Lost French love letters from the 1750s reveal what life was like during wartime
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
On March 22, 1758, Anne Le Cerf wrote a letter to her husband, an officer on a French warship.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Speaking French).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Reading) Mr. and Ms. Mahieu send their best, and I, who am in pain to possess you. And until this happy moment, I am and will be for the rest of my life in deepest friendship. All yours, my dear husband. Your obedient wife, Nanette.
CHANG: But Le Cerf's husband was imprisoned in England and never received her love note.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Hers is among scores of letters sent during the Seven Years' War, which until recently sat unopened in Britain's National Archives, bound with white ribbon.
RENAUD MORIEUX: I had to basically pull the string a bit like a Christmas gift. And there, there were three little packets of letters which were clearly unopened. They were still sealed. I immediately felt like, you know, my heart started to beat faster. And I felt like, ooh, it's just like, then there might be some secrets in there.
SUMMERS: University of Cambridge historian Renaud Morieux says the letters were written on expensive, heavy paper. Some had seals of red wax.
MORIEUX: They're covered with ink but not just from top to bottom. The sentences are written from left to right, but also, they're written in the margin. You have to turn the letter around in order to continue reading.
CHANG: Many were addressed to sailors on the Galatee warship. When the Royal Navy captured it in 1758, the letters made their way to England, where they remained sealed for centuries.
SUMMERS: In another letter, an upset mother scolds her son for not writing.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Reading) On the first day of the year, you have written to your fiancee. 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.
MORIEUX: The son who is at sea is only writing to his fiancee. And here you feel that there is some kind of, like, really long, ancient kind of trope about tensions in the family between the mother and the daughter-in-law.
SUMMERS: Morieux published his findings this week in the French history journal Annals of History and Social Sciences.
CHANG: He says the letters offer a rare glimpse at how common people dealt with the uncertainty of war and the extraordinary efforts they made to reach loved ones.
SUMMERS: Some families even piggybacked on the love letters of others, inserting their own messages to sons, brothers and husbands in hopes that something, anything would get through.
MORIEUX: In every letter, you've got, actually, multiple correspondents. So the big argument, so to speak, of the article is to say that this is really a form of collective communication.
SUMMERS: Collective communication, which, to Morieux, is a testament to the power of the collective in times of crisis.
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