YouSaid · the spoken record

Andrew Roberts

lines on the record: 34
first: 2021-08-01
most recent: 2021-08-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It's wonderful music, by the way, that he's writing a biography of Napoleon, and I am very much looking forward to reviewing it. When one sees the effects of this great man and when they went into these towns, one of the first things they do, like in the papal states, a classic example, the papal state, where Jews still had to wear the yellow star and where they were forced into ghettos, he not only opened up the ghettos, but he gave civil and religious rights and liberties to the Jews and to everyone else. This is a liberating concept, the idea of the enlightenment on horseback. And for all of you who voted yes, you can feel yourself part of one of the great liberating enlightenment traditions. Those of you who didn't, of course, are still stuck in the maia of reaction, legitimacy, and the Ancien regime. Thank you very much indeed.”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ladies and gentlemen, everyone who put in one of these black little cards Following in the tradition of Goethe, Hegel, Berlioz, Byron, Carlyle, the great intellectuals who appreciated that he was a bona fide intellectual, a connoisseur, a critic, a theorist of drama and music, a man who champions science, who socialized with astronomers, and who impressed these great men as well as all of those of you who handed in this garden. He was an enlightenment, ladies and gentlemen, on horseback. He abolished wherever he or his armies went, they abolished feudalism, they rationalized countries, they abolished the Spanish Inquisition, and all the appalling, backward things that had held Europe back for so long under the legitimists and the ancien regimes of whom the spokesmen. Seems tonight is Count Adam Zamoyski.”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I believe in both. I believe he was both by the standards of the day and by the standards of today. But I don't believe that really history makes that much sense if you constantly just see it through the prism of the present day. And the fact is that we have seen Napoleon wrongly through the prism of the Second World War again and again he's presented, especially by British historians as a kind of proto-Hitler who was a totalitarian monster. He wasn't. You have to see him through the actual prism of the day.”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very intelligent question from the gentleman over there about Elba. It's quite wrong to say that nobody welcomed him before Grenoble. Actually at La Frie, he had a regiment fling themselves on him. And in one of the other villages, sorry, towns, I think it was Cisteron, they actually, the common people of France, just of the town, anyway, just pulled down the gates and smashed them up and gave him bits of the gates to show that they didn't want him to be kept out of Ciceron. So, you know, it's not fair. He's absolutely right when he says that the Bourbons ruined everything and screwed everything up in 10 months. But nonetheless, that wasn't the only reason that people welcomed him back in 1815.”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Surely site better than being put in prison. At least she was able to live in her vast and beautiful mansion on Lake Geneva, the Lake Coppe. Oh, fewer, no, no, no, no. That's not the case. The Ancien regime and the French Revolution imprison more people than Napoleon”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way in which you're treating him, like he's Madame de Stales was sent into internal exile. It is hardly a police state when you have one policeman for every 1,510 Frenchman. In Britain today, we have one policeman for every 450 Britons. Does that make us a police state? No.”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are wildly hypocritical about this. The Lord Chancellor had the right and exercised the right to censor theatrical productions in this country until 1968, Pinderello's plays. Well, pretty much all the anti-government newspapers. Yeah, and how much genuine, it's wartime, how much genuine freedom of the press was there in this country, in the Second World War? When Winston Churchill said that the truth needs to be protected by a bodyguard of lies, he understood exactly what Napoleon was trying to do.”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, why was that such a bad thing? It's only when it gets nasty in 1914 that we have to be, or at least 1870, that there's that big problem.”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“of course, but his family had benefited from because that was the only way that they'd managed to keep their estates together in Corsica. Yes, I think it's a very bad idea. I've always been against primogenitor. I'm the eldest brother. Things that happen literally a century after his death, such as the rise of German nationalism at the time of the First World War, really is going too far. And I think the case is the same for Primogenitor.”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, obviously, if the Code Napoleon had nothing to do with Napoleon, it can't be blamed on him. But Adam is wrong about that. He presided over well over half of the meetings that set up the Code Napoleon. And when I say presided, he had something to say about absolutely everything. And he also provided, most importantly, Adam's absolutely right when he says that Cambassarez was the intellectual force behind it. But Cambassarez had been trying to get a code, a revision of the legal code into French law since the French Revolution broke out. And nothing had happened for 15 years. What it needed, 10 years, sorry, what it needed, 15 by the time it got through, was a driving political force willing to cut the Gordian knot. And that's what Napoleon was. Now, with the question of primogenitor, which he himself”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think his primary objective was a, well obviously French hegemony in Western Europe. He was never attempting to rule the world. He was never attempting to rule all of Europe either. But he did want to ensure that he was not going to be in any kind of military or strategic danger from Austria, Prussia or Russia. I think that he also wanted to put the most key parts of the Enlightenment into as many countries as he was able to. And Adam was absolutely right that the brothers of his were pretty uniformly useless as kings. But the reason was not that he bullied them so much, was because they were constant wars. Wars that were, as I mentioned, started by the legitimist and Nien regime powers. Not wars that he wanted.”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not when he actually thought that that's where the power lay. It was when he'd done his reading and understood the importance of France and the Enlightenment and his own belief in Enlightenment concepts and reading of Rousseau that he came intellectually over to appreciate that Corsica was a cause he believed in but was not as important as the wider picture.”