XIX century. Boom of fakes

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The scale of the falsifications is simply amazing. Allegedly ancient Greek manuscripts, letters of monarchs, famous scientists, and many other documents were forged by tens of thousands. For example, between 1822 and 1835 alone, more than 12,000 allegedly original manuscripts of famous people were sold in France …

For example, in the summer of 1867, a famous French scientist, mathematician Chal, at a meeting of the Institute (Academy of Sciences) presented to his colleagues several letters from Pascal to the English chemist Boyle and Newton, as well as letters from Newton's mother, Pascal. These letters revolutionized ideas about the development of science. They showed that Pascal had convinced the eleven-year-old Newton to take mathematics seriously. Moreover, Pascal explained to him the results of his research, including the law of universal gravitation, which made Newton famous as a scientific genius! The impression produced by these letters could not be shaken by the individual objections of English scholars, who began to be considered dictated by a feeling of wounded national pride.

The British demanded the presentation of the originals of these letters for examination by experts, custodians of the Newtonian archive. It was proved that the digital data reported by Pascal on the Sun, Jupiter, Saturn and the Earth repeat the data given in the edition of Newton's works published in 1726. One of the letters mentions coffee, which was first brought to Western Europe by the Turkish ambassador only in 1669, seven years after the death of Pascal. In response, Shal presented a host of documents from his contemporaries, from the French kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV and the English king James II to Pascal's sister, the poet John Milton and many others. From the letters it was clear that Newton always envied Pascal, as well as Descartes, whose discoveries he appropriated.

At the next meeting of the Institute, Chal appeared with another package of documents, this time letters from Galileo to Pascal, in which it was mentioned that the French scientist had presented his famous Italian brother with considerations about the law of universal gravitation. Critics have identified two errors in the letters presented: they talked about the moons of Saturn, discovered only much later, in 1655, by the Dutchman Huygens. In addition, Galileo had been blind for four years by the time he "wrote" the letters. Shawl was able to answer these objections as well. He presented another letter to Galileo, where he reported that he had only partially lost his sight and spread information about his blindness in order to avoid persecution by the Inquisition.

He watched Saturn through a telescope, which he bequeathed to Pascal, and he bequeathed to Huygens. But in April 1869, already in print, Shal was presented with proof that most of his collection of letters from Pascal and his famous correspondents was material borrowed from A. Severien's History of New Philosophy, published in 1761. Shal dismissed this argument as well. assuring that he simply described Pascal's documents known to him. Chal presented a letter from Montesquieu and a note from the all-powerful favorite of Louis XV, Madame Pompadour Severien, and a reply from the author of the History of a New Philosophy with gratitude for the precious correspondence used.

This was followed by accusations of forging already letters from Severien's contemporaries and new documents demonstrated by Shal, which were supposed to attest to the authenticity of the previously submitted letters and contained plausible explanations for the inaccuracies and anachronisms revealed in them additionally. All this movement in a circle came to an end when photocopies of Galileo's letters sent to Florence were immediately recognized by Italian experts. crude forgery … Shalyu had to make a public apology and ask the police to help him get back the 140,000 francs he had paid for three thousand fake letters.

The supplier of the forgeries was a certain Wren-Luka, the son of a village teacherwho has not received a formal education. He began by compiling forged genealogies of noble families. Luca got the hang of skillfully copying from books, but the additions made by him show that he was completely unable to grasp the style and manner of thinking of people of different eras. He told Shaly a fable that the documents he was selling were taken from the collection of Count Boisjourdin, who had fled revolutionary France in 1791. The ship was wrecked, part of the collection was lost, and the last member of this noble family began to sell the remaining documents.

Among them were such fabulous treasures as the letters of Alexander the Great, Cicero, Julius Caesar, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Euclid, the Egyptian queen Cleopatra, the emperors Augustus and Nero, the poets Ovid and Virgil, the philosophers and scientists of Seneca, Pliny, Tacitus, Plut Dante, Petrarch, the inventor of typography Gutenberg, Machiavelli, Luther, Michelangelo, Shakespeare and so on, right up to Mary Magdalene, Judas Iscariot, King Herod and Pontius Pilate. The letters of French statesmen, writers and scientists were especially widely represented - from Charlemagne to Richelieu, from Joan of Arc to Voltaire and Rousseau. At the same time, even Julius Caesar and Cleopatra expressed themselves in their love letters. in modern French … Luca cared little about the appearance of his forgeries, which he passed off as originals. Once he was removed from the library, where he with scissors cut out blank sheets of old folios … Abelard's letters to Héloise were generally written on paper with the watermark of the Angoulême factory. Luke simply had no time to go into such subtleties - after all, he had forged no less with his own hands - 27,000 (twenty seven thousand!)various documents. He was tried in 1870 and sentenced to 2 years in prison.

