Scores of French love letters from the mid-18th century have been opened and studied for the first time since they were written. The letters – sent to French sailors by wives, siblings and parents – never made it to their intended recipients, but they offer rare insight into the lives of families affected by war.
Sent between 1757-58 during the Seven Years War, the letters were mostly addressed to the crew of the Galatée warship, and the French postal administration forwarded them from port to port in hopes of reaching the sailors. But when the British Navy captured the Galatée in April 1758, French authorities forwarded the batch of letters to England.
The 104 letters are written on heavy, expensive paper, and some have red wax seals. Renaud Morieux, the historian of the University of Cambridge, discovered them in the digital remainders of Britain's National Archives. Morieux spent months decoding(解码) the letters, and published his findings Monday in the French history journal Annales.
In one letter, Marguerite Lemoyne, a 61-year-old mother, scolds her son Nicolas Quesnel for not writing:"On the first day of the year... you have written to your fiancée... I think more about you than you about me...In any case I wish you a happy new year filled with blessings of the Lord. I think I am for the tomb, I have been ill for three weeks. Give my compliments to Varin, it is only his wife who gives me your news."
"The son who's at sea is only writing to his fiance, and the mother gets really annoyed about that," Morieux said. The letters also demonstrate the difficulty of long-distance communication in the 1750s. Many of the senders, like Lemoyne, were likely illiterate and dictated their messages to a copyist. Moreover, sending a letter to a ship constantly on the move during wartime was difficult and unreliable, and families often sent multiple copies of letters to different ports.
In an effort to maximize the chances of successfully communicating with a loved one, each letter had multiple messages crammed onto the paper, often from different families and addressed to multiple crewmates. To Morieux, the letters show how communities stay resilient(有韧性的) in times of crisis.