r/rarebooks • u/AdiDraws • 1d ago
I found a 210 pages autograph research manuscript by Baron Marcellin de Marbot, Napoleon's famous cavalryman, a private encyclopedia of French military uniforms from 1732 to 1815, never published, never referenced
What a find!
An original manuscript of the Baron of Marbot!
Who was Marbot?
Jean-Baptiste Antoine Marcellin de Marbot (1782–1854) is one of the most celebrated figures of the Napoleonic era, not for his rank, but for the extraordinary witness he left behind. He served successively as aide-de-camp to Marshals Augereau, Masséna, and Lannes. He was at Austerlitz. He was at Eylau, where he reportedly crossed a frozen lake under fire to retrieve a wounded officer. He fought at Wagram, survived the Russian campaign, and was present at Waterloo.
His Mémoires, published posthumously in 1891, became a classic of world military literature, translated across Europe, read avidly by Arthur Conan Doyle (who drew on Marbot for his Brigadier Gerard stories) and reportedly praised by Winston Churchill as among the most vivid war memoirs ever written. Napoleon himself, on St. Helena, supposedly said that if Marbot wrote his memoirs, they would be worth reading.
What has survived in manuscript from his hand is scarce. His Mémoires were published from family papers.
What this notebook actually contains
This is not a diary. It is not a memoir. It is something rarer and stranger: a private scholarly encyclopedia of French military dress regulations, compiled from primary sources, covering nearly a century of French military history.
The chronological span is extraordinary. The earliest entry I can identify dates to 1732: uniform regulations for the Corps of Engineers under the Ancien Régime. The latest entries reach 1815, the Hundred Days. That is 83 years of French military dress history, assembled by a man who lived through the last thirty of them on horseback.
The content is organized with military precision:
Revolutionary period (1789–1799). The notebook opens with the decree of 19 July 1790 prescribing the first unified uniform for the Gardes Nationales : blue coat, white lining, scarlet facings, tricolor buttons inscribed with the district name and the words Constitution and Liberté. The decree of 5 September 1790 follows, regulating button design. Then the instruction of 1 April 1791 on the uniforms of general officers and aides-de-camp, cited with precise page references to the source volume. The Federation of 1790, the gendarmerie decree of 22 October 1790, the formation of the légions, the compagnies franches, the École de Mars, all noted and cross-referenced.
The Consulate (1799–1804). Here the notebook transcribes the full text of the arrêté regulating the costume of the Consuls and Councillors of State, issued on 14 nivôse (the handwriting specifies the Revolutionary date), describing in extraordinary detail the velvet-trimmed coats, gold-embroidered waistcoats, white pantaloons, and three-cornered hats of the new Republican government. This is not a summary. It is a verbatim transcription of official regulatory text.
The Empire (1804–1815). The heart of the notebook. Regimental tables for the dragoons list all 18 scarlet-facings regiments (Royal, Condé, Bourbon, Conti, Colonel-Général, la Reine...) and all 12 crimson-facings regiments (Dauphin, Penthièvre, Lorraine, Mestre de Camp, Augustin, Arluij...) with columns for collar, facing, piping, and button type. Hussars follow, then chasseurs à cheval, then infantry by regiment number. A double-page spread covers corps numbers 1 through 65+, tracking four uniform distinctions per regiment simultaneously.
The artillery regulations of 3 June 1811 are transcribed in a two-column format comparing foot artillery and horse artillery side by side, coat cut, lapels, buttons (bombé for horse, flat for foot), grenades, pocket placement, piping in scarlet, epaulette details. The entry closes with a note that certain items were retained "jusqu'au 1er janvier 1813."
The shako pages are meticulous: colback specifications, dragon cords, pompom shapes, epaulette distinctions for captains versus lieutenants, saddle types (à la française versus à la hussarde), shabraque designs with gold galons, bridles, stirrups. The harnessing chapter distinguishes horse artillery from dragoons from hussars down to the precise placement of sun ornaments and the number of buttons on the crupper strap.
Departmental tables. Among the most visually striking sections: multi-column tables assigning uniform colors to every département in France for the Garde Nationale infantry, running from Ain (no. 1) to Deux-Sèvres (no. 76) and beyond. Columns track collar ground, piping, facing ground, facing piping, sarement, buttons, six variables per département, for eighty-plus territorial units. These tables run across several pages and appear nowhere in published form that I can identify.
