"To die is nothing, but to live defeated and without glory is to die everyday."
                            --Napoleon Bonaparte I

  Napoleon Bonaparte was born Napoleone Buonaparte the 15th of August, 1769 in Ajaccio on Corsica, just three months after the island had been defeated by the French.   After the French victory, many Corsican rebels fled to the mountains, where they continued to fight on. But Napoleon’s father Carlo, a twenty-three-year-old university student, readily submitted to French rule.  Napoleon never forgave his father for betraying his Corsican heritage.  He would later say harshly that Carlo was rather "too fond of pleasure."  His mother, Letizia, was a hard, austere woman, toughened by war, who punished her children to teach them sacrifice and discipline.  Napoleon was the fourth of eleven children, three of which did not survive infancy.

At Brienne, Napoleon received an excellent military and academic education, and at the age of fifteen he earned an appointment to the École Militaire of Paris. The Royal Military Academy of Paris was the finest in Europe in the years before the Revolution.  At sixteen, he began his apprenticeship as a lowly second lieutenant, training with the best artillery unit in the French army. His ambitions soared far beyond a military career, but in French society power and achievement was reserved for the nobility — not for an unsophisticated Corsican soldier.

Then the French Revolution changed everything. Bonaparte was twenty-three when he took leave of absence from the French army and returned to Corsica an idealistic revolutionary. He took part in the power struggle between the forces supporting Pasquale Paoli, the island's governor, and those supported by the French Republic. After Paoli was victorious, Napoleon and the Bonaparte family were forced to flee to the mainland.  The Corsican Assembly declared Bonaparte and his entire family "traitors and enemies of the Fatherland, condemned to perpetual execration and infamy."  Napoleon had been given a death sentence by his own people.  The young officer then turned his attention to a career in the French army.

Upon his return from Corsica in the spring of 1793, Capt. Bonaparte was given a command with the republican army that was attempting to regain control of southern France from the pro royalist forces.  On his way to join the French Army of Italy, Napoleon was offered command of the artillery besieging the port of Toulon.