Andrew Roberts’s diary: Just who’s the despot here – Napoleon or Paxman?

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. As we left the Green Room for the main hall, I overheard Jeremy saying to Adam, ‘Let’s bury this maniac’, which I assumed referred to Napoleon. When Jeremy started off by making a rude reference to Napoleon, I pointed out that in his recent book Empire he’d referred to him as ‘a despot’. ‘But he was a despot!’ expostulated Jeremy. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ I said to the audience, ‘the moderator.’ Napoleon went on to win 56 per cent of the vote, despite Adam’s superb 15-minute speech with no notes.Publicising