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the artillery at the siege of Toulon and in a brilliant immediate apes as soon as he went up to the top of the Igulette above the heights of Toulon, he saw how if you captured a particular”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, yes. Well, born on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, he came from that interesting penumbra between the upper middle class and the lower upper class. He was like a sort of highland clan chief family, but they didn't have any money. They were officially noble, but they had to actually get that confirmed. He went to school in mainland France because his father had confirmed him as noble and had a fantastic education at Brienne Military Academy and then at the ⁇ cole militaire in Paris. And then after that, he followed the career of an army officer whilst also at the same time getting involved in Corsican politics, which, as Adam quite rightly pointed out, he was very bad at. And they got the whole family got chased off the island in 1793. What Adam didn't mention also happened in 1793 a few months later, was that he commands”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's now to blame for the European Union, which wasn't set up until 100 years after he died. Can we go back to science and the art? The fact is that he was the one who set up the great scientific prizes. He was the one who for the first time in French history gave scientists, made scientists into important people in society, gave them peerages. You know, the first scientists that we ever made appear in this country, Lord Kelvin in 1896, the first artist who ever got a peerage was Lord Leighton in 1892, the first poet, he made these great men into great men and the first poet in this country was Tennyson in 1884. That is ridiculous. It's because it's a way of thanking people. By the way, he brought in life peerages, which we didn't do in this country until 1958. Yes, it's a way of, well, what, you prefer the hereditary version that we had in this country at the time?”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, when you criticise Marengo, that is completely outrageous. When you say, and then reinforcements happen to arrive, who asks for the reinforcements? You know, he did. He went from that moment that he realized the Austrian attack was taking place at 9.30 in the morning. He sent out the demands to Desai to return to the battle, and they did it at the key and decisive moment. So it's not fair, really, to slag off 46 victories and make such a fuss of seven defeat.”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, he got defeated. It doesn't stop you, as I mentioned earlier, all these other people who were still called the great who got defeated. But he won 46 of his 60 battles. And that is an astonishing achievement for anyone. Yes, of course, the ones that really mattered, the ones at the end, the Battle of Waterloo, he lost and he deserved to lose. As I say in the book, that was a series of blunders.”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, he was not a short ass. He was five foot six. He was exactly my height. When I was making this BBC TV series, when nobody was looking in the room in which he died, I lay on his deathbed. And my feet just touched the end of the bed. He's exactly the same height. The reason people think that he's tiny is because of all those caricaturists who constantly made him minute against huge John Bull figures and George III figures. He was the exact average age for a Frenchman of his”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The word coun anything to you? Yes. Yeah, it certainly does. Yes, of course, he came to power in a military coup. And thank God he did, because look at all the wonderful things he did for France. Whereas if you try to change the French constitution, hang on, please, in 1799, it would take three years, it had to go through both houses of parliament. Is there nothing you admire about this man?”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can you just remind us how he was elected? Well, actually he had three great referendum plebiscites that were slightly fraudulently manipulated, but they were manipulated. He actually won by, we have the actual proper voting figures in the National Archives. The great thing is that he won about 80% but claimed 95%. Now that is obviously outrageous and disgraceful and despicable, but he still won 80%.”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, thank you very much, Adam. I wasn't bad news for you, though. The preliminary vote, the vote that people cast before they'd been exposed to your argument was for the proposition that he should be called the great, 49%, against it 24%, but 27% not knowing. So perhaps you'll have persuaded them, but we'll see congratulations on that. Uninformed audience. Well, unexposed to your view, sorry, sorry. And also your view, because in your 2011 book, Empire. What you call Napoleon a despot? He was a despot? No, he was not a despot. This is the moderator, ladies and gentlemen.”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Midshipman on HMS Bellerophon that Napoleon surrendered to and was taken back to Plymouth on said he showed us what one little human creature like ourselves can accomplish in a span so short and that, ladies and gentlemen, is so true and one of the major reasons why tonight you should vote yes. Thank you very much indeed.”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of his marshals came from the working classes, a fact totally unknown in the history of France up until then. They were the sons of Coopers and Tanners and Bailiffs and innkeepers and millers. One of them actually claimed to have had a claimed that his father had had a royal appointment, but the royal appointment was in fact the royal mole catcher. So in a sense you could actually add him as well and make 11 of the marshals. And I believe he's also, his life is a standing rebuke to people who don't believe in the great man theory of history and who think that history is all created like the Marxists do by vast impersonal forces. Standing against that, ladies and gentlemen, is the career and life of Napoleon.”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As I say, he had no intention of going there when he started that war. And he did know about the winter, which is why he allowed himself three weeks to get back to Smolensk. He made a terrible mistake after the Battle of Malayaroslavits. But the idea that he had no concept of the Russian winter is absurd. He'd read Charles XII, the book by Voltaire, and knew perfectly well that it did. So he's not a matter of hubris. He was defeated. But plenty of people have been defeated in history and are still great. Peter the Great lost the Azov campaign. Frederick the Great lost the Battle of Colin. Catherine the Great lost the war against Sweden. Alfred the Great lost so many battles he spent most of his time in the marshes of Athelney, but it doesn't stop them from being great, and neither should it stop Napoleon. He was a great meritocrat.”