Ajaccio

Corsica had been French for barely a year when Napoleon was born on 15 August 1769: Paoli had been beaten at Ponte-Novu on 8 May. Carlo Buonaparte, who had followed the independence party, had rallied to Versailles; the house on Rue Malerba, received by inheritance, grew with the favours obtained from Governor Marbeuf. Tradition has it that Letizia, seized by labour on her way back from the Assumption mass, gave birth on a couch on the first floor.

The family belonged to the minor nobility — enough to obtain royal scholarships, not enough to be rich. At nine the boy left the island for the college of Autun, then Brienne and the military school in Paris. His French was still approximate and he signed himself Buonaparte.

He returned on leave between 1786 and 1793 and took part in Corsican politics alongside Paoli before breaking with him. In June 1793 the old leader's partisans sacked the house; the family fled to Toulon. That was the end of Corsica in his life: he would spend only one more night there, in October 1799, on the way back from Egypt.

The Maison Bonaparte, listed as a monument in 1923, is now a national museum; the imperial chapel, called for in the Emperor's will, holds Letizia and Cardinal Fesch. Ajaccio remains the one place in the epic where everything begins without anything ever having been decided there.