It will run through the beginning of the Capetian dynasty to nowadays and will focus on everything related to France and its history.
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Louisiana Purchase Treaty
In this transaction with France, signed on April 30, 1803, the United States purchased 828,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River for $15 million. For roughly 4 cents an acre, the United States doubled its size, expanding the nation westward.
Clés de la ville de Lyon
Les trois clés de la ville, dessinées par Chinard et exécutées par l’orfèvre Saulnier © Pierre Verrier
Those keys are symbolic and open no door in Lyon. Instead, they embody the three divisions of the town (North, West, South) that existed during the 1st Empire. Each key is decorated by elements specific to each part.
They were created by Joseph Chinaed for the visit of the Emperor Napoléon I and his wife Joséphine in Lyon on the 10th of April 1805, and then publically presented to him in front of the political men of the city as a sign of allegiance and gratitude.
Ceinture tricolore portée par Bonaparte pendant la campagne d’Egypte
Tissage égyptien (?)
vers 1798
Laine, cachemire
L. 2 m
During the Egypt campaign, Bonaparte wore the French general costume, which included a large tricolore belt. He later gave this particular belt to Hortense de Beauharnais, who gave it then to her son, the futur Napoléon III.
La bataille de Toulouse, le 10 avril 1814 vers cinq heures de l’après-midi, JUNG Théodore
The Battle of Toulouse was one of the final battles of the Napoleonic Wars, four days after Napoleon’s surrender of the French Empire to the nations of the Sixth Coalition. Having pushed the demoralised and disintegrating French Imperial armies out of Spain in a difficult campaign the previous autumn, the Allied British-Portuguese and Spanish army under the Marquess of Wellington pursued the war into southern France in the spring of 1814.
Toulouse, the regional capital, proved stoutly defended by Marshal Soult. One British and two Spanish divisions were mauled in the bloody fighting on April 10, with Allied losses exceeding French casualties by 1,400. Soult held the city for an additional day when he orchestrated an escape from the town with his entire army. Wellington’s entry on the morning of April 12 was acclaimed by a great number of Royalists. That afternoon, the official word of Napoleon’s abdication and the end of the war reached Wellington. Soult agreed to an armistice on April 17.
franc germinal
In 1803, the “germinal franc” (named after the month Germinal in the revolutionary calendar) was established, creating a gold franc containing 290.32 mg of fine gold. From this point, gold and silver-based units circulated interchangeably on the basis of a 1:15.5 ratio between the values of the two metals (bimetallism). until 1864, when all silver coins except the 5 franc piece were debased from 90% to 83.5% silver without the weights changing.
Arrivée de l’archiduchesse Marie-Louise à Compiègne.
Pauline AUZOU.
Marie Louise of Austria was the second wife of Napoleon I, Emperor of the French and later Duchess of Parma. As such, she was Empress of the French from 1810 to 1814, and subsequently ruler of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla from 1814 until her death.
La berline de l’Empereur. Châteaux de Malmaison et Bois-Préau, Malmaison / © RMN
This is the famous Berline Landau belonging to Napoleon and seized by the Prussians following the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815. This vehicle, commissioned from the carriage-maker Getting for the Russian campaign, would not join the Emperor’s fleet until Vilna. It was a new design and the upper section could be opened so as to allow the Emperor to observe his surroundings during military operations or to converse with those accompanying him on horseback. Used throughout the Russian Campaign, it was seized and pillaged by the Prussians after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
Lettre de Robert Livingston à Joseph Bonaparte à propos de l’acquisition de la Louisiane par les Etats-Unis, en date du 8 mars 1804.
This letter of Livingston insists on the financial aspect of the Louisiana purchase.
Baron Antoine-Jean GROS
Paris, 1771 - Meudon (Hauts-de-Seine), 1835
Bonaparte visitant les pestiférés de Jaffa (11 mars 1799)
1804
Bonaparte Visits the Plague Stricken in Jaffa (Bonaparte visitant les pestiférés de Jaffa) is an 1804 painting commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte from Antoine-Jean Gros to portray an event during the Egyptian Campaign. The scene shows Napoleon during a striking scene which occurred in Jaffa in 1799. It was an attempt to quell unsavory rumours after Napoleon ordered that fifty incurable plague victims in Jaffa be poisoned (without complete success) during his retreat from his Syrian expedition.
Le ralliement du 5e d’infanterie de ligne à l’Empereur, le 7 mars 1815, de Charles Auguste Guillaume Steuben
The Hundred Days, sometimes known as the Hundred Days of Napoleon or Napoleon’s Hundred Days for specificity, marked the period between Emperor Napoleon I of France’s return from exile on Elba to Paris on 20 March 1815 and the second restoration of King Louis XVIII on 8 July 1815 (a period of 111 days). This period saw the War of the Seventh Coalition, and includes the Waterloo Campaign and the Neapolitan War. The phrase les Cent Jours was first used by the prefect of Paris, Gaspard, comte de Chabrol, in his speech welcoming the King.
Napoleon returned while the Congress of Vienna was sitting. On 13 March, seven days before Napoleon reached Paris, the powers at the Congress of Vienna declared him an outlaw, and on 25 March, five days after his arrival in Paris, Austria, Prussia, Russia and the United Kingdom, members of the Seventh Coalition, bound themselves to put 150,000 men each into the field to end his rule. This set the stage for the last conflict in the Napoleonic Wars, the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, the restoration of the French monarchy for the second time and the permanent exile of Napoleon to the distant island of Saint Helena, where he died in May 1821.
