- He was born in Corsica, not France. He supported Corsican independence and hated France, until he attended the famed Ecole Militaire. Later, when he returned home, he saw that Corsica was backwards.
- He met Josephine at a party. She was a widow with three kids. Her husband was a nobleman who she married at age 16. He was executed by guillotine during the Reign of Terror. She was in prison and scheduled to be executed when Robespierre was himself chopped and the Reign ended. Napoleon was 26 and she was 32 when they got married.
- Their marriage was interesting. Napoleon was infatuated and she was not. He wrote hundreds of schmaltzy love letters which she did not respond to. In fact, when he was off conquering Egypt and pining for her, she was having an affair (one of many). He found out and returned determined to divorce her, but she used her feminine ways to change his mind. He did start cheating on her, too. They stayed together for fourteen years and it was not due to infidelity. It was the same reason Henry VIII got rid of his first two wives, no boy baby.
- He tried his hand at a romantic novella entitled “Clisson and Eugenie”. Clisson is a young French officer in love with his brother’s wife.
- Contrary to belief, he was not short. He was average at 5’6”. So Napoleon Complex is misnamed. He was called the “Little Corporal” by his men as term of endearment, not height.
- Beethoven was an admirer of Napoleon the general. When he became Emperor, Ludwig was enraged and changed his mind about naming his third symphony after Napoleon.
- He would sometimes disguise himself and wander the streets at night to get a feel for public opinion.
- He famously said “an army travels on its stomach.” He offered a reward for anyone who could come up with a way to preserve food. In 1809, Nicolas Appert invented canning. He was awarded $12,000.
- Napoleon also offered a reward for developing a method of reading letters in the dark. Charles Barbier invented “Night Writing” but it was too complicated for soldiers to learn the system. Later, Barbier met a Louis Braille at the Royal Institution for the Blind and the rest is history.
- He had the Mona Lisa hanging in his bedroom.
- He kept a vial of poison hanging around his neck. When he tried to use it before being sent to Elba, it simply made him violently ill.
- He died at age 51 of stomach cancer. Some suspected poison and this seemed to have been confirmed when later a hair sample showed a very high amount of arsenic. It may not have been malicious because the wallpaper in his bedroom had arsenic. However, in 2008 a study of hair sampled from various times in his life indicated he had high arsenic content his whole life.
https://www.historyhit.com/facts-about-napoleon/
https://www.historyhit.com/facts-about-napoleon/
https://www.factinate.com/people/42-imperial-facts-napoleon-bonaparte/
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