Indeed, it is our mission make the sources accessible to everyone.
First of all, we would like to provide the winners of our PhD grants and professional historians, sometimes from far away, with easy access to the most important documents. You could say that it is the essence of our institution to be able to share their analyses and to dialogue with them. But we also do public history; enthusiasts and simply the curious are likewise integral to our projects.
We had an idea right at the start that we were on the right track. All those bicentenary years 1995-2021 encouraged us in our intuition. But it was this year 2021, in its entirety, that gave us the solid proof: this is a history for all, specialists, teachers, critics, enthusiasts, young people alike.
As a result, we shall continue to concentrate on making all of our activities focused on the sharing of the history, untethered from commemorative dates, constantly reminding ourselves and our readers that History only endures because of our common will over the long term. This history does not belong to any particular scholar; it belongs to all of us, and the important thing will always be to strive to identify the authentic and to distinguish it from the apocryphal, the approximate, and worse still, the lie.
Victor-André Masséna
January 2022
Victor-André Masséna, Prince d’Essling, is President of the Fondation Napoléon.