Category: European History

Military exploits of Prince Maurice of Nassau, 1st ed. in French; the Fairfax–Osterley Park copy, with first-person marginal notes on the Cadiz action of 1596 and the siege of Ostend, identified as Sir Walter Raleigh’s autograph by William Oldys in his Life of Ralegh (1736).

Jan Jansz ORLERS

Description & Representation de toutes les Victoires tant par eau que par terre, lesquelles Dieu a octroiees aux nobles, hauts & puissants Seigneurs, Messeignrs les Etats des Provinces Unies du Païs-bas, souz la conduite & gouvernement de son Excellence, le Prince Maurice de Nassau. Leiden: par Jean Jeanzoon Orlers & Henry de Haestens, 1612.

Folio (12 1/4 x 8 inches; 311 x 203mm). Pp. [iv], 282 pp. Half-title (“Les Lauriers de Nassau”). Letterpress title with elaborate engraved surround, the verso with a full-page engraved plate of Prince Maurice of Nassau’s coat-of-arms, faced by a full-page engraved portrait of the Prince (the portrait bearing the printer’s pencil crop-masks from its reproduction as the frontispiece of Nutting, 1894, see below). 43 double-page or folding engraved maps and plates (The destruction of the Spanish armada plate with heavy old ink-staining, lighter staining to the four following text leaves, some other spotting, about 5 plates with splits to the central folds, one heavily toned). Contemporary calf over pasteboard, the covers with large central arabesque plaque blocked in gilt, the borders ruled in gilt and blind, old re-backing with red morocco spine label (extremities worn, the upper joint split, some strengthening of the inner joints; bound without pastedowns, as usual in bindings of this period, the period free blanks preserved and bearing the inscriptions and press-marks described below, later flyleaves added at the re-backing).

The hands in this copy

Two principal annotating hands, of distinct dates and characters, are present, together with the pen-trials and signatures of earlier owners and the pencil memoranda of a later one.

I. The annotator. The earliest hand is an informal English italic of the early seventeenth century, writing a soldier’s phonetic French (prix for pris, refuse for refus, pardu for perdu). Its notes cluster on the chapters describing the Anglo-Dutch descent on Cadiz in June 1596 — the action in which Sir Walter Raleigh, commanding the Warspite, led the fleet into the harbour — and they are written not as a reader’s observations but as a participant’s claims, in the first person. Beside the passage describing Raleigh (“Ravvleyg”) requesting the charge of taking the Spanish Indies fleet, asking only his own ship and twelve London merchantmen, and being put off by the Generals until the morrow: en lequelle ils m’ont trompé; par la refuse nous avons pardu 2 millions (“in which they deceived me; by the refusal we lost 2 millions”) — the two-million-ducat ransom offered for the flota, refused, after which the Spaniards fired their own fleet. The word pardu is itself a witness to composition: first botched and blotted wet in the line, it is keyed with an asterisk and rewritten below at a matching mark — the writer correcting his pen, and retaining, at leisure, his own phonetic spelling.

Beside the resolution of Howard and Raleigh to attack the galleons: a moy seule (“to me alone”).
Beside the account of the great galleons San Mateo and San Andrés, carried off as prizes: Je ay prix tous deux (“I took both of them”).

Beside “le Lord Thomas Havvard Vice-Admiral, prés de Sire VValter Ravvleyg”: mais bien arrière (“but well astern”) — echoing the grievance that runs through Raleigh’s own Relation of the Cadiz action, that he led in and the rest came up behind.

The printed count of 57 great ships in the Bay of Cadiz is corrected in the margin to 67.

—— a figure agreeing with no printed account of the action, and, with the Ostend notes, among the annotations unrecorded by Oldys, who canvassed the conflicting ship-counts in a dedicated note without knowledge of the margin’s ruling.

The same hand annotates the account of the siege of Ostend. Where Orlers rehearses the governors of the town who fell in succession — Gistelles killed in March, Loon who “fut aussi tué,” Berendrecht, Utenhove carried out wounded, Marquette arriving in June 1604 — the annotator supplies, in the same soldier’s French, the commander the chronicler omitted: Coll: Charles Fairfax fut Governeur, et fut aussi tué (“Colonel Charles Fairfax was Governor, and was also killed”) — Sir Charles Fairfax having been killed commanding the English companies at Ostend on 17 September 1604, three days before the town fell.

