BERNARD WILKIN (Archives générales du royaume), ROBIN SCHÄFER (Historien Indépendant) et ARNE HOMANN (Directeur du Schloss Salder Municipal Museum, Salzgitter, Allemagne)

Résumé

S’appuyant sur une riche documentation jusqu’alors inédite, cet article examine le commerce et la production d’artefacts et d’autres objets associés au champ de bataille de Waterloo. Les auteurs révèlent qu’à partir de 1815, un commerce lucratif se développa sur la plaine brabançonne, marqué dans un premier temps par la profanation de tombes par des touristes. Par la suite, une industrie florissante de faux artefacts prit son essor, visant principalement les visiteurs britanniques un phénomène que les touristes français et allemands ne manquèrent pas de remarquer. Après consultation d’experts médicaux, de conservateurs de musée et de spécialistes en graphologie, les auteurs se sont également penchés sur les ventes actuelles de reliques plus récentes de Waterloo, confirmant l’existence d’un marché important de contrefaçons, comprenant à la fois des faux du XIXe siècle et des productions contemporaines.

Introduction

‘Sir!’ exclaimed the coachman. ‘Well, what is it?’-‘You will pardon me for disturbing you; but as we are coming to Mont-Saint-Jean, I must ask you to beware of a branch of business which you may not have heard of in Paris. ‘-’A line of business that is unknown in Paris! (…) ‘What is this trade?’ ‘Perhaps you think,’ continued the coachman, ‘that after the battle of Waterloo there were many bullets, many saddle-buttons, many little copper eagles, bits of sword and bayonet, sabre-hilts, and the like, left on the field of battle.’ (…) ‘Well, for 34 years the country people have been selling these rusty, earth-covered things, half destroyed by patina, to foreigners. – ‘But it seems to me, my friend, that there can’t be much more of it left over, after 34 years of supplying them.’ – ‘No Sir, but that is the industry I wanted to tell you about. Those whose business it is to sell these things, sow once a year, on their own account, within a radius of several miles, bushels of imperial eagles, thousands of copper buttons, and wagons full of bullets. This seed they leave till summer, for in winter foreigners do not visit Waterloo; but as soon as summer comes, they dig up their pieces of lead and copper, which, after lying for eight months in damp ground, have acquired an appearance of age which deceives the cleverest, and excites the hearts of the admirers of the great Emperor.’^[1]

For nearly two centuries, visitors have come to the Braine-l’Alleud plain to see the site of Napoleon’s defeat.^[2] It has become a tradition for tourists to take home a souvenir from this historic battlefield of 18 June 1815. This practice is universal and can be observed not only at Waterloo, but also at Gettysburg (USA 1863) and on the European battlefields of the First World War.^[3] In fact, at Waterloo – as elsewhere – it was the victorious allied soldiers themselves who were the first to take home souvenirs of the fighting, such as weapons, uniform parts or personal effects of French soldiers.^[4] Owning an authentic object from a historic event is a symbolic way of creating a personal connection with a memorable moment. It serves as both a form of private commemoration and an attempt to connect with the past.^[5] The Waterloo artefacts that today are present in countless public and private collections around the world demonstrate the enduring appeal of this approach and the remarkable historical significance of this particular battle.

That said, the authenticity of relics alleged to have come from the Waterloo battlefield is often questionable, with dealers frequently offering items without any verifiable provenance. The allure of owning a piece of history, coupled with the persuasive tactics of sellers, has led to a thriving market for both genuine and forged artefacts. The historical record reveals a long-standing tradition of exploiting tourists’ eagerness to acquire battlefield souvenirs, with British visitors often being the primary targets. The article aims to shed light on the extensive trade in relics that once thrived on the battlefield, arguing that it was a deliberate attempt to profit from foreign tourists, particularly the British. The authors suggest that some French and German individuals viewed this exploitation as a form of retribution for the 1815 defeat and, in the German case, a response to the downplaying of their crucial role in the battle. The research draws upon a range of unpublished sources, including municipal and regional records, as well as press articles, to illuminate this phenomenon in past and present. To enhance accessibility, all non-English sources have been translated by the authors.

After the battle

Waterloo tourism and pilgrimage

The Battle of Waterloo, fought on 18 June 1815, was a pivotal moment in European history, marking the end of Napoleon’s dominance and the beginning of a period of relative peace.^[6] Its outcome resonated deeply with the British, symbolising their military prowess and their nation’s role in shaping European affairs. The battlefield quickly became a magnet for visitors, drawn by a potent mix of historical mythology, accessibility, and burgeoning nationalistic sentiments.^[7] This was significantly influenced by the deliberate actions of the British to solidify their narrative of the battle, including downplaying and even erasing the crucial roles of other nations like the contingents of German states and the Dutch who fought with and alongside them. This was evident in their choice to name the battle after Waterloo, a village closely associated with Wellington’s headquarters, rather than ‘Belle Alliance,’ a name proposed by the Prussians to acknowledge an Allied effort^[8]. The construction of memorials and monuments further reinforced this narrative, focusing primarily on British heroism and sacrifice.^[9] The British – led by Wellington – effectively ‘wrote out’ other nations from the dominant narrative, ensuring that Waterloo became synonymous with a solely British triumph. This curated narrative of the battle significantly contributed to its appeal as a site of nationalistic pilgrimage for British tourists throughout the 19th century. The battlefield’s proximity to the British mainland, coupled with advancements in transportation, made it easily accessible for travellers. Steamboats and railways facilitated travel, making Waterloo a convenient destination for a growing number of tourists eager to witness the site of their historic triumph.^[10] The 19th century was a period of intense nationalistic fervour and imperial expansion for Britain. Waterloo, as the site of a decisive victory against a formidable foe, became a potent symbol of British power and resilience. The battlefield served as a tangible reminder of national glory, reinforcing a sense of collective identity and of belonging to a triumphant empire. The process of ‘sight sacralization’, as formulated by MacAnnell^[11] and Seaton^[12], played a crucial role in elevating Waterloo’s status from a mere battlefield to a revered national shrine. Through deliberate efforts to name, frame, enshrine, and reproduce the site’s image, Waterloo was imbued with symbolic meaning and transformed into a pilgrimage destination for patriotic Britons. The rise of mass media and advancements in printing technology also played a significant role in Waterloo’s popularity. The battle was extensively covered in newspapers, books, and illustrations, further fuelling public interest and cementing its place in popular culture.^[13]

Of course, the battlefield was visited by citizens of other nations whose soldiers had – or had not – participated in the battle. However, In German consciousness the Waterloo Battlefield held limited prominence due to a confluence of factors. For Prussia, the Battle of Ligny, fought two days before Waterloo, was prioritised in Prussian memory as, while it represented Napoleon’s final victory, it did underscore the Prussian army’s resilience and discipline. The outcome of the Prussian Battles of Ligny, Wavre and the Prussian attack on Plancenoit were seen as key to victory at ‘Belle-Alliance’ and overshadowed the importance of that single battle. Additionally, the campaign’s continuation beyond Waterloo, more or less ignored by English writers even today, with further battles and the march on Paris, diluted the perception of Waterloo as the singular, decisive event. The German Wars of Liberation, which fostered a sense of unity and national identity, held far greater resonance in German national consciousness than Waterloo, which occurred after these transformative events. The Prussian role in securing victory was well-recognized and celebrated within Prussia, even if their contributions were not always fully acknowledged in broader European narratives. Furthermore, prior to 1871, Germany lacked a cohesive national identity, with soldiers from various German states fighting on different sides during the Napoleonic Wars. This fragmented historical experience made it difficult to establish a unified national perception of Waterloo’s significance. Ultimately, Waterloo was one battle among many in a complex and multifaceted historical period that shaped the development of modern Germany, but it did not hold the same central position in German memory as it did for the British.^[14]

Dutch travellers initially shared the British sentiment of patriotism towards the Battle of Waterloo, but in a quieter manner. Dutch and Belgian accounts focused more on the bravery of their soldiers than on the grandeur of the victory; the admiration for the Crown Prince, hailed as the ‘Hero of Waterloo,’ was particularly strong. However, after the dissolution of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1830, Dutch interest in Waterloo waned and declined further with the passing of the last Dutch veterans of the battle.^[15]

From the day after the battle, tourism became a permanent feature in and around Waterloo. The first ‘visitors’ were soldiers from the victorious units still positioned on, or visiting the battlefield once the guns had fallen silent, followed by local visitors from Brussels and the surrounding regions. In addition to the ‘traditional’ plundering of the dead and wounded immediately after the battle^[16], the hunt for souvenirs equally set in almost immediately. Prussian soldier Georg Wilhelm Heinrich Häring, who marched across the battlefield on 29 June 1815, 11 days after the battle, later remembered:

Buttons, musket balls, ribbons, scraps, anything lying around that had once belonged to gentlemen who could probably no longer own anything on this earth, and what even looters, gravediggers and marauders had thrown aside as worthless, was still picked up out of piety or because of its rarity; but mostly to be thrown away again on the next march^[17]. Others, of course, traded in those objects which revealed a little more value.^[18]

After the dead had been buried, the battlefield was quickly tidied up and soon returned to its original purpose, the growing of crops – for the local population life had to continue. Yet within the first few months after the battle the numbers of visitors to the battlefield, and the way in which they behaved gave rise to complaints. On 6 April 1816, the Deputy Director of the district of Brussels reported to the governor of southern Brabant^[19] that every day a large number of people still came to the battlefield where they ‘trample(d) the grain as they cross(ed) the countryside on horseback’. The mayor of Ohain, Mr. Mascart claimed that ‘up to fifty or more came in a single day’ and that most of them were English. The farmers rightly complained about the harm done to their crops while the garde champêtre, the rural guards, stated that they could not impose themselves on men on horseback who were often armed with pistols. Even worse, however, the Deputy Director reported, was the fact that some of those visitors, ‘motivated by greed’, ‘(…) went so far as to dig up the corpses in the hope of finding those who had been buried before the battlefield had been fully searched, had kept their clothes and what was in their pockets’. This was far from being anecdotal, as not as Mr. Mascart reported no less than six such incidents on a single day before 10am.^[20] This, and other official letters, reporting similar large-scale opening of mass-graves at the same period, discovered by the authors during their research, form the earliest proof of the exploitation of the human and animal remains buried on the battlefield.

Soon after the battle, the ‘Waterloo Elm’ or ‘Wellington Tree,’ an elm tree under which the Duke of Wellington reputedly stood during the battle, became an early tourist hotspot. Its central location and elevation offered a panoramic view of the battlefield, symbolising Wellington’s steadfast leadership and the allied triumph. The tree’s branches were highly sought-after souvenirs, echoing the fate of the willow tree at Napoleon’s tomb on St. Helena, both succumbing to the desire for tangible mementos of historical events. The quest for relics that could sustain the visitor’s imagination was accompanied by a desire to appropriate all sorts of relics from the battle site or even, more exceptionally, the bodies of its actors. For the Wellington Tree this desire would turn out to be more lethal than the French cannon fire during the battle had been. So many visitors broke and cut-off pieces from it that it had soon to be felled.

