So this letter was written by Marie Dubosc to her husband
an officer on board the French ship Galatée
which was captured about 250 years ago.
And she didn't know where the ship was,
she didn't know where her husband was
And she never saw her husband again.
She wrote the letter, and in fact she died before he was released from captivity.
So for a Historian this is both extremely moving and also extremely interesting.
To realise that a lot of the letters at the time never reached their destination.
So I am the first person to have read this letter.
Finding in an archival box
an open letters is very rare.
It never happened to me before.
It never happened to me since It's pretty uncommon
for historians to be the first readers of any material,
because archivist to our friends and allies have been there before us.
But in this case, I was generally the probably the first
certainly the first person to read this material,
if not the first person to to find it, because it had been put in a box
by someone at some point and then stored in the archives.
So I found in the National Archives in Kew, a collection of about 100 letters
written by family of French sailors sailing on board a French frigate
at the time of war, so-called seven Years War between 1756 and 1763.
The ship was captured by an English man of war,
transported it to Portsmouth,
and in the meantime, the letters were waiting in the French ports.
no one knew where the sailors were.
So when the news reached France that the ship had been captured,
the French postal administrations forwarded those letters to England.
What probably happened is that in the meantime,
the crew of the ship was dispatched to war prisons in England
and Scotland and Ireland in fact, the English administration,
the so-called Admiralty, didn't know what to do with those letters.
the first three letters of the pile were actually opened, I assume,
by The British Admiralty wanted to check what was in there.
They realized, okay, there's nothing super important in there,
no secrets of state, no strategic information.
But we should at some point send forward those letters to their right
owners, the French sailors and difficult to forward.
Then the war ended a few years later, or
Clark's bureaucrats had way too much work on their hands.
They were not.
We're not talking about hundreds of staff at the time.
They had more urgent business to deal with, and so they probably forgot
those letters which were kept for, you know, use
in a distant future and then were forgotten until
the 21st century.
Letter writing was particularly challenging in that period.
there was no guarantee at all that your letter would reach
its destination, which led to very creative
ways of communicating on the part of the populations.
So I could give you a few examples.
One of them would be to write several times the same letter,
but hand it to different individuals so that they would be transported
by different routes.
another difference would be the fact that you could
you could put your letter within someone else's letter.
And so I've got some examples of this, as you can see here.
Another. Correct.
Originality of communication by letter at that time is the fact that
because the paper was so expensive, you tended to fill
the space as much as possible with words.
And so visually, these documents look very different from the letters
we're used to seeing in the 20th, the 21st centuries.
So that's text all over the place.
Text is written at the top, at the bottom, in the middle,
in the margin of from top to bottom and from left to right.
Also, because these letters where a large proportion of these letters
were not written by very educated people.
these letters were not structured in paragraphs.
There were no capitals, There was no punctuation.
there was no standardization of spelling.
So that was very, very weird
for us and which makes them very exotic and fun
to decipher as historians.
this kind of interaction
tells us something about the anxiety that is structural,
that is fundamental to communication by letter at that time,
because you're never sure that the person is not writing because,
you know, they hold a grudge against you or because perhaps they're dead.
Again, we're writing these letters were written at the height of the war,
And so this is not just a mother expressing a bad temper.
It's also a genuine fear that she might never see her son again.
The other
thing I want to highlight, if I may, about this
kind of letter is the fact that in fact, it is not just like
a kind of binary exchange between one offer and one recipient.
The letter wasn't actually written by the letter by the mother herself.
She was illiterate.
She asked, Describe someone who knew how to write, to write on her behalf.
So she signed the letter.
She presumably dictated the letter.
But that means that there are other protagonists in the exchange.
And likewise the son at the end of all these letters, you've got instructions
to please send my salutations,
my greetings to this and that person.
And so you realize that there's probably dozens of people,
in some cases 20 people who are mentioned by name
in a letter that it should be presumably about one individual.
And another individual. In fact,
large groups of people are connected on both sides.
That's very different, you know, from contemporary
exchanges by email, except when you press send all by mistake.
But that's not the point here.