“I could spend the night writing to you… I am your ever faithful wife. Good night, my dear friend. It’s midnight. I think it’s time to rest. Marie Dubosc wrote these words of love in 1758 to Louis Chambrelan, first lieutenant of the Galatée, a French ship, during the Seven Years’ War. He never read them. His ship was captured by the English and the letters were confiscated by the British Royal Navy. Marie died the following year in Le Havre, Normandy. Louis was released, married again and returned to France. “I can’t wait to own you,” Anne Le Cerf wrote to her husband Jean Topsent, a corporal from Galatée. He signed “Your obedient wife Nanette,” an affectionate, almost cheeky nickname. Topsent was imprisoned in England and would never receive this passionate confession.
In its place it was read 263 years later by Renaud Morieux, professor in the history department at the University of Cambridge. “It was something very exciting,” he admits in a video call. “There is some voyeurism, but it is also tragic. These lines were never read by the people for whom they were intended.” The letters were taken to the Admiralty in London, where they gathered dust for more than two centuries until they were transferred to the National Archives at Kew. Morieux was working on French prisoners in England and came across the letters while searching the archives. “There were three files connected by a tape. “The letters were very small and sealed, so I asked the archivist if I could open them,” he explains. Yes, I could.
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Morieux spent months studying and deciphering 104 letters sent to French sailors on the Galatée. He has just published his results in the journal Annales Histoire Sciences Sociales. The decryption is not an exaggeration, he explains. Sending a letter was expensive in the 18th century and communication was not very smooth. So the senders scribbled the letters close together, filling every inch of the expensive paper. In addition, these are popular writings whose expression often takes phonetics rather than spelling into account. To understand her, he had to recite aloud words about love, family secrets and town gossip.
To reconstruct the story, he also drew on records from the churches of Normandy, where most of the crew came from. There he confirmed marriages, deaths and births. He also searched genetic family tree websites and the ship’s sailor registry until he identified twenty of the 200 people registered.
Nanette’s love letter to her husband JeanThe National Archives
Almost 60% of the authors of these letters are women, which is remarkable in a time when most documents were written by men. “This means that women are treated as actors in history and not just as passive subjects,” reflects Morieux. “And they discover themselves as people with a lot of room for maneuver in economic, political and family terms. For example, these women put pressure on governments to secure the release of their husbands and children. They wrote to the authorities. They lined up outside the French Navy offices and said, “We still haven’t heard from our husbands.”
The messages provide an intimate look into the loves, lives and family feuds of all of French society, from elderly peasants to the wives of wealthy officers. There were love letters like Marie’s or suggestive letters like Nanette’s. And there were others who said they were tired of so much romance.
The 61-year-old Marguerite wrote her son, the young sailor Nicolas Quesnel, a text full of envy, accusations and emotional blackmail. “On the first day of the year you wrote to your fiancée,” it began. “I think about you more than you think about me. […] In any case, I wish you a Happy New Year full of blessings from the Lord. I think I’m on the way to the grave, I’ve been sick for three weeks. Congratulations Varin [un compañero de barco]”Only his wife gives me news about you.” A few weeks later, Nicolas’ fiancée, a certain Marianne, wrote to him and asked him to immediately send a letter to his mother, who was healthy but very heavy, which put him in an unpleasant situation situation brought. Nicolas Quesnel survived his captivity in England and, as Morieux discovered, joined the crew of a transatlantic slave trading ship in the 1760s.
Marguerite’s letter to her son Nicolas Quesnel, in which she accuses him of writing to his fiancée and not to her. The National Archives
“These letters are about universal human experiences, they are not just limited to France or the 18th century,” says the professor. History, in the singular and capital letters, consists of hundreds of stories, plural, lowercase and human stories. Sometimes the two are intertwined. “The letters contain family news, very intimate things, but also connections to larger history.” “In one letter it is mentioned that Spain has declared war on England and there is talk of possible inflation and food prices.” About this one At that time, according to the expert, newspapers were not widely distributed and letters were also a means of communication.
Perhaps for this reason, the historian highlights the mixing of the private and the public in these writings. They could be passionate phrases (there are a few risqué letters), but often it was someone else who wrote them because the author was illiterate. Or they were mixed with greetings to mother or neighbor. “You wonder why they didn’t censor themselves at some point, but very often they knew that it might be their last chance to talk to their loved one,” explains the researcher. In this sense, the historian points out that these epistolary relationships were not bidirectional, but almost socially divided. As if it were a Facebook wall: a place to talk politics, declare eternal love and send memories to cousins.
The three files analyzed by Professor Morieux are exceptional for their human value, but they are far from unique. The British Navy didn’t just confiscate Galatée’s letters. He did the same with another 35,000 ships, many of them Spanish. Mountains of envelopes remained forgotten for centuries in British government offices, a kind of warehouse of dead letters. Known as prize papers, they have only been cataloged and digitized in recent years, revealing a mosaic of private lives in their grandeur and misery. Archivists from the British National Archives and a research team from Carl von Ossietzky University in Germany are working on a joint project that is expected to last two decades. The idea is to open and release the history of more than 160,000 letters, making them freely accessible and easily searchable online. “There are a lot of unopened letters,” confirms Morieux. “Many stories are still waiting to be read by someone.”
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