15 August: Napoleon

Napoleon Bonaparte was born on this date in 1769. 10 things you might not know about him:

1. His family were Italian, not French. They were minor Italian aristocracy. Napoleon was born on the island of Corsica and was named Napoleone di Buonaparte. As a young man he was opposed to French rule in his homeland and even wrote a series of treatises on the history and government of Corsica in which he calls the French “monsters” “who are said to be the enemies of free men.” He became more sympathetic towards France when he’d travelled the world a bit and changed his name to Napoleon Bonaparte in order to sound more French.

2. He attended the prestigious École Militaire in Paris, but had to cut his studies short when his father died and he had to help his family financially. He graduated 42nd in a class of 58 students, but was the first Corsican to graduate from École Militaire.

3. At 16 years old, Napoleon became an officer in the French army.

4. He was an author, and not just of essays on military subjects. He once wrote a romance novel. It was called Clisson et Eugénie and was the story of a young soldier’s relationship with a woman called Eugénie. It’s thought to have been at least partly autobiographical, a fictionalised story of Napoleon’s relationship with Bernardine Eugénie Désirée Clary, whose sister married his brother Joseph. The novella was never published during his lifetime and wasn’t even fully translated into English until 2009. Nowadays if you fancy reading it, you can get it from Amazon.

5. He probably never uttered the words “not tonight, Joséphine.” He met her at a party when he was 26 and she was a widow of 32 and a popular socialite. When they married six months later, she reportedly knocked four years off her age on the marriage certificate and he added 18 months to his, which made them appear to be the same age. The young general embarked on his Italian campaign just a few days after the wedding, and it seems from the letters he wrote at the time that he was deeply infatuated with his wife. If anything, it would have been her saying “not tonight, Napoleon” because he was so needy! While he was away she had affairs and barely bothered to reply to his letters. However, despite all his declarations of love, the fact she couldn’t have children was the reason he ditched her in the end. His second wife was Marie Louise, the archduchess of Austria. The couple had one son, Napoleon Francis Joseph Charles, who ruled France for two weeks in 1814. 13 Catholic cardinals were thrown into prison because they didn’t attend the wedding.

6. Beethoven’s third symphony was originally going to be dedicated to Napoleon as the composer rather admired him when he began writing it; but when Napoleon had himself crowned Emperor of France, Beethoven lost all respect for him.

7. When faced with the prospect of exile on Elba in 1814, Napoleon decided he’d rather die. He’d been carrying a poison pill around with him for years and finally took it. However, the pill must have been past its sell by date as it didn’t kill him, only made him violently ill.

8. He probably wasn’t excessively short. It’s thought he was average height for the period and it might have been differences in measurements used in France and England that started the rumour that he wasn’t very tall. Nor is there any evidence to suggest that he hated Cats.

9. During Napoleon’s final exile on St Helena, there was allegedly a scheme hatched by British smuggler Tom Johnson to help him escape making use of rudimentary Submarines, for a fee of £40,000. There’s no written evidence of the plot, however.

10. Napoleon died on May 5, 1821, at the age of 51, while still in exile on St. Helena. The official cause of death was stomach cancer, but rumours abounded that he’d actually been poisoned with arsenic, either deliberately or accidentally by the fumes created by the arsenic in his bedroom Wallpaper and the damp humidity on St. Helena. However, a study in 2008 by Italian scientists disproved that theory. They analysed hair taken from Napoleon’s head at four different times in this life and found that, although there was a very high arsenic level compared to people today, it had been fairly constant throughout his life and was probably simply a result of exposure to the chemical in household products throughout his life.

Character birthday

Ant, aka Kenneth Jones. When Kenneth Jones left school, he went to work, as did most of his male relatives and friends, as a miner. When the pit he worked at closed, Jones was made redundant and was unable to find any other work. In due course, he turned to crime. When his powers and skills at digging tunnels came to light, he was in demand by various criminal gangs who wanted tunnels built into bank vaults or large houses.

Jones was once arrested and sent to prison, but used his power to escape. This brought him to the attention of Captain Cricket, who hired Ant to help construct an underground complex for his team. By the time the work was finished, Ken Jones had become a member of the team and taken the code name "Ant".