The month after Louis XVI’s execution, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon obtained his first significant command:
He was put in charge of the artillery section of an expedition to ‘liberate’ three small Sardinian islands from the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia under Paoli’s nephew, Pier di Cesari Rocca, whom he privately derided as a ‘clothes-horse’.
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They mutinied, and so the entire expedition was aborted by Rocca. A furious Napoleon was forced to spike his own cannon and throw his mortars into the sea.
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It was an inauspicious start for the career of the new Caesar, but it taught him the importance of morale, logistics and leadership more powerfully than any number of academic lectures.