Paoli's triumph was complete.

To cement it, on the very day of the Bonapartes' departure the

Paolista National Assembly declared them to be 'traitors and enemies of the Fatherland,
condemned to perpetual execration and infamy'. Paoli's success, in socioeconomic terms, meant
the triumph of the mountain folk, the shepherds and the peasants over the great landowners, the
nobility and the bourgeoisie of the ports and cities. Most of those who fled into exile with the
Bonapartes were merchants or landowners; the paradox was that Napoleon the 'Rousseauist
revolutionary' was from the viewpoint of social class more 'reactionary' than the 'counter-
revolutionary' Paoli. The French still maintained a precarious toehold in Corsica, for they still
held a few towns and villages, and Commissioner Lacombe St-Michel stayed on to encourage
them. Paoli's triumph was shortlived. Fearing the inevitable French invasion to restore their
position on the island, he ended by inviting the British in. When Admiral Hood anchored at San
Fiorenzo with rz,ooo troops, Paoli added his 6,ooo men and proceeded to besiege the French in
Calvi and Bastia. In June 1794 the Council of Corsica, with Paoli at its head, proclaimed
perpetual severance from France and offered the crown to the King of England. George III
accepted and sent out Sir Gilbert Elliot as viceroy. Paoli, who was officially in retirement, still
wanted to be the power on the island and, not surprisingly, soon quarrelled bitterly with Elliot.
The British, tired of his prima-donnaish antics, hinted broadly that Paoli might like to retire to
England. Paoli hesitated, saw France still in the grip of anarchy and then thought of the possible
consequences of war with both France and England. He accepted the offer. His victory over the
Bonapartes was therefore a hollow one. His loyal ally Pozzo di Borgo left Corsica for a
diplomatic career that would eventually find him in the service of the Czar of Russia. What is the
explanation for Napoleon's violent split with Paoli? The 64 cynical view is that he realized that
there was no future in Corsica for an ambitious young man, that Paoli had already snatched
anything that was valuable in the way of power and prestige, and that the 'glittering prizes' were
to be found only in France. The conventional view is simply that both men backed different
horses in the Corsican power struggle and thus ended up as enemies; an additional factor was
Paoli's personal dislike of the young man. Another view is that when Napoleon became a Jacobin
he lost his faith in Rousseau and came to despise him. But it was Rousseau's Social Contract that
had inspired his original visionary view of Corsica as a society of Spartan simplicity, civic virtu,
social equality, poverty and nobility of soul. Simultaneous with his loss of faith in Rousseau, and
possibly a contributory factor, was the extreme factionalism and in-fighting in Corsica in the
early 1790s, which Napoleon witnessed at close quarters. As Masson put it: 'Just as France had
made him Corsican, so Corsica made him a Frenchman.' Yet it seems unlikely that it was merely
the contingent circumstances during February-March 1793 that turned the Paolista Napoleon into
Paoli's enemy or that a negative attitude to the Bonapartes alone could have turned off such an
oil-gusher of adulation as that from Napoleon to Paoli. The psychologist C.G. Jung has warned
us that 'lightning conversions' are seldom that and even coined the word 'enantiodromia' to
describe the process whereby Saul becomes Paul - not, on this view, through seeing the light on
the road to Damascus but because the experience crystallized a process of gradually dawning
illumination. If Napoleon's violent breach with Paoli had in fact been brewing for years, we may
ask another question of more general import. Was Napoleon simply boundlessly ambitious, in
the way Brutus hinted Caesar was, and was his ambition an irreducible and dominant
psychological factor in his makeup? Or was his ambition a more complex manifestation
reducible to other factors, which in turn might give us the clue to the deep dynamic of the quarrel
with Paoli? The key may lie in two apparently insignificant remarks. To one of his close friends
Napoleon once confided that at some time in the Corsican period he had surprised Paoli having
intercourse with his (Napoleon's) godmother. And in the anti-Paoli essay he wrote in July 1793
Le Souper de Beaucaire he said that Paoli's greatest fault was that he had attacked the fatherland
with foreigners; by uniting Corsica to France in 1790 without thinking through all the
implications he had in fact lost any chance of an independent Corsica. We may, then, reasonably
infer that Napoleon was deeply worried about three things: illicit sexual relations, the attempt to
fuse Corsica and France, and the idea of a fatherland invaded. 65 Since it is a commonplace of
psychoanalysis, confirmed in hundreds of case studies of neurotics, that concern about the
fatherland really indicates concern about the mother, and we know in any case of Napoleon's
ambivalent feelings towards Letizia, it seems reasonable to assume that Napoleon's antagonism
towards Paoli was, at the unconscious level, something to do with his mother. And since Paoli
was consciously acknowledged by Napoleon as a father-figure, it is clear that what needs further
investigation is what depth psychologists would call Napoleon's 'paternal image'. There seem to
have been four paternal images significant in the mind of the young Napoleon: of Paoli, of his
