Stop 1: Youthful dreams from Corsica to France
When Napoleon was 16-years old he dreamed of sailing the seas to the edges of the known world. He was a young military student and a fellow classmate and one of his teachers were selected to join the crew of the great French explorer La Pérouse. 
La Pérouse set off in 1785 on his great voyage to explore the South Seas, having been asked by the French king, Louis XVI, to circumnavigate the Pacific for the benefit of world knowledge and French trade. The exploration of the northern and western coastlines of New Holland, as Australia was then known, was a particular feature of La Pérouse's brief. And a dominant force in the first section of this exhibition is Nicolas Monsiau’s painting of Louis XVI, giving instruction to La Pérouse. You can see the king’s hand pointing close to the region where Australia lies. ‘Make haste’ we can imagine him saying to La Pérouse, ‘go and see what lies at the edges of the known world’. 
It is no wonder that a young man like Napoleon was excited by the prospect of an adventure across the high seas. So who was this young man ‘Napoleon’ who was so keen to prove himself?
First, a strange twist: Napoleon was very nearly not a Frenchman. He was born Napoleone Buonaparte in 1769 in Corsica, an island that lies between France and Italy. Napoleon’s first languages were actually Corsican and Italian and he was very nearly a citizen of Genoa, rather than France. Corsica had been a French colony for exactly a year to the day when Napoleon was born. When Napoleon went on to learn French, he always spoke with a thick Corsican accent – something that made him idiosyncratic within the elite and exclusive French community. His name was also distinctly Italian – ‘Napoleone’ . After his move to France, he was to Gallicize his name to Napoléon Bonaparte in an attempt to better assimilate into his adopted country.
Napoleon was the second child in a large family of eight children. The Bonaparte family were of noble Corsican lineage but they were not a wealthy family. His father, Carlo Buonaparte, was a lawyer who instilled in his son a love of learning and respect for law and humanity. 
Napoleon’s mother, Letizia Bonaparte, was a woman with a famously formidable presence. Napoleon once said she possessed a ‘man’s head on a woman’s body. A woman from the Corsican mountains.’ She had her children up on horseback before they could barely walk and she made them bathe and clean their teeth daily, something unsual for the time. Her strong character would have been especially important when Carlo died leaving his wife to bring up eight children on her own. Napoleon was only fifteen.
As a child Napoleon was boisterous and impulsive, earning himself the nickname Ribulione, – ‘the troublemaker’ – for the youthful scraps he got into. He was also unsociable – he was a lone wolf who preferred his own company. 
He excelled at school, his efforts driven along by a perfectionist streak. Reflecting on his schooldays, he once said: ‘My temperament could not bear it, if I was not immediately top of the class.’ At age nine, he left Corsica to go and complete his education in France. At age sixteen, Napoleon was admitted to the prestigious École Militaire in Paris. He sped through the course, completing it in ten months rather than the customary two years, and then entered the army. 
In hindsight, it is perhaps fortunate that Napoleon’s dream of accompanying La Pérouse to the end of the earth did not come true. After visiting Botany Bay in January 1788, where La Pérouse met the English First Fleet, his expedition was lost at sea. How different history would be if Napoleon had perished alongside La Pérouse’s men.