Napoleon's letters to Bigot de Préameneu: digitised collection

		Napoleon's letters to Bigot de Préameneu [1800-1815]

Lettre de Bonaparte à Bigot du 29 vendémiaire an 11, archives du Conseil d'Etat

Presentation of the digitised collection

Digitised collection specifications

Heading		Napoleon's letters to Bigot de Préameneu, Bibliothèque du Conseil d'Etat
Dates		1802-1815
Volume of material		148 documents
Technical characteristics of digitisation		All the letters have been transcribed in text form from the handwritten originals. Each letter has been annotated to explain the references to people or events by Professor J. O. Boudon. Digitisation in image form from the black and white photographs kept at the Conseil d'Etat. The images have been touched up and compressed in JPEG.
Search tools		Full-text search engine on the contents of each letter. Possibility of consulting groups of letters in chronological order.

Detailed description

Reasons for the technical choices for digitisation and distributio

LThe transcription was carried out by N. Clot, a student at the École des Chartes, from the black and white photographs of the originals kept in the Bibliothèque du Conseil d'Etat, in order to avoid excessive handling of the old binding of the collection. Difficulties of reading were solved by checking the originals of the letters.
Where parts of letters have not been published before this is indicated in a note. Where applicable, previous editions of the letters are identified precisely (N° of the letter in the edition, volume, page).

Digitisation in image form: the black and white photographs were scanned and stored in TIFF format. The luminosity and contrast of the images has been touched up for displaying the images of the letters on the Internet. JPEG type compression is used.

Part of the documents of the Nougarède du Fayet collection was published in: Correspondance de Napoléon Ier publiée par ordre de l'empereur Napoléon III, Paris, Imprimerie Impériale, 32 volumes, 1858-1869, cited as follows: Correspondence, xx (volume), date, p. xxx (page), N° xxx (number).

Comte d'HAUSSONVILLE, L'Eglise romaine et le Premier Empire 1800-1814, Paris, Michel Lévy, 5 volumes, 1868-1869.

The other letters already published were published from the original records kept in the Archives Nationales in the series AF IV at the turn of the last century in: Léon LECESTRE, Lettres inédites de Napoléon Ier (an VIII-1815), Paris, Plon, 1897, 2 volumes; cited as follows: Lecestre, x (volume), p. xxx, N° x (number), according to AF IV xxx (number of the dossier containing the record of the letter in the AF IV series in the Archives Nationales).

Léonce de BROTONNE, Lettres inédites de Napoléon Ier, Paris, Champion, 1898, 611 p. and Dernières lettres inédites, Paris, Champion, 1903, 2 volumes, 556 et 542 p.

For further information on the previous editions, read the analysis by J. O. Boudon. As far as possible references to people or events have been explained with the assistance of Professor J. O. Boudon, president of the Institut Napoléon and a specialist in religious affairs of the 19th century.