The collection 

The writings of Jean Baptiste Adrien Durand (1767-1834), former infantry officer and native of Dieppe, survive in a remarkable group of four uniformly bound manuscript volumes, organized and copied in the mid nineteenth century from Adrien’s earlier papers by his son Jules Adolphe Durand (1801-1882).

Durand died at Fécamp in 1834. His son, Jules Adolphe Durand (born at Fécamp on 16 June 1801), is directly associated with the surviving four manuscripts. A note in the volume bearing Adolphe’s name refers to the death of his wife, Émilie Gingois, confirming his role in either preparing or transmitting the material. Both the internal reference to Émilie Gingois and the handwriting indicate that Jules Adolphe Durand copied or arranged the extant texts, working from his father’s earlier papers. The four volumes—numbered 1, 2, 3, and 5—are uniformly titled J. L. A. Durand Amusemens Literaires.  There is a fifth volume, titled J. A. Durand Poesies Diverses that is entirely the work of Adolph.
Volume 4 is missing, presumably containing writings between 1800 and the time Adrien died in 1834. We make this assumption on account that little is written about his married life and his spouse. The missing volume may have been kept by the descendants.

No statements in the manuscript identify any other contributors, and the narrative itself consistently attributes the events described to Jean-Baptiste Adrien Durand, all bear the same title on the spine and start with the same title page identifying Adrien as the author.

Together they present a complete record of his literary, personal, and intellectual life: poems, songs, polemics, reflections, theatrical pieces, allegories, translations, and correspondence. Each volume is carefully transcribed by his son, the whole forming a coherent portrait of a soldier-writer shaped by the Revolutionary era.

Volume I, strangely out of chronological order, situates J.-B. Adrien Durand at the very heart of the French occupation of northern Italy, after his release from captivity, during one of the most consequential cultural episodes of the Revolutionary Wars: the systematic seizure of Italian artworks and scientific collections in 1797. Far from being a passive observer, Durand moved through the same cities, corridors of power, and intellectual circles as the French commissioners tasked with selecting objects for transport to Paris. His letters, composed as he followed the shifting front from Lombardy to the Adriatic and back toward the Venetian mainland, offer an unusually intimate perspective—neither administrative nor propagandistic—on how a reflective, educated officer perceived the unfolding cultural expropriation. What follows traces, through his letters, Durand’s itinerary, his encounters with scholars, collectors, and artists, and his gradual realization that he was witnessing not merely military occupation but the transformation of Italy’s cultural landscape.

Volume II is the most historically significant of the set. It opens with Durand’s major work: a forty-five-page “Rapport au Ministre de la Guerre des traitements atroces qu’ont éprouvé les prisonniers français dans la Hongrie,” an account of the brutal conditions endured by French prisoners held in Austria and Hungary after the defection of General Dumouriez. Durand stated that he had secretly smuggled the original text out of the prison despite the vigilance of his jailers, preserving it at great personal risk. His narrative is followed by forty-six pages of related writings—letters, warnings, confessions, petitions,inscriptions, verses, and appeals—composed during or shortly after his captivity. These include a “General Confession of a French Prisoner of War” a direct address “To the Peoples Armed Against France.” and a “Free Translation of an Order Issued by the Major Commanding the Prison of Klein-Zell.” a rare documentary piece on life in the Hungarian prisons. The tone of these texts moves between patriotic indignation, personal testimony, philosophical reflection, and restrained satire, always returning to the central theme of how war and political events shaped the fate of ordinary soldiers.

The remaining volumes—devoted primarily to poetry, songs, epigrams—reveal the more intimate and artistic side of Durand. Many poems are set to popular airs, implying light public reading or performance. Letters addressed to Durand are copied throughout the set, and several original letters from his friend Laboissiere  are loosely laid in Volume II, adding an important personal layer to the collection as it came directly from the inherited archive.

Taken together, these four manuscripts volumes form the fullest surviving portrait of J.-B. Adrien Durand. They show him as a witness of war and captivity, a writer of humor and sentiment, a translator, a musician, a playwright. Few manuscript collections of the Revolutionary period survive with such breadth, personality, and unity of execution. They amount to the literary and emotional autobiography of a French officer whose voice—copied with care decades later but rooted in writings once smuggled past his jailers—still resonates with clarity and humanity.

