Compare the rule of napoleon bonaparte and jacobin club
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Answer:
Explanation:
Young Napoleon – The Corsican Experience
Bonaparte was optimistic about bringing French revolutionary politics to Corsica. We see him there handing out cockades, and he helped found a political club. As mentioned in the first article in this series, The Bonapartes worked as a family, so he supported his older brother Joseph for political office. His family bought nationalized church lands. By 1792, he got himself elected as the lieutenant colonel of the National Guard.
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Napoleon Bonaparte - Napoleon and the French Revolution
Napoleon Bonaparte, aged 23, lieutenant-colonel of a battalion of Corsican Republican volunteers
But there was a problem. Napoleon and the Bonaparte family clashed with Pasquale Paoli, the leading Corsican politician. Paoli had led independent Corsica back in the day, from 1755 to 1769. Now he had come from exile and won back his old power and prestige on the island. But he didn’t get along with the Bonapartes. They were more tightly allied with the pro- French factions, and Paoli increasingly resented and mistrusted France. The politics were extremely messy, but a couple of points stand out.
First, Paoli broke with France and kicked out the Bonapartes. He targeted them as enemies, pro-French and anti-Corsican. They were condemned to “perpetual infamy.” Their home was sacked, their property ruined. So Napoleon packed up his mother, his three sisters, and three of his brothers. They fled as refugees across the Mediterranean to southern France to make a new start.
Napoleon – A Young Revolutionary Enters Politics
And a second key point stands out: Napoleon came of age politically in Corsican politics. The truth is, he didn’t maneuver well in Corsica. He was naïve and unrealistic. After all, he was only 20 in 1789. He was headlong in his approach and he underestimated resistance to radical, revolutionary reforms. But then he grew more savvy and more cynical and more pragmatic. In 1793, he wrote about politics, “It is better to eat than be eaten.” Simply put, Bonaparte couldn’t have become such a brilliant, hardnosed, and pragmatic politician without his Corsican apprenticeship and this moment of disillusionment.
Learn more: Bonaparte Seizes Power
One more point on the Corsican experience. Some historians see his flight from Corsica as the moment when Bonaparte became French. But in a way, this moment actually cemented his status as an outsider. He surrendered his Corsican ties and dreams, but he couldn’t truly be wholly French. This status as an outsider drove him and enabled him to reinvent himself continuously and so strikingly. An outsider who could become more than French. He would later claim, with stunning success, that as a self-created outsider, he stood above politics.
By chance, he happened in Paris in the summer of 1792, and saw the August 10 uprising and the fall of the king. An old classmate who was with him that day recounted that Bonaparte walked the streets, angry at the violence of the crowd. Napoleon wasn’t a man to glorify “the people.” In a letter to his brother Joseph after August 10, he made two revealing observations: “When you get right down to it, the crowd is hardly worth the great effort one takes to curry its favor.” And just as revealing, he also wrote, “If Louis XVI had climbed on a horse, victory would have been his.” But there were things about the Revolution that drew the young soldier. He became a Jacobin and a backer of Robespierre. In 1793, he wrote a pro-Jacobin pamphlet attacking the Federalists of Marseille.
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Napoleon and the French Revolution
What appealed to him about the French Revolution? Its energy and its forcefulness. Its ideology of possibility. The toughness and hardcore style of the Jacobins. And the Revolution glorified war and honored successful soldiers. The Revolution also made it possible, as never before, for a bold soldier to rise up through the ranks on the basis of merit. Lots of elite officers had emigrated; that left openings in the officer corps. The army had a new structure—more open and egalitarian.
Napoleon Bonaparte at the Siege of Toulon
Bonaparte at the Siege of Toulon
In the fall of 1793, Napoleon got his chance to make his name in this new system. On the Mediterranean coast sat the town of Toulon. In August 1793, the inhabitants had surrendered the town to the British. The French then laid siege to Toulon and its British occupiers. Napoleon had the backing of a Corsican patron who had power, so he was put in charge of the artillery of the French siege of Toulon. First, he spent a few weeks rounding up and requisitioning equipment. Horses, oxen, more cannon from the surrounding area, blacksmiths. He got 5,000 sacks of dirt every day from Marseille to build up his ramparts for his batteries.