Over 100 letters sent to French sailors by their fiancées, wives, parents and siblings – but never delivered – have been opened and studied for the first time since they were written in 1757-8.

The messages offer extremely rare and moving insights into the loves, lives and family quarrels of everyone from elderly peasants to wealthy officer’s wives.

The messages were seized by Britain’s Royal Navy during the Seven Years’ War, taken to the Admiralty in London and never opened. The collection is now held at the National Archives in Kew.

The letters provide precious new evidence about French women and labourers, as well as different forms of literacy.

“I could spend the night writing to you … I am your forever faithful wife. Good night, my dear friend. It is midnight. I think it is time for me to rest.”

So wrote Marie Dubosc to her husband, the first Lieutenant of the Galatée, a French warship, in 1758. She didn’t know where Louis Chambrelan was, or that his ship had been captured by the British.

Louis would never receive Marie’s letter and they would never meet again. Marie died the following year in Le Havre, almost certainly before Louis was released. In 1761, he remarried, safely back in France.

“I cannot wait to possess you” wrote Anne Le Cerf to her husband, a non-commissioned officer on the Galatée. She perhaps meant “embrace” but also “to make love to you”. She signed “Your obedient wife Nanette”, an affectionate nickname. Imprisoned somewhere in England, Jean Topsent would never receive Nanette’s love letter.

Professor Renaud Morieux, from Cambridge University’s History Faculty and Pembroke College, spent months decoding these and 102 other letters written with wild spelling, no punctuation or capitalization and filling every inch of the expensive paper they appear on. He published his findings today in the journal Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales.

You can read more about these letters in an article by Tom Almeroth-Williams published in the University of Cambridge web site at: https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/french-love-letters-confiscated-by-britain-read-after-265-years