There is still one country in Europe capable of legislation; that is the island of Corsica. The courage and steadfastness with which this brave people has managed to regain and defend its freedom deserve to be taught by some wise person how to secure it. I have a sense that this small island will one day astonish Europe. So wrote Jean Jacques Rousseau in his timeless book on the social contract in 1762. A few years later, a man was born on the small island who would turn the thinker's intuition into truth through his immense, world-changing genius. August Fournier describes in this part of the three-part biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, from his birth in 1769 to 1802, the new France after the Revolution. This book is an unchanged reprint.