‘I went to see Mr Mathieu, who sold this tree, and told him how sorry we were to see it felled and transported. He replied that the original buyer of this tree had no intention of destroying it, but that this buyer had given it to a second buyer, who speculated by uprooting and transporting it. Sieur Mathieu was not pleased to see the tree fall, despite the damage caused to it by curious onlookers who made a path from the spot where it was placed to the monument erected some distance away, and that he would gladly replace the one that no longer exists with a young tree, which would not have lived much longer because of the cuts made in it by visitors to the site’.^[21]

The felled tree was a profitable investment. The buyer, John George Children, turned it into seating for the British sovereign and a small range of other furniture, before selling the remains to private individuals.^[22]

Relic trade and counterfeiters

In December 1839, the German Düsseldorfer Zeitung published a humoresque in its supplement ‘Blätter für Scherz und Ernst’, written by the court pharmacist Johann Heinrich Gempt junior from Steinfurt near Münster, who also worked as an author and translator of comedies under the pen-name ‘Wilhelm Achat’. In ‘Der Nagel’ [The Nail] he writes about a visit he himself allegedly paid to the battlefield of Waterloo in the summer of 1820. There, in an ‘inn by the road’, he encounters the young innkeeper Wilhelm, who is standing on a chair and is about to take his own life with a rope hanging from a rusty nail in the wall. Dissuaded from the terrible deed by the author, the young publican told him of his suffering. He was so poor that he was not allowed to marry the love of his life, as her father demanded 10.000 francs for the dowry, an amount he would never be able to afford. Having promised to help the desperate young man, Gempt returns to Germany. Years later, he travelled to the battlefield again and found the innkeeper married and in much better living conditions:

The old lowly cottage had disappeared. In its place rose a stately building, under whose picturesquely projecting roof Wilhelm sat with his mother and Gretchen, who was now married to him, eating a hearty supper. They approached me in a friendly manner and greeted me with the liveliest joy as the founder of their present fortune. ‘So the remedy worked?’ I asked. ‘’Excellently!’ was the answer. Six months after your departure, Fortuna began to pour out her blessings on us. All the foreigners who passed through the country came to stay with us. They claimed that Napoleon had spent several hours here before the Battle of Waterloo; indeed, they demanded to see the nail on which he had hung his world-historical triangular hat. They blamed my denial on the fear of losing the precious nail, and so I had to do my customers’ bidding and deceive them. I showed them the nail that had caused our acquaintance, a poor, rusty thing of no real value. But it was surrounded by a historical nimbus, for it had been sanctified by Napoleon’s hat, and now everyone was respectful of it. My nail was found to be quite different from the other nails, and an English lord was so enthusiastic about it that he offered me 100 pounds sterling if I would give it to him. I didn’t think twice about it, but the next day a second lord arrived who wanted to pay even more for the relic. Well, there are still plenty of nails in the world. So I put together a small stockpile of them and made a profit from the goods. The trade was so profitable that I soon had the required 10,000 francs. So I asked her again to marry me and her father kept his word. But how did you, dear sir, bring all this about? I assume there is something odd about it ». Of course, there was a bit of black magic going on, if you want to call the art of putting black ink on paper that. So I let a little lie slip in my travelogue, and I hope for three reasons that heaven will forgive me for it. Pro primo, this first lie will be my last, and one time doesn’t count. Secondly, logically out of my good intentions, because the nail did not become a nail in the coffin, but in the marriage bed of a happy couple. Thirdly, I expect to have the merit of having diminished the number of fools on the earth by somewhat. For when the lords meet with their nails, they will no doubt put the noose around their necks and use the dearly paid nails for what you, my dear Wilhelm, once wanted to use yours for (…).^[23]

The account was of course apocryphal, and based on a story which had circulated in the French press a decade before^[24]. The tale of the cunning Waterloo peasant deceiving gullible English visitors remained popular and was republished in a number of variations in the German and French press.^[25] According to a French newspaper, a century later, British tourists were still purchasing, for the umpteenth time, the nail supposedly used by Napoleon to hang his hat at the Belle-Alliance farm. By then, according to the report, it had been mass-produced by a local company.^[26] True or not, it is not too unlikely that the ‘inn by the roadside’ described by Gempt, was indeed the Belle-Alliance farm where, according to local historian Jacques Logie, himself once owner of the farm, such a nail was once shown to visitors to the inn and later sold for a high price.^[27] The existence of such satire reinforces the idea that the Waterloo battlefield was seen as a space claimed and dominated by the British and that the trade with and collection of dubious relics was a well-established fact. This was also observed by a Danish visitor writing home to Copenhagen in the summer of 1816:

Waterloo is a beautiful farm and Belle-Alliance a poor house, inhabited by a fat man who pours the wine, and it is about as far from Waterloo as Lundehus is from Vibenhus. In the centre of both these places stands a tree on a bank, where the Duke of Wellington stood or commanded during this great battle — the enthusiasm with which especially Englishmen, or Englishwomen, visit these remarkable places, surpasses all imagination. They visit them in great numbers by carriage, by horse, or on foot. Everyone takes something as a souvenir, be it a small bag of earth, or a twig or splinter of the aforementioned tree. The scruffy table in Belle-Alliance, at which the Duke of Wellington and Lord Blücher have shaken hands, has pieces chiselled away and is carved up. Everyone carries a piece of it away in remembrance, just like a relic. No Englishman comes to the neighbouring Brussels without going to Waterloo and Belle-Alliance.^[28]

As early as the summer of 1815, author Walter Scott, visiting the site, observed this nascent industry orchestrated by local peasants.^[29] James Simpson also described this activity: ‘We were immediately surrounded by the people offering for sale, with great importunity, relics of the field; particularly the eagles which the French soldiers wore as cap plates. A few cuirasses, both the back and breast pieces, were likewise held up to us; as well as sabres, bayonets, and other spoil’.^[30]

The authenticity of objects offered for sale in the immediate aftermath of the battle is likely, but not guaranteed. Local peasants, among the first on the battlefield after the conflict, would have encountered numerous items still lying on the surface or buried just beneath the earth. In addition to the continued sale of weapons and equipment, locals reportedly began dealing in human remains. Their knowledge of mass grave locations, as documented in Barthélemy and Mery’s Napoléon en Égypte: Waterloo et le fils de l’homme is further substantiated by a letter reproduced within the book purportedly authored by the poet Saintine:^[31]

On our way back from Hougoumont, we met some women who wanted to sell us sections of weapons, shell fragments and rifle bullets. I had been told that the inhabitants of this country made them. I remembered the mystification of the thirty thousand large bronze Othons sold to the English by the modern Italians, the counterfeiters of antiquity. I consulted my guide; he dissuaded me. ‘In the early years, he told me, when we ploughed the land, we found so many bullets and debris that we only picked them up to sell them by the pound. Even today, with a little care, you can find a lot of them. We can no longer speculate on this: it has become too common. But if you’re interested in buying skulls, I’ve got some well-cleaned ones here that I’ll sell you. – What do you mean, skulls? I exclaimed. You sell skulls? – The English are taking away a lot of them,’ he answered coldly. He then explained how he got them. We arrived in front of the Haie-Sainte: ‘You see, he said, pointing to a large field of rye on the right; all these are not the same colour; there are whole patches of a darker, blacker green than the others: that is where the pits are. It is the same almost all over the plain, and when we want a few bones, a few heads, we notice the place, we wait for the evening and we dig….^[32]

The authenticity of macabre relics such as this appears unquestionable. And again, the primary clientele hailed from Great Britain, a trend that would persist throughout the century. British visitors, with a penchant for souvenirs, readily parted with their money, often without rigorous scrutiny. However, not all were susceptible. In 1835, Anna Thorold became the first to document the large-scale production of counterfeit objects. Her observations are captured in the following letter: ‘So great was the demand for buttons, that there existed a manufactory at Liege to supply the numerous visitors with the wished-for prize’.^[33] Distinguishing genuine artefacts from forgeries remains a challenge. Several sources allude to the presence of manufacturers in Liège during the 1820s and 1830s who produced objects supposedly recovered from Waterloo. Even within Liège, a vendor named Durand reportedly offered bullets supposedly dating from 18 June 1815.^[34] However, evidence of large-scale production in the city is lacking.^[35] Following his visit to Waterloo, American entrepreneur and entertainer Phineas Taylor Barnum, while in England, documented the existence of a Birmingham factory allegedly exporting a significant quantity of relics to Belgium.^[36] What a disappointment for him who, during his visit to the battlefield, had emptied the museum’s stock of bullets! Unsurprisingly, it did not take long for the reserves to fill up again.^[37]

In the 1830s, two tourists, one French and the other Prussian, found themselves returning from Waterloo by carriage. The Frenchman noticed a curious object on his companion’s lap. Upon inquiry, the Prussian proudly unveiled a skull bearing three bullet holes, claiming it to be that of one of Napoleon’s colonels, purchased from a local peasant. Amused, the Frenchman revealed that he too had been offered a similar relic, purportedly the skull of a Prussian colonel, also with three bullet holes.^[38] This anecdote, recounted in numerous 19th-century works, again may be apocryphal. Nevertheless, it serves to illustrate the increasing scepticism towards souvenirs offered at Waterloo.

The most critical tourists were unquestionably the French, who were more reluctant to bring back souvenirs of the ‘glorious defeat’.^[39] From the 1830s onwards, they began to denounce the dubious practices of guides and salesmen in the region. In 1836, Félix Pyat, a journalist and prominent figure in the future Paris Commune, discovered an original method of swindling. The victim was an English soldier from the 1815 battle who had returned to the scene of his exploits:

The day before he had taken the road to Waterloo. (…) He had fought under Wellington against the usurper. Taking advantage of the moment when the London onlooker was staring at the Lion’s Mound, the clever cicerone [the local guide] had shallowly buried a tricolour cockade and a shako plate with an Eagle on it; then, as if by chance, digging in the earth with his tip of his boot, he had shown the Englishman, who was very surprised at the discovery, the false remains of the defeated, and had sold them to him for a good guinea, like real relics of the battle. The Waterloo field is a great help to those cicerones: it is a branch of the Brussels trade. Similar to the pieces of the true cross which were once mined in Egyptian Sudan..^[40]

The French writer Léon Gozlan was also visiting Brabant in 1842. He skilfully described the swarms of small children begging for charity from wealthy visitors. He too witnessed the sale of dubious souvenirs: ‘Waiting for us at the door of the Hôtel du Mont-Saint-Jean, in addition to our guides, were the local beggars, vendors of eagles and fake relics. My education was complete. I saluted the eagles with deep respect and didn’t buy any’.^[41]

The French were very suspicious of these objects sold by the inhabitants of the battlefield. In 1848, a visitor got angry when surrounded by aggressive merchants who, dumbfounded by the French visitor’s refusal to trade, began to lower their prices: ‘In response to my reluctance to trade, a real and obstinate auction was organised around me: – At thirty cents, twenty cents, ten cents a relic! – Don’t listen to these scoundrels! Jean-Jacques Pirson tells me indignantly. Their only aim is to deceive foreigners, and I know where their relics are made’.^[42] This time it is the battlefield guide who confirms the existence of a well-organised industry.