Volume one:

An Officer’s Witness: J.-B. Adrien Durand and the French Confiscation of Italian Art and Cultural Treasures, 1797
 
 Volume two:

Unpublished manuscript of Adrien Durand, French prisoner of war in Hungary in 1793

Volume five

Adrien Durand: Clarified Chronology of Captivity, Italian Journey, and Later Writings

Volume 2

The manuscript presented here contains an account written by Jean-Baptiste Adrien Durand, born in Fécamp on 23 September 1767, described within the text as an officier d’infanterie and as a prisoner in Hungary in 1793. His account names several locations associated with the movement and confinement of French prisoners, including Linz, Vienne, Ebersdorf, Moson, Klein-Zell, and Pesth. Some passages state explicitly that they were written in Pesth.

The first chapter begins with his description of the early stages of imprisonment and the movements of French officers through Austrian and Hungarian territory. It is reproduced here as it appears in the transmitted manuscript.

Letter addressed to Citizen Camut, archivist of the Republic, with the draft report to the National Convention of 14 June 1796.

Translation of the letter

“Citizen Representative,

We too have horribly suffered in the claws of the Imperial Eagle! I have the honor of addressing to you this essay, an account of our misfortunes such as I was able to save from the exact searches of our jailers. I wrote it at Pesth, in Hungary, where we were confined to the number of five hundred officers and some soldiers. My comrades provided me with notes. It is accurate. You will judge if it can be of some utility to sustain the ardor of the French to fight the Austrian, and especially if it can serve to disabuse the too great number of those who obstinately believe in sentiments of justice and humanity from this atrocious government.

The circumstances might require another form for this report; but the time taken by my duties and my little practice of writing do not permit me to give it to it. These are facts, moreover, that need to be made known. If you believe it should be used, you will kindly present them in the aspect that seems most suitable to you, sending me back the draft.

Footnote: “I was then at Senlis, at the Depot of the 184th provisional demi-brigade, of which the second Battalion of the 104th Infantry Regiment occupied the center.”

Translation of the first page of the report

Rapport au Ministre de la Guerre des traitements atroces qu’ont éprouvé les prisonniers français dans la Hongrie.

 (Report to the Minister of War on the Atrocious Treatment Suffered by French Prisoners in Hungary)

Exoriar aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor!…
« Puisse un vengeur renaître de nos cendres ! »

(This epigraph was read by Citizen Marie, officer of the 98th Infantry Regiment, at Krems in Lower Austria, on the Danube, on the walls of a barracks where soldiers had stayed before the column of which he was part.)

“A victim who has escaped Austrian barbarity, I have undertaken to lay before your paternal eyes the dreadful yet faithful picture of the unheard-of cruelties by which our unfortunate countrymen were made to perish, in the midst of your fellow citizens, in the very depths of despair. (¹)

It may be useful to awaken within you an indignation that must equally stir the heart of every Frenchman when he learns of the vile purpose to which the Imperial government and its subordinate agents resorted by the most abominable means, in order to rid themselves of the numerous prisoners whom the hazards of war—after the disastrous defection of Dumouriez—had placed in the power of this modern Nero.

The sorrowful narrative I am about to begin would seem unbelievable were it not confirmed by so many witnesses who endured the very atrocities it contains.”

(¹) Our convention for exchanging prisoners having been abandoned, we asked the Austrian officers when our soldiers would be exchanged.

End of translation

Historic context

The defection of General Charles-François Dumouriez in April 1793 marked one of the most stunning reversals of the French Revolution. Only months earlier he had been celebrated as the victor of Valmy and Jemappes, the savior of the young Republic; yet, confronted with the radicalization of the Revolution and the execution of Louis XVI, Dumouriez broke with the Convention, attempted to march his army against Paris, and finally passed over to the Austrians. His betrayal shattered the fragile equilibrium of the Revolutionary Wars and cast immediate suspicion on every French soldier who fell into enemy hands.

