Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon Bonaparte was the general and emperor who reshaped Europe. He was born on Corsica and died in exile on Saint Helena, one of the remotest islands in the Atlantic.

Born on 15 August 1769 in Ajaccio, late in the morning, he had Scorpio rising and three planets in the tenth house: the Sun in Leo, Mars in Virgo and Neptune. The tenth house is standing, the thing the world decides you are. A Sun there is ambition as an identity rather than as a choice, and Mars there is ambition that will fight for it. A Leo Sun needs to be the author of the story it finds itself in. For a provincial outsider from an island France had only just taken, that is an enormous amount of pressure aimed at a single door.

There is no air in his chart at all. Not one of the ten planets. Air is what negotiates, what sees the other position, what can be talked round. Five planets sit in earth instead, which is the part that builds and holds and does not let go. Somebody arranged like that does not stop at a reasonable settlement, because there is nothing in him equipped to recognise one.

What made him extraordinary at the work is in there too. Mars trine Uranus, exact to half a degree, is quick reflexes and acting well in an emergency, an instinct for the move nobody is expecting. Mars trine Pluto is power kept under command and the capacity to survive what would stop other people. Those two together are a battlefield reputation. But Mars also runs up against Saturn, drive meeting refusal, which is the part of the chart that kept finding the wall, and eventually did.

He died at Longwood on 5 May 1821, on a thin crescent Moon, nineteen per cent lit, which is the phase that pushes against the weight of how things have always been done. He was on a rock in the South Atlantic by then, about as far from the tenth house as a life can travel, and still the most consequential man of his century.