After more than 200 years, a coded letter written by the diminutive and problematic Napoleon Bonaparte has been deciphered.
Napoleon’s son-in-law Eugene, Viceroy of Italy, sent the original letter to French General Auguste de Marmont in March 1809, in the midst of the ongoing conflict between France and Austria.
At this time, Marmont, a close companion of the emperor, was positioned with his troops in Dalmatia, on the other side of the Adriatic, where he was totally isolated from other French forces and their allies.
While the first line of Napoleon’s correspondence is in his native French, the next 24 are an incomprehensible jumble of symbols, letters and numbers.
Experts believe that the OG correspondence would have been accompanied by a decryption key, but this key has been lost in the mists of time, until now.
Carter Church, an engineer at cybersecurity company SentinelOne, cracked this centuries-old code using AI.
“I used GPT-6 Astra to transmit to one of Napoleon’s generals an unsolved cipher that had not been read in 217 years. What makes this impressive is not really the decryption, but the fact that Astra completed the entire multimodal workflow in six hours from a single image and a single lens,” he explained on X.
The first line says: “You must have received, Mr. General Marmont, my letters of the 8th, 14th and 20th of this month,” which translates to: “You must have received, General Marmont, my letters of the 8th, 14th and 20th of this month. »
The contents of the rest of the coded letter remained unknown until Church asked the AI to decode it, a process that took about six hours.
“‘Astra cut the 1,202 x 1,836 plate into rows, read the signs, decided which of the 175 hand-drawn marks was the same sign written twice, and only then began to decipher the cipher,” Church explained in a blog post.
As the AI decipherment revealed, the letter described the locations of all other French and Allied armies, urged him not to lose hope or be “intimidated” by his isolated position, and assured him that Austria was heading toward catastrophe.
“The Russians are marching against Austria, and the army (of) Friuli today numbers eighty thousand men,” we can read.
“Add the Dalmatian corps, without counting the reserves which are being organized everywhere in the rear, and you see that Austria will be attacked from all sides at once. It is therefore heading towards its ruin,” he wrote.
“When you receive the order to march, you must not allow yourself to be intimidated by a few troops or a gathering of mobs.”
He added: “I continue to look forward to hearing from you. »
Just two months later, on May 21, 1809, at the Battle of Aspern-Essling near Vienna, Austria, Napoleon suffered his first personal defeat, which resulted in the deaths of 23,000 French soldiers.
Following this defeat, Napoleon regrouped his forces and defeated Archduke Charles in July 1809 at the Battle of Wagram. This battle led to the dissolution of the Fifth Coalition, the alliance led by Austria and Britain against France.
Church maintains that deciphering the cipher was not particularly difficult, but that the task would have taken the human mind much longer than the six hours required by the AI.
“The cipher itself is not difficult, and cryptographers could have cracked it easily given the time and energy required, but the work of transcribing, cataloging, translating, and then deciphering is complex and multidisciplinary,” he said, noting that each field contains a litany of problems that specialists do not have the capacity to solve.
“The takeaway here is that the people who narrow down these lists will increasingly be simply curious outsiders. »
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