From the 1830s onwards, tourism became more common among the wealthy classes, and demand for objects from the battlefield increased. Several publishers produced guidebooks to Europe in which the famous battlefield was featured. To help British tourists find their way around, some Belgian guides were mentioned, but the most highly recommended was Sergeant Cotton, a British veteran of the battle who set up shop at the foot of the Lion’s Mount in 1835.^[43] Cotton used his role as a tour guide, his hotel and the museum to expose and sell objects and relics of the battle, directly to his customers.^[44] This kind of behaviour was sufficiently suspicious for an investigation to be opened by the Nivelles District Commissioner, who wrote a letter of complaint to the Mayor of Braine-l’Alleud. In it he criticised Cotton for the aggressive manner in which he tried to appropriate the tourists on the battlefield, especially as he had the advantage of attracting English customers, because of his nationality. The head of the commune confirmed the dubious methods of the former sergeant.^[45] Newspapers also mentioned the objects he sold to tourists, without questioning their authenticity.^[46]

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the following century, the Cotton collection was catalogued and finally sold in 1909. The published catalogues, some of which are illustrated, provide information on the authenticity of the pieces. Newspapers from the period remind us of the caveats that had to be taken into account when dealing with this collection, which had been built up gradually, mainly through donations that were difficult to trace back to the battle.^[47] The people involved were well aware that the collection contained some remarkable pieces, but that these rubbed shoulders with a motley assortment of bric-a-brac^[48] and unrelated items, like a uniform tunic which, even though it had belonged to an officer of the Scot Greys, who was present in 1815, was of a much later model.^[49]

German journalist Max Hochdorf, in a critical piece about the ‘Waterloo Museum of Relics’ in 1909, not only condemned the Cotton Museum’s value and importance, but also, as he called it, the ‘haggling beneath the Lion’ on the Waterloo battlefield:

At 9 o’clock on the morning of 3 September in Brussels, a man with a powerful voice will proclaim: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I am about to begin the auction of the world-famous Waterloo Museum. Whose priceless treasures are well known to you all. I have for auction the silver spurs lost by the great Napoleon at Waterloo, a letter in his own hand from the victorious English Lord Wellington, a lot of Prussian swords, French bayonets, Dutch hussar tunics, saddlecloths, bugles, kettledrums and trombones from the memorable battle, cuirassier boots, cartridge pouches, notebooks, skulls and skeletons and watch fobs of all the brave heroes who lost their lives on the bloody field of Waterloo.’

The French and Germans will hardly have much money to spare for the auctioneer, and so an Englishman or perhaps an American will probably come and buy the whole museum and pack it into boxes. Then the rich man will carefully arrange and copy everything and think proudly that he has brought home a mighty piece of world history for his personal enjoyment. The major newspapers of Belgium and France, led by the ‘Galoise’, do not want the treasures of Waterloo to be taken to Britain. The newspapers believe that such precious possessions should go to a state museum and continue to belong to the whole world. But it seems that all the valiant guardians of this war treasure judge more with an exuberant heart than with a wise mind. For it must be said, contrary to popular belief, that this endangered and now much-lauded battle museum is of ridiculously little value. We know that the decisive battle that overthrew Napoleon was not fought at Waterloo, but on the fields of the village of Braine l’Alleud, a few kilometres away. The battle was only named after the larger neighbouring village. Braine l’Alleud is also home to this museum, which was once put together by an English officer. The good man has a solid, trusting disposition. He paid a decent price for what the local farmers brought him. He worshipped everything that had anything to do with the seal of his Generalissimo Wellington: all the weapons, all the instruments, all the musket balls, every single shard of shell. When someone brought him two silver spurs and told him that the great Napoleon had lost them on the battlefield, the staid veteran immediately believed it. He sacrificed a considerable part of his meagre pension for the imperial spurs. He didn’t cringe at all and was proud of the fact that a cooking pot in which the roast for the defeated Corsican had once been braised was rusting in his house. The Englishman’s belief in the fruitfulness of the battlefield was unshakeable. He bought and bought and bought everything that was offered to him; without choice, without scrutiny, only pious admiration. He may have found this and that on a few stalking trips, but he was overjoyed when the relics were brought into his house. And so the honest old warrior created his museum of battles, which is not too marvellous to imagine. In a sparse, narrow room, everything has its place, real and fake, trinkets and the occasional lost gem. Blindly grasping belief has created this collection. But rarely is there a document to authenticate the origin and home of the relics kept here. The warrior of Waterloo was happy in his old age. He left the fruits of his belief to his family, and in the end the museum remained the property of a single lady. It was her heirs which turned her relative’s personal sanctuary into a business. And now the haggling began in the museum and near the lion, whose bronze image rests on the hill of the battlefield as a symbol of the defeated Emperor. The pilgrims to Waterloo had to pay an entrance fee if they wanted to see the museum. The heiress turned her relative’s shrine into a pub. A bazaar was set up in the meagre museum room. Napoleon as an inkwell, as a clock stand, as a paperweight, Napoleon or Wellington or Blücher on a teaspoon, on a coffee cup, on a sausage knife – these were the treasures on offer here. The prices for beer and sandwiches and tasteful souvenirs were quite high. The goods had to be viewed with suspicion and the museum treasures deserved the same caution. All the Napoleons and Wellingtons were supposed to have been cast from real bullets that had buried themselves into “sad plain” on 18 June 1815. It was all advertising and showmanship and no reverence. A profit was made from everything. The pilgrims quietly put up with the year out, year in. They were picked up at the station by a museum employee, put into a carriage and dropped off at a museum pub. That’s how they liked it, that’s how they wanted to enjoy the glory of Waterloo. The pub and the tiny cabinet of rarities are now to go under the hammer. There is no need to complain about fate. No site whose worthiness should be protected is lost to the world. Only a pub of little originality will be closed in the first days of September. The moving mournful letters that beset such an event were overloaded with errors and false pathos. And already, some fresh businessmen in Braine l’Alleud are endeavouring to ensure that the haggling beneath the lion does not stop altogether. The tourist wandering across the battlefield is invited in by the shouting proprietor of an inn. Inside he will find the skeletons of the great warriors, their flintlocks, their uniforms. And all for free, all for the price of a glass of beer, which is very bad and very expensive. And the traveller who has allowed himself to be guided by the implacable beer tapper, who cannot be repelled by rudeness or force, discovers with joyful astonishment that the bayonets that did the killing on 18 June 1815 were in fact made in Liège in 1873. Since the battlefield has been ploughed clean of musket balls and shells, the industrious farmer still finds them, in the ground, since the great days. And the farmer always finds the bullets when a curious tourist wanders past, happy to carry an iron relic home for a few francs. As if these bullets and shell splinters were soft seeds bearing rich fruit, the bullets have multiplied over the course of 94 years in the same way as if they had once been sown when muskets and cannon spread them across the battlefield. The English and Americans are favoured by the clever farmers when selling these iron fruits. The Germans usually keep their hands too tightly on their wallets. All of the beggars who cavort around the Lion’s Mound and hold out their hands to strangers are of very good families. Their grandfathers or granduncles or other relatives were on a first-name basis with Napoleon or Wellington or Blücher, and the beggars know how to tell touching stories about their illustrious family in return for sufficient payment. Some can even do it in broken English or even in German. So the field where Napoleon fell is no longer a town of seriousness and solemnity, but a place of business and bargaining. When the ironic Thackeray wrote the novel of Waterloo, he called it ‘Vanity Fair’. A market of vanities is set up in the neighbourhood of the Lion’s Hill and its visitors, the fools of the world, are the victims.^[50]

In 1862, the Baedeker guide painted a bleak picture of the visiting conditions at Waterloo:

Relics. Relics of the battle, weapons, cannonballs, buttons, etc., are offered in profusion to visitors. Those who love these things will be able to risk a few pennies, leaving the authenticity of their provenance to the consciences of the sellers. It is true that every year the plough turns up some new debris: shreds of cloth, bullets, bones, skulls, etc., but the fraud is no less widespread. However, the collection at the Hôtel du Musée seems to consist only of authentic relics; nothing is sold there. There is no shortage of beggars either.^[51]

This warning was repeated in subsequent editions. In 1862, the situation did not seem to have improved for visitors wishing to venture onto the battlefield. L’itinéraire descriptif, historique, artistique et industriel de la Belgique described the problems facing tourists: ‘On arriving at the village of Waterloo, you are besieged by unofficial visitors, offering to guide tourists or sell them relics’.^[52] And it seems that the insatiable desire for battlefield relics fuelled the emergence of other opportunistic and illicit ventures, as another German visitor to the battlefield described in 1855:

The old battlefield has become a hub of commercial activity. The sale of supposed battle relics, such as musket balls, buttons, and broken weapons, has flourished despite the widespread knowledge that these items are more than often not what they seem to be. The allure of owning a piece of history, however dubious, has proven irresistible to many visitors. In the past this bartering on the site even extended to a scam where visitors were tricked into paying a spurious export tax on their relics. Our host assured us that the government has since intervened to stop this particular fraud.^[53]

It is crucial to note that, contrary to claims in a recent paper, no tax or duty was imposed on ‘relics’ taken from the battlefield in some kind of revolutionary early effort to protect this historic site.^[54] The confiscation of objects taken from the field of battle, particularly French heavy cavalry equipment, by the Dutch authorities stemmed from their practical military value, not preservation concerns. The government even offered rewards for these items, viewing them as usable weaponry rather than historical artefacts, highlighting the disconnect between its perceived souvenir value and its potential military use at the time^[55].

The 1867 the Hachette guide for travellers in Europe, which highlighted the abundance of guides, was also quite explicit in its warnings: ‘Beware of battle relics, and get your prices up front’.^[56] Equipped with the Hachette guidebook, the French writer Louis Montalant made the journey in the company of Englishmen, Germans and Belgians. Harassed by beggars as soon as they left the church in Waterloo, the group visited all important sites on the battlefield. Arriving where the Wellington Tree once stood, the visitor commented on the sale of the tree to an English industrialist: ‘It should have been sacred, at least for Englishmen; but speculation is a sapper for whom nothing is sacred; and it was an English speculator who made it disappear’.^[57] Further on, Montalant confesses his annoyance at children determined to sell souvenirs:

However, my companion and I were often distracted and impatient by the obsessions of children of both sexes who insisted on selling us a thousand bric-a-brac objects, the remains they said they had picked up in the furrows of the battlefield. These types of shady vendors and this branch of more or less adulterated commerce are creations of 18 June 1815; but I never believed in these relics, and I had to believe even less on the eve of a fiftieth anniversary. We fought obstinacy against obstinacy, on this ground where obstinacy had been elevated to heroism by the success of the English arms; we bought nothing, and this time, at least, the French remained victorious.^[58]

This extract is particularly relevant because it openly expresses the sentiment, which other sources only hinted at, i.e. that the deception to which the British fell victim enabled the French to regain a form of moral superiority on the battlefield of Waterloo. Although they had lost the battle of 1815, they had shown themselves to be less naïve than their cousins across the Channel. Thus, national pride remained intact. The French press took great pleasure in mocking British credulity. More than fifty years after Napoleon’s defeat, La Petite Presse ridiculed the Belgian dealers and the alleged existence of a factory producing fake buttons of the French Old Guard grenadiers, which the paper claimed had been operating near the battlefield for half a century.^[59]

German visitors were no less critical of what they found when visiting the Waterloo battlefield. An anonymous writer described the atmosphere on the famed morne plaine:

During my stay in Brussels, I also visited the battlefield at Waterloo. This took place on 18 April 1853 (…) Blücher’s merits were commemorated very little here, or they were dismissed with brief words, as if the old field marshal had only just arrived on the battlefield of Waterloo in time to see from afar the French, completely defeated by the English, flee and to send his hussars after them. In a similar vein, the guides on the battlefield, one of whom in particular presented testimonials from two English generals regarding his excellent local knowledge and expertise, were, for good money, chatting away to the English tourists, hard enough to make their ears itch, and I must confess that I was a little indignant at the impudence of them, both the guides and the tourists. On the other hand, I had to smile at the gullible eagerness with which the tourists bought imitation bronze eagles, which were supposed to have come from shakos and cartridge pouches of fallen warriors, uniform buttons and even pieces of weaponry at rather high prices. It is said that the battlefield has been so ransacked for such relics that little authentic artefacts can still be found. However, the industry caters to the need for souvenirs of greedy tourists, and there is a factory that deals only with the manufacture of such objects, which are then buried in the ground, only to be oxidised and covered with clay after some time and end up in some collection of curiosities on the other side of the Channel.^[60]

Like their French counterparts, German travellers seized upon the commercialization of the battlefield, catering largely to British tourists, as an opportunity to redress the perceived historical injustice. They sought to reassert Germany’s pivotal role in the battle, which they felt had been erased from British accounts, and to claim intellectual and moral superiority. German novelist Karl Müller (writing as Otfried Mylius), who visited the battlefield in the early 1860s, shared this sentiment, finding little to admire in the site’s commercialization.

