Many people today see the sheer volume of work that I have produced and the people I have touched, and they conclude that I must have been born remarkable. Quite the contrary. Growing up in Bucharest in Romania I was remarkably unremarkable.

My work, the paths that I followed through life, were not pre-planned. Nothing was linear in this path. It might be linear for the fact that dedication and hard work remain constant throughout.

I loved reading, and I remember at age five I was already in love with picture books my counsins had.

Around that time I was growing up from age five upwards I began reading Alexander Dumas. I carried along Alexander Dumas’ well known work, The Three Musketeers everywhere I went. I also read Victor Hugo. So I will carry along with me The Three Musketeers and Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. This is the clay that formed the historian I am. Unconscious to me both these men were laying the seeds that will take root. And it just flowed to me naturally.

You can see where these authors were leading me, with me not knowing. Both Alexander Dumas and Victor Hugo were historians in the fact that they wrote stories about politics and culture. My focus, the history I teach and write, is about politics and the ordinary ways of life.

I eschew history based on theory for the simply reason history emanates from flesh and blood. I remember the Empress of Russia Catherine the Great telling enlightened philosophers, (when they were critizing her), you write on paper I write on the flesh and blood of people. That’s is the difference.

Victor Hugo was a Member of Parliament, a Congressman representing Paris. Alexander Dumas had many mistresses including Adah Isaacs Menken, an American actress who was less than half his age.

Both Dumas and Hugo are Frenchmen.

Later on in life when I started my university education, first in France’s Science Po, and soon later entered Cambridge University. By that time I had a great interest in Marc Bloch, the great historian. And I set myself to follow in his footsteps. Marc Bloch was a medieval historian. And I wanted to be a medieval historian. But by and by along the way the situation at Cambridge ensured I was not to be a medieval historian.

I remember the day at Cambridge when the news came that my PhD degree was to be withdrawn. How I felt is uncommon to many people. I took it calmly. And related and confined myself to what Alexander Dumas once wrote:

“Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss”.

If you want to know more about the details leading to the withdrawal of my PhD, I wrote about it at length as an introduction to My France. Amongst all the textbooks I wrote My France is very personal and close to me. My France is published by Harvard University. Harvard demanded the book and I wrote it. I think Harvard was trying to get even with me as I ran rounds with them when they wanted to recruit me way back in the early 1980s. My France was written in 1990 and was officially published in 1992. It is really a personal account, a sought of a memoir.

And here I am specifically known as an “authority” in European history. I am where I am by destiny, not by following a plan. Things naturally flowed and guided my path in life.

Let me leave you with one of the lines Victor Hugo wrote, once upon a time: “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent”