Reddit reviews Napoleon: A Biography

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This comment is partially from a linguistic perspective as opposed to a historian perspective, although I have provided a secondary, historical source. Mods, please feel free to remove if you feel it's not relevant.

There is a concept in linguistic theory called the "critical window", which explains that unless you learn a language as a child, you will never be able to be fully fluent/native in it. This used to be a hard limit of 5/6 years old, these days it's acknowledged to be more like 10-12 for some individuals. Napoleon learned French just at the later limit of that window.

When Napoleon was 10 (1779) he was enrolled in a school in France to learn French. We can assume that before that time he would not have spoken French with native French people at a regular basis, so his French, if any, before that time, will have been learned with a Corsican accent. When he moved to a military academy in May that year he still had an accent and incorrect spelling, although he did pass his exams in the language.

The book source says he "never mastered French and always spoke with an Italian accent, pronouncing certain words as if they obeyed the Italian rules of phonetics", however, the author is unclear in whether he's referring to Napoleon's time in Autun, or his whole life. A later quote says "as became clear later, he had absolutely no linguistic talent".

Source: Napoleon, a Biography

Earlier this week I just finished up Schama's Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution & McLynn's Napoleon: A Biography, both of which I highly recommend if you're at all interested in the French Revolution.