dennis poliquit

257 years ago yesterday, a woman walked out of Assumption Day mass in Ajaccio because the contractions had started. She did not make it upstairs. She gave birth on a couch in the front room. Her name was Letizia. She was 18. The year before, she had followed her husband into the mountains while pregnant, because he was riding with Pasquale Paoli's rebels and the rebels were fighting to keep Corsica out of French hands. The French broke them at Ponte Novu in May 1769. Three months later she had the baby. Nobody in that house spoke French. They wrote his name Napoleone di Buonaparte. Then his father did the thing that quietly changed European history. He switched sides. Signed on with the new French administration, got the family registered as nobility, and cashed that in for a royal scholarship for his second son. So at nine years old the boy was put on a boat to France to learn the language of the people who had just taken his island. The other students at Brienne heard "Napoleone" and turned it into "la paille au nez." Straw up the nose. He was the foreign scholarship kid with the accent, and he never really lost it. Now watch the clock. At 24 he is an artillery officer nobody has heard of at the siege of Toulon. He figures out where the guns should go, the harbor falls, and he walks out of it a general. At 26 he is handed the Army of Italy, which is barefoot, unpaid and losing. Inside a year he has run the Austrians out of northern Italy and is signing treaties on his own authority without waiting for Paris to reply. At 30 he takes over the country. At 35 he puts the crown on his own head in Notre Dame. Eleven years from the guns at Toulon to the throne. Two years after that he decides August 15 should be a holiday across the whole empire, but declaring your own birthday a national holiday looks a bit much. So in 1806 the Church produces a barely documented Roman martyr named Neopolus, renames him Saint Napoleon, and gives him a feast day. August 15. Conveniently also the Assumption. The empire celebrates. On paper it is religion. Most people stop at the battles, and the battles are not even the strange part. He took 167 scientists, engineers, artists and mathematicians to Egypt with the army. Not as decoration. They measured, dug, drew and catalogued, and what came out of it was the Description de l'Egypte, essentially the founding document of Egyptology. In 1799 his soldiers repairing a fort near Rosetta pulled a broken slab of stone out of a wall. Champollion finally read it in 1822. Napoleon died in 1821. He missed it by a year. He sat in on the drafting of the Civil Code and personally chaired more than half the sessions, arguing with career jurists about inheritance and marriage law at one in the morning. He carried a traveling library on campaign. When he met Goethe at Erfurt in 1808 he skipped the small talk and told him which passage of Werther rang false and why. Goethe conceded the point. After Goethe left the room Napoleon turned to Talleyrand and said, "Voila un homme." He put up prize money for a way to stop food rotting on campaign. A confectioner named Nicolas Appert collected 12,000 francs in 1810 for sealing food in glass and boiling it. That is the can in your kitchen. He is not a hero story, and anyone selling him as one is lying to you. He reinstated slavery in the French colonies in 1802 after the Revolution had abolished it. He marched more than half a million men into Russia in 1812 and brought back a fraction, most of them killed by roads, cold and typhus rather than by any enemy. He bet whole generations of Europeans on his own judgment, and eventually the judgment ran out. But then there is Laffrey. March 1815. He has slipped off Elba with about a thousand men and is walking north through the Alps. Outside Grenoble a French battalion is drawn up across the road with orders to stop him. Two forces, one road, the same flag on both sides. He tells his men to hold their fire. He walks out alone in front of the loaded muskets, opens his coat, and says that if there is one man among them who wishes to kill his Emperor, here he is. Nobody fires. They shout Vive l'Empereur and fall in behind him. He takes back France without firing a shot. A hundred days later it ends at Waterloo, and he spends what is left of his life on a wet rock in the South Atlantic, dictating his memoirs and dying at 51. On that rock he told his companions what he thought he would actually be remembered for, and it was not the victories. Waterloo, he said, would wipe those out anyway. It was the Civil Code. Two centuries later it is still the spine of French law, and you can hear it in the legal codes of Belgium, Italy, Louisiana, Japan and most of Latin America. One last thing. Late in life he told people he had been born on a carpet woven with scenes from the Iliad. Heroes, Troy, destiny, the whole production. His mother was still alive. She outlived him by fifteen years. Asked about the carpet, she said it was a fable, and that they did not have carpets in Corsica. He redrew the map of Europe, wrote a code half the world still argues in, and got his own name into the Catholic calendar. He could not get the rug past his mom.