Napoleon Bonaparte was born at Ajaccio, Corsica, on 15 August 1769.

Such a bald, even banal statement is necessary when we consider that

every aspect of the man's life has been turned into the stuff of legend. In
1919 Archbishop Whateley tried to push beyond legend into myth by
suggesting, tongue-in-cheek, in his Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon
Buonoparte, that Napoleon had never existed, that his was a proper name
falsely attributed to the French people collectively. The psychologist Carl
Gustav Jung, while accepting the reality of Napoleon's existence, argued
that his significance was wholly collective and not individual: that he
represented the resurgence from the depths of the French unconscious of
the savage and irrational forces the Revolution had tried to suppress
through the cult of Reason (Deesse Raison). Even those who accepted the
importance of Napoleon the individual argued about his origins and his date
of birth. There has in some quarters been a curious reluctance to accept
that he was a Corsican at all, even though born on the island. Some have
asserted that he was descended from the Greeks, the Carthaginians or the
Bretons. Others, remarking his 'Oriental complex' (of which more later), and
noting that in the ninth century the Arab invaders of Europe reached
Corsica, claim an Arab, Berber or Moorish strain in his provenance; hence
(on this view) his excessive superstition, his belief in ghosts, Destiny and
his own star, and his preference for Islam over Christianity. The historian
and critic Taine traced his descent to an Italian condottiere, while Disraeli,
on the grounds that Corsica had once been peopled by African Semites,
claimed Napoleon as a Jew (presumably, given Napoleon's later antipathy
to the Jews, an anti-semitic one). Kings of England, the Comneni, the
Paleologues, and even the Julian tribe have been pressed into service as
Napoleon's forebears. The prize for the most absurd candidate as
Napoleonic ancestor must go to the Man in the Iron Mask and for the most
unlikely parents to the footman and goat girl, proposed by his most
scurrilous enemies. At another level of mythmaking, Napoleon's champions
claimed that
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he emerged from his mother's womb a born warrior because she gave birth
to him immediately after a hazardous 'flight in the heather' - retreating
through the maquis with Corsican forces after being defeated by the
French. And the French writer Chateaubriand, who knew Napoleon well
and worked for him as a diplomat, argued that the true date of his birth was
5 February I768; according to this theory, it was Napoleon's brother Joseph
who was born on IS August I769 and Napoleon was the eldest son. The
sober facts are less sensational. On 2 June I764 Carlo Buonaparte of
Ajaccio, an eighteen-year-old law student, married the fourteen-year old
Marie-Letizia Ramolino, also of Ajaccio. Both families were descended from
Italian mercenaries in Genoese pay who settled in Corsica at the beginning
of the sixteenth century. The Buonapartes came originally from Tuscany
and could trace their lineage to the soldier of fortune Ugo Buonaparte,
documented as a henchman of the Duke of Swabia in I I22. Ugo was a
veteran of the struggle between Guelphs and Ghibellines and a devoted
supporter of the Holy Roman Emperor in his conflict with the Pope. The
loser in a Florentine power struggle, Ugo spent his last days in the seaport
of Sarzana, and it was from there in the early sixteenth century that his
descendant Francesco Buonaparte emigrated to Corsica. Such at any rate
was the Buonaparte family tradition; their surname was said to denote
Ugo's Imperialist affiliations. The earliest unimpeach able record shows a
member of the Buonaparte family, a lawyer, as a member of the Council of
Ancients in Ajaccio in I6I6; several more Buonaparte lawyers served on this
council in the eighteenth century. The Buonapartes like the Ramolinos
were part of the Corsican nobility, but it must be remembered that Corsican
'nobles' were as common as 'princes' in Czarist Russia. Carlo Buonaparte,
born on 27 March I746, had been studying law at Pisa University but left to
marry Letizia without taking his degree. The romancers have seized on this
fact to build up a coup de foudre love affair between Carlo and Letizia, but
the match was certainly dynastic, even though some sections of the
Ramolino clan objected to the marnage. The Ramolinos were a cadet
branch of the distinguished Collalto family, well entrenched in Lombardy
since the fourteenth century; the Ramolinos themselves had been
established in Corsica for 250 years. Where the Buonapartes were a family
of lawyers, with the Ramolinos the tradition was military: Letizia's father
was an army officer with expertise in civil engineering, who commanded the
Ajaccio garrison and held the sinecure office of Inspector-General of Roads
and Bridges. Both theBuonapartes and the Ramolinos specialized in
intermarriage with ancient families of Italian origin, so a dynastic match
made sense. There was just one peculiarity: both the newly-weds' fathers
had died young. Carlo's father, a lawyer, died in 176o when his son was
fourteen, which meant that Carlo could bring into the marriage the family
house in the Via Malerba, two of the best vineyards in Ajaccio, some
pasture and arable land, and also his claims to another estate. Marie-
Letizia Ramolino (born either in late 1749 or early 1750) was in a more
complicated situation. Her father died when she was five, after which her
mother Angela Maria turned for consolation to Franl):ois (or Franz) Fesch,
a Swiss captain in the French garrison forces at Ajaccio. Angela Maria
married Fesch in 1757 and persuaded him to convert to Catholicism, but
his father, a banker in Basle, responded by disinheriting him. From the
union of Fesch and Letizia's mother came Joseph (born 1763), the future
cardinal and Napoleon's uncle, though only six years his senior. The
unfortunate Fesch, who died in 1770, gave Letizia away; her dowry
comprised thirty-one acres of land, a mill, and an oven for baking bread.
