The well-behaved lawyer of a provincial town is a symbol of the French Revolution, its illusions, its horrors. We do not know when the uneasiness of a bourgeois soul manifested itself in an “incorruptibility” later embodied in the sacred principles of a Revolution, despite itself, inevitably destined to corrupt itself.

A member of the Accademia dei Lincei, former president of SISEM and professor of modern history at L’Orientale University, Luigi Mascilli Migliorini is one of the leading scholars of the Napoleonic age and the Restoration in Europe, to whom he has dedicated two important biographies, Napoleon, Salerno Editrice (2002 and new edition 2015) and Metternich, Salerno Editrice (2014). He is Commandeur de l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques, Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the French Republic and invited professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and the Catholic University of Santiago de Chile. He is on the scientific committee of Napoleon’s Correspondance at the publisher Fayard. For Laterza he has published, among others, The Modern Age. A global history (2022).

At the end of the meeting, the author will be available to the audience for signacopies.