A LEADER IS BORN

“NAPOLEON RETURNED TO PARIS FULL OF A NEW, STILL MORE AMBITIOUS PLAN, TO MOUNT AN INVASION OF EGYPT”

The French Revolution had brought down the centuries-old regime of absolute monarchy and privileged nobility. In its place, the revolutionaries founded a new regime based on principles of individual liberty, equal rights, and popular sovereignty. Yet they had not been able to secure this new political structure for a new France and the ensuing 10 years would be defined by instability, bloodshed and war.

Exploiting that chaos, the gifted army officer Napoleon Bonaparte was able to seize power in a militarist regime that was, in some ways, more autocratic than that of Louis XVI, and in terms of the millions of casualties of the Napoleonic Wars, much more lethal.

Many young men profited from the revolution smashing the stranglehold of hereditary privilege and venality, hitherto endemic in all parts of ancien régime society, forging careers in the higher ranks of the army. Napoleon was one of them. Although his family were minor nobility, they were Corsican – France had conquered Corsica in 1769 – and of Italian origin, making them the kind of people who, before the revolution, were looked down upon as foreigners and outsiders. By July 1792, Napoleon had been promoted to captain in the