An interview of Zamoyski himself for a Flemish paper, written in Dutch, about his latest book, interview that I translated from Dutch to English

"Napoleon did not understand Tsar Alexander. He did not understand dum people, they can be very stubborn '

Napoleon was like a child in a sandbox "
"We can all make a mess of it, but we can not all become Napoleon." Adam Zamoyski emphasizes in his biography the rise of the Corsican.

Three years ago, on the bicentenary of the battle of Waterloo, you could pave the way to Austerlitz with the new Napoleon books. The deluge is somewhat matted, but still the man keeps inspiring and fascinating historians.

The appearance of the Napoleon biography of Adam Zamoyski (69) is symbolic. Too late? Not at all.
Zamoyski, a Polish-British American, wrote acclaimed books about, for example, Chopin, Poland, the regime of fear after the French Revolution, the year 1812 and the Congress of Vienna. That he would also venture to a biography of Napoleon Bonaparte was written in the stars. That he would not talk about his military exploits, or not in particular, too. His book is an epitome of elegance, nuance and, despite the nearly 800 pages, tempo.

I meet Adam Zamoyski in the stylish castle of Bois-Seigneur-Isaac in Ophain, on a cannon shot from Waterloo. Host Baron Bernard Snoy is a friend of Zamoyski, old nobility among themselves. Count Zamoyski lives in London but regularly moves to his estate in Poland. Bernard Snoy had an impressive career in the World Bank, the OSCE and the European Union. His father, Jean-Charles Snoy et d'Oppuers, signed the Treaty of Rome on behalf of Belgium in 1957. The European idea is in the wallpaper of these stately rooms. They are Adam Zamoyski - tight in the sharp cut suit - as cast;

With your curriculum it is not entirely surprising, but still, in the name of God, a biography about Napoleon?

'When I read some of the latest biographies, I understood that a new one was needed. Most people still can not just look at the man as a man. Somewhere in their head the image of him plays as either a genius or a despot. Many biographers have been brought up in a particular national history and have difficulty in rejecting what they have learned as a child. The French do not touch the trauma, the British find it impossible to get rid of the myth that they were, as in 1940, only to save Europe. When I was in elementary school in London, Napoleon was compared to Hitler, which is completely absurd. At the summer school with my French cousins ​​I heard the opposite. I was fortunate to grow up in different parts of the world and feel perfectly at ease in the middle. '

The American version of your book is called "Napoleon. A life '. That is very understated, isnt'it?

Many wrote about the military exploits, but the more I read about it, the more impossible I found it to understand it all. It was also very complicated and confusing for the soldiers. They hardly knew what they were doing themselves. I did not want to talk about that. However, I was interested in how the small offspring of the unsightly Buonaparte family, with its talents and faults, originating from the stinking Corsican fishing town of Ajaccio, became the myth named Napoleon. '

"You can look at him carefully on the basis of his own letters and writings. From the age of 10, when he was in the military school, he began to make notes in the books he read. They show his intellectual and emotional development and also show that he did not always understand the book well. I wanted to limit myself to those immovable sources and to reliable testimonies of his time, and not to write down from memory or hearing fifty years later. With all that material it is not so difficult to get close to the man. For example, who else wrote so honestly about his first, failed sexual experience? That piece of text tells so much about the man and his complexes. '

"His father wanted to climb the social ladder at all costs. He sent his sons to the mainland to work on their careers there, but he died early and Napoleon never knew him. There was no father figure, but an almost fearfully strict and strong mother. In France he ended up in a military school and his complexes were reinforced, his figure, his southern skin, his Corsican accent. He was laughed at because he would be a bastard. He had no idea how to behave and then became arrogant. "

"He lacked empathy, was manipulative and self-centered. At the same time he was very smart and he could solve problems quickly, but he did not have a long-term vision. If you put that against the characteristics of a psychopath, you clearly see similarities. He had a few close friends, men he had met at the officers 'school, but no one ever said to him: "Stop it, Napoleon, you're ridiculing yourself."'

His closest comrades died one by one on the battlefield.
"Even then. Nobody went against him. He always tried to distance himself from himself and the others. He was a complicated young man. No genius, but a quick thinker. It frustrated him when he saw stupid people doing stupid things. That's how it all started. He saw an officer take a wrong decision and he intervened because he knew better. That drove him forward and in this way he received constant promotion. '

"Just as he stood at the start of his military career, the revolution broke out, which he welcomed, as most intelligent people did. He was already a republican before, he found the royal system inefficient and unpragmatic and he was a practical man. But the revolution turned into a frightening system of dog eat dog. Under Robespierre everyone tried to save his own skin. At the same time people were afraid of who was too smart. He found himself in a situation where he had to think about self-protection and therefore he had to be ruthless. In such a situation you have to quickly reject your young ideals and become practical or even cynical. He had gone to politics in Corsica during the revolution and everybody was deceived by everyone. On his birth island he was a small Mafioso and intrigant; even before he was twenty-five, he had already deceived, lied, falsified and bribed. '

'In the Italian campaign, his first achievement, he was given the command of an army. Because he was smart and had read history, he knew that France would not have peace in the south if the Austrians were not reduced. He was successful and pumped as a master in propaganda who succeeded. His bosses in the Directorate helped to sell that image, because France needed successes. Until they realized that they had created a monster that they could not cage. "

