Jean-Noël Jeanneney, "The civic responsibilities of historians", University of Melbourne, April 29th 2008.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am honoured to have been invited to give this lecture, and by way of setting it in a suitably elevated context, I want to begin with some striking remarks made by Chateaubriand about Napoleon. They were published in the newspaper, Le Mercure, on the 4th of July 1807.