The last, but not the least of Napoleon's victories was won at St Helena. There he created the Napoleonic legend, and there he lived long enough to see his own career in perspective, and to reinterpret it in tune with the forces of liberalism and nationality which were to shape the Europe of the nineteenth century. Bonapartism was thus preserved as a living force, and the foundations of the Second Empire were laid. Though he often complained in exile that his career should have ended at Moscow, the Hundred Days and the ‘martyrdom’ of St Helena gave it the proportions of Greek tragedy, of hubris followed by nemesis. Like the music of Mozart's ‘Don Giovanni’, (which Napoleon heard shortly before the battle of Jena and, rather surprisingly, admired) his personality and career combine classical proportions with a wilder note of romantic, daemonic and unlimited ambition.

The mists of St Helena and the legend still obscure the figure of Napoleon. It is the task of this chapter to present him as the product of his age and also the moulder of it, and to analyse the interaction between his personality and the forces, moral and material, at work in Europe.

Napoleon was born at Ajaccio in Corsica in 1769, the year in which the French occupied the island. His father, Carlo Buonaparte, abandoned the cause of General Paoli, the patriot leader, and rose to high office in the French administration. Through the good offices of the French governor he obtained a place for Napoleon at Brienne, from which he proceeded to the École Militaire in Paris.