Napoleonic uniforms for sale
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Guides for these pieces
- Dating a French military uniformThe cloth gives the period, the inner label gives the year, the collar tabs give the unit. The four places to look, in order.
- Caring for military leather, textile and metal: the minimum ruleDry leather, moth-eaten wool, rusted metal: what to do, what never to do, and why doing nothing is often the right call.
- Spotting a reproduction or a fake: the seven-point methodAn aged reproduction fools the eye, not the method. Seven concrete checks to tell a period piece from a copy before you buy.
Collecting First Empire uniform items
Part of what is sold under this heading comes out of the ground. The shako plates, buttons and cartridge-box plates offered by specialist dealers are often presented as battlefield or bivouac finds, and their appearance shows it: fragments rather than whole pieces, corroded and brittle brass, softened relief, gilding gone. A piece described as a find whose surface remains even, with no pitting and no difference in patina between hollows and edges, needs explaining before anything else.
Reading a shako plate
The so-called model 1810 shako plate of the line infantry is the most instructive example. Lozenge-shaped, in stamped brass, it carries the regiment's number in the centre, within a moulded frame. Since the model is generic and the number alone distinctive, the temptation to turn an ordinary regiment into a sought-after one has existed for a long time. So look at the back before the front. The original stamping leaves on the reverse the exact negative of the relief visible on the front: a number that has been added, re-engraved or soldered has no counterpart on the back. Traces of brazing around the fixing lugs and the distribution of wear are read the same way.
Buttons and textile items
For buttons, shape, diameter and type of shank say more than the design. A maker's mark on the back only became widespread after the imperial period: its absence is not a flaw, its presence needs explaining. A stamped piece is not to be confused with a cast copy, whose relief stays soft and whose surface is grainy. With coats, the difficulty lies less in the cloth than in the whole: many are reassemblies combining an old base with added buttons and lace.