English Caricature and Satire on Napoleon I. Volume 1 (of 2)Ashton, John
History
English Caricature and Satire on Napoleon I. Volume 1 (of 2)
Ashton, John
Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1769-1821 -- Caricatures and cartoons
Prince Napoleon Louis Bonaparte (brother to the Emperor) published in
1830, at Florence, a French translation of an old book[2] about the
sack of Rome, 1527, which gives an account of the family of the writer.
But Majorca also puts in a claim to the older Bonapartes; and in 1852,
Don Antonio Furio, a learned man, Member of the Royal Academies of
Belles Lettres of Barcelona and Majorca, &c., made a declaration as to
‘the rank, dignity, and extinction of the noble family of Bonapart in
the island of Majorca;’ and quotes from a book kept in the archives of
Palma, in which are preserved the armorial escutcheons of the noble
families of the Island, the arms of Bonapart--which were Dexter,
on a field Azure, six stars, Or, placed two by two, Sinister, on a
field gules, a lion rampant, Or; and the Chief Or, bears a scared
eagle, sable. He says the family came from Genoa to Majorca, in which
island its members were considered noblemen, and they filled several
distinguished offices. In a register of burials relating to knights and
gentlemen, written in 1559, the antiquity and nobility of the Bonaparts
are clearly authenticated; and it would seem from Don Furio’s account
(for all of which he gives chapter and verse) that the learned
jurisconsult Don Hugo Bonapart left Majorca and went to Corsica, where,
in 1411, he was made Regent of the Chancery of that place; and, as he
settled there, his name was inscribed in the Golden Book of France.
This seems pretty circumstantial, until another theory appears--namely,
his Greek extraction. Sir J. Emerson Tennent says:[3] ‘There is a story
relative to the family name of the Bonapartes, that somewhat excites
curiosity as to the amount of truth which it may contain. In 1798, when
Napoleon was secretly preparing for his descent upon Egypt, among other
expedients for distracting and weakening the Porte, French emissaries
were clandestinely employed in exciting the Greeks in Epirus, and the
Morea, to revolt. In Maina especially (the ancient Sparta), these
agents were received with marked enthusiasm, on the ground that
Bonaparte was born in Corsica, where numbers of Greeks from that part
of the Morea had found an asylum after the conquest of Candia, in 1669,
but they were eventually expelled by the Genoese.
‘One of the persons so employed by Napoleon to rouse the Greeks in 1798
was named Stephanopoli; and one of the arguments which he used was,
that Napoleon himself was a Greek in blood, and a Mainote by birth,
being descended from one of the exiles who took refuge at Ajaccio in
1673. The name of this family, he said, was Calomeri, Καλόμερις,[4]
which the Corsicans accommodated to their own dialect by translating it
into _Buonaparte_.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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