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was going to kill 140,000 of his men. He had no idea that the Russians were going to fight such a scorched earth policy that they would allow they would actually burn down Moscow, or at least three quarters of it.”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And James Gilray and George Cruikshank that make out this man to be a monster. What's more, he didn't have a Napoleon complex. This idea that there was a hubristic concept where he had to go around invading countries is completely absurd. The way in which we try to fit his career into hubris versus nemesis, this old ancient Greek drum, a dramatic conceit, just simply doesn't work. The reason he invaded Russia in 1812 was because he had beaten the Russians twice before. He fought in blizzards before. He had the largest army in the history of the world. It was the same size as the whole population of Paris, twice the size of the Russians. He had no intention of going to Moscow. He wanted to fight within twenty days along the borders of Russia. He had no idea that typhus”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He wasn't a warmonger. There were seven wars that were seven wars of the coalition that were declared against him, and he did attack both Spain and Portugal in 1807 and 1808, and of course Russia in 1812. Two wars that he started against the seven that were declared against revolutionary Napoleonic France. If you're looking for an inveterate warmonger, you have to go back to the British who were funding all of those seven coalitions to a huge degree. And rightly so. He wanted to invade us. I'm delighted that the British won the Battle of Waterloo as an Englishman. It set up the British Empire very nicely after 1815. But it doesn't mean that we still have to be enthralled to the old propaganda of the cartoonists, the caricaturists like Thomas Rowland.”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when the Archbishop De Rowan wrote in the letter on the eve of the coronation saying that he would willingly give his life for Napoleon, Napoleon noted on the letter, pay 12,000 francs to the Archbishop out of the theatrical fund.”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in a sense, one can understand why he felt that it was necessary to do all of this and why also the British and indeed the old legitimists, the Ancien regime, old reactionary powers, desperately wanted to get rid of him. But the fact is 200 years later, we can now appreciate that he was a great man, not somebody that needed to be used for propaganda. He also was a member of the great sense of humour, which you don't get in monsters. When at the opera an escaped lunatic from a lunatic asylum came up and told him that he was in love with the empress, Napoleon replied, you seem to have chosen a curious person for your confidant.”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the first proper public accounting system and he also reformed the tax code. He did the things that you need to do in order to make a country work. He set up, ladies and gentlemen, the Legendon, which is still, quite rightly, coveted by Frenchmen, and he also signed the Concordat, which brought to an end the horrific system of discrimination against Christians in the”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the useful things like the reservoirs and the sewers. He was a true creator. He created the Bonte de France, which is still around. And of course, at the time, was the reason that he was able to get inflation down from 10,000% a year to 6% a year. He was the man who ended the war in the Vond ⁇. This incredibly vicious war that had claimed 40,000 lives, more than were guillotined in the terror, and he ended that war. He's the man, Napoleon the Great, who is behind the system of prefects in departments. There were departments, of course, before, but he managed to centralize that system with the prefects, which again we have today. He set up the Conseil d' ⁇ tat, which meets every Wednesday today able to vet the laws of France. He managed also to”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As Jeremy pointed out was the code Napoleon. He ripped up the 42 often contradictory legal systems that had so held France back and instead had one single code, which was from then on been able to basically make France into a modern state and it's been adopted by 40 countries of the world in every inhabited continent. He also created the glories of Paris When you go on a romantic weekend to Paris you will walk along the quays that were built by Napoleon the Great. You will cross one of the four bridges built by Napoleon the Great. You will see the Vondom column in the Place von dom or the Arct de Triomphe de Carousel in the Louvre. It is partly because of him that it is such a glorious and beautiful city today. He built also”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then he became first consul and effective dictator of France in seventeen ninety nine, Napoleon had been faced by indescribable chaos, resulting from ten years of revolution and counter revolution, interly signed political struggle, random political terror, class war and open civil war in some parts of the country. The authority of the state had been undermined by the rapid succession of governments, each of which overturned the legitimacy of its predecessor. The law had been turned into a tool by rival political factions and justice had been politicized. Napoleon may have been a product of the Enlightenment and what conservatives saw as its depraved values, but he was a pragmatist. If he did not believe in divine right, he certainly had no time for Jacobin ideology, illuminati, or dreamers of any kind. He believed in order, and he knew how to impose it. So what did he do with this order?”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know it's Ladies and gentlemen, it's a great honour to be invited to address you and to answer Jeremy's question. Central point about Napoleon is the way in which he saved France. And to understand the dangers that he overcame in the course of this, I'd like to quote from an extremely good book, Phantom Terror, written by Adam Zamoyski. And what Adam writes on page seventy seven quite rightly is that”
2021-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Sunday Debate: Napoleon the Great? With Andrew Roberts, Adam Zamoyski and Jeremy Paxman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source