If you’d like some legitimate French ruling-family jewellery you should head to Geneva next month to view the very sparkly Napoleonic hatpin that is leading the publicity for Sotheby’s November 12th Royal & Nobel Jewellery sale.
Europe is on alert for the jewellery stolen from the Louvre in October, which included some Napoleonic pieces, but this Imperial relic is completely above board.
The hatpin was probably made for Napoleon, but was considered legitimate loot when he fled the battle field at Waterloo. Image courtesy of Sotheby's.
And, it travelled from the Emperor's carriage to a new centre of European power, in Berlin when Napoleon fell.
Hat pin is an underwhelming way to describe this big, beautiful, elegant piece built around an enormous 13.04-carat central stone with mine- and mazarin-cut diamonds arranged around it.
But, if it’s Napoleon’s, how did it end up in this saleroom and not, say, in the national collections of the Louvre?
Abba tell us that “At Waterloo, Napoleon did surrender,” but the Swedish pop quartet were slightly telescoping their historic timelines.
Napoleon was decisively defeated at Waterloo, but he retreated rather than than surrendering, making it back to Paris to consider his options.
Napoleon was isolated and probably doomed even before the Battle of Waterloo finally ended his rule. It was a huge, sprawling, bloody and confused fight lasting a full day and involving hundreds of thousands of combatants.
Finally, he acknowledged that he could no longer fight on and his escape routes were cut off. On July 15 the Little Corporal surrendered to a British sea captain nearly a month after Waterloo.
By this time the possessions that he had dragged in carriages to Waterloo were being traded and displayed around Europe, seized as the shattered French army ran for their lives.
A Lieutenant von Pless grabbed this piece, and no-doubt with an eye oh his future career prospects presented it to his king, Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia.
It was, say Sotheby’s, a talisman of a shift in the power dynamics of Europe.
Certainly the Prussian Hohenzollern dynasty were pleased to own the finery of the general who had so recently humiliated their armies and signed away half of their territory in a treaty considered a national humiliation.
Napoleon with Tsar Alexander and Queen Louise and King Frederick William III of Prussia for the signing of the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807. The deal all-but ended Prussia's status as a great power.
The end of Napoleon’s domination of Europe would allow German to unite - under Hohenzollern Imperial rule - through the 19th century.
And through that period they kept this jewel.
When World War I’s disastrous end also finished off the German Empire the jewellery passed into the family’s private ownership.
It was sold into private hands by Louis Ferdinand, Prince of Prussia, the grandson of The Kaiser who led Germany into World War I.
And, now it is on sale again, along with a glittering array of other jewels (it is not the most valuable item on offer by estimate) in Geneva.
Perhaps it will return to France, or make a move that marks another shift in world wealth and power, to the US, to the Gulf or East Asia perhaps.
