Learning & Tech❯Talks & Lectures❯History Talks

Join acclaimed historian Lord Andrew Roberts for a fascinating look at the men who helped build — and ultimately unravel — Napoleon Bonaparte’s empire. In his new book, Napoleon and His Marshals, Roberts brings to life the extraordinary generals who served at Napoleon’s side, from the courageous Ney and flamboyant Murat to the tenacious Masséna, iron-willed Davout, and meticulous Berthier.

In 1804, Napoleon created the Marshalate, the highest military honor of the French Empire, and over the next decade elevated 26 of his most accomplished generals to the rank. Roberts explores their personalities, ambitions, rivalries, and complex relationships with their emperor, revealing how Napoleon’s leadership both inspired fierce loyalty and fueled destructive competition among his marshals. Ultimately, only two of the 26 would ride beside him at Waterloo.

Drawing on years of scholarship on Napoleon and his era, Roberts offers a dramatic and richly detailed portrait of the men whose military brilliance helped create Napoleon’s extraordinary empire — and whose rivalries helped bring it down.

This event is a co-production with The Chartwell Society of Oregon, a chapter of the International Churchill Society.

In the interwar period (1919-1939), French colonial officials heavily relied upon an “Arab-Berber” racial model in their North African colonies, using it to shape policy and strategy and subdue “unruly” populations. Around this time, an increasing number of French musicologists, borrowing the language of physical anthropology, began arguing for their field’s utility as a “race science” that could be deployed to decisively address the colonial “Berber question.” In this talk, I argue that, in surprising ways, music – often understood as an apolitical aesthetic form – was rather intensely political; and that interwar French musicologists intentionally made a case for musicology as a race science with colonial North Africa as their laboratory.