actual father Carlo, of Louis XVI and of the Comte de Marbeuf. At any given moment, the
association of 'father' could have been to any one of the quartet. The role of Marbeuf as protector
of the Bonapartes needs no further elucidation. Moreover, on returning from France on his first
leave, Napoleon bracketed Marbeuf with Carlo when he expressed sorrow that he had lost the
two significant older men in his life. We have also noted Napoleon's uncertainty how to respond
to Louis XVI, the father of the nation to whom he had taken oaths of loyalty. The flight to
Varennes did not alienate Napoleon, and in Paris in 1792 his dominant emotion during the two
savage mob irruptions into the Tuileries were sympathy with the King rather than fellow-feeling
with the crowd. The ambivalence Napoleon felt for Carlo was mirrored in his uncertain attitude
to Louis XVI; he was partly for the Revolution against all kings, but partly for this particular
King against this particular mass of revolutionaries. What finished Louis for Napoleon was when
he became convinced that the monarch had called on foreign powers to invade French soil. The
quartet of father-figures all represented men who, in Napoleon's mind, were betrayers. Whether
or not Letizia and the Comte de Marbeuf were lovers - and circumstantial evidence
overwhelmingly indicates they were - Napoleon certainly thought they had been. This trauma
explains so much in his later life especially his sexuality, his misogynism. The horror he
expressed at finding Paoli with his godmother may refer, not to an actual event, but to a
transmogrified fantasy, hinting at Letizia's infidelity with Marbeuf. Napoleon's 'mother complex'
owes something to the neurotic feeling that he could not be certain who his own father was -
even though, as we have seen, Letizia's probable infidelity with Marbeuf had no actual
connection with Napoleon, who was certainly Carlo's son. The important thing is that he thought
it did, and we surely find an echo of the anxiety in that pithy clause in the later Code Napoleon:
'Investigation of paternity is forbidden'. 66 It is very probable that the excessive concern about
the union of Corsica and France expressed in Le Souper de Beaucaire - 'he helped unite Corsica
to France', 'he attacked the fatherland with foreigners' are an unconscious manifestation of
anxiety about Letizia's infidelity with Marbeuf and of anger towards Carlo for letting such a state
of affairs develop. The conscious anger Napoleon felt about his defeat by Paoli in Corsica tapped
into an unconscious well of rage about quite other matters. Since Paoli was a father-figure,
Napoleon could discharge his anger about Carlo and Marbeuf on to him. The rage against France
as a young man, the violent outburst against the schoolmates who invaded his 'fatherland' at
Brienne in the garden incident, the violent Francophobia in general are all explained on this
hypothesis. But, it may be asked, why did the outburst against Paoli take place at this very time?
Almost certainly the answer lies with the execution of Louis XVI in 1793 . With Carlo and
Marbeuf out of the picture, Napoleon's conscious adoration of Paoli coupled with an unconscious
antagonism towards him for the 'sins of the fathers' was dispersed for a while as Louis XVI took
centre stage. In late 1792 the anger against a man who would deliver the fatherland to foreigners
was obviously directed by the Jacobin Napoleon against the perfidious Bourbon king. It is a
characteristic of ambivalence to divide the love/hate object so that all negative feelings can be
decanted against the 'Hyde' aspect and all positive ones retained for the 'Jekyll'. Put simply, in
late 1792 Louis XVI attracted the fire that would later fall on Paoli. When Louis XVI's execution
redeemed him in Napoleon's eyes, the undischarged hatred arising from Letizia's infidelity with
Marbeuf had to find a new focus. And it was only at this precise time Ganuary 1793) that
Napoleon attached himself to France in a decisive and unambiguous way. It is sometimes
overlooked by those who regard the breach with Paoli as purely contingent and political that
Napoleon made common cause with Saliceti and the anti-Paolist faction before the breach was
inevitable. In any case, once Louis XVI was dead, it made sense, at the unconscious level, that
Napoleon should rid himself of the one remaining figure so that he could become the father. In
symbolic terms, his infantile Oedipal phantasies were now partly assuaged. These had become
exacerbated into a mother complex by the conviction that, though Carlo denied Letizia's body to
his son, he had allowed it to other men. It must be stressed that by falling out with Paoli
Napoleon lunged into disaster, losing all his family's property without any good reason for
thinking that he could retrieve the Bonaparte fortunes. From the point of view of rationality and
self-interest, Napoleon's opposition to Paoli in 67 early 1793 makes no sense at all. Yet one of
the reasons historians have so violently debated 'Napoleon, for and against' is the conviction that
Napoleon, with his great intellect, must always have had sound reasons for his actions. An
examination of the dark recesses of the Napoleonic psyche shows that this is not necessarily so
and that self-destructive psychological impulses usually played some part, and sometimes the
major part. This was not the last time in his life that Napoleon, pleading ineluctable necessity,
raison d'etat and 'there is no alternative', plunged into reckless adventures that defy rational
explanation.