Is the World's Most Famous Piece of Armour a Fake?
There are no perfect crimes, only failed investigations, so when a serious crime investigation goes wrong, there should always be some sort of independent review, away from whichever agency undertook the original investigation. It’s something I feel passionately about, especially after spending five years reinvestigating the disappearance of missing estate agent Suzy Lamplugh and uncovering a completely different truth, as detailed in my book, Finding Suzy.
In recent years there have been many Domestic Homicide Reviews and Serious Case Reviews that refer to a ‘lack of professional curiosity’ by investigators. It was also a term used by an inquest jury in its findings following the murder and rape of four men by Steven Port. During the inquests, police admitted failing to carry out basic checks, failing to send evidence to be forensically examined - and failing to exercise professional curiosity during Port’s 16-month killing spree conducted between June 2014 and September 2015.
Why aren’t investigators professionally curious enough to carry out even the most basic of checks and ask the relevant questions?
And it doesn’t just happen in the world of criminal investigations, it goes on around us all the time. It’s a type of confirmation bias or intellectual laziness which can sometimes arise when there is a fear of rocking the boat and upsetting colleagues. Or perhaps when a false narrative suits someone’s particular motives?
To give an example of this, last week, a social media user tweeted a short video of a smashed and ruptured Napoleonic breastplate.
The armour was said to belong to a French cavalryman of the 2nd rifle regiment (2ème Régiment des Carabiniers) who fought at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, and thanks to social media it has become a sensation, with more than seventeen million views at the time of writing. It would be fair to say that it is now the most well known piece of armour in the world.
The armour in question consists of a breastplate and backplate fastened together at the shoulders and waist and is known as a 'cuirass'. This particular cuirass is on display in the Musée de l'Armée (Army Museum) in Paris. As the Musée de l'Armée points out on its website, ‘In itself, breastplates of this type are not exceptional.’
In fact, hundreds of them were taken as souvenirs from the battlefield at Waterloo. Hundreds more probably survived unused, in French army store rooms, after metal body armour became obsolete. Many have found their way into museums and private collections across Europe since the battle. You can even buy something similar on Ebay.
So what makes this particular piece of armour exceptional?
This Napoleonic cuirass is pierced right through, front to back, by what appears to have been a cannonball. At chest height, the cannonball has punctured a neat hole in the shiny brass surface of the breastplate, before it has apparently ripped through the person wearing it and exited from the backplate. At the rear, the exit hole is larger and fiercer - the twisted and torn metal of the backplate at odds with the neat hole seen at the front.
It’s this ghastly mutilation of the cuirass that has made it so special and evocative of that damp day in June 1815. For many it illustrates the barbary of the defeat suffered by Napoleon's army at Waterloo at the hands of the British.
Our imagination is captured by the power of a cannon launching a single metal ball at somewhere close to 400mph directly at a man sitting on a horse. As we look at the ravaged armour, we can smell the gunpowder, taste the soot in the air, feel the pain of the soldier as he realises he is about to die, the cannonball hurtling toward him, most likely ripping off his arm and decapitating him as it carries on through him and into the battlefield behind.
Tony Pollard, a professor in Conflict History and Archaeology at Glasgow University tweeted about the find:
“This cuirass was worn by a French cavalryman in 4th company, 2nd Carabinier Regt at Waterloo on 18 June 1815. His name was Antoine Fauveau [sic]. He was 23 yrs old & he died sabre in hand. He [sic] not long been conscripted and he had benefited from no more than 7 days training.”
“Around 4pm French put in cavalry charges against Wellington’s Centre/Right – famously under Ney. More of a slog up a muddy hill than a gallop. By the end, c.10,000 horsemen had engaged in the messy ebb & flow against allied cavalry, artillery & infantry arranged in squares.”
“Throwing more men into this meat grinder didn’t help, but 1st & 2nd Carabiniers ordered forward against ‘20 guns’ from east edge of Hougoumont at c.6.30pm. Men & horses slogged up hill to be met by muskets & cannon. The reserve Div made 3 advances but each time repulsed.”
The tweets were shared many thousands of times. Professor Pollard even predicted the size of the cannon and where it was when it was fired, before concluding:
“Over next 10 days bodies were stripped & then buried or burned. Every item of hardware & clothing was recycled or sold & the field became a tourist attraction. The cuirass a prized trophy. The bloody plate was pulled from his body before pitching him into a mass grave.”
As a former police detective with Scotland Yard, my professional curiosity in explosives, firearms and ordnance and their effects on the human body was piqued by this fascinating story.
In particular, why was the size of the hole in the backplate completely at odds with the hole in the breastplate?
Exit wounds from gunshots are often much larger than their entry point. This is due to a variety of reasons from muzzle velocity, type of gun, type of bullet, and what damage different types of bullets inflict inside a human body. But in this case, we are talking about a piece of solid metal, a spherical iron ball. Cannonballs don't fragment upon striking a human body as musket shots or some modern bullets do; thus one would expect the exit wound from the backplate to be a similar size to the entrance hole on the front of the breast plate?
To check how different the two holes were, I carried out some simple, relative length/distance measurements on the photos of the cuirass available on the museum website. Based on a known reference object size, in this case the height of the cuirass (given by the Musée de l'Armée as 45cm), I was able to then measure the size of the entry and exit holes. As the attached images show, this proves that the exit hole (18cm) was one and half times larger than the entry hole (12cm). As you may by now recognise, this presents two problems for the authenticity of the cuirass and when/how it was mutilated?
