THE MENTOR
SERIAL NUMBER 38

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

BY
IDA M. TARBELL

Author of “Short Life of Napoleon Bonaparte,” “He Knew Lincoln,” etc.

Nobody who has lived in modern times has so stirred up the world as Napoleon Bonaparte. Nobody has upset so many old things, and started so many new ones. No man ever lived who had more faith in his own powers—and less respect for those of other men. Napoleon had, too, an unusual combination of those personal qualities which excite and interest men. It is nearly a hundred years since he dropped out of active life; but his story is more rather than less thrilling as time goes on.

There was nothing in his birth or schooling or his first activities in life to lead one to expect an unusual career. His family was poor and servile; his father trading on his name and his acquaintances to feed, educate, and place his family. The most promising thing about young Bonaparte was his resentment of this servility and his own flat refusal to participate in it to help himself. Throughout his boyhood in the island of Corsica, where he was born in 1769, during the six years he spent at school in France and the eight years of intermittent military service that followed his first appointment at the age of sixteen to a second lieutenancy, he lived a tempestuous inner life. Ambition for himself, devotion to his family, love for Corsica, hatred of France, sympathy for the new ideas of human rights that were stirring Europe,—these sentiments kept the mind and heart of the young officer in tumult and made him waver between allegiance to the land in which he was born and the land that had trained him; between the career of a soldier that was his passion and a career of money making, in order to educate his brothers, settle his sisters, and put his mother into a secure position.

NAPOLEON THE OPPORTUNIST

It is quite fair, I think, to characterize his early career as that of an adventurer. He was watching for a chance, and had determined to take it, regardless of where it offered itself. It was at a moment when he was in disgrace for having refused the orders of his superiors in the army that the chance he wanted came.

LÆTITIA BONAPARTE

The Mother of Napoleon.

The convention in which at that moment the French government centered was attacked by the revolting Parisians. Bonaparte had no particular sympathy with the convention,—in fact, he had more with the rebels,—but when one of his friends in the government who knew his ability as an artillery officer asked him to take charge of the force protecting the Tuilleries, where the convention sat, he accepted—with hesitation; but, having accepted, he did his work with a skill and daring that earned him his first important command, that of general in chief of the French Army of the Interior. Four months later he was made commander in chief of the Army of Italy, the army that was disputing the conquest of northern Italy with Austria.