Napoleon was there all my life. "An interview with Adam Zamoyski, found in a Dutch newspaper.

It was not until he was seventeen that Adam Zamoyski first visited Poland, the land of his parents. He was born in New York and grew up in Great Britain. Last week, his publisher Balans published his biography of “Napoleon Bonaparte, The man behind the myth” . Zamoyski settles with several stubborn cliches and misunderstandings about the man. I meet Zamoyski at the inn of the writers in Amsterdam, the Ambassadehotel on the Herengracht.

'In our apartment in London,' says Zamoyski, 'a portrait of Napoleon, hung together with that of Prince Poniatowski, the tragic hero of the Polish partition . I remember that we had a Bonaparte medallion at home, and how I visited his tomb as a little boy in the Dôme des Invalides. Of course I was delighted with the Napoleonic uniforms. For the Poles, Napoleon was a reassuring and comforting figure.. Despite all his genius, a coalition of English grocers and Russian barbarians managed to get him on his knees, just as they got us on our knees. At the Primary School they presented me Napoleon as the Bad. I was taught that the British had defeated Napoleon on their own, as they had liberated Europe from the Nazis with their own hands. Trafalger and Waterloo were mentioned in the same breath with the Blitzkrieg. During the summer holidays with my cousins in France it was again Napoleon before and Napoleon after. An extremely entertaining chair dance. '

Intellectual laziness
'I am amazed by the intellectual laziness with which various academics stick to the most ridiculous and childish anecdotes about Napoleon. That he cried when he was born, that he was playing a little drum, fell in love with his girl next door. "Prove it!", I think. If you write about heroic figures, such as Napoleon, Beethoven or Churchill, you can lose yourself in their enormous style, their panache. You have to keep your emotions under control. Michael Broers claims in the first part of his Napoleon biography that Bonaparte was so eager to learn that he was still reading under his blanket in the late hours. With a night candle! "

'Recently I attended a lecture by Margaret MacMillan, a fantastic historian and a dear friend. During the question round with the audience she said that Napoleon brought so much death and misery about Europe. "Ho," I thought, "What does that mean?" Napoleon did not start the war, it was already under way when he appeared on the scene. His first mission was to free Toulon from a foreign force. MacMillan made this remark in a lost moment, but it also proves how ineradicable some platitudes are ... "

'We also have such a wonderful source material to paint a completely different picture of Napoleon. The thousands of letters that have been preserved of him, the notes about the books he read, the youth novels he wrote. The man even entrusted his first sexual experience to the paper! Precisely all these ego documents, when he returned from Waterloo in the Élysée, he did not abandon the fire. From which historical figure can we followthe loss of his virginity to the last minute! '

Napoleon and his contradictions
"Napoleon is so interesting because of his contradictions. He embraced the Enlightenment, but he also stood at the beginning of the Romantic movement. Hence his fascination for La nouvelle Héloïse of Rousseau or, his favorite book, Paul et Virginie of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. A rare cocktail of pragmatic rationalism and sentimentalism. From Corsica he took a potpourri of pagan notions - his belief in the fatum for example. Napoleon was obsessed with this idea of his destiny. "

'I also find it lazy to always talk about his supposed genius. That myth can only thrive if people do not think, or if historians continue to quote unreliable sources. In my biography of Napoleon, I claim that this whole cult of genius fits into an era that had settled with a Christian spirituality and mythology. So the Enlightenment. Glory and fame replaced the hereafter, eternal life could only be acquired in the here and now. With the revival of the classics, the Plutarchic idea of the superhuman returned to fashion. The extraordinary individual, the hero. Napoleon had the time with him. "

'Anyone who wants to understand an epoque has to look at her culture, and that in her entire scope, from the sublime to the ridicule. A figure like Tony Blair can only be found if you know something about the music scene of the sixties and seventies. The man did not read. He wanted to be a rock star, stand on stage and merge with his fans. That ambition has shaped his character and actions to a large extent. '

Adam Zamoyski examines how that penny falls to me. A man of nearly seventy, with the mischievous gaze of a young boy, still delighted with the Napoleonic era about which he wrote his entire working life.