The same hand returns at the death of the Comte de Chastillon (fol. 224), struck down by a cannon-shot on the Sand Hill on 10 September 1601, the debris flying in the faces of Huchtenbroeck, Captain Brog “& de quelques autres” — against which the margin supplies: et de Cap: Charles Fairfax Chevalier (“and of Captain Charles Fairfax, knight”).

 

Twice, then, the annotator names Charles Fairfax with particulars beyond his chronicler — whether from the printed siege literature or from the returning eyewitnesses who filled London, and later the Tower itself, where the Earl of Northumberland, named on this very page of Orlers among the siege’s visitors, was Raleigh’s daily companion through the years these notes were made.

The internal evidence thus identifies the annotator, if he is to be taken at his word, with one man only: the deceptions, the lost ransom, the two captured galleons, and the precedence in the harbour are the documented grievances and claims of Raleigh himself, and of no other officer at Cadiz. The chronology is coherent: the book appeared in 1612, while Raleigh sat in the Tower of London (1603–1616) with a substantial working library, six years before his execution; the notes, if his, record a prisoner rereading a Dutch chronicler’s account of his greatest action and setting down his corrections. The identification is, moreover, not new. William Oldys, in the standard eighteenth-century Life of Ralegh prefixed to the 1736 folio of the History of the World, describes and quotes these very notes: a copy of the Lauriers de Nassau “falling into his hands soon after it was published,” Raleigh “has, in the language it is writ in, made short notes with a black-lead pencil throughout this whole action, where himself is mentioned; which are not only still legible, but demonstrable to be his own writing, both from the sense and form of the characters.” Oldys prints A moy seul, Mais bien arrière, and J’ay pris tous deux (“it appears under his own handwriting that he took them both himself”), and records that “this curiosity” was then in the possession of Thomas Brian, esq., of the Inner Temple, who lent him the notes. The notes in the present copy stand in ink — fluent, shaded, self-correcting ink, with a botched word blotted wet and rewritten at an asterisk, the antithesis of writing traced over a pencil original — so that Oldys’s “black-lead pencil” appears to describe not the book itself but the form in which the notes reached him, Thomas Brian having “favoured me with the use of those notes,” a phrase as consistent with a lent transcript as with the volume — a reading reinforced by Oldys’s ignorance of the corrected ship-count, a silent numeral alteration such as an extract of the verbal notes would naturally omit; it is the single point of his description not borne out by the copy.
Neither Ostend note is recorded by Oldys, who understood the annotations to be confined to the Cadiz action ‘where himself is mentioned’ — they appear to be published here for the first time.
The attribution, resting since 1736 on the authority of the century’s foremost Raleigh scholar, who examined the notes themselves and pronounced them autograph from the sense and form of the characters, awaits modern palaeographic comparison with Raleigh’s autograph Tower notebook (British Library, Add. MS 57555).

II. The Fairfax family hand. A second, later seventeenth-century hand writes in English, and its concern is genealogical. On the first period blank it has indexed the volume: S^r Charles Fairfax. p.199. At folio 199 — the order of battle of the Nieuwpoort campaign, the English regiment of thirteen companies under Sir Francis Vere — the same hand identifies three names in the margin: “S^r Fr: Vere” against the general, “S^r Charles Fairfax” against the company the printer garbled as “de Farfax,” and “S^r Horatio Vere” against the regiment of Sir Horace Vere. At the account of Vere’s parley at Ostend of 23 December 1601, when “le Capitaine Ogle, Lieutenant Colonel, & le Capitaine Fairfax” were sent as hostages to the Archduke’s camp, the same hand glosses the margin: S^r Charles Fairfax, brother to y^e first Lord Tho: F.

The formula “the first Lord” dates the notes: it presupposes a second Lord Fairfax, and was most naturally written after 1648, when “Lord Thomas Fairfax” meant to every English reader the Lord General. The hand is entirely distinct from that of the French notes; it is the hand of a family reading its own history in the margins of another man’s book, and it records a Fairfax association with the volume in the seventeenth century, before its documented residence in other hands and its later return to a Fairfax library.

III. Earlier owners. Pen-trials and signatures of the seventeenth century on the endleaves record the volume’s passage between its annotator and its later owners: the name Josephus Acosta written out four times (once with the date 1562); Captaine Clarke; a cancelled George; and the schoolroom tag Si deus est animus, the opening of Cato’s Distichs. The military style of address suggests at least one soldier-owner among them.

 

Provenance

This copy carries a paper trail of more than two centuries through the scholarship and the great libraries of England, and the physical evidence of that history survives on the period blank endleaves and in the margins themselves.

The seventeenth-century glosses of the Fairfax family hand record the volume’s earliest English association: Sir Charles Fairfax (c.1567–1604), fourth son of Sir Thomas Fairfax of Denton and brother of Thomas, first Lord Fairfax, served under Sir Francis Vere in the Low Countries, rallied the English companies at Nieuwpoort, went as hostage and fought in the breach at Ostend, routed Velasco’s troops at the siege of Sluis, and was killed commanding the English companies at Ostend three days before the town fell — campaigns this volume chronicles, and in the margins of which the annotator had already twice set down his name.

The copy enters the scholarly record in the possession of Thomas Brian, esq., of the Inner Temple, who lent its marginal notes to William Oldys for the Life of Ralegh (published 1736, the sheets in print by 1733), where Oldys declared them Raleigh’s autograph and the volume Raleigh’s own copy, acquired soon after publication. By what channel it passed from Brian to the Fairfax library is not yet traced; it had done so by the death of Brian Fairfax the younger (1676–1749), commissioner of customs, appearing as lot 945 in the catalogue printed by Prestage for the auction of his library beginning April 26, 1756 — a bare entry (“Description des Victories de Maurice de Nassau, Leyd. 1612”), silent on the manuscript notes, standing on the family’s Low Countries shelf a few lots from Sir Francis Vere’s Commentaries (lot 954), the memoir of the very commander under whom Charles Fairfax served. That auction never took place: the entire Fairfax library was purchased beforehand by the banker Francis Child (1735–1763) and installed at Osterley Park, Middlesex.

Curiously, the volume then passed briefly through the London trade — most plausibly released as a cull or duplicate after Child’s wholesale purchase. On Thursday, February the 7th, 1760, the booksellers L. DAVIS and C. REYMERS opened the sale, at their Great Room against Gray’s Inn Gate, Holborn, of “A Catalogue of about Four Thousand Volumes, lately purchased” — not an auction but a fixed-price catalogue, the lowest price of each book printed. This copy appears as lot 1416, priced at 10s 6d, the notes named and attributed as Oldys’s printed Life had identified them:

1416 Les Lauriers de Nassau, avec fig. with some MS. marginal notes by Sir W. Raleigh, 10s 6d, Leyden, 1612

The cataloguer’s confidence is thus explicable: the identification had stood in print for twenty-four years, in the most authoritative Life of Raleigh of the age — and it is the same identification the internal evidence of the Cadiz passages makes on its own.

The volume’s absence from Osterley was brief: by 1771 it stood again on the Osterley shelves, recorded (“Le Lauriere de Nassau — 1612”) at press-mark X.1.3.9 in the privately printed Catalogus Librorum in Bibliotheca Osterleiensi compiled by Thomas Morell — entered, notably, in the catalogue’s Appendix (Classis Decima, Libri Miscellanei), among the books shelved outside the main classified arrangement, as a volume restored to the library after that arrangement was settled would be. Both that press-mark and an earlier, cancelled mark reading II.2.Pr.9 survive in ink in this copy, fixing its identity with the Morell record beyond question. The cancelled mark is written in the catalogue’s own notation for a separate piece of library furniture, “The Press” (its shelf-lists printed in the form II.2.1, II.2.2 &c., and its abbreviation “Pr.” used in cross-references such as “[Pr. 36. X.1.2.28]”): the book stood first in the Press, case II, shelf 2, ninth book, and was re-shelved into the Appendix at X.1.3.9, its old address struck through — an institutional two-address pattern the printed catalogue itself documents for other volumes (the Bembo at II.2.10 carries the bracketed alternate address “II. 1. Pr. 8”, in the very notation of this copy’s cancelled mark), and one consistent with a book restored to the library after the main arrangement was settled. The printed list of the Press’s case II, shelf 2 shows its ninth place occupied by another work, the present volume having already removed to the Appendix by the time the catalogue was set. There it remained for more than a century, descending with the library to Victor Child Villiers, 7th Earl of Jersey, until the dispersal of the Osterley Park Library by Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge over eight days beginning May 6, 1885, where it was lot 1187, sold to Bernard Quaritch for 12 shillings. Quaritch offered it the following month in his rough list of the choicer portion of the Osterley library, item 145, at one pound.

The copy then crossed the Atlantic. On the rear board are the pictorial bookplate of George Hale Nutting (1867–1957), of the Nutting family of Groton, Massachusetts — its design commemorating John Nutting, killed defending Groton in March 1675/6, and the family’s Revolutionary service — and the later armorial plate of one Andrew Stewart. The Nutting ownership is documented by the last item in the references below: the portrait frontispiece of Mary Olivia Nutting’s Days of Prince Maurice (Boston, 1894) was reproduced from the engraved portrait of the Prince in this copy, the printer’s pencil crop-masks of c.1893–94 remaining on the plate — placing the volume in New England, in the family’s possession, within a decade of the Osterley sale.

Litt:

William Oldys. The Life of Sir Walter Ralegh, prefixed to Raleigh, The History of the World. London: 1736 (quoting the marginalia, then in the possession of Thomas Brian, esq., of the Inner Temple, and pronouncing them Raleigh’s autograph); reprinted in W. Raleigh. The Works… now first collected. Oxford: 1829. Vol.I p.245, etc.

Walter Oakeshott, ‘Sir Walter Ralegh’s Library’, The Library, 5th Ser. 23 (1968), pp. 285-327.

Peter Beal (ed.). Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700 (CELM), Introduction to Sir Walter Ralegh: recording this volume, from Oldys’s citations, as an “unlocated volume” whose authenticity is “not impossible” — here located.

British Library, Add. MS 57555 (Sir Walter Raleigh’s autograph notebook of the Tower years, with the list of his library).

Ref:

Prestage (auctioneer). A Catalogue of the … Library of … Bryan Fairfax… 1756. London: [1756] lot 945

L. Davis and C. Reymers (booksellers). A Catalogue of about Four Thousand Volumes, lately purchased… London: [1760] lot 1416

[Thomas Morell]. Catalogus Librorum in Bibliotheca Osterleiensi. [London?:] 1771. Appendix, Classis Decima (Libri Miscellanei), shelf mark X.1.3.9 (“Le Lauriere de Nassau — 1612”)

Sothebys (auctioneer). The Osterley Park Library. Catalogue …, the property of… the Earl of Jersey : which will be sold by auction… on Wednesday, the 6th day of May, 1885, and seven following days. [London:] 1885. Lot 1187 (sold to Bernard Quaritch for 12 shillings).

Bernard Quaritch. A rough list … including the choicer portion of Osterley Park library… [London: June 1885]. Item 145 (asking price 1 pound).

Mary Olivia Nutting. The Days of Prince Maurice. Boston & Chicago: 1894. See the portrait frontispiece (reproduced from this copy).

 

Geneve, chez les principaux libraires, 1862. Thin pamphlet by J.-Aug. Bost, here bound with related tracts forming a sammelband of abolitionist writings, including sections titled Encore une fois plus d’exécution capitale à Genève, Le bourreau, Notes sur l’assassinat légal, Raisons chrétiennes contre la peine de mort (Nos. 1–2, second edition), Lettre à Monsieur le bourreau, and Une exécution capitale ou la conscience publique, dated 24 avril 1862. Imprint references include Geneva printers Pfeffer et Puky and Bonnant. A strongly argued Protestant critique of capital punishment rooted in evangelical morality, reflecting mid-19th century Swiss debates on penal reform.

Issued at a moment when Geneva and the Swiss cantons were actively debating penal reform, these tracts belong to the wider 19th-century European movement toward the restriction and eventual abolition of the death penalty. Since the late 18th century, thinkers such as Beccaria had challenged capital punishment on rational and humanitarian grounds, and by the mid-1800s Protestant circles in Switzerland and France were recasting the argument in explicitly religious terms. Bost’s text reflects this shift, invoking the Gospel to oppose what he calls “l’assassinat légal,” and situating execution as a relic of medieval justice incompatible with modern Christian conscience. The references to recent executions at Geneva indicate a local controversy, where public spectacles of punishment were increasingly criticized as demoralizing and unjust. Such pamphlets, cheaply printed and widely circulated, were instrumental in shaping public opinion during a transitional period that would, over the later 19th century, see many European states reduce or abandon capital punishment.

In the decades following this 1862 publication, abolition advanced unevenly but steadily across the world. Venezuela had already abolished the death penalty for all crimes in 1863, becoming the first modern state to do so; Portugal followed for civil crimes in 1867, and the Netherlands abolished it in 1870. In the Americas, Costa Rica (1877) and Brazil (effectively by the late 19th century for ordinary crimes) moved toward abolitionist practice. In Europe, Italy abolished the death penalty in 1889, while Switzerland itself, after periods of cantonal variation, abolished it at the federal level for peacetime crimes in 1874 and definitively in 1942. The early 20th century saw further progress: Norway (1905, completed 1979), Sweden (1921), and Denmark (1930) abolished it for ordinary crimes, while many Latin American countries followed suit.
After the Second World War, abolition became increasingly associated with human rights frameworks. The United Kingdom abolished the death penalty for murder in 1965 (fully in 1969), France in 1981, and Canada in 1976. Internationally, treaties such as the European Convention on Human Rights (Protocol No. 6 in 1983 and Protocol No. 13 in 2002) and the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1989) accelerated abolition. By the late 20th and early 21st centuries, most European countries, as well as large parts of Latin America, had abolished capital punishment entirely. Today, over two-thirds of the world’s countries have abolished the death penalty in law or practice, marking the long trajectory of reform to which Bost’s Geneva pamphlets belong.

Below is the list of countries where the death penalty is still being applied with a caveat for Russia, Sri Lanka and South Korea.

United States, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Yemen, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Belarus, Russia moratorium, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka retention, Japan, North Korea, South Korea moratorium, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman.

United States — death penalty status by state (current landscape)

States with active death penalty (executions carried out in recent years)
Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah
States retaining the death penalty but with a moratorium or no recent executions
California (governor’s moratorium since 2019), Oregon (moratorium), Pennsylvania (moratorium), Nevada (no executions since 2006), Montana (no executions since 2006; limited by court rulings), Wyoming (no executions since 1992; de facto non-use), Kentucky (no executions since 2008; litigation delays), North Carolina (no executions since 2006; legal challenges)
States that have abolished the death penalty
Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin
Federal and military
United States federal government retains the death penalty (last executions carried out in 2020–2021, currently paused under policy review)
U.S. military law also retains capital punishment (rarely used)

Volume 5

While volume three does not contain any more information on J. B. Adrien Durand’s timeline, the whole manuscript is a collection of translated Martial’s Epigrams, the Poesies Lyriques, penned in volume five, consolidates Adrien Durand’s captivity, release, Italian movements, and later poetic activity into a single clarified chronology. It integrates evidence drawn from his manuscripts (Amusemens littéraires), dated poems, and contextual military events, resolving earlier ambiguities caused by retrospective copying and thematic rather than chronological arrangement.

Captivity and the conditions of writing

1794 Durand is taken prisoner by Austrian forces and transferred to Hungary.

1794–1797 He remains imprisoned in Hungary for approximately three years. During this period he composes verse, reflections, letters and documentary notes. The letters are particularly important as some original letters received by Durand are loosely inserted in the manuscript as well as copied into the manuscript. It confirms the faithful discipline of the copyist when transcribing the original materials used to produce the present manuscript. Several texts later copied into bound volumes originate here, although the manuscript books themselves were assembled decades later.

Transition from captivity to the Italian theater

Early spring 1797 While still in Hungary, Durand receives news of an impending exchange of prisoners (la nouvelle de l’échange). His writings from this moment mark a psychological shift from endurance to expectation.

18 April 1797 [the manuscript incorrectly gives April 18, 1798] Durand is present at the French camp at Leoben, participating in celebrations following the preliminaries of peace between France and Austria. This date anchors his liberation and return to French military space.

The Italian journey sequence (1797)

Following his release, Durand moves with French forces and administrative columns through northern Italy. His itinerary aligns with the operational geography of the Army of Italy rather than with a continuous combat posting.

Spring 1797 Leoben → Klagenfurt.

Summer 1797 Southward movement into Italy, passing through Castelfranco.

Late summer–autumn 1797 Residence or passage at Verona, during the reorganization of Venetian territories under French control.

3 November 1797 Documented presence in Venice, coinciding exactly with the final phase of French art confiscations and evacuations following the Treaty of Campo Formio.

Late 1797 Westward movement through Marquia Pellegrini and Brescia, concluding the Italian sequence.

Post-captivity reflection and literary consolidation

1797 Durand composes Le Songe, a reflective text synthesizing captivity, release, and moral reckoning. Although written close to the events described, the surviving form is preserved through later copying.

1799 Durand is documented at Caen, indicating reintegration into metropolitan France and a shift toward civilian life.

Later political poetry

1814–1815 Durand writes poems responding to the Bourbon Restoration, demonstrating political adaptability and continued engagement with public events.

4 April 1831 He produces celebratory verse honoring Louis-Philippe, marking his final known dated political-poetic intervention.

Clarifying note on manuscript chronology

The manuscript volumes preserving these texts are not contemporaneous notebooks but later compilations. Dates within the texts reflect moments of composition, not moments of copying. This distinction explains apparent chronological inversions within Amusemens littéraires and reinforces the need for an external, event-based timeline such as the one established here.

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