The consequences for French prisoners of war were catastrophic. The agreements governing exchanges were abruptly abandoned. Austrian authorities, fearing further defections or subversion within their own ranks, adopted increasingly severe measures. Thousands of French soldiers captured on the Rhine, in Belgium, and along the Danube found themselves transported deep into the Habsburg territories—into Styria, Lower Austria, and the remote counties of Hungary—where they languished in barracks, fortresses, improvised depots, or forced-march columns that often resembled chains of convicts more than military captives. Many perished from hunger, disease, exposure, or direct brutality; others survived only to recount the horrors they had witnessed.

Map of the approximate route to Hungary described by Durand

The manuscript presented here, addressed to the French Minister of War, is one such testimony. Written by a soldier who escaped what he calls “Austrian barbarity,” it is both a personal account and an act of moral accusation. Its author seeks not pity, but justice: a careful and faithful tableau of the treatment inflicted upon French prisoners in Hungary, offered to the “paternal eyes” of the Minister so that the truth might be known at last. The narrative that follows is at once sorrowful and indignant, its tone sharpened by the Latin epigraph—borrowed from Virgil—invoking an avenger rising from the ashes of the oppressed.

Without the corroborating testimony of numerous surviving prisoners, the events described might seem unbelievable. Yet they form part of a larger, now largely forgotten history: the suffering of thousands of Revolutionary-era captives whose fate was sealed not on the battlefield, but by political collapse and diplomatic rupture. This manuscript restores their voices and preserves the memory of what they endured.

 

Following the prisoner writings, Durand inserted a substantial theatrical work that stands apart from the gravity of the first pages: a seventy-seven-page vaudeville titled “Le Bienfait du Divorce.” This play was written to amuse and distract his fellow prisoners, who were to perform or recite parts of it during their internment. It reflects a strikingly modern subject. Divorce, introduced by the French Revolution in 1792, was a new legal right and had not existed under the Ancien Régime. Durand’s decision to create a comic work based on this radical reform—at a time when he and his companions were confined in enemy territory—underscores the mixture of resilience, wit, and political awareness that characterizes his work. The play is preceded by an “Avertissement,” followed by a dedicatory letter to his friend and fellow officer Laboissière, and then unfolds in songs, couplets, dialogues, and light theatrical scenes intended for performance among the prisoners.

After the vaudeville, Durand continues the volume with a sequence of polemical verse grouped under the collective title Combat polémique. These short pieces include satirical poems, epigrams, responses to rival writers, defenses of friends, and commentary on contemporary political debates. Many are addressed to named individuals, offering insight into Durand’s circle and the literary culture of Revolutionary soldiers.
The manuscript continues with a transcription of letters to and from Durand. Several original letters received by Durand are preserved loosely within the manuscript but  also transcribed, with the replies into the text. Their presence confirms the copyist’s disciplined fidelity to the original materials used in assembling the volume.
The manuscript concludes with translations from Latin and Italian, an essay on the invention of playing cards, a statistical notice on Fécamp, published in small edition in 1810, and a final group of verses, completing a manuscript marked by range and coherence.

 

Volume 5

Adrien Durand: Clarified Chronology of Captivity, Italian Journey, and Later Writings

 

1912 Duke of Devonshire Prize British Empire League Charterhouse Taylor Sea Power Mahan RFC MC KIA

Bound in full vellum-grained white presentation cloth, gilt stamped with the seal of the British Empire League and titled “The Duke of Devonshire Prize—Presented by the British Empire League—1912,” all edges gilt. A 1912 Charterhouse School prize copy awarded to Denis Percival Beauchamp Taylor, later Lieutenant 3rd Hussars and Royal Flying Corps, recipient of the Military Cross and killed in action 14 March 1916 at the age of 21 years old (old a cruel misnomer for someone who died so young). Includes the original illuminated manuscript prize leaf presenting this volume to Taylor for the British Empire League essay competition. London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., early twentieth-century impression using the 1890 plates of A. T. Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783. A rare imperial prize binding linking Charterhouse pedagogy, the Duke of Devonshire’s educational patronage, and the early military career of an M.C.-winning officer lost in the Great War.

