Napoleon was born on 15 August 1769 to Carlo Maria di Buonaparte and Maria Letizia Ramolino in his family's ancestral home, Casa Buonaparte, in the town of Ajaccio, the capital of the island of Corsica. He was their 4th child and 3rd son. This was a year after the island was transferred to France by the Republic of Genoa.[6] He was christened Napoleone di Buonaparte, probably named after an uncle (an older brother, who did not survive infancy, was the first of the sons to be called Napoleone). In his twenties, he adopted the more French-sounding Napoléon Bonaparte.[7][note 1]

The Corsican Buonapartes were descended from minor Italian nobility of Tuscan origin, who had come to Corsica from Liguria in the 16th century.[8][9]

His father, Nobile Carlo Buonaparte, an attorney, was named Corsica's representative to the court of Louis XVI in 1777. The dominant influence of Napoleon's childhood was his mother, Letizia Ramolino, whose firm discipline restrained a rambunctious child.[10] Napoleon's maternal grandmother had married into the Swiss Fesch family in her second marriage, and Napoleon's uncle, the later cardinal Joseph Fesch, would fulfill the role as protector of the Bonaparte family for some years.

Head and shoulders portrait of a white-haired, portly, middle-aged man with a pinkish complexion, blue velvet coat and a ruffle
The nationalist Corsican leader Pasquale Paoli; portrait by Richard Cosway, 1798
He had an elder brother, Joseph; and younger siblings, Lucien, Elisa, Louis, Pauline, Caroline and Jérôme. A boy and girl were born before Joseph but died in infancy. Napoleon was baptised as a Catholic.[11]