Napoleon

‘The hero of a tragedy, in order to interest us, should be neither wholly guilty nor wholly innocent . . . All weakness and all contradictions are unhappily in the heart of man, and present a colouring eminently tragic.’

Napoleon, on François-Just-Marie Raynouard’s play The Templars

‘The reading of history very soon made me feel that I was capable of achieving as much as the men who are placed in the highest ranks of our annals.’

‘If I were black,’ Napoleon said, ‘I would be for the blacks; being white, I am for the whites.’

‘To spend the night between a pretty woman and a fine sky, and spend the day recording observations and making calculations, seems to me to be happiness on earth.’

Sturm-und-Drang

‘Do you know how I managed?’ Napoleon later recalled of this period of his life. ‘By never entering a café or going into society; by eating dry bread, and brushing my own clothes so that they might last the longer. I lived like a bear, in a little room, with books for my only friends . . . These were the joys and debaucheries of my youth.’

but he had little interest in equality of outcome, human rights, freedom of the press or parliamentarianism

his family nickname of ‘Rabulione’, or troublemaker.