Even the famous scientist Joseph Justus Scaliger at about the same time compiled a free compilation from ancient Greek authors, passing it off as a work of a certain Astrampsychus. Many recognized it as antique.

In the process of studying European civilization, a new field for forgeries appeared (mastered, however, mainly in the 19th century) about peoples, about whose past in the pre-Roman period there was almost no information in written sources - Celts, inhabitants of the Phoenician and Greek colonies in the west of the continent, Etruscans, Iberians, Vikings, Franks.

Some works that enjoyed authority and popularity in ancient times and did not survive or came down in the form of separate fragments, attracted the attention of falsifiers because of the author's surname or the subjects described in them. Sometimes it was about a whole series of sequential forgeries of any composition, not always clearly connected with each other.

An example is the various writings of Cicero, many of which were forged in England at the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century. heated debate about the very possibility due to falsification primary sources of real historical knowledge.

The writings of Ovid in the early Middle Ages were used to include the miraculous stories they contained in the biographies of Christian saints. In the 13th century, a whole work was attributed to Ovid himself. The German humanist Prolucius in the 16th century added a seventh chapter to Ovid's "Calendar". The goal was to prove to opponents that, contrary to the testimony of the poet himself, this work of his contained not six, but twelve chapters.

Another example of a series of hoaxes is the fake addition to Satyricon, the author of which, Petronius, close to Nero, was revered as a trendsetter and good taste and was executed by the emperor out of envy of his glory. A fragment of the novel, which gave a vivid picture of the Roman customs of that time, was allegedly found in the middle of the 17th century in Trau, in Dalmatia, by Martin Statilius. The fragment added 30 pages to the already known pages of the Satyricon. The grammatical errors found in the text made us suspect a forgery. However, experts considered the passage to be genuine.

Most of the forgeries in question were a kind of reflection of the peculiarities of not only the political struggle, but also the prevailing atmosphere of the hoax boom. At least such an example allows one to judge its scale. Researchers estimate that in France between 1822 and 1835 more than 12000 manuscripts, letters and other autographs of famous people, in the years 1836-1840 was put up for sale at auction 11000, in 1841-1845 - approximately 15000, in 1846-1859 - 32000 … Some of them were stolen from public and private libraries and collections, but the bulk were fakes. An increase in demand gave rise to an increase in supply, and the production of forgeries was ahead of the improvement in methods of detecting them at this time. The successes of the natural sciences, especially chemistry, which made it possible, in particular, to determine the age of the document in question, new, as yet imperfect methods of exposing hoaxes were used rather as an exception.

It was in these middle decades of the 19th century, which we are talking about, that the name of the Greek Simonides acquired fame in the circles of specialists in the history of the ancient world and collectors. First, he presented unknown fragments from Hesiod, Homer, Anacreon, as if he had inherited from his uncle. Wanted them buy for a huge amount of the British Museum in partnership with the University of Athens. Only one of twelve experts suspected fraud and proved that previously unknown passages from Homer reproduced all the typos in the recent publication of the poet's works by the German publishing house Wolf. The fragments of ancient Greek poetry proposed by Simonides were rejected by the British Museum, which nevertheless acquired some of his other manuscripts. A few more items were bought by one collector of antiquities. Simonides further said that he had found the ancient history of Armenia. In the garden of the Egyptian Khedive Ismail Pasha, he seemed to have found a whole box of documents. The Duke of Sunderland bought letters from the Greek politician Alcibiades Pericles and other finds for huge money.

Simonides claimed to have tracked down the Egyptian history of the ancient author Urania. The text of Urania, according to Simonides, was under four layers of other ancient writings. The highest authorities in Germany recognized the history of Urania as genuine, which