Brienne-le-Château

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Coordinates: 48°23′31″N 4°31′35″E / 48.3919444444, 4.52638888889

Administration
Commune of Brienne-le-Château
Location

Country	France
Region	Champagne-Ardenne
Department	Aube
Arrondissement	Bar-sur-Aube
Canton	Brienne-le-Château (chief town)
Mayor	Mr. Nicolas Dhuicq (2001-2008)
Statistics
Elevation	126 m (avg.)
Land area^¹	21.56 km² km²
Population^²	3,870
- Density	154/km²
Miscellaneous
INSEE/Postal code	10064/ 10500
¹ French Land Register data, which excludes lakes, ponds, glaciers > 1 km² (0.386 sq mi or 247 acres) and river estuaries.
² Population sans doubles comptes: residents of multiple communes (e.g. students and military personnel) only counted once.

Brienne-le-Château is a commune of the Aube département, in France.

The Battle of Brienne was fought there on January 29, 1814.

[edit] Napoleon at Brienne-le-Château

Napoleon arrived in Brienne on May 15, 1779. The military 'college' there, originally a monastery, stood at the foot of a hill dominated by the chateau. A religious academy from 1730, it had become a military school in 1776, one of ten (later twelve) such schools set up to replace the École Royale Militaire in Paris, which had been wound up that year on grounds of cost.

It was still run by monks and the religious ethos was dominant, but the Minimes of the Order of St Benedict were poor and ignorant, the Brienne school was underfunded so could not afford to engage top-class teachers, was the lowest-ranked of all ten military colleges and had the lowest student enrolment (around 150) as against a top military school like La Flèche (with nearly 500). Its aim was to prepare the sons of the nobility for eventual cadetships in the armed services but, apart from a course in fortification in the final year, the education was not remotely military, but rather a variant of the standard training of the 18th-century gentleman.

The theory was that the best pupils would be selected for the artillery, the engineers and the navy, and the mediocre ones for the infantry; only those who were too stupid even for the cavalry would be sent back in disgrace to their families.

In this sleepy town on the vast open plains of Champagne, Napoleon spent five years. He often professed an admiration for Sparta, but here he had to live like a Spartan of old. There were two corridors, both of which contained seventy cells, each six feet square, furnished with a strap bed, a water jug and a basin. Students were locked into their cells at 10 p.m., in a vain attempt to stamp out homosexual practices which were rampant at the Brienne school. In an emergency a pupil could press a bell which communicated with the corridor where a servant slept. At 6 a.m. reveille sounded. After a breakfast of bread and water and some fruit in a common dining-hall which seated 180 persons, lessons began. The morning was given over to Latin, history, mathematics, geography, drawing and some German. A two-hour lunch break followed, where the standard of food improved. A typical menu contained soup, bouilli, roast meat, salad and dessert. Teaching in the afternoon concentrated on fencing, dancing, music and handwriting. There was a brief break for 'tea' which was a repeat of breakfast, and later there was a dinner which repeated the lunch menu. Only on feast days did the monotonous fare vary: one Epiphany Napoleon noted down that the boys had been served chicken, cauliflower, beetroot salad, cake, chestnuts and hot dessert.

There was a strict dress code. Pupils wore a blue coat with red facings and white metal buttons; the waistcoat was blue faced with white; the breeches were blue or black and an overcoat was allowed in winter. No servants were permitted. Linen was changed twice a week, but only one rug was permitted on the bed, except in cases of illness. Up to the age of twelve the boys had to have their hair cut short but after that a pigtail was to be worn; powder could be worn only on Sundays and saints' days. The regime was austere in other ways. Boys were not allowed to visit home except in the case of death or severe illness of a parent, parental visits were discouraged, and there were no real holidays. During the short annual break between 21 August and 8 September classes were cancelled and the boys taken on long walks, though the Champagne countryside hardly inspired Romantic feelings: Brienne was situated in flat, agricultural and often flooded or waterlogged terrain, where the monotony was broken only by wretched, poverty-stricken villages, dilapidated cottages, smoking bothies and thatched hovels.

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Brienne-le-Château.

The teachers at the school were of poor calibre and sometimes downright incompetent. The Berton brothers, who had started life in the Army and now acted as Principal and Vice-Principal, did not run a tight ship and were even cavalier about religion: the younger Berton brother, Jean-Baptiste, used to race through Mass in nine or ten minutes. Vulgar yet pretentious, tough yet incompetent, cynical, worldly and faineant, the Berton brothers, as their name suggests, would have been better running a circus than a military school. Official inspections of the school in 1785 and 1787 found laziness and carelessness in both staff and students, and the 1787 report recorded outright indiscipline. The Bertons' career was hardly a glittering success. Napoleon, in one of those flashes of genuine generosity his critics never acknowledge, rescued Louis Berton, the Principal, from poverty in later years and gave him a sinecure in educational administration, but the man died insane. The brother proved that his record-breaking time for saying Mass was no fluke by getting himself released from his vows after the Revolution.