You will probably go to Waterloo, too, in this four-horse express carriage; the fare to and fro is only 5 francs, and the coachman is a stout Englishman who also rents horses. You drive over a wide road and over a fat, fertile area. You are shown the stumps of what was once the forest of Soignies; you see La Belle Alliance and Hougoumont, the garden where the leg of the Marquis of Anglesea is buried, and the artificial hill surmounted by the statue of the Belgian lion, tail ominously tucked between its legs. You’ll hear a lot of tall tales, you’ll be offered some imitation relics for sale, you’ll be taught a confused epistle about the topographical position of the allied armies; You will buy a stupid travel guide full of outdated views, take an expensive but bad lunch in the inn, drive back to Brussels in a four-horse carriage, and finally, on your return home, tell your relatives and friends that you have seen the battlefield of Waterloo. I know well that my warning is not influential enough to dissuade the majority of tourists from such an attempt, but if I could advise someone sincerely and amicably, I would persuade him not to go to Waterloo, because it is a deception, a mockery, a swindle, a trap set for the stranger to take his money.^[61]

Of course, not all the relics offered for sale were fake. Books on the region point out that objects were occasionally brought up by ploughing. Bones had become scarce due to the exhumation of human and animal remains by the sugar industry from the 1840s onwards, but certain fortuitous circumstances led to the uncovering of pits that had escaped the farmers’ vigilance.^[62] A French journalist from Le Temps reported on 18 June 1893 after a visit to the village of Plancenoit the following:

Most of them have now been uprooted, the old trees that I once saw, still numerous, with their nodules that were like bullets. Still fresh on that April day, they lay out of the ground, their roots cut, their branches with their sap dried up. They had just been felled. The axe did not even make them bleed. The woodcutter had cut wedges out of the skeletons of these trees to split up for visitors: pieces of branches, like mummified stumps, with bullets from 1815 still embedded in them.

It was an old woman who was selling them, crouched against the wall of the orchard, with a small display of debris, the bric-a-brac of defeat, oxidised buttons with eagles gnawed with rust, half-broken pistols, bits of iron, bits of bones… Do not think that these debris are inauthentic. What would be the point? The whole ground is full of fragments that chance uncovers. Last year, in the vicinity of Plancenoit, the rain smashed the monument erected there to the Prussians who had been struck by the Count of Lobau’s artillery, and as the storm water disgorged from the burial mound, it swept skulls, tibias and fibulas into the torrent, a hideous jumble of macabre osteology…

The old peasant woman who was cutting up this debris was holding close to her, wrapped in a white handkerchief, I do not know what round object I asked to see.

• – Ah, this, sir, this is the best thing I have. Some English people wanted to buy it for a museum in England. But my husband did not want to sell it. I want a lot for it.
• But what is it?
• She unfolded the handkerchief and a skull appeared, very clean, a head with full jaws, very white teeth, the skull of a very young man – French, I imagine, studying the construction of the skull and the shape of the jaws – with, what was extraordinary – a bullet lodged in the bone, right in the right parietal and left there, as if set by the bones which it had exactly perforated without a break, filling the hole made in this head. And while I was examining the skull, the old woman was stubbornly watching my movements, as a jeweller might do when he sees a jewel in the hands of a buyer, repeating:
• Very expensive… My husband wants much for it!

Alas, poor Yorick! Alas, poor hero, whose skull, after three quarters of a century, had emerged from the earth to become an object of curiosity, a commodity, a trinket to be sold by a Walloon peasant whose husband had found it, pushed like Hamlet’s gravedigger, at the end of his spade. Where were those lips, poor devil, captain or soldier, that quivered with anger while those white teeth clenched in rage or bit the cartridge? Where was the voice that, passing in front of the man in the grey frock coat, had shouted seventy-eight years ago: ‘Long live the Emperor! We are going to die!’. So much youth, so much beauty no doubt, for the conformation of this skull was harmonious, superior. And this is why the stupid bullet, the ferocious bullet, the ironic death has turned this head of a valiant soldier into something curious and rare that is sold like a valuable sabre or an old cracked helmet.

‘She wants too much for her head’, said Mrs P., who was acting as my guide. ‘But if you go back through the Lion, I know a farmer who has two of them, two skulls, they don’t have any bullets in them, but he’ll give them to you cheaper’. Death on the cheap. Cheap glory!^[63]

In 1904 a German from Brussels decided to visit the inauguration of the L’Aigle blessé, the Wounded Eagle memorial, commemorating the last stand of the Old Guard squares. At the train station in Brussels, he was roped into taking a tour across the battlefield by a guide in the form of an elderly widow from Braine l’Alleud, who he soon gave the nickname of ‘Hyena’:

My hyena was very efficient. Whether or not I had come to see the new memorial, I was soon sitting between a little Englishwoman and her in a carriage that was to take us to the most remarkable points of the battlefield. I soon had in my hand several dozen postcards, a map of Waterloo, and many other printed papers, as well as some musket-balls, which I had obtained from the rich museum of the inn (…) Every inn here, of which there are a great many, has its museum; and in every one is the chair on which Wellington sat when he wrote his dispatches after the battle. There is also a lively trade in projectiles and uniform buttons. People smile about it. However, the only relic whose authenticity remained unquestionable to me was the horse that pulled our wagon. It had certainly seen the great day of 1815, if it was not already blind back then (…) Incidentally, when I speak of a carriage, that is a euphemism. We travelled in a completely springless thing on wheels. The vehicle rumbled and bumped along the road leading from Brussels to Paris towards the farmstead of Hougoumont (…) One room of the farmstead, where a simple-minded farmer keeps watch, is furnished as a museum. There, the hyena, who in the meantime has explained the positions of the enemy forces ad nauseam, finds some fitting words. Pointing to old uniforms and cannonballs, she says: these relics will not be sold, because they are real!^[64]

As late as 1906, L’Avenir du Luxembourg reported that a shop in Brussels used to sell: ‘authentic buttons’ of the battlefield as well as the sword of Ponsonby or five hundred of Marshal Ney’s spurs, ‘found near the path of Ohain’. The newspaper pragmatically concluded that ‘The English made up an incomparable clientele’.^[65] The much-criticised trade in forgeries was even compared to the trade in mummies and statuettes carried on by the Egyptians in Luxor.^[66]

The trade in Waterloo relics, both genuine and counterfeit, seemingly didn’t cease during the First World War as the flow of British tourists dried up. Now German occupational troops visited the battlefield:

As soon as you get off the steam railway, which runs from the Brussels Forest through the village of Waterloo to the vicinity of the lion monument, you are confronted by a row of restaurants whose wide-open doors are full of staff gesticulating and shouting at you. Just like at Italian holiday destinations, the competition is fierce. We offer our defiance and strive towards the Lion Mound. The same thing happens here. In addition to tea rooms and English beer, the local establishments at its foot each have a « museum » to offer as a lure. Men push their way through the beggars and slip advertising slips into our hands. Young girls with light-coloured blouses wave their welcome to the old Landsturm soldiers. Next door, in front of the cigar and souvenir shop, a man tells two visitors that there is still time to view his battlefield rarities before the next train leaves.^[67]

In 1915, another visitor, the German writer Hermann Ritter, also recorded that tourism on the battlefield was as healthy as before, only the clientele had changed. The local industry had adapted accordingly:

The chicken-ladder-like stone staircase that leads to the top of the monumental mound once erected by Walloon labourers and to the base of the enormous lion supplied at the time by the Cockrill company in Liège can no longer be climbed in one go, without pausing to catch my breath, as I was able to do 15 years ago. The scenery of the battlefield and the explanations of the very same man who had once guided me remained the same. I only notice a slight change in the traditional explanatory speech. The guide speaks less of the English than of the Germans, Belgians and Dutch in the English army, as well as of the decisive intervention of the Prussians in the rear at Papelotte and Plancenoit. Current events and considerations of business, because the memorial is naturally much frequented by German officers and soldiers. As far as business in general is concerned, the memorial guide is very satisfied with the present situation, but he is concerned about the years after the war and believes that Ypres and the surrounding area will be a tough competition for Waterloo. Admittedly, Waterloo has, if one may say so, special charms that cannot be surpassed by any other battlefield (…).^[68]

Following the Armistice, the market indeed didn’t rebound immediately. British tourists, the primary clientele of relic forgers and traders, indeed began flooding to war-torn Ypres and Flanders, favouring the new battlefield over the seemingly ancient Waterloo, which was ‘dating back to the Flood’.^[69] This apparent drop in visitors in the 1920s and early 1930s however was only temporary. The Second World War brought another change of visitor demography, but again the battlefield remained an attractive destination for German occupational forces in Belgium and France. Even today it is still Belgium’s second most important tourism site.^[70]

The situation today

« What do you want to do? », I’ve been shouted at. « Reveal the forgeries! » You’ll deal a terrible blow to the antiques trade. Without any profit. You will spread terror among all the previously trusting collectors. And what success will you achieve? None at all. The imitation satisfies a real desire. No matter how fierce the rebellion, ‘King Bibelot’^[71] reigns supreme, always and without restriction. The number of antiques must increase in the same proportion as the number of enthusiasts, and he deceives himself who wants to prevent naive men from buying their old rubbish from professional forgers. Just admit that beginners in collecting are made just as happy by a fake piece as by a genuine one: why do you want to destroy their illusions? If they are cheated, it’s their fault. If you don’t want to be cheated, you can read books, study in museums,visit private collections, consult proven experts. There is also another danger. By drawing the attention of the deceived, you are at the same time teaching the deceivers, who will learn from you how to avoid their mistakes and how to perfect their manipulations. In this way, you will not eradicate this cancer of counterfeiting, this true prostitution of art, but on the contrary, you will cause trouble and in the end only increase the number of your enemies. (…) Forgers deserve no protection. They are a constant danger to honest dealers and inexperienced enthusiasts. The proliferation of fakes, like the spread of a parasitic plant, is bound to gradually suffocate the sense of authenticity. It is time to put a stop to this. It is necessary for newcomers to learn to mistrust their over-enthusiasm and to recognise the pitfalls that their predecessors more or less fell into when they were beginners themselves. Experience in this field, as everywhere else, is given only to those who have gone through a school, and it is then useful work to show beginners that it is no disgrace to be deceived, since everyone has been so at one time or another. There is no famous collection which, despite the knowledge and care of the conservators, does not possess notoriously false pieces (…) those who have been deceived are therefore in good company.[72]

The fascination for the Battle of Waterloo continues to drive a thriving market for relics, fuelled by collectors’ yearning to possess a tangible connection to this historic event. The emotional and psychological appeal of owning a piece of the past often overrides critical scrutiny, leading to a form of ‘suspension of disbelief’ where the desire for authenticity overshadows concerns about provenance. The following analysis will explore the intricacies of this market, examining the motivations of collectors, the methods of forgers, and the ethical complexities of trading in manufactured memories.

