Napoleon Bonaparte

Residence 1

📍Maison Bonaparte, 18 Rue Saint-Charles, 20000 Ajaccio, Corsica, France

“I was born Napoleone di Buonaparte on the 15th of August 1769 in Ajaccio, Corsica, the second of eight surviving children of Carlo and Letizia Buonaparte. Corsica had been transferred from Genoa to France just a year before my birth, and I grew up in a household that was Corsican first, Italian second, and grudgingly French. The Maison Bonaparte on the Rue Saint-Charles was a comfortable merchant house — my father was a lawyer of local standing — and my childhood was large, argumentative, and poor by mainland French standards. I spoke French with a Corsican accent that the boys at military school in Brienne would mock. I left Corsica for France at nine and never lived there again, but the island and my mother Letizia's granite character were always the ground beneath the ambition.”

Sources: Roberts, A. Napoleon: A Life (2014), Viking; Schom, A. Napoleon Bonaparte (1997), HarperCollins

Residence 2

📍Rue Saint-Charles 18, 20000 Ajaccio, Corse-du-Sud, France

“I was born in August 1769 in these rooms, one year after France acquired Corsica from Genoa — which means I was born technically French but raised Corsican, speaking the island's language before I spoke France's. My father Carlo had fought alongside Paoli for Corsican independence; then, when France proved permanent, he accommodated himself to the new order and secured scholarships to mainland schools for my brother Joseph and me. I left for Brienne at nine years old, speaking French with an accent the other boys mocked. The house on Rue Saint-Charles was the world I understood before I understood France: the smell of the macchia, the heat, my grandmother's authority, the Corsican grudges that were kept and repaid across generations. I would become the most powerful man in Europe, but these rooms were where I first learned that the world belongs to those who refuse to be told where they fit.”

Sources: Wikipedia: Maison Bonaparte

Residence 3

📍Chateau de Malmaison, Rueil-Malmaison, France

“Of all the places I lived — the Tuileries, the Elysee, the palaces of conquered Europe — it was Malmaison that felt most like home. Josephine found it first, a modest chateau west of Paris, and she transformed it into something extraordinary: rooms full of Egyptian antiquities from my campaigns, rose gardens that were the finest in France, a library where I could work without the weight of the empire pressing on every hour. After Waterloo, before my exile to Saint Helena, I came back one last time. I walked through the rooms where we had been happiest, and I understood that Josephine — who had died the year before — had known something about living that I, with all my victories, had missed.”

Sources: Roberts, A. Napoleon the Great (2014), Allen Lane; Schom, A. Napoleon Bonaparte (1997), HarperCollins

Residence 4

📍Place du Général de Gaulle, 77300 Fontainebleau, France

“Versailles was contaminated by revolution. I chose Fontainebleau because Francis I and Louis XIV had slept here before me — it gave my empire legitimacy older than the Republic. I signed my first abdication on this desk in April 1814. As I descended the horseshoe staircase to address the Old Guard for the last time, I embraced the eagle on their standard. That farewell is the most honest thing I ever did.”

Sources: Wikipedia: Château de Fontainebleau