The approach to teaching was as pragmatic as the brothers' general attitude. Latin was studied for moral example, not so as to provide models for rhetoric; the elements of logic were instilled by detaching them from their metaphysical and Aristotelian roots; German was taught because it might be useful in a future war; history, geography and mathematics for their use in topography and fortification, and so on. Plenty of Latin authors were picked over - Virgil, Caesar, Sallust, Livy, Cicero, Horace, Cornelius Nepos - but Napoleon could never master Latin inflections (strangely for one with such mathematical talents). In any case, his favourite classical author was Plutarch, who wrote in Greek. What Napoleon liked most about the ancient world was the study of its military leaders such as Caesar. From the story of his assassination boys were meant to draw the moral that Caesar was a tyrant and Brutus the champion of liberty; but Napoleon concluded that Caesar was a great man and Brutus a traitor.

There were twenty teachers instructing six classes, but the only ones remembered by Napoleon with any affection were Father Patrault, the head of mathematics, and Father Dupuy, the head of French. He was unmusical, sang out of tune, hated dancing, fencing and deportment and was hopeless at all of them but evinced a flair for ancient history and was brilliant at mathematics. He liked geography but his actual knowledge was always shaky: in later life he confused the river Elbe with the Ebro and Smolensk with Salamanca. He never mastered the rules of spelling and always spoke French with an Italian accent, pronouncing certain words as if they obeyed Italian rules of phonetics. No Greek was taught at Brienne and only the most elementary Latin; Napoleon read the classical authors in translation. He read omnivorously if erratically and was soon recognized as one of the more able pupils. In August and September each year the school opened its doors to the public for exercices publics, in which the cleverest boys answered questions put to them by the masters in the presence of Church and State dignitaries. After 1780 Napoleon was a prize exhibit each year at these sessions. In 1781 he was awarded a prize for mathematics by the duc d'Orleans; in 1782 he answered on mathematics and ancient history; and in 1783 he answered mathematical problems that were as difficult as his teachers could make them. Despite his brilliance, he never got his teeth into higher mathematics, simply because there was no one at Brienne with the talent to teach him.

If Napoleon's academic progress at Brienne was fair, his social and personal formation was disastrous. Three things combined to turn him into a misanthropic recluse when not yet in his teens: brutality, social snobbery and racial prejudice. Brutality was visited on him by both boys and masters. Corporal punishment was officially outlawed at Brienne as damaging to body and soul, but this proscription was honoured more in the breach than the observance. On one occasion Napoleon was punished by having to eat his dinner kneeling down in the refectory, wearing coarse brown homespun and a dunce's cap. This brought on hysteria and anattack of vomiting. Father Patrault, the head of mathematics, a tall, red-faced man who was the only one at Brienne to discern Napoleon's true intellectual potential, intervened and reproved the master who had inflicted the punishment. Napoleon's initial problem with the other boys was that he would not consent to be a 'nymph', as the catamites in the school, well known to be honeycombed with homosexuality, were called. This inevitably led to beatings-up and fights. His sallow skin, his nationality and even his name set him apart. His schoolmates converted 'Napoleone' into paille au nez ('straw nose') - an insult he still remembered at the end of his life. Great mirth was occasioned by Napoleon's first encounter with ice, in his water jug. 'Who's put glass in my water jug?' he cried, to hoots of laughter. Napoleon's response to such humiliations was to insult his fellow-pupils in turn, which led to further fisticuffs. But he won grudging respect from his peers by not 'peaching' to the masters.

Yet the major source of tension was Napoleon's virulent Corsican nationalism and his worship of Paoli. His schoolmates scoffed at Paoli; he expressed his hatred for Choiseul; they jeered that the Corsicans were a defeated people and were natural cowards; he replied that they were the bravest of the brave and could easily have handled odds of four to one but not the ten to one they actually faced; moreover, he would one day make good his words by leading Corsica to independence. There is also this highly significant outburst to one of his teachers: 'Paoli was a great man: he loved his fatherland, and I shall never forgive my father, who was his adjutant, for helping to unite Corsica to France. He should have followed his fortunes and succumbed with him.'

The spiral of taunt, counter-taunt, playground fight and return match between Napoleon and schoolmates continued. The arrival in 1782 of another student from Corsica, Elie-Charles de Bragelonne, might conceivably have been a source of relief, but Bragelonne was the son of the French military commander in Bastia, and the strong anti-Napoleon schoolboy faction twisted this to its own advantage. Knowing that Corsicans hated Genoese even more than the French, they put Bragelonne up to pretending he was Genoese. The sequel was predictable: Napoleon flew at the boy and pulled out his hair in tufts, leading to another fight. But there is a tradition that Bragelonne later joined in Napoleon's anti-schoolmaster baiting and troublemaking and even aspired to inherit his mantle in this regard, for he was expelled in 1786. There must have been some kind of rapport, for Napoleon later made him one of his generals.