Napoleonic documents for sale
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Guides for these pieces
- Reading and keeping military photographs and documentsThe back of a postcard dates the print, the service record book opens the archives. How to identify a soldier, and store papers without destroying them.
- Inheriting military items: where to start, and in what orderPolishing, washing, taking apart: a few seconds are enough to destroy a piece's value. How to identify, preserve and sell an inheritance.
- Militaria glossaryShell, crest, stamp, restrike, mounting, fourragère: the words used in listings and appraisals, each defined in one sentence.
Collecting First Empire documents
A document is judged first as a physical object, before it is read. Paper of the period is most often laid paper: held against the light, it shows the close chain lines and the more widely spaced laid lines of the mould, sometimes a watermark. Iron gall ink browns with age and bites into the fibre, to the point of showing through on the back of the sheet. Writing that has stayed black, sitting on the surface of a uniformly pale paper, does not belong to this period.
Print, manuscript and seals
Many of these pieces are printed forms filled in by hand, with an engraved heading featuring trophies of arms, the eagle and laurel wreaths. Print and handwriting should have aged together: a difference in tone between the two, or ink laid over folds that had already formed, calls for a longer examination. The blind stamp, the wax, the postal marks and the direction of the folds are part of the reading just as much as the text.
The signature, the most imitated
The signature calls for the most caution. Documents issued in the Emperor's name overwhelmingly carry a secretary's signature or a stamped one, and it is the minister's countersignature that validates them. An autograph imperial signature belongs to another market, and remains the most imitated of all. A lithographed facsimile gives itself away through the mechanical regularity of the line, the constant thickness of the strokes, and ink that sits on the surface without biting into the fibre.
Finally, the interest of a discharge paper or a service record lies in the name it bears. The muster rolls kept at the Service historique de la Défense and the Legion of Honour files digitised in the Léonore database often make it possible to find the man, his unit and his campaigns. A cross-checked document is worth much more than an isolated one.