And so events pushed him forward.
"Yes, suddenly he got the keys to the land. Napoleon had all the power and he could do what he wanted. He had a vision of how a country should be governed and how society should be organized. He was like a child in a sandbox. But at that moment all his uncertainties - social, sexual, intellectual - strengthened again to the surface. While on the other side of the Channel the British helped to create the monster. The British press wrote, often paid by the government, that Napoleon was not a real Frenchman, perhaps even of North African descent, that he slept with his sisters, that he kept orgies, that his wife was a whore, that he was stepdaughter did ... That was, for the bourgeois moral preacher he was, his sore spot. The British government also paid the assassinations, which did not help Napoleon to be happy and calm. I have never quite understood why he crowned himself Emperor in 1804, because from then on it went downhill, but he wanted to secure his inheritance and anchor his achievements. "

And then everything turned.
"He was pushed from one side to the other, like on a surfboard. He was an excellent surfer, but the waves were too big for him and he had to keep surfing because otherwise he drowned. From his emperorship and the Third Coalition he had to take up arms. He won all big strokes, Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena. He was thousands of miles from Paris and defeated everything and everyone. The emperor of the Holy Roman Empire begged for mercy, the tsar of Russia fled for him. '

"Suddenly he was the master of Europe. How should this man know what to do? 1807 is the crucial year. He went to negotiate with Tsar Alexander, while that was the moment to summon a congress in Erfurt or wherever, as a victor, and say, "Let's come up with something intelligent for the future of Europe." '

Let us think of the European Union?
"(Laughs) For example, yes. But instead he began to palate with Alexander. Strange, he thought the idea of ​​talking to the tsar was sexy - you saw something similar with Roosevelt who at the end of the Second World War was stalking with Stalin in Yalta. In any case, with the peace of Tilsit, Napoleon reaches the turning point, from then on everything goes wrong, which could go wrong. On the one hand you had a leader, Napoleon, with all the features of a psychopath, with whom you could not make an appointment. And on the other hand, you had a state, Russia, with all the features of a psychopath, who lacks empathy and is egocentric, offensive and manipulative under every regime and under every ruler. Impossible that the two would reach an entente.

"Napoleon could have saved it. In 1807 almost all of Europe saw him as a demigod, many leaders were impressed. His behavior was never exemplary, but he was not as arrogant and unpleasant as later. Then there was the magic of the young warrior with that extraordinary energy and that idealism, which would weaken with aging. "

Napoleon was captivated by the so-called rediscovered epic of the Celtic poet Ossian. Why that fascination?
"He was very sentimental and Ossian was a big hype. I do not believe that Napoleon accepted that it was an invention. He was good at the suspension or disbelief. Because he himself was a great liar, he easily went along with someone else's lie. "

"Napoleon and his contemporaries grew up in a world where everyone went to church every day. But in the meantime they had gone to school, were able to read and write and were skeptical about Christianity. At the same time there was a classicist revival with vague pseudo-religious notions and lived the idea of ​​human fulfillment, not by going to heaven, but by pursuing glory in this life. '

"Corsica was a strange place that had never been poured into a full political or social structure. Still not, by the way. It was Catholic, but the population held on to pagan or even Roman rituals. There was, as always, an idea of ​​"destiny". Napoleon and his comrades were young and heroic; they had swagger. They wanted to create a new world. Forget about Jesus, this is year 1 of the new era. They were convinced that they were doing something extraordinary. Compare it to the energy in Great Britain in the 60s. They were unstoppable. Until they stopped themselves, when they married, became rich, settled in big houses and suddenly had to lose everything. The whole company lost direction. "

Let's do something about history. What if Napoleon had not been drawn to Moscow?
"It did not matter much anymore. Napoleon maneuvered into such a position that he either had to invade Russia or feed his huge army in Poland. He had no plan b. Napoleon did not understand the tsar. He did not understand weak people, they can be very stubborn. "

Another one. What if his brothers had been more competent?
"They were not that abominable. Napoleon gave them no room. Joseph modernized Naples and was loved there. Spain was a failed state, otherwise he would have had a chance of success, but Napoleon interfered with everything. Louis Napoleon was a capable king of Holland and without the continental blockade it would not have been impossible for one of his descendants to still sit on the throne. And even the fat Jérôme, if only he had done a little less ridiculous, would have been an acceptable king of Westphalia. Lucien Bonaparte? He was too smart to want to be king somewhere. "

In your book, the chapter about the 100-day campaign, from Elba to Waterloo, is very short.
'If you look at the chronology, my book is out of balance, yes. I had the greatest attention for the period up to 1807, after that everything went much faster. That is not because I got bored or tired - now, maybe a bit tired - but the most interesting thing is the source, how things start. '

'How such a powerful man made such an inventory, of course, had to be told, but in a way it is evident, less interesting. Admit it, we can all make a mess of it, but we can not all become Napoleon. "

"The 100 days were tragic and it was a monstrous mistake by the European powers. Napoleon was tired and bored and he just started to enjoy Elba. If they had given him some money and let his wife and child come to him, he would have stayed on Elba and become what he always wanted to be in Corsica: a small ruler of a small island. The tens of thousands of deaths could have been avoided if the European powers had been more intelligent. "

Best regards

Marc