At the age of sixteen Napoléone was commissioned a second lieutenant in the French army. While still a lieutenant Napoléone served in Valence, Douai, and Auxonne where he spent much of his time reading about the tactics of history's most famous generals. In Auxonne he was a member of an experimental artillery battery where he experimented with tactical theories developed in France. The man commanding this operation was the Baron du Teil, one of the leading gunners of the eighteenth century. During this period with du Teil, Buonaparte continued to form many of his maxims for war.
While a lieutenant and captain Napoléone began to became involved with the Corsican independence movement. He took many sick leaves to stay in Corsica to help his hero Paoli and to continue his involvement as a lieutenant-colonel in the Corsican Volunteers. However, his overexuberance caused him to fall out of favor with Paoli and he and his family were forced to leave Corsica for France. Napoléone experienced his first military action with the Corsican Volunteers. Unfortunately, this engagement with a neighboring island was unsuccessful.
Rise in the military
Napoléon initially considered himself a foreigner and an outsider, not learning the French language until the age of ten; accusations of being a foreigner would dog him throughout his life, especially since he spoke French with an Italian accent. He had become an officer in the French army when the French Revolution began in 1789. Napoléon returned to Corsica, where a nationalist struggle sought separation from France. Civil war broke out, and Napoléon's family fled to France. Napoléon supported the Revolution and quickly rose through the ranks. In 1793, he freed Toulon from the royalists and from the British troops supporting them. In 1795, when royalists marched against the National Convention in Paris, he had them shot.
Nicknamed the Little Corporal, Napoléon was a brilliant military strategist, able to absorb the substantial body of military knowledge of his time and to apply it to the real-world circumstances of his era. An artillery officer by training, he used artillery innovatively as a mobile force to support infantry attacks. When appointed commander-in-chief of the ill-equipped French army in Italy, he managed to defeat Austrian forces repeatedly. In these battles, contemporary paintings of his headquarters show that he used the world's first telecommunications system, the Chappe semaphore line, first implemented in 1792. Austrian forces, led by Archduke Charles, had to negotiate an unfavorable treaty; at the same time, Napoléon organized a coup in 1797 which removed several royalists from power in Paris.