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Napoleon? More like Neapolitan

Napoleon was Itali-ench.

Leo Dong

Leo Dong

— 1 min read
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Napoleon? More like Neapolitan
Photo by Boston Public Library / Unsplash

Napoleon was from Corsica, which had spent almost four centuries[1] being ruled by the Republic of Genoa, in modern-day Italy. His parents were of Italian origin,[2] he was baptised Napoleone di Buonaparte (only Frenchifying it after his marriage to Joséphine in 1796),[3] didn't learn French until he was about nine, and his Corsican accent[4] followed him his entire life. Worse: Genoa only sold the island to Louis XV via the Treaty of Versailles in May 1768,[5] fifteen months before Napoleon was born. Conceive him half a year earlier and the future Emperor of the French would have been a foreigner.

It showed. Shipped off to the military academy at Brienne-le-Château at nine, he was mocked relentlessly for his accent, his short stature, and his island manners. One of the kinder recorded epithets is "Corsican short arse".[6] The accent never left him, and neither did the spelling. He wrote French his entire life with Italianisms and inventive orthography[7] that his secretaries had to quietly tidy up.[8] The man who codified French civil law did all of it in a French his own teachers would have marked down.

  1. Genoa took the island from Pisa in 1284 and held it, with the occasional interlude under Aragon and France, until the Corsican Republic broke away in 1755. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Corsica. ↩︎

  2. Tuscan on his father's side (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Bonaparte), Lombard on his mother's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letizia_Bonaparte). ↩︎

  3. If you're more interested in his first love, please read this article about his pining novella here. ↩︎

  4. Corsican is a Romance language in the Italo-Dalmatian branch, much closer to the Tuscan dialect that standard Italian descends from than to French. To a Parisian ear, his French sounded specifically Italian. ↩︎

  5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles_(1768). ↩︎

  6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon. ↩︎

  7. i.e. made-up spelling. ↩︎

  8. https://www.napoleon.org/en/history-of-the-two-empires/articles/bullet-point-21-what-was-napoleons-mother-tongue/. ↩︎

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