It’s well known that the largest piece of artillery the British and its allies had on the battlefield of Waterloo was a 9lb cannon. These 9lb cannons fired solid metal cannonballs of four inches or 10cm in diameter - too small to have made a 12cm entry hole in the breastplate of the cuirass. The French had larger artillery on the battlefield that day, but even their largest cannon fell slightly short of being able to make a 12cm hole.
Through professional curiosity, a number of important questions are thus raised - a process that all investigators, museums and indeed, historians should be doing.
With these anomalies in mind I started to look a little deeper at the provenance of the cuirass in question - how did it come into the possession of the museum? Was it, as some have suggested, picked off the lifeless body of the victim on the day of the battle, before the victim was thrown into a mass grave?
The museum website states:
“Unearthed by a farmer, it was immediately acquired by Colonel Lichtenstein. The colonel, a descendant of an officer of the First French Empire, collected memorabilia from the Napoleonic Era.
An officer of the President of the Republic between 1879 and 1887, Philippe Lichtenstein (1831-1892) was staying at the Élysée Palace and by a curious turn of fate, this relic would come to illustrate the Emperor's ultimate defeat and embody the sacrifice of the French soldiers in the palais de la République.
The collector patiently reconstructed the background of the breastplate and its wearer. And in order to keep this story alive, long after the protagonists died, he collected it, shared the story and passed it on to subsequent generations, through a donation to the museum’s collections.”
The first thing of note here is that the cuirass is said to have been ‘unearthed’ by a farmer when Philippe Lichtenstein (1831-1892) was an officer at the Élysée Palace between 1879 and 1887. Has this cuirass really been in the ground for sixty to seventy years? There isn't a spot of rust on it? The second point is that Philippe Lichtenstein is the one who constructed the original story, some sixty years after it had allegedly taken place, and that Philippe Lichtenstein served at the Élysée Palace under Jules Grévy, the then president of France.
Grévy was known for his fierce political opposition to Charles-Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte who had engaged in the Second Italian War of Independence, as well as the disastrous Franco-Prussian War. Charles-Louis’ uncle was Napoleon Bonapart, the man who’d commanded the Napoleonic wars which culminated in the Battle of Waterloo, the very place the mutilated cuirass is said to have been worn by a now dead cavalryman. More than that, when Grévy came to power in 1879 he famously said, “I will never enter into battle against national wishes expressed by its institutional bodies.”
Could this cuirass simply be a piece of political propaganda, enabled by Philippe Lichtenstein at the behest of Grévy to show the human cost and brutality of war? I turn then to the alleged victim. What of the young man, named as François-Antoine Fauveau by the museum, who was said to have been killed wearing it?
The museum website claims that François-Antoine had “blue eyes, an aquiline nose, small mouth, dimpled chin, chestnut hair and eyebrows; face marked with freckles he measured 1.79 m, which probably favoured his entry into the elite corps of the riflemen. Assigned May 21, 1815 to the 2nd Rifle Regiment (2ème Régiment des Carabiniers) commanded by Colonel François Beugnat, and part of the 4th Squadron, 4th Company, he died on the field of honour less than a month later, June 18, 1815, in Waterloo.”
But many historians, since the cuirass went on display, claim that it could not have been François-Antoine who died on the battlefield because his subsequent marriage certificate demonstrated that he was very much alive some time later at his wedding ceremony. How on earth could it have been the same man who died on the battlefield wearing the armour that day at Waterloo?
All of this should have put the museum in a very difficult situation, there should have at least been some sort of investigation to prove that this cuirass is what it purports to be? Why hasn’t someone carried out an investigation and written all this up in a report for us all to read?
This is where some individuals close their minds to the obvious, and carry on being intellectually dishonest with everyone around them to protect the integrity of the organisations they work for, or in this case the integrity of the museum’s exhibit.
Instead of a complete reinvestigation - many have tried to smooth over the biggest and most important question - how on earth did François-Antoine live through this astonishing injury?
The armour's backstory has been changed, even on some official museum catalogues and another legend inserted. It is now said that when his call-up papers arrived, François-Antoine was on the verge of getting married, thus a friend or relative, or even a paid replacement somehow joined up and became part of this elite fighting force, and died, in his place.
Really?
In my honest opinion, I don’t think anyone died wearing this particular cuirass at the Battle of Waterloo. In fact I don’t think anyone ever died wearing it. The evidence of this is the size of the hole in the backplate. Cannonballs don’t disintegrate when they enter or come into contact with a human body. And soft body tissue and bone are not strong enough to have enlarged the exit hole on a solid metal backplate, tearing the metal one and a half times larger than the entry hole. Whatever was inside the cuirass when it was shot with a cannon, a cannon that we know the British didn't have at Waterloo, was hard and solid, and that's what exited from the backplate as the cannonball passed through it, creating a larger exit hole.
I’m sorry to say that I think the exhibit itself is a complete fake and that all the evidence suggests this to be the case.
Finding Suzy by David Videcette available on Amazon
Why haven't these questions been asked before? To do so would ruin the narrative. It would unpick the evocative and painful story embroidered over the years which has made people stare at this ‘exceptional cuirass’. It was not in the financial interests of the farmer, the collector or the museum to carry out this investigation, just as it was not in the political interests of those who brought the original story to the public’s attention.
To some investigators, the truth is unimportant. Their only desire is to support an already carefully installed narrative. I happen to think the truth is much more important.