In the course of this research, the authors have examined several hundred objects housed in private and public collections across the globe. The primary objectives were twofold: to identify original forgeries, or items falsely presented as battlefield relics in the past, and to understand the methods and operations of contemporary forgers, particularly their ability to fabricate provenance.

One illustrative example of this emerged from our research assistant’s interaction with a prominent Belgian collector. Widely known as an ‘expert’ on the subject, this individual owns a collection of purported Waterloo relics, including edged weapons, buttons, and shako plates, many of which have been featured in specialist publications and other media. However, despite this public exposure, there is a surprising lack of concrete evidence to support their claimed provenance. The collector relies heavily on verbal provenance, or stories passed down from previous owners, without any supporting verifiable documentation. Such verbal accounts, without corroborating evidence, hold little value in establishing authenticity.

This lack of hard provenance is the basis for a concerning change in the way modern forgers work: they focus on fabricating provenance rather than the objects themselves. Readily available and unremarkable items are upgraded with deceptive labels, engravings, and other fabricated historical markers to artificially inflate their value. The emphasis on creating a convincing backstory underscores the critical importance of provenance research in the field of relic authentication. The examples presented in this paper offer a glimpse into the pervasive issue of forged relics associated with the Waterloo battlefield. A more comprehensive exploration of the contemporary landscape of battlefield relic and provenance forgery, with detailed case studies and analysis, will be presented in a forthcoming publication.

Distinguishing genuine artefacts from forgeries remains a significant challenge for both private collectors and institutions. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that forgeries have existed for well over 150 years. Relics created and sold so long ago can exhibit signs of age and wear (patina) that lend them an air of authenticity and, even worse, may have passed through multiple collections and auctions, acquiring a seemingly credible provenance that adds to their perceived legitimacy.

Cast eagles and Cotton’s cursed legacy

Several types of small, crudely cast brass eagle, one of which is today often described as a cartridge pouch badge of Napoleon’s Young Guard, quite possibly represent examples of those forgeries which were observed by the French writer Léon Gozlan and other period visitors in the middle of the 19th century and beyond. The fact that today we seem to find these types mainly in British collections seems to underline the notion that visitors from across the Channel, in their eagerness to acquire tangible connections to their glorious past, were not only less discerning than Gozlan, but indeed the main customers of the relic trade. The badges themselves are a complete fabrication since no such insignia existed in the French Army. They appear in polished metal, but more often patinated, sometimes with the remains of hardened soil sticking to them. What makes them interesting for the present article, and indeed collectable in their own right, is the fact that we can trace their origins back to the 19th century, where some of them were obtained on the battlefield of Waterloo^[73]. Surprisingly similar eagles, both in material, style and size, can be found mounted to mass produced, late 19th century busts of Napoleon.^[74] The misidentification of these fantasy items as genuine relics has even permeated reference literature^[75], highlighting the insidious nature of manufactured narratives and their potential to distort historical understanding. The proliferation of such forgeries underscores the challenges of preserving the integrity of historical narratives in the face of commercial exploitation and the enduring allure of battlefield souvenirs.

A central pillar of the modern forger is the creation of false provenance. To illustrate this the authors focussed their attention on a particular range of objects purportedly originating from the Battle of Waterloo and linked to the Cotton Collection. For clarity we will call the unidentified producer, or the producers, of these objects the ‘Cotton Forger’. These objects, bearing elaborate backstories and multiple layers of invented provenance, highlight the techniques employed by forgers to deceive gullible collectors. There are a significant number of ‘Cotton Forger’ relics on the market, ranging from framed collections of smaller objects to modified swords and pistols and they all clearly originate from the same source. The forger’s modus operandi involved « upgrading » these items with fabricated narratives and labels, in an effort to significantly enhance their perceived value and importance. The items’ supposed provenance often includes a dual lineage, claiming prior ownership by collectors in both Britain and France following the 1909 Cotton Collection auction. Regardless of their alleged origins, these objects seem to invariably trace back to the former Waterloo Museum in Broadstairs in Kent, adding a third layer of provenance. A large number of objects of the type was sold via a now defunct battlefield relic dealer’s website^[76] from about 2012 onwards. The owner of the website claimed that all of the objects were obtained from the Waterloo Museum in Broadstairs: ‘(…) when that museum closed in 1999 some of the items were placed in storage and eventually we bought the remains of the entire collection.’.^[77] Helmets, armour and weapons with the same ‘provenance’ enter the market frequently up to today.^[78]

When examined collectively^[79], the similarities in the techniques and materials used to create these provenanced relics become undeniable. It is likely that the forger capitalised on the limitations of research and communication in the pre-internet era. The absence of readily available information and the inability to quickly compare items across collections facilitated the deception. The forger exploited the « power of wanting to believe, » preying on the strong desire among collectors to own a piece of history.

The objects made by the Cotton Forger use a combination of strategies to deceive, all of which have and are deployed in a number of forms by forgers of all ages and all kinds of objects.

• Framed and sealed Collections: Antique picture frames turned into object frames, sealed with old or distressed materials. These often include a mix of genuine period items, such as buttons, alongside aged reproductions and fantasy pieces like shako plates and badges. The inclusion of authentic elements lends an air of credibility to the entire collection.
• Modified Weapons: Original swords and pistols are upgraded with plaques, engraved inscriptions, or other alterations to link them to specific individuals from the Battle of Waterloo. The forger may have relied on the assumption that such modifications would be difficult to verify.
• Labels and Documentation: The forger created elaborate labels and accompanying documentation to support the fabricated provenance claims. These may include references to previous owners, auction records, or even expert opinions.

The hand-written cardboard labels illustrated below are just some samples of those which are found attached to weapons and artefacts made and ‘tuned’ by the Cotton Forger. Written in ink, and sometimes in what seems to be indelible pencil, they are designed to appear as the ‘original’ labels of the Cotton Collection, signed by Edward Cotton himself.

Antique picture frames converted into object frames, housing mostly metal relics of the battle and equally captioned by Cotton himself, seem to have been another popular product of the Cotton forger and regularly turn up on the market. They are often sealed and decorated with glued-on cut-outs of the Cotton Auction catalogue, title pages of his book or newspaper adverts.^[80]

The vast majority of objects framed by the Cotton Forger are questionable at best. A mix of fantasy items and aged reproductions prevails. A forensic examination of the labels and signatures was commissioned for this article and realised by Pierre Hanson, a sworn expert in handwriting comparison for the Belgian Federal Police. His examination clearly shows that the various labels and notes presented above and below were not written by Edward Cotton^[81].

A second characteristic of the objects from the Cotton Forger’s workshop is the invention of secondary provenance. Here his creativity knew no bounds. There are relics once owned by Henry Weymouth, a gentleman collector, who travelled Waterloo in 1857 and 1860, who brought back a number of relics he found on the battlefield, including cap badges, shako and cartridge pouch plates and buttons. Some ‘Henry Weymouth’-objects seen by one of the authors referenced a further layer of provenance in form of added labels claiming that the frame had been given by Weymouth to the United Services Museum in London, followed by temporary ownership by the ‘Bishop collection’ and a later exhibition at the Strand in London in 1922. Numerous objects with a Henry Weymouth provenance were offered online from 2012 on and the website states that they had originally been acquired by the owner of the Waterloo Museum in Broadstairs in 1974^[82]. Again, the collections are mounted in antique frames and are sealed with old/distressed materials in a way that would cause a serious collector believing to own the ‘real thing’, to shy away from opening them for conservatory reasons.

Other, often additional, labels attached to products of the Cotton Forger proclaim ownership by a French ‘Sully Collection’ in Fontainebleau. Cut from what appears to be picture mount-boards they state alleged ownership and purchase at the Cotton Museum auction in 1909 in machine-typed letters. The range of objects thus ‘provenanced’ often includes more substantial pieces like swords, helmets, shakos and armour (cuirasses). Inside those objects we often find more detailed, additional information on past owners on glued-in, machine-typed pieces of paper. Other, similar labels can be found attributing ownership to other ‘old collections’. One object (a heavily ‘doctored’ cavalry helmet of the Dragons de l’Impératrice de la Garde Impériale) seen by one of the authors, made a veiled attribution of ownership to the French academic painter and military artist Édouard Detaille (1848-1912). The said collection did exist and was a cornerstone of the Musée de l’Armée in Paris, but there is simply no convincing paperwork to prove the provenance.

Several labels found inside a questionable French infantry shako from the ‘Sully Collection’, recently sold at auction^[83] for £6200, go a step further, and present us not only with the entire military vitae of some veteran Monsieur Berthon, allegedly a former soldier of the 37e Régiment d’ Infanterie de Ligne and owner of the ‘historic’ headgear, but also with the reference that the shako has been on exhibition in 1900 as exhibit No. 780 on ‘l’Exposition retrospectine [sic]’. It also states that the Shako originates from the ‘sale of Monsieur Rouffet’s collection’. The biographical information of the French soldier is not only presented in machine-typed form, but also in ink in what appears to be, again, ‘the hand of Edward Cotton’.

Even if one ignores the obvious flaws of the shako itself, it is surprising that such an assembly of fantastic claims and lies can still pass scrutiny today. The handwriting inside is that found on other objects of the Cotton Forger, not that of Edward Cotton. The reference to a Monsieur Rouffet^[84] could be another attempt to somehow tie the shako to the collection of a known French artist like Detaille (see above). The surviving French muster rolls know only one Monsieur Berthon in the 37^th Regiment of the Line, an Antoine Berthon, who was conscripted in the year XI (1802/1803) of the Republic and discharged home in 1806.^[85] The exhibition the Cotton Forger most likely refers to is the Exposition Rétrospective de l’Art Décoratif Français which was part of the events of the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris. This was an exhibition of objets d’art, of sculptures, antique furniture, paintings etc., not of French infantry equipment of the Napoleonic Wars. As such the actual exhibit No. 780 was one in a collection of Gallo-Roman vases ‘from the collection of M. Léon Morel from Rheims.’^[86]

As mentioned before, the machine-typed labels inside the shako are a common feature on many of the Cotton Forger’s works. One is that of the ‘Sully Collection Fontainebleau’, the other offers a history of the shako and is written in bad French. While the Cotton Forger’s creativity and craftsmanship are undeniable, his work is let down by shoddy research and a lack of historical understanding. This becomes apparent if one looks at the numerals he uses on his type-written works. Keyboards of the period usually did not have an entire set of numerals and lacked a dedicated key for a 1. In the 19th up to the middle of the 20th century, a writer would have used a lower-case l.^[87] A typical error of a ‘modern’ user of a vintage typewriter, is to use the upper-case character I (like a roman numeral) instead, which is exactly what the Cotton-Forger is doing (I78 or I8I5). Even though there is a method to place the French accents with a machine, the forger places them afterwards by hand. While this was sometimes done in the period, the Cotton Forgers use of French makes it quite obvious that he was not a native French speaker.

A curious mind might wonder: who typed these labels? The Cotton Museum Collection owners before the 1909 auction? If so, why did they write in French? And if they did not, why did Jean Sully seemingly use the same typewriter for his own labels? Note that on other labels of the Sully collection the writer also confuses his numerals when he types I909 instead of l909 (see image above). If that means that « Sully from Fontainebleau » really typed everything, why does another lot from the same auction, a British 1796-pattern cavalry sword, not from the Sully collection, have an English-language label typed with the same typewriter, the same mistakes, and the same aged paper?

Finally, numerous larger objects from the Cotton-Forger’s workshop exhibit attached metal plaques (examples provided above). These plaques predominantly attempt to associate the objects with the 1909 Cotton’s Waterloo Museum auction, though some bear the names of individuals purported to have carried or used the respective historical items in battle. The plaques, found in various styles and states of distress, bear a striking resemblance to contemporary trophy plaques readily available for purchase. While it was already evident that these plaques were affixed to low-quality and altered items in an attempt to deceive, the authors were understandably intrigued when their research led them to a collection of unmounted plaques originating from the Cotton Forger’s workshop, which had recently and inexplicably surfaced on the open market (image below).

The examples detailed in this article represent merely the tip of the iceberg, selected to illustrate not only the prolific and characteristic output of the Cotton Forger but also the methods employed by forgers to fabricate and manipulate provenance, falsely linking objects to the battle of Waterloo in order to inflate their value and/or historical importance.

A darker side of forgery

Far more disturbingly, a recent trend, mirroring practices of the 19th century, involves the trade of human bones claimed to have been found on the battlefield of Waterloo. In 2022, one of this article’s authors was contacted by a concerned individual in Brussels who had purchased a skull from a curiosity shop near the Petit Sablon market. The seller had deceitfully presented the human remains as originating from an excavation on the Waterloo battlefield. The buyer, distressed by this unethical practice, sought a proper burial for the remains and reached out to us for assistance.

The skull, fragmented and mounted in an aged wooden frame, bears the marks of corrosive treatment and recent handling. Entrusted to anthropologist Mathilde Daumas of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, the remains exhibit traces of an electric saw and biro markings along its sides. Additionally, the adhesive used to secure the skull to the frame is modern, casting significant doubt on the seller’s claims. More alarmingly, the skull appears to belong to an individual of sub-Saharan origin, a finding confirmed by Aurélien Partoune, forensic pathologist at the Université de Liège. This not only renders any connection to the battle of Waterloo implausible but also raises grave concerns about potential grave robbing. This case underscores the substantial impact of the forgery market and its numerous victims.

The archaeological perspective

From an archaeological point of view, battlefields are highly problematic sites. This has been known for a long time^[88]. After all, a large proportion of the material found in the soil lies in the uppermost layer of earth, which is usually disturbed by agriculture and other factors, and not, as on other types of archaeological sites such as settlements or burial grounds, in more or less undisturbed features that lie deeper in the ground. Accordingly, every battlefield is inevitably ‘contaminated’ (if that is what you want to call it) with a variable mass of metal objects, usually of civilian origin, which came into the ground there before or after the corresponding war event, for example through loss, waste and other means: buttons, lead balls, buckles, coins and so on.

Therefore, the central challenge is to separate objects of civilian origin from the actual battle relics in all the finds recovered from the disturbed top layer of soil. The further one goes back in time, the greater the problem becomes. This is because militaria that can be clearly identified by shape and / or inscription (buttons) did not appear on a large scale in Europe until the later 18th century, while original items (uniforms, cartridge pouches, gaiters and so on) of unambiguous provenance that do not originate from archaeological finds become increasingly rare in collections the older they are, until they are practically non-existent from the 16th century backwards. And even after the large-scale standardisation of the round lead balls for firearms of the 18th century, it can be problematic to assign such relics with certainty, for example when two armies involved in a battle used similar calibres. And of course, on all battlefields we have to accept that some bullets will be relics of civilian hunting – though the number of these will usually be very small compared to the number of those usually fired or lost during the respective fighting. In general less relevant in all of this is another aspect: the problem of the material legacy of re-enactment events, which, as we know, only began to be common on a larger scale in Europe in the third quarter of the 20th century. This is because objects such as buttons, buckles and other small metal artefacts can usually be identified quite reliably as modern due to their design and condition^[89]. Fortunately, it is generally the situation in Europe that in battlefield archaeology projects the problems outlined above can be avoided with a methodologically sound, critical approach by focusing on the safe relics and calling uncertain finds what they are: likely not battle-related.

The situation is different at Waterloo. As already described in detail, shortly after the end of the battle a very extensive trade in counterfeit battle relics (bullets, buttons, shako fittings and other militaria) developed, which continued for at least several decades. From an archaeological point of view, this situation is exacerbated by the fact that forged objects were evidently buried in large quantities in an unknown number of places directly on the historical battlefield. This was done by contemporaries so that after a relatively short period of storage these fake objects would develop the patina needed to convince critical potential buyers of their authenticity. This also made it possible, if opportune, to dig them up again in front of potential customers (= tourists) as part of a performance.

The conclusions that must inevitably be drawn from the above findings with regard to the archaeology of the Waterloo battlefield are somewhat frustrating. As far as we know today, most, if not all, other European^[90] battlefields of this and probably other periods did not see a similar degree of tourist trade in forged battle relics^[91]. Consequently, artefacts found there (both ancient and modern) can be identified as genuine and attributed to the respective event with far less hesitation. For Waterloo, however, this basic presumption of innocence with regard to material taken from the ground can definitely no longer apply. Any future battlefield archaeological investigation, but also any processing of material from older or more recent archaeological investigations or collections, must inevitably examine far more critically than previously assumed whether the objects presented are actually remains of the great battle of 1815. Or whether they are in fact products of the 19th century souvenir industry that were first buried and then, for whatever reason, never recovered by the respective intermediaries.

For Waterloo in particular, in order to answer the question of what is ‘genuine’ and what is not, not only studies that present undoubtedly genuine relics are of essential importance, but all the more so those that identify and describe reproductions. For only on such a basis can it be determined in the field whether a find really already existed in June 1815, or whether it was reproduced from existing originals as an attractive souvenir or even invented from scratch sometime afterwards.

At this point, the problem of French uniform buttons, especially for Waterloo, should be mentioned. If the relevant production facilities from the time of the First French Empire, which certainly still had the means to do so, had continued to produce these buttons after 1815, it would simply be impossible to distinguish between original and reproduction. Only newly produced moulds with differences in decoration and eyelet, for example, would make it possible to distinguish the new from the old. However, as with other militaria of the period, there is a lack of well-founded overview studies on this. Until such studies are available, the following should therefore apply in general to Waterloo militaria finds, however beautiful and indeed genuine they may appear: caveat emptor!

On the other hand, there is the documented problem of later cast lead balls, which are likely to be indistinguishable from the originals if the dimensions and production method (use of moulds with the correct dimensions, pinching off the casting necks with pliers) are correct. As frustrating as this realisation is, it only applies to pieces that have not been fired. Any ball with traces of loading, firing and/or impact, with the correct measurements and weights, that is scientifically documented and recovered from the soil of this battlefield is very likely to be genuine, even at Waterloo^[92]. For financial reasons alone (black powder!), it can hardly be assumed that fake bullets would have been fired to create the corresponding traces and deformations. Last but not least, the supply of genuine balls, with at least many hundreds of thousands fired and lost during the battle, was certainly far greater than that of pieces such as buttons and, even more so, the rarer larger metal parts of uniforms and equipment.

Less problematic – at the moment at least – is the phenomenon of uniform and equipment items, primarily buttons, that were taken to the historic battlefield of Waterloo after 1815 by other means, particularly in the course of re-enactment events. According to the database of finds of Waterloo Uncovered, which is available online, the ongoing investigations have evidently unearthed quite a number of such specimens^[93]. Fortunately, these recently reproduced pieces generally look very different from the originals in terms of design and state of preservation and can therefore be clearly identified as new productions. But of course, this is only the case at the moment. In 50 or 100 years from now, we might have a different situation, because the more fragmented or corroded a find is, the more complex its exact identification and dating will be. But that is a long way off.

Here we need to mention the fact that uniform buttons from French units that were not present at the battle of 1815 appear in prospections at Waterloo can be explained to a certain extent – if they are perfectly genuine pieces, and only then – by something other than the souvenir trade. On the one hand, as has been known for a long time^[94], Napoleon’s army was formed under partly chaotic and generally hectic circumstances following his unexpected return. In addition to those actively serving, fresh recruits and veterans also rushed to his flags. Those who were not already equipped were certainly simply dressed in what was available. However, many ‘old hands’ undoubtedly brought their old uniforms with them and there were probably still stocks in the depots and at manufacturers. The re-equipping of the army after its comprehensive Bourbon reorganisation from May 1814, which was accompanied by a renumbering of the regiments, was probably not yet complete when Napoleon returned on 1 March 1815. There is no doubt that many men on the French side at Waterloo wore metal uniform components with inscriptions from units that were actually inactive, disbanded or simply not present in the battle. Furthermore, with regard to the uniform buttons of ‘false’ units, one can think of souvenirs from Napoleon’s campaigns that soldiers brought with them to this battle (see also below), which were then lost there. But even with this aspect, it is of course just as possible that after June 1815, manufacturers also produced new buttons for such units using existing old moulds, as mentioned above, and then sold them as souvenirs after Waterloo. The average tourist in the first half of the 19th century, among whom British and other foreigners evidently predominated, was unlikely to have known whether a particular French regiment was actually present in 1815. And in case of doubt, the vendor could always use the aforementioned argument of the chaotic circumstances of the 100 days to convince potential victims who were too critical.

For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that the phenomenon of the presence of ‘unfitting’ militaria is not limited to Waterloo, although this is probably for different reasons. Reference should be made here to the archaeological investigations on the battlefield of Wagram (Austria 1809). There, uniform buttons were recovered from deposits that could undoubtedly be attributed to the battle – but these buttons belonged to units not present at the said action. So they were very probably contemporary private trophies or mementos of soldiers from earlier battles or campaigns^[95]. However, this aspect of early 19th century military culture has so far been too poorly researched across Europe to allow any further conclusions to be drawn about such finds from other sites like Waterloo.

It should also be noted that, from an archaeological point of view, there is still a real elephant in the (historical) room at Waterloo: it is the so-called Lion’s Mound, which is over 40 metres high. In order to erect this largest monument on the battlefield, significant parts of the centre of the main Allied battle line were removed from 1824 to 1826, most obviously between the current location of the monument and the Chaussee de Charleroi to the east. A study estimates that 287,500 m3 of soil were removed and that the ground was lowered by up to several metres^[96]. It goes without saying that relics of the battle were also recovered (and sold) during this work^[97]. From an archaeological point of view, the affected areas have to be considered practically ‘dead’ today, at least with regard to prospections in the uppermost layer of earth. And whether deeper features (burials) still exist there, at least in the form of traces of them deeper in the earth, is at least doubtful. Corresponding studies on this problem are, as far as is known, still pending.

At this point, it is important to briefly mention another fact: according to contemporary reports, many of the dead soldiers of Waterloo were by no means buried sufficiently deep, but probably only shallowly. One text states that the uppermost bodies were only about a spade’s depth below the surface: ‘Owing to the dry weather, the ground cracks or opens, and as the bodies of the men buried are not above a foot below the surface, they may still be seen in many places.’^[98] Elsewhere it is reported that the earth above graves cracked even at low pressure, and that some corpses were only insufficiently covered with earth: ‘The earth told in very visible terms what occasioned its elasticity; upon forcing a stick down and turning up a clod, human bodies in an offensive state of decay immediately presented themselves. I found four Belgian peasants commenting upon one figure which was scarcely interred, and on walking under the outer wall of La Haye Sainte a hole was tenanted by myriads of maggots feasting upon a corpse.’^[99] This undoubtedly led to the fact that even in places where no earth was removed and no bones were taken for commercial reasons^[100], many graves that were not deep enough were completely or partially destroyed by intensive farming.

In conclusion, it can be stated that the already known complicated archaeological situation on the battlefield at Waterloo receives a further serious blow by the new findings. As stated above, it is now urgently necessary to apply even stricter standards than before when identifying genuine metal militaria from old and new prospections and collections from this world-historically significant site. Further research on the subject of fake battle relics produced for the 19th century tourist market is an absolute necessity in order to create a reliable basis for future material studies.

Conclusions

The Wellington tree was not the only first casualty of tourism and the relic trade at Waterloo. Official documents, recently discovered by the authors, reveal a grim reality: mass graves were exploited for profit, with objects looted from fallen soldiers and horses on a large scale less than a year after the battle, decades before the bones themselves fell victim to industrial exploitation.

The romanticised image of Waterloo and its proximity to major European capitals fuelled a growing influx of visitors, which did not entirely die down even during the First World War. While early tourists could find genuine artefacts on the battlefield, high demand quickly depleted this source. Locals responded by creating fakes, and despite warnings, tourists, particularly British ones, continued to buy bullets, buttons, and shrapnel in droves, from local vendors and museums. The sheer volume of these objects aroused suspicion, with rumours circulating about clandestine ‘relic’ factories.

The trade in forged relics at Waterloo was characterised by the blatant crudeness of the objects and the transparent sales tactics employed, which were widely recognized and even condemned at the time. Despite this, numerous tourists, predominantly British visitors seeking to connect with their nation’s military triumphs, fell victim to these deceptive practices. The perceived gullibility of the British was met with a mix of irony and satisfaction by visitors from other nations, particularly the French, who saw it as a form of symbolic revenge for their defeat, and German-speaking visitors, who resented the downplaying of their armies’ crucial role in the battle.

After the First World War, the market for fake Waterloo relics faced competition from the touristic appeal of Ypres battlefields. Although less discussed in archives and the press, the trade in Waterloo forgeries persisted. Even today, scams abound, often involving the reproduction of objects and fabricating connections to historical events or figures. Napoleonic-era objects, particularly those linked to Waterloo, remain highly sought-after, even leading to morally unacceptable practices like grave robbing or the mishandling of unrelated human remains.

Still every year numerous supposed relics of the battle of Waterloo are sold by dealers and in auction houses. Historically, auctioneers have sought refuge under the doctrine of caveat emptor, often incorporating disclaimers regarding catalogue descriptions into their terms and conditions. However, established case law demonstrates that auctioneers can indeed be held accountable for inaccurate or misleading descriptions. While many auctioneers strive for accuracy, the sophistication of some forgeries, particularly in specialised areas like forged provenance, can challenge even the most diligent efforts. Despite employing expert consultation and rigorous authentication processes, instances of uncertainty persist, with items remaining contentious even amongst specialists. In such circumstances, a degree of shared responsibility between auctioneer and buyer appears justifiable. Serious dealers in historical artefacts will generally agree that explicit declarations and critical examination of nature, origin, and provenance are not only essential but expected.

The enduring fascination with major military historical events, fuelled in part by modern media portrayals, continues to drive a market for battlefield relics. The desire to own a tangible piece of these often romanticised and « heroic » events can lead to misconceptions and perpetuate a market rife with deception and exploitation. The allure of possessing an authentic relic, even if subconsciously aware of its potential inauthenticity, remains strong. As Paul Eudel astutely observed in 1884, « The imitation satisfies a real desire », highlighting the enduring human need to connect with the past, even through manufactured objects. The persistence of this desire ensures the continued trade in fake relics, blurring the lines between historical authenticity and manufactured narratives.

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^[1] Léon GOZLAN, « Waterloo: Trente-quatre ans après la bataille », in Revue des Deux Mondes (Paris, August 1849), 649.

^[2] The authors would like to thank the following individuals: Bernard Burton, Sarah Ashbridge, Megan Llewellyn-Brown, Giles MacDonogh, Paul Laidlaw, Anthony Cribb, T.S. Allen, Alison Kempson, Wouter Lambrechts, Guilin Lambert, Elliot Worral and Achille Verschoren, Megan Llewellyn-Brown and Mr. T. S. Allen.

^[3] Robert JONES, Battle of Gettysburg – The Relics, Artifacts & Souvenirs, (USA: LuLu, 2009), 109 and Mat MCLACHLAN, Walking with the ANZACS: The authoritative guide to the Australian Battlefields of the Western Front, (Australia: Hachette, 2007) (online version consulted on 18 August 2023).

^[4] Gareth GLOVER, Waterloo: Myth and Reality (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2014), 142.

^[5] Teresa BARNETTE, Sacred Relics: Pieces of the Past in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 80.

^[6] The period of relative peace was of course not without various complex challenges, especially in France, as argued by Alan FORREST, Great battles: Waterloo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 74-75.

^[7] A point analysed by Luke REYNOLDS, Who owned Waterloo: Battle, Memory, & Myth in British History, 1815-1852 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).

^[8] ‘To commemorate the fortuitous encounter, the battle received on our part the name of ‘Belle-Alliance’, whereas the English, less poetical but more egotistical than we, named it Waterloo, after the headquarters of Wellington before the battle, thus indicating that they claimed the honour of the day for themselves.’ Ludwig VON REICHE, Memoiren des königlich preußischen Generals der Infanterie Ludwig von Reiche, herausgegeben von seinem Neffen Louis von Weltzien, Vol. 2 1814-1855 (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1857), 218.

^[9] A practice still very much alive today, as seen for example during the unveiling of a new memorial at Hougoumont. BBC, « Battle of Waterloo memorial unveiled by Prince Charles », 17 June 2015. Available online at https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-33160368 (consulted 2 September 2024).

^[10] Percy LINDLEY, The Great Eastern Railway Company’s Tourist-guide to the Continent (London: Great Eastern Railway, 1880), 37.

^[11] Dean MACCANNELL, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1976), 43-45.

^[12] A. V. SEATON, « War and Thanatourism: Waterloo 1815-1914 », in Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 26, n°. 1 (1999), 130-158.

^[13] Luke REYNOLDS, op. cit., 7.

^[14] A good overview of the German commemoration of the battle in: Kevin PRYOR, The Mobilisation of Memory: The Battle of Waterloo in German and British Memory 1815-1915 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, Master Thesis, 2010).

^[15] J. A. GOEVERNEUR (dir.), De huisvriend: gemengde lectuur voor burgers in stad en land (Groningen: CM van Bolhuis Hoitsema, 1863), 11-12.

^[16] Alexandre Cavalié MERCER, Journal de la campagne de Waterloo (Paris: Éditions du grenadier, 2007), 110-112, 114-115.

^[17] An interesting observation, which illustrates how objects lying on the surface might have ended up elsewhere.

^[18] Georg Wilhelm Heinrich HÄRING (as Willibald Alexis), Als Kriegsfreiwilliger in Frankreich 1815 (Berlin: Reclam, Berlin, 1915), 118.

^[19] Provincial Government of Brabant, General Archives of the Kingdom of Belgium (Anderlecht), I66, n° 3983.

^[20] The fact that graves were already disturbed for the sake of ‘relic hunting’ so shortly after the battle itself, is highly important when looking at the later relic trade and to manage expectations of modern conflict archaeology.

^[21] Register of letters sent and received by the Mayor of Braine-l’Alleud, State Archives of Belgium, Louvain-La-Neuve, Letter of 15 October 1818 to the commissaire d’arrondissement.

^[22] Yves VANDER CRUYSEN, Waterloo démythifié (Paris: Éditions Jourdan, 2014), 203-206.

^[23] Wilhelm ACHAT, Blätter für Scherz und Ernst, n° 104, 29 December 1839, 2-3.

^[24] ‘The English now seem to have returned from their rage to buy antiquities or other curious objects at high prices, and nowadays they would probably no longer spend gold for a quantity of nails, which a clever miller of Waterloo sold to all of them for the nail on which Napoleon hung his hat on the day of the battle, any more than they would now buy whole bales of feathers for those with which Napoleon is said to have signed the abdication of Fontainebleau.’ Gazette de France, n° 263, 20 September 1827, 4.

^[25] ‘Tell them that Napoleon or Wellington entered your house during the battle and sat down on this chair.’ Not long afterwards, an English tourist entered the inn, and when he asked about relics, he was told the story of the chair. The chair was bought for an incredible price. The next visitor was told that Wellington had had a drink there, and the Wellington tankard was also sold. The third arrival gazed in breathless amazement at the nail on which Bonaparte’s hat had hung; the fourth bought the doorposts between which he had entered; and the fifth was the delighted purchaser of the floor on which he had once walked. According to the latest news, the lucky innkeeper no longer has a roof over his head and is sitting on a sack of gold in the corner in a deep pit he had made to sell the earth on which the house had stood.’ Stadt und Landbote, n° 18, 2 December 1865, 3.

^[26] Vers l’Avenir, 28 April 1933.

^[27] Yves VANDER CRUYSEN, op. cit., 185.

^[28] Lollands Falsters Stifts Kongelig priviligerede Adresse-Contoirs Efterretninger, som forsendes med Ride-Posten, n° 85, Copenhagen, 1 November 1816, 2.

^[29] Damien ZANONE, « La chose de Waterloo »: Une bataille en littérature (Leyden: Brill, 2014), 184.

^[30] James SIMPSON, A visit to Flanders in July 1815, being chiefly an account of the field of Waterloo with a short sketch of Antwerp and Brussels, at the time occupied by the wounded of both armies (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1816), 64.

^[31] Auguste Marseille BARTHÉLEMY and Joseph MÉRY, Napoléon en Égypte: Waterloo et le fils de l’homme (Paris: Ernest Bourdin, 1842), 269-270.

^[32] Ibid, 269-270.

^[33] Anna THOROLD, Letters from Brussels, in the summer of 1835 (London: Longman, 1835), 279.

^[34] Auguste HOCK, Liège sous le régime hollandais, 1820 à 1830 (Liège: H. Vaillant, 1891), 47. Another reference to Liège manufactures can be found in L’Illustration: journal universel, vol. 19 (1852), 410.

^[35] The available records within the State Archives of Belgium in Liège offer limited insights into the operations of small-scale foundries during the relevant period.

^[36] Phileas Taylor BARNUM, The life of P.T. Barnum (New York: Cosino, 2006), 273, cited in Jolien GIJBELS, « Oog in oog met het slagveld van Waterloo », in De Moderne tijd, n° 40 (2016), 242.

^[37] Le petit bleu du matin, 17 June 1894.

^[38] Revue des deux mondes, 1849, 651.

^[39] Jolien GIJBELS, « Oog in oog met het slagveld van Waterloo », 242.

^[40] Félix PYAT, Une tournée en Flandres (Paris: Revue de Paris, 1836), 263.

^[41] Léon GOZLAN, De neuf heures à minuit (Paris: Victor Lecou, 1852),243.

^[42] L’Illustration : Journal universel, vol. 9, 1848, 255.

^[43] Jean-Philippe TONDEUR, Le sergent Cotton: Sa collection & l’histoire du Musée (Brussels: La Belle-Alliance, 2021), 11.

^[44] Jolien GIJBELS, Op. cit., 243.

^[45] Register of letters sent and received by the Mayor of Braine-l’Alleud, State Archives of Belgium, Louvain-La-Neuve, letter of 3 February 1840.

^[46] Le Messager de Gand, 4 August 1852.

^[47] Le journal de Charleroi, 6 September 1909.

^[48] Jean-Philippe TONDEUR, Op.cit., 103.

^[49] Ibid., 222.

^[50] Max HOCHDORF, Berliner Tageblatt und Handels-Zeitung, Morgen-Ausgabe, 31 August 1909, 2.

^[51] Karl BAEDEKER, Belgique et Hollande : manuel du voyageur (Koblenz: K. Baedeker, 1862), 87.

^[52] A. DU PAYS, Itinéraire descriptif, historique, artistique et industriel de la Belgique (Paris: Hachette, 1863), 96.

^[53] Aller Zeitung, Nr. 250, 20 October 1855, 3

^[54] ‘For a state to adopt such an attitude over battlefield relics, which here appears to have been enacted into policy, at least in a small part, was certainly ahead of its time, and even now the status of relics from sites such as battlefields is a thorny issue.’ in Tony POLLARD, « I have been Eighteen times since that awful day.” the Ker papers, relic collecting, and the origins of battlefield tourism at Waterloo », in Journal of Conflict Archaeology, n° 18(1) (2023), 27.

^[55] L’Oracle, 28 June 1815, 2

^[56] Adolphe JOANNE, Guide du voyageur en Europe (Paris: Hachette, 1867), 270.

^[57] Louis MONTALANT, Effusions poétiques (Versailles: Aubert, 1870),283.

^[58] Ibid, 288.

^[59] La Petite Presse, 27 February 1877.

^[60] Neues Frankfurter Museum, n° 34, 1862, 266-267.

^[61] Otfrid MYLIUS, Erheiterungen, (Stuttgart, 1865), 773-778.

^[62] Bernard WILKIN, Robin SCHÄFER and Tony POLLARD, « The real fate of the Waterloo fallen », in Journal of Belgian History, LIII (4) (2023), December 2023, 8-30.

^[63] Le Temps, 18 June 1893.

^[64] Frankfurter Zeitung und Handelsblatt, N° 162, 12 June 1904, 1.

^[65] L’Avenir du Luxembourg, 5 February 1906.

^[66] Le Matin, 25 August 1907.

^[67] Honnefer Volkszeitung, No° 31, 8 November 1916, 4.

^[68] Kölner Local-Anzeiger. Colonia: Sonntagsbeilage zum Kölner Local-Anzeiger mit besonderer Abteilungen unseren Frauen sowie Gartenarbeit und Blumenpflege. N° 31, 30 July 1916, 1.

^[69] La Gazette de Charleroi, 6 June 1923.

^[70] A. V. SEATON, « War and Thanatourism: Waterloo 1815-1914 », in Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 26, n° 1 (1999), 130.

^[71] Bibelot = A bauble, knickknack or trinket.

[72] Paul EUDEL, Le Truquage: Les Contrefaçons Dévoilées (Paris : Dentu, 1884), 1-3.

^[73] Provenanced examples can for example be found in the collections of the Wisbech & Fenland Museum, Cambridgeshire and the Great War Hut Museum in Suffolk, Great Britain.

^[74] See for example this French Antique Brass Finish Napoleon Bust & Imperial Eagle sold for $350 on https://www.harpgallery.com/shop/item48245.html (consulted 2 September 2024).

^[75] Philip HAYTHORNTHWAITE and Bryan FOSTEN, Napoleon’s Guard Infantry (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2012), 43.

^[76] See for example waterloorelics.co.uk, Internet Archive. https://web.archive.org/web/20140614035249/http://www.waterloorelics.co.uk/battlefield-relics-shop/ (consulted 25 August 2024).

^[77]  waterloorelics.co.uk, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20140613193004/http://www.waterloorelics.co.uk/battlefield-relics-shop/jean-sully-collection-fontainebleau/(consulted 25 August 2024).

^[78] See for example: Anthony Cribb Ltd, TWO DAY SPRING VIRTUAL ANTIQUE ARMS, ARMOUR AND MILITARIA AUCTION 4 April 2023, https://www.invaluable.com/search?houseName=Antony%2520Cribb%2520Ltd&upcoming=false&query=cotton&keyword=cotton (consulted 25 August 2024).

^[79] The authors extend their sincere gratitude to Mr. Anthony Cribb, whose cooperation, insight and permission to utilise auction catalogue photos have been invaluable to this research. The willingness of ethical business professionals to assist in exposing fraudulent practices is crucial in safeguarding future collectors from the pitfalls of the military relic market.

^[80] The latter also applies to larger objects like headgear and armour

^[81] The expert pointed out a number of irregularities: the writing was done with a steel point, the rings around the holes in the labels were not invented until the end of the 19th century, and the writing is completely different from the original and corresponds to a much later style. The verdict is clear. The report, 24 pages long, is too dense to be published here but can be consulted by contacting the authors of the present article.

^[82] ‘Henry Weymouth 1857 collection Waterloo and Quatre Bras’, Internet Archive, waterloo-relics.co.uk, https://web.archive.org/web/20120421150202/http://waterloorelics.co.uk/battlefield-relics-shop/henry-weymouth-1857-collection (consulter 24 August 2024).

^[83] Anthony Cribb Ltd, TWO DAY SPRING VIRTUAL ANTIQUE ARMS, ARMOUR AND MILITARIA AUCTION 4 April 2023, Lot No. 6, https://www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/french-1st-empire-37th-regiment-shako-6-c-6bb4ff7a78 (consulted 22 August 2024).

^[84] Jules Rouffet (1862 – 1931),

^[85] Register of the 37th line infantry regiment, 1803-1806, Service Historique de la Défense, SHD/GR21 YC 320.

^[86] Catalogue officiel illustré de l’exposition rétrospective de l’art français des origines à 1800 / Exposition universelle de 1900, (Paris, 1900), 272 or Jean ROUSSET, Les Machines À Écrire (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1910), 27.

^[87] A Manual of the Typewriter: A Practical Guide to Commercial, Literary, Legal, Dramatic and all Classes of Typewriting Work (Bath & New York: Isaac Pitman, 1893), 22-23.

^[88] For detailed information on basic methodological questions, cf.: Arne HOMANN, Historische Schlachtfelder als archäologische Quelle. Studien zu Möglichkeiten und Grenzen ihrer Erforschung. MA thesis, Universität Hamburg, 2008; Glenn FOARD, Battlefield archaeology of the English Civil War (Oxford: BAR Publishing, 2016). (BAR. British series, 570); André SCHÜRGER, The archaeology of the Battle of Lützen. An examination of 17th century military material culture. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2015; Arne HOMANN, « Archäologische Untersuchungen auf dem Schlachtfeld bei Lutter am Barenberge vom 27. August 1626 », in Nachrichten aus Niedersachsens Urgeschichte n° 87 (2018), 205-212; Arne HOMANN, « Trümmer, Gräber, Schlachtfelder – Ein Blick auf die Archäologie des Dreißigjährigen Krieges », in Birgit EMICH, Dirk NIEFANGER, Dominik SAUERER and Georg SEIDERER (eds.), Wallenstein. Mensch – Mythos – Memoria, (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2018), 67-96.

^[89] The first battlefield archaeological investigation by one of the authors in 2006 near Großbeeren (Germany 1813) also uncovered six mostly very good to well-preserved copper percussion caps in a very confined space, in addition to other objects that certainly originated from recent re-enactment events: Homann, op. cit., 2008, 145.

^[90] The corresponding conditions outside Europe should be examined in this regard, especially in the theatres of the US Civil War of 1861-1865, which, as is well known, also experienced a considerable influx of tourists shortly after the end of the fighting.

^[91] However, it would definitely have to be clarified whether, for example, a similar trade took place to a certain extent on the other, albeit less popular, battlefields of the 100 days.

^[92] Of course, it must be assumed that some Waterloo bullets offered on the market today are in fact genuine finds from other contemporary battlefields which due to the great popularity of Waterloo, are sold with a false provenance. This is a fundamental problem with objects that have not been reliably recovered or come from old collections.

^[93] See https://www.lparchaeology.com/waterloouncovered/data_view.php (Online resource, consulted on 18 August 2024).

^[94] Dominique BOSQUET and Philippe DELPIERRE, « Braine-l’Alleud/Braine-l’Alleud. Confrontation des données matérielles et historiques sur le champ de bataille de Waterloo à partir de prospections métalliques » in Chronique de l’archéologie Wallonne, n° 31 (2023), 34-37; Gilles BERNARD and Gérard LACHAUX, Waterloo relics (Paris: Histoire & collections, 2005), 120.

^[95] Michaela BINDER, Slawomir KONIK and Alexander STAGL (eds.), Leben und Tod auf dem Schlachtfeld: Archäologie entlang der S8-Trasse im Marchfeld (Vienna: Phoibos Verlag, 2021), 53, 58-59, 72, 74.

^[96] For a reconstruction of the state of the terrain in June 1815 and the extent of the changes in the course of the construction of the Löwenhügel, see: Daniel SCHNURR, James KAVANAGH and Paul HILL, « Wellington était-il géomètre? RTK GPS révèle Waterloo », in FIG Working Week 2003, Proceedings, 5-11. (Online resource: https://www.fig.net/resources/proceedings/fig_proceedings/fig_2003/TS_19/PP19_3_Schnurr_et_al.pdf / accessed on 18 August 2024). Some observations on more recent LIDAR images are provided by two smaller studies: Anonymous, The Material for the Construction of the Lion Mound. Circa 2015. (Online resource: https://tls509.wixsite.com/archaeologyawaterloo/about1 / accessed on 18 August 2024);

Hattie FORD, Aerial Laser Imaging Throws New Light on Waterloo Battlefield, 2015 (Online resource: https://waterloouncovered.com/aerial-laser-imaging-throws-new-light-on-waterloo-battlefield / accessed on 18 August 2024).

^[97] See, for example, the report on the 1825 visit by the American entrepreneur, inventor, author and lawyer Zachariah Allen (1795-1882). He noted how he was offered the freshly extracted teeth of a skeleton found during the excavation work for the construction of the Lion Mound: ‘While I was standing near the labourers who were engaged in digging up the earth to be carried in carts to the top of the mound, one of the workmen struck a human skeleton with his shovel. He eagerly began extracting the teeth and immediately brought me a handful to sell.’ Quoted from: Arne HOMANN, « A ‘Hero’s smile’ from Waterloo? Using dead soldiers‘ teeth for dental prostheses, 1750-1860 », in Bernard WILKIN and Robin SCHÄFER (eds.), Bones of contention: The industrial exploitation of human bones in the modern Age (Brussels: Archives générales du Royaume, 2024), 111-124.

^[98] Anonym, The Battle of Waterloo, also of Ligny and Quatre-Bras, described by the series of accounts published by Authority, with circumstancial details. […] (London: Printed for John Booth, Duke Street, Portland Place; and T. Egerton, Military Library, Whitehall, 1817), 122.

^[99] Jane H. ADEANE and Maud GRENFELL (eds.), Before and after Waterloo: Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802; 1814; 1816) (London: T. Fisher Unwin, Adelphi Terrace, 1907), 268.

^[100] Bernard WILKIN and Robin SCHÄFER, op cit.