Colonial troops (1788). A small but remarkable section covers the uniform regulations for French colonial regiments: Port-au-Prince, Martinique, Île de France (present-day Mauritius), and Guyane. Four regiments, tabulated by coat color, facings, collar, and piping. Given the date (1788, one year before the Revolution), this is a snapshot of the pre-Revolutionary colonial military establishment at its last moment of stability.
Helvetian troops (1803). The three demi-brigades helvétiques in French service, noting their uniforms in detail, followed immediately by a regulation forming a Bataillon de Pionniers composé d'hommes noirs, with officers in white. A single entry, clinical in tone, but historically charged.
The loose research note
Tucked inside the notebook is a small loose sheet in the same hand. It is a reading list: page references from what appears to be a large compiled volume of laws and regulations (Bulletin des lois or similar), tracking military legislation year by year:
22 Dec. 1790 — p.17 — Gendarmerie regulations
1791 — p.303 — Organization of horse artillery
1791 — p.211 — Formation of légions
1791 — p.336 — Formation of compagnies franches
1793 — p.717 — Formation of the École de Mars
An 3 — p.524 — Formation of Gardes Départementaux for legislative bodies
An 4 — p.113 — Naval departmental guards
An 6 — p.398 — Naval health officers
An 8 — p.232 — Nougado Canaris (?)
An 8 — p.745 — Engineer officers
An 8 — p.1025 — Garde des Consuls
This is the working infrastructure of the notebook proof that Marbot was not copying from memory but conducting systematic archival research, tracking primary legislation across a paginated source volume and then transcribing the relevant passages into his notebook in organized form.
The papetier label
On the inside front cover, a printed label: PREVOST, Mᵈ Papetier, Rue Saint-Honoré N° 420, Paris. Prévost was active on the rue Saint-Honoré in the first third of the nineteenth century. The notebook was purchased in Paris, on one of its great commercial streets, by someone who intended to fill it seriously.
The library stamp
Page 168 bears a circular library stamp, the town appears to read Rennes. This suggests the notebook passed through a public or institutional collection at some point before returning to the private market. It is a link in a provenance chain that remains to be fully reconstructed.
French military uniformology is a serious field. The foundational published reference, Bucquoy's Les Uniformes du Premier Empire, drew on a combination of contemporary plates, regulations, and surviving garments. What it could not fully draw on was the private research of participants, officers who had worn the uniforms, who had read the regulations, who had filed the decrees.
A 210-page research notebook compiled by one of Napoleon's cavalry officers, covering uniform regulations from 1732 to 1815, drawing on primary legislative sources, organized with scholarly precision, this is the kind of document that doesn't appear in bibliographies because it was never known to exist.
Whether it was preparation for a publication Marbot never completed, or simply the private archive of a man who could not stop collecting and organizing what he had lived through, I don't know. But I find it extraordinary that it survived at all, in a notebook bought on the rue Saint-Honoré, passed through a library in Rennes, and ended up here!
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u/zenerat 1d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/11JbaLzOXsg6Fq
But seriously I imagine there are quite a few historians drooling right now. Congratulations
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u/LfrenchyV 1d ago
If you’re correct then you absolutely need to reach out the Napoleon Foundation in Paris and register it. I worked for them in the past and they would be very grateful to add it the archives.
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u/Aplanos 1d ago
The stamp of the city of Rennes is not of good augure for you : it can be a stolen book. I would contact the archives and the library in order to learn more about how it came to you.
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u/cassodragon 1d ago
That looks like the flap of an envelope someone used as a bookmark?
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u/citrus_mystic 1d ago
Agreed. It’s valid to research the chain of custody (so to speak) but that absolutely looks like a scrap piece of paper used as a bookmark
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u/Hope25777 1d ago edited 1d ago
The physical details here are genuinely encouraging. The Prévost stationer’s label at Rue Saint-Honoré N° 420 is a documentable early 19th century Paris address — you can verify his operating dates against Parisian commercial directories, and if he was active there between roughly 1815 and 1835, that puts the notebook purchase squarely in the window when Marbot was in Paris between campaigns and after Waterloo.
The binding construction reads as period-appropriate: sewn signatures over raised cords, not a glued spine, which is why a 200-year-old working notebook can still be opened flat. The high-resolution close-ups show chain lines consistent with period French laid paper and the feathering pattern of iron gall ink on lightly sized paper. The Rennes library stamp is actually a useful provenance detail rather than a problem, institutional custody is often exactly why things survive this well.