Empire, Education, and Sacrifice: Charterhouse, the Duke of Devonshire Prize, and the Short Life of Denis Percival Beauchamp Taylor

In the early twentieth century, Charterhouse School stood as one of the leading English public schools shaping the intellectual and moral formation of Britain’s imperial elite. Founded in the seventeenth century and firmly established among the great schools by the Victorian era, Charterhouse cultivated a culture of disciplined scholarship, athletic rigor, and patriotic service. Its curriculum and civic ethos were deliberately aligned with the larger ambitions of the British Empire, preparing young men not merely for university but for leadership positions in the Army, Navy, civil service, and colonial administration.

Within this educational environment, academic essay prizes carried exceptional weight. Among the most prestigious was the Duke of Devonshire Prize, awarded under the auspices of the British Empire League. The League, founded in 1895, promoted imperial cohesion and saw education as a principal instrument for instilling loyalty, civic awareness, and a broader understanding of the constitutional and geopolitical structure of the Empire. Through school competitions, it encouraged students to interrogate the political frameworks that connected Britain with its dominions and to develop the analytical skills expected of future statesmen and officers.

The 1912 competition at Charterhouse exemplified this program. The assigned topic—examining the advantages and disadvantages of unification versus federation, illustrated through the constitutions of Canada, Australia, and the United States—reflected contemporary debates regarding the political destiny of the British world. The question required not only historical knowledge, but substantial comparative insight into governance, sovereignty, and the evolving relationship between Britain and its dominions. The winner of this demanding exercise was Denis Percival Beauchamp Taylor, a young man whose brief life illustrates the ideals and tragedies of his generation.

Taylor, born in 1894 and associated with Toft Manor in Cambridgeshire, entered Charterhouse in 1908. His scholarly promise quickly became evident, culminating in his receipt of the 1912 Duke of Devonshire Prize. The volume awarded to him—A. T. Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, specially bound in a gilt-stamped British Empire League presentation binding—serves as a fitting symbol of the intellectual and imperial values celebrated by the prize. Mahan’s work, which reshaped naval doctrine across the world, was profoundly influential in British strategic thought. Its selection as a prize book underscored the League’s commitment to shaping young minds for imperial citizenship and military responsibility.

Following Charterhouse, Taylor continued along the traditional path of the Edwardian public school officer, entering the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. Commissioned into the 3rd (King’s Own) Hussars, he soon found himself thrust into the demands of the First World War. Like many young officers of his background, he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, the new and perilous arm of service that attracted volunteers from Britain’s most academically and socially elite institutions. Taylor distinguished himself in action and was awarded the Military Cross, a decoration for gallantry.

His life ended abruptly on 14 March 1916, when he was killed in action on the Western Front at just twenty-one years of age. Charterhouse recorded his name on its Roll of Honour, and he is likewise commemorated in the records of the 3rd Hussars, the Royal Flying Corps, and his home parish in Cambridgeshire. His prize book, preserved with its illuminated manuscript presentation leaf, now serves as a rare and poignant artifact linking his intellectual promise, his imperial education, and his wartime sacrifice.

Viewed through this single surviving volume, the world of early twentieth-century British imperial education comes clearly into focus. The book embodies a complete narrative: the values of Charterhouse; the ideological mission of the British Empire League; the intellectual formation of a young scholar; the military trajectory of a decorated officer; and the profound losses inflicted by the Great War. As both a prize of scholastic distinction and a relic of personal history, Taylor’s copy of Mahan stands as a testament to a vanished era, preserving the intertwined stories of school, empire, and sacrifice.

Quarto manuscript ledger, 116 leaves, contemporary limp wrappers with docket title, recording the judicial seizure, inventory, auction, and distribution of the extensive properties of Claude Gaud and Claude Joseph Gaud, merchants of Russey (Doubs), under the Bailliage Royal d’Ornans. Detailed descriptions of houses, barns, presses, gardens, vineyards, meadows, and woodlots, each valued and sold at public auction to nobles, clergy, and merchants including Léonard Blanchard (vicar of Russey), Pierre François Calamand, the Accarin brothers of Besançon, the abbé de Nozeroy, and the Duke and Duchess of Randan, whose seigneurial dues were confirmed in priority. Total realized over 43,000 livres; proceeds distributed to creditors in strict rank. Signed at close by Simon François Xavier Simonin de Deservilliers, lieutenant général, and Jean Antoine Tournier, greffier. An extraordinary survival of rural debt liquidation and feudal law in 18th-century Franche-Comté.