You can't go far in Ajaccio without a little reminder that Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) was born here.

In fact his birthplace is on the very street where we're staying:


There are numerous statues of the great man scattered around the city. The one at the top of this post is on the main square, difficult to view at the moment, because this area is all being renovated (there are boards everywhere promising that it's worth putting up with the current noise and dust because the result will be wonderful). But you can clearly see him there on horseback, a brother at each corner.

There's another one near the Town Hall, a building given short shrift by Antoine-Claude Valery, whose Travels in Corsica, Elba, and Sardinia (1837) I have also been consulting. "The new Town Hall," he sniffs, "begun in 1827 and still under construction, will be a fine edifice, but it seems too big and too lavish for an island as poor as Corsica." He also notes that Napoleon was baptised, on 15 August 1769, in the very cathedral whose bells we enjoy on a regular basis, and comments acidly that this son of Ajaccio did hardly anything for his native island.

This is a view we'll come back to, but meanwhile, here's Dorothy Carrington's description in Granite Island: "The First Consul ..., wearing a toga, crowned with a laurel wreath and surrounded by fubsy-faced lions." I had actually noticed the rather soppy lions well before I read this:









Various plaques denote other aspects of Napoleonic doings:



Most imposing, however, is the statue that presides over Place d'Austerlitz. It's a replica of the one in Les Invalides, Paris, and it's accompanied by a roll call of his victories:




Nearby is a cave, in the midst of a rock formation. Legend has it that Napoleon, as a child, used to go into this dark space to meditate on his destiny while reading Plutarch's Lives... It's unlikely this story is true, but it's a pretty place anyway:


To close, Carrington's take on Napoleon's "neglect of his homeland". Which all has to do with his changing politics: From Corsican nationalism and support for Paoli, to ambitions for something different and bigger. There's loads of detail here and here, but essentially, the two men went their separate ways, and violence ensued. Napoleon's family were forced to flee when Paoli returned from his first exile, declaring Corsica independent. "[These] mortifying experiences," says Carrington, "when he was hounded out of the island with his family, marked him for life. In his youth he had been an ardent Corsican patriot... To be forced to fly for his life and his family's, his home ransacked, his reputation blackened, his position ruined and his future jeopardised, was a humiliation of an intolerable kind." Later, he made Ajaccio the capital, but the improvements he instructed were practical and utilitarian -- "works more suited to a conscientious mayor than to the Emperor of the French". It was only much later in life, in exile on St Helena, that he began to remember the scent of the maquis, and request that if he could not be buried in Paris, his grave should be with his ancestors in the cathedral of Ajaccio.

It's all so much more complicated than the version of Napoleon I learnt at school...