That said, the spine label attribution is the entire foundation of the valuation, and it needs to be verified before this goes anywhere commercially. Three things have to happen first. Handwriting comparison against confirmed Marbot holographs his correspondence survives at the Service Historique de la Défense at Vincennes. Non-destructive spectroscopic analysis of the ink and paper, which can catch period-accurate forgeries that fool the eye. And identification of the Rennes stamp against institutional deaccession records, which can extend the provenance chain backward toward Marbot’s estate.
If authentication holds, this does not belong on eBay. It belongs at Osenat in Fontainebleau, who run the major Napoleonica sales, or Swann Galleries Manuscripts & Archives if you’re stateside. Authenticated, a unique unpublished research notebook by a named Napoleonic officer with this content and provenance profile could realistically reach 25,000–100,000 euros at specialist auction. The authentication work costs perhaps 500–1,500 euros. That’s a trivial investment relative to the difference between verified and unverified value.
Don’t sell this quickly. Don’t sell it casually. Get it to a specialist first.
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u/york100 1d ago
Fascinating, this comment is an education in itself.
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u/No-Wasabi-2281 1d ago
It's AI
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u/york100 1d ago
Oh christ, I hope not. How do you know?
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u/No-Wasabi-2281 1d ago
It has all the classic tells of AI writing. Heavy use of em dashes. Evenly spaced similar length paragraphs. Heavy use of appositive phrases. Lots of rule of three constructions.
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u/ProfessionalSnow943 1d ago
I’m not disputing your conclusion but does one singular em dash really count as heavy usage?
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u/NotJohnB 22h ago
I love em dashes and use them all the time in my writing 🥲.
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u/No-Wasabi-2281 10h ago
My suggestion would be to stay away from all the other hallmarks of AI writing then.
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u/mollymayhem08 1d ago
This does not read as AI to me. This reads like someone who has been reading AI (as we all have, like it or not.)
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u/No-Wasabi-2281 1d ago
Right. It's either AI or someone patterning their writing after AI, which would be a sippy thing to do.
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u/mollymayhem08 1d ago
I’m saying it’s not intentional
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u/No-Wasabi-2281 1d ago
If it wasn't I intentional then they need to pull out all the stops and figure out what they can do to stop writing exactly like AI because it massively undermines their credibility.
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u/Significant-Put-9011 1d ago
No, doesn’t read that way
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u/No-Wasabi-2281 1d ago
It does. It has all the hallmarks Evenly spaced paragraphs, rule of three construction. Em and en dashes. It's either AI or someone who is absorbing AI construction.
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u/AdiDraws 1d ago
Merci beaucoup pour vos conseils, cependant je n'ai pas besoin de le faire authentifier, je suis certain de son authenticité puisqu'il vient directement de la bibliothèque de Marbot, le manuscrit était accompagné d'autres livres lui ayant appartenu et portant son Ex Libris. En regardant sur internet on trouve des lettres manuscrites de lui, l'écriture est strictement identique. Pour le tampons de Rennes, c'est en effet un morceau de lettre ayant servi de marque page, donc pas de lien avec une bibliothèque.
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u/EuSouUmAnjo 1d ago edited 1d ago
French military archives might be interested in studying it.
https://www.defense.gouv.fr/sga/memoire-culture-archives/archives-bibliotheques.
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u/LOL_bit07 1d ago
Absolutely splendid find, congratulations! If you ever feel like selling it, it could fetch a good buck on Sotheby’s or Christie’s.
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u/NotJohnB 22h ago
A remarkable find, and one that could only be found by a true specialist who knew exactly the kind of artifact they were looking for. Well done! I hope you take it to get professionally scanned for digital preservation.
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u/Emotional_Platform35 1d ago
That's incredible and really should be shown to researchers of the Napoleonic era and made publicly accessible on some university website
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u/Tennessee-ham 1d ago
Do you happen to know any young historians of this period? Access to your manuscript could contribute mightily to their careers, as well as enhance its monetary value, whether you sell it or claim a tax deduction after donating it.
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u/Thissnotmeth 16h ago
Holy mother of god what an acquisition. I’m literally taking a class on reference works and bibliographies as we speak, a whole field of study unto itself, and this is the first post I see: a book never catalogued in any of them. Incredible stuff.
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u/jonwilliamsl 1d ago
This is genuinely an incredible find: a serious, brand new primary source for a field of history. I'm sure you're already thinking about this, but I hope you get it to an institutional collection (again).