To the British embassy in Paris for a colloquium on ‘Napoleon and Wellington in War and Peace’ organised by our ambassador, Sir Peter Ricketts, to mark the bicentenary of the purchase of the embassy from Pauline Borghese, Napoleon’s sister. (According to the historian of the house, Tim Knox, Pauline would warm her feet on the naked backs of her ladies-in-waiting, and be carried to her bath by a huge Egyptian slave.) William Hague opened our proceedings, boldly pointing out the other anniversarial elephant in the room: it was Trafalgar Day. The French fielded several of their senior Napoleon historians, including Jean Tulard, Thierry Lentz of the splendid Fondation Napoléon, Jacques-Olivier Boudon and Talleyrand’s biographer Emmanuel de Waresquiel, while Britain was represented by Peter Hicks (who spoke in French), Philip Mansel, John Bew, Wellington’s descendant the Marquess of Douro, and myself. If you’d like to hear the resulting avalanche of wit, charm and civilised scholarly debate, please go to this site.
By contrast, more than a thousand people turned up to Intelligence Squared’s debate at the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster to watch Adam Zamoyski and me debate the motion ‘Napoleon the Great?’, partly I suspect because it was moderated by Jeremy Paxman.
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