The marriage of Carlo and Letizia was a solid, down-to-earth marriage of
convenience. There is even reason to believe that Carlo hedged his bets by
not marrying in the Church in 1764, or ever. It was well known that
Corsicans took an idiosyncratic, eclectic attitude to the Catholic Church,
which was why legal marriage on the island consisted in the agreement of
the two male heads of families, the signature of a dotal contract, and the
act of consummation. The likelihood is that Carlo simply refused to go
through with a religious ceremony, and for reasons of pride and saving face
the two clans kept quiet about it. Again, contrary to the mythmaking, it is
untrue that some of the Ramolinos opposed the match for political reasons,
allegedly on the grounds that they supported the Genoese masters of the
island while the Buonapartes backed the independence movement under
Pasquale Paoli. Almost certainly, they simply had doubts that this was the
very best dynastic bargain they could strike while, as for political ideology,
both the Buonapartes and Ramolinos were notorious trimmers who made
obei sance to whichever party in Corsica had the most power. Carlo, a tall
young man with a prominent nose, sensual lips and almond-shaped eyes,
was a hedonist and sensualist. Cunning, self regarding, unrefined,
unscrupulous, he made it clear that his marriage was no love match by
declaring a preference for a girl of the Forcioli family. The romancers claim
that he was bowled over by Letizia's beauty, but portraits reveal a woman
whose mouth was too small, whose nose was
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too long and whose face was too austere for a claim to real beauty to be
advanced. It was true that she was petite (s'r"), with rich dark-brown hair
and slender white hands; and what she had, incontestably and by common
consent, were large, lustrous, deep-set eyes. As was normal at the time,
Letizia was wholly uneducated and trained in nothing but domestic skills.
Letizia fulfilled the essential requirement of women of the time, which was
to be an efficient childbearer. She gave birth to thirteen children in all, of
whom eight survived. A son, named Napoleon, was born and died in 1765.
Pregnant again almost immediately, Letizia next brought forth a girl who
also died. Then came a mysterious interlude of about two years. Allegedly
Paoli sent the twenty-year-old Carlo as his envoy to Rome, to appease the
Pope when he launched his planned attack on the Genoese island of
Capraia (Capraia and Genoa had originally been deeded to Genoa by
papal gift), but the best evidence shows Carlo becoming a Paolista while
he was in Italy. Carlo's time in Rome seems to have been spent in
cohabitation with a married woman. His own story was that he returned
from Rome after running out of funds, but a stronger tradition has it that he
seduced a virgin and was run out of town. On his return to Corsica he again
impregnated Letizia, who this time bore him a lusty son in the shape of
Joseph (originally named Giuseppe), who was born on 7 July 1768.
Another prevalent myth about Napoleon's background was that he was
born into indigence. The property brought into the marriage by Carlo and
Letizia seems to have been nicely calculated, since Letizia's dowry was
valued at 6,750 livres and Carlo's assets at about 7,000 livres. The joint
capital generated an annual income of about 670 livres or about £9,000 a
year in today's money. In addition, there was the money earned by Carlo.
Pasquale Paoli employed the young man as his secretary on account of his
unusually neat and clear handwriting. Carlo also worked as a procureur -
approximately equivalent to a British solicitor. Letizia employed two
servants and a wet-nurse - hardly badges of poverty. What Carlo and
Letizia suffered from was not poverty but relative deprivation. The
Buonapartes and their great rivals, the Pozzo di Borgos, were among the
richest families in Ajaccio, but they were aware that they were big fish in a
very small pond. Across the water, in mainland France, their wealth would
have counted for nothing and their pretensions to nobility would have been
laughed at. The Buonapartes wanted to be as rich as the richest nobles in
France and, since they could not be, they created a compensatory myth of
dire poverty. Economic conditions in Corsica and their own pretensions
worked against them. A sharecropping