floor of the casa Bonaparte. Some inkling of their esoteric traditions may thus have filtered through to him, but he must always have been aware of belonging to a different social category with different values.

In fact, the French conquest of Corsica in 1769 had been easily accepted in Ajaccio. Only a few of the citizens, among them Carlo and Letizia Bonaparte (Napoleon's parents), had sided with Pasquale Paoli, the Corsican independence leader, and most of them switched their allegiance to the French after his defeat, Carlo and Letizia included. French manners and fashions soon became the rule in the town; the ambitious sought social advancement by ingratiating themselves with the French authorities, Carlo and Letizia setting the example.

During the five formative years Napoleon spent in school at Brienne in France, he was virtually cut off from Corsican influences. Yet, paradoxically, the experience aroused and stimulated his consciousness of being Corsican. His French schoolmates mocked and derided him as a foreigner, come from a conquered land. He reacted by developing a new pride in his Corsican origins and a hatred of the French, who had destroyed Corsican independence. As Dr. Parker so aptly wrote in "The Formation of Napoleon's Personality": "he accepted the Corsican identity thrust on him".

His education at Brienne was not strictly rationalistic, as it would be in a French state school today. Teaching was still largely controlled by the clergy; in Ajaccio he had been sent to little primary schools run by nuns and by a priest; Brienne was in the hands of a congregation of Franciscan monks. Their instruction, however, did nothing to enlarge his religious consciousness.

According to the dictate of Saint Germain, minister of war, religion was to be taught in the military academies "without metaphysical superfluities". At Brienne it may hardly have been taught at all. Performance of the rites was perfunctory: Mass was habitually celebrated in less than ten minutes.

Though Napoleon received his first communion there, from the village priest, he admits that whatever religious faith he had brought with him from home was demolished; not by the carelessness of the monks, but by their focus on the study of Antiquity, which enthralled and inspired him. The pagan heroes of the ancient world came to represent his human ideal; mathematics, for which he was gifted, was for him the supreme science. His passionate concentration on these two subjects can have left little place for religion.

Later, when he had acquired maturity of judgment, as is well known he declared his belief in God and his confidence in Christianity as a stabilizing force in society, negotiated the Concordat [an up-to-date version of the old Concordat which regulated the Catholic Church in France], and restored religious worship in France.

His conformist, somewhat pragmatic approach to the sacred precluded any leaning towards folk beliefs. In fact, he valued established religion for this very reason. "Religion", he announced to the Council of State in 1803, "is the vaccine of the imagination, preserves it from all dangerous and absurd beliefs". ["Religion est la vaccine de l'imagination; elle la preserve de toutes les croyances dangereuses et absurdes."] It is thus understandable that he took no interest in Corsican occult traditions except by imposing drastic measures against the code of duty to the dead, as I will describe.

Unhappiness

His unhappiness at Brienne did not lead him to look for comfort in sex or religion. Rather he found compensation in his newly awakened empathy with Corsica; his admiration of Pasquale Paoli, who had given the island a brief, glorious period of independence; and his loathing of the French who had destroyed it. He dreamed of succeeding Paoli, of freeing Corsica from her "chains".

He asked his father to give him Boswell's Account of Corsica, an enthusiastic description of Paoli's regime. The wonder is that Carlo Bonaparte had kept the book after his change of allegiance. Napoleon, it is said, openly blamed him for rallying to the French. This was not the only situation in which his instinctive respect for family ties clashed with his personal views.

His pro-Corsican, anti-French opinions gathered strength in the ensuing years, during which he completed his education at the Ecole Militaire in Paris and gained a commission in the French Army. His situation was paradoxical. Trained in France to serve France, he owed to France his livelihood and his social position, which he valued and had worked hard to achieve. He carried out his duties with loyalty and competence; yet he still felt victimized by his benefactors. Are such mental conflicts characteristic of conquered peoples, subjected to the rule of their conquerors? Napoleon, eventually, overcame the predicament by ruling his rulers.

He remained attached to his homeland even when he no longer depended on it. As a young artillery officer he hastened to take his first leave there in 1786, and during the next seven years he contrived to spend about half his time on the island. These repeated visits brought him no closer to the country people, for he was almost continuously in Ajaccio, engaged in political maneuvers, mostly fruitless, although he did eventually succeed in getting himself elected lieutenant colonel in the National Guard.

French Revolution

The French Revolution, welcomed by the majority of Corsicans, inevitably fueled his detestation of the French conquerors, exponents of the ancien regime. It exploded in an often quoted letter to Paoli, written from Auxonne on 12 June 1789, when Paoli was still in exile in England: "I was born when the country was perishing. Thirty thousand Frenchmen spewed onto our coasts, drowning the throne of Liberty in torrents of blood". ["Je naquis quand la patrie perissait. Trente mille Francais vomis sur nos cotes, noyant le trone de la Liberte dans des flots de sang."]

Less well known is Napoleon's unfinished short story, "Nouvelle Corse". It was inspired by the brutal repression of a revolt of the Corsican shepherds in the Niolo in 1774, when French troops killed, hung on the spot, or deported men, raped women, burned villages, and slaughtered the herds. An old Corsican, so Napoleon relates, the sole survivor of his family, escaped to the island of Gorgona, where he avenged the massacre of his kinsmen by killing French sailors on ships wrecked from time to time on its shores.

Revenge, according to "the virtuous old man" was "the first law of nature"; murder must be committed to appease the spirits (the word used is "manes") of the murdered dead. When he was eventually captured by the crew of a passing ship, he regarded his misfortunes as a punishment, not for having killed many Frenchmen, but for not having killed enough: his ancestors were revenging themselves on him for the insufficiency of his own revenge. Though fragmentary, the story is a powerful affirmation of an essential element of the Corsican ancestor cult: the code of duty to the dead.

But did Napoleon really adhere to that code? The horrific quality of the tale and the unhappy fate of the old man may suggest, on the contrary, that he rejected it.

Such an interpretation is borne out by his brutal repression of the vendetta code of vengeance when he assumed control of Corsica after the collapse of the Anglo-Corsican kingdom in 1796. Strong measures were certainly needed: anarchy prevailed, and a considerable part of the population was in open revolt. Napoleon suspended the French constitution on the island and in 1801 appointed General Morand governor, with dictatorial powers.

If a murderer was not immediately arrested, Morand had authority to arrest the killer's close relatives and execute them, without trial, within two hours. Not all murders, of course, were motivated by revenge; but it is likely that the majority were, as is still true in Corsica today. Napoleon's policy constituted a spectacular rejection of certain significant Corsican values and traditions, and a merciless condemnation of his countrymen.

In the words of the contemporary Corsican chronicler, F.O. Renucci, Morand's government was "rather the work of an oriental despot than of a civilized man born in a century that defended the sacred rights of humanity". ["plutot l'oeuvre d'un despote oriental que d'un homme civilise et ne dans un siecle qui defendait les droits sacres de l'humanite."] I have lifted this quotation from Dr. Francois Paoli's book on Antonmarchi, Napoleon's last doctor at Saint Helena, which I am translating and will appear shortly in French with the title: Docteur Antonmarchi, ou le secret du masque de Napoleon (Paris: Edisud). It contains a well-researched chapter on this period of Corsican history, until now somewhat neglected, perhaps because it presents Napoleon in an unfavorable light.

But Napoleon's rule in Corsica was not unmitigatedly harsh. He showed clemency to the former supporters of the Anglo-Corsican kingdom; he granted concessions in taxation (in the Arretes Miot, 1801, and the Decret Imperial, 1811); he founded much-needed educational institutions.

As Dr. Parker points out in his "Napoleon and the Conquered", Napoleon knew how to make use of terror or conciliation according to circumstances. Revenge was contrary to his principles as a ruler and as an individual: he was not by nature personally vindictive, as his record shows, even though he had the power to be so. His treatment of Corsica by the government of Morand can be perhaps interpreted as the most vindictive step in his career. It can be explained as a vengeful reaction against the humiliation he had suffered in 1793, when he and his family were driven off the island by the partisans of Paoli, once his idol and who was then in conflict with the French revolutionary government.

Expulsion

The experience of expulsion left Napoleon with a lasting grudge against his countrymen. In fact, he only returned to Corsica, once more, when he spent a week in Ajaccio on his way back from Egypt in 1799. As first Consul he subjected the island to arbitrary acts of tyranny, as I have described; as Emperor he did little to assist or develop it, given his resources, although individual Corsicans, army officers (including forty-three generals, or so it is said!), and various functionaries greatly benefited from the imperial regime.

By then he had formed a strong emotional link with France as a whole: "I have only one mistress, she is France", he confided to Pierre-Louis Roederer in 1809, "I sleep with her. She has never disappointed me". ["Je n'ai qu'une maitresse, c'est la France. Je couche avec elle. Elle ne m'a jamais manque."]

"Never disappointed me": this he could not say for his countrymen. It is significant that in his days of defeat he never sought refuge among them, although he always trusted and admired their valor: they knew, he wrote (in 1789-90 in his previously mentioned sketch for a history of Corsica), that "death is one of the states of the soul, but that slavery is the soul's abasement".

In the face of his triumphant, overriding passion for France, his resentment against the little province of Corsica faded. In his last days, on Saint Helena, he was able to think of his homeland with affectionate nostalgia, recalling, in particular, the scent of the maquis. When he knew his end was near, he made a last-minute appeal to the Corsican cult of the dead by expressing the wish that if burial in Paris were refused him, he wanted to lie beside his "ancestors" in the cathedral of Ajaccio, as is recorded on a plaque in this building where he was baptized.

Speak with the Dead?

Did Napoleon, following Corsican tradition, believe in the reality of prolonged communication with the dead? According to Corsican tradition, the dead are honored on All Souls's Day, on the second of November; their tombs are lit with candles all through the previous night, and food and drink are laid out for them in the houses, with the doors left open and the fires burning, to welcome them to their former homes. If these attentions are neglected the dead may wreak vengeance on the living by dragging them down toward themselves. But I have found no evidence that Napoleon took heed of these customs, even though they are still observed in Ajaccio.

Nor have I found in Corsican tradition any parallel to the British belief in ghosts. If the dead returned, their presence was felt rather than seen. They did not assume the physical likeness of their living selves, although the figures in the dreaded "Squadra d'Arozza," the phantom procession that gave warning of an imminent death, appeared like human beings, but without being recognizable as specific individuals.

And while some houses in Corsica are regarded as accursed, places where deeds of violence have occurred and may occur again, there are not to my knowledge any equivalents to the haunted homes of Britain. Yet Napoleon did believe in the possibility of seeing a dead person, for in his last days at Saint Helena he claimed that Josephine had appeared before him in all her youth and beauty. This he confided to one of his companions in exile. (I wrote an article on the subject in an English journal called Light, but regret that I cannot give you exact references.) The experience was evidently not connected with Corsican tradition. In fact, the Catholic Church in Corsica reproved any attempt to communicate with the dead, as is still true. The Inquisition of the 16th and 17th centuries mercilessly condemned and imprisoned women for claiming to act as mediums.

Napoleon was not inclined by his nature, his experience, his education or his religious tendencies to sympathize with Corsican occult beliefs. Many he may not have known, or if he had, he would have no doubt dismissed them as "absurd and dangerous". Did he, for instance, know of the mazzeri?

It is remembered that he organized hunting and shooting expeditions on the Bonaparte's property, the Milelli, close to Ajaccio, when he returned there for the last time in 1799. Did he know that many of his countrymen also hunted in dreams? Did he ever hear talk of the Evil Eye or of the means of dispelling it? Did he come across any signadori in Ajaccio? That would not have been impossible, for some still practice in the town. But I have found no evidence that he was familiar with any of these phenomena.

On the other hand it is undeniable that he was influenced by Corsican occult beliefs at a deeper level -- that of the underlying ancestor cult -- but in an ambivalent manner. While he remained loyal to his family (with questionable consequences in his career), while he expressed the wish to be interred beside his ancestors (but only if a grander burial in Paris was denied him), he uncompromisingly rejected the duty of avenging the dead.

Nevertheless, another aspect of what might be called the basic Corsican religion he accepted without question: the belief in Destiny. Destiny, the primordial Corsican divinity, that determines all things, is still present in the Corsican psyche, though disguised under the name of "Providence" by practicing Catholics. It is responsible for attitudes and behavior characteristic of the population as a whole.

Napoleon boasted that he never took precautions for his safety, even on the battlefield, but "abandoned" himself to his Destiny. He was convinced that Destiny would ensure his triumph; but in the campaign of 1815 he knew that Destiny had deserted him. So firm was his faith in Destiny that it precluded any attention to the various signs and omens thought, in Corsica or elsewhere, to presage death.

Did he hear of the terrible "Squadra d'Arozza"? Did he meet anyone who had seen it? I have found no evidence on the subject. He never, to my knowledge, sought to foresee his future, or resorted to any technique of prediction, even though soothsayers cannot have been lacking. The Corsicans, according to an ancient tradition, mentioned by the 16th Century Corsican chronicler Filippini, believed they could read the future by looking at the shoulder blade of a slaughtered animal, preferably a lamb, shorn of its flesh and skin and held up against the sun. Shepherds of the Niolo claimed to have foreseen in this way the whole story of Napoleon's rise and fall. They did not, apparently, communicate it to Napoleon, nor did he seek their advice.

More Carrington:

Napoleon and Corsica
Napoleon's Corsica: Photos
Napoleon's Attitudes Toward Popular Corsican Beliefs

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