Zenon Vantini

Book excerpt: In this remarkable study, Pamela Sambrook rescues from obscurity the contribution of a former member of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard to the development of specialist hotels and catering in the formative years of the railway network in England and France. In doing so, she interrogates what lies behind some of Zenon Vantini’s very real achievements, legacies and disasters. She asks how far he was driven by his familial background in Elba and his involvement in the political turmoil of early-nineteenth-century France, and to what extent his whole life was known to those around him. Vantini’s extraordinary life encapsulates the change between two very different worlds – the old imperial past and the new age of entrepreneurial risk-taking. Never shaking off his old political loyalties, he believed resolutely that the mobility afforded by railway travel would change Europe fundamentally. In the long view he was a component part in the very early years of an industry which arguably changed England and Europe more than did even his hero, Napoleon. Scholars and casual readers of British and European social history will be fascinated by his story.