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发表于 2004-3-23 14:49:40
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born Aug. 15, 1769, Ajaccio, Corsica
died May 5, 1821, St. Helena Island
French in full Napoléon Bonaparte, original Italian Napoleone Buonaparte, byname The Corsican, or The Little Corporal, French Le Corse, or Le Petit Caporal
French general, First Consul (1799–1804), and emperor of the French (1804–1814/15), one of the most celebrated personages in the history of the West. He revolutionized military organization and training; sponsored the Napoleonic Code; the prototype of later civil-law codes; reorganized education; and established the long-lived Concordat with the papacy.
Napoleon's many reforms left a lasting mark on the institutions of France and of much of western Europe. But his driving passion was the military expansion of French dominion, and, though at his fall he left France smaller than it had been at the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he was almost unanimously revered during his lifetime and until the end of the Second Empire under his nephew Napoleon III as one of history's great heroes.
Napoleon was born on Corsica shortly after the island's cession to France by the Genoese. He was the fourth, and second surviving, child of Carlo Buonaparte, a lawyer, and his wife, Letizia Ramolino. His father's family, of ancient Tuscan nobility, had emigrated to Corsica in the 16th century.
Carlo Buonaparte had married the beautiful and strong-willed Letizia when she was only 14 years old; they eventually had eight children to bring up in very difficult times. The French occupation of their native country was resisted by a number of Corsicans led by Pasquale Paoli. Carlo Buonaparte joined Paoli's party, but when Paoli had to flee, Buonaparte came to terms with the French. Winning the protection of the governor of Corsica, he was appointed assessor for the judicial district of Ajaccio in 1771. In 1778 he obtained the admission of his two eldest sons, Joseph and Napoleon, to the Collège d'Autun.
A Corsican by birth, heredity, and childhood associations, Napoleon continued for some time after his arrival in Continental France to regard himself a foreigner; yet from the age of nine he was educated in France as other Frenchmen were. While the tendency to see in Napoleon a reincarnation of some 14th-century Italian condottiere is an overemphasis on one aspect of his character, he did, in fact, share neither the traditions nor the prejudices of his new country: remaining a Corsican in temperament, he was first and foremost, through both his education and his reading, a man of the 18th century.
Napoleon was educated at three schools: briefly at Autun, for five years at the military college of Brienne, and finally for one year at the military academy in Paris. It was during Napoleon's year in Paris that his father died of a stomach cancer in February 1785, leaving his family in straitened circumstances. Napoleon, although not the eldest son, assumed the position of head of the family before he was 16. In September he graduated from the military academy, ranking 42nd in a class of 58.
He was made second lieutenant of artillery in the regiment of La Fère, a kind of training school for young artillery officers. Garrisoned at Valence, Napoleon continued his education, reading much, in particular works on strategy and tactics. He also wrote Lettres sur la Corse, in which he reveals his feeling for his native island. He went back to Corsica in September 1786 and did not rejoin his regiment until June 1788. By that time the agitation that was to culminate in the French Revolution had already begun. A reader of Voltaire and of Rousseau, Napoleon believed that a political change was imperative, but as a career officer he seems not to have seen any need for radical social reforms. |
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发表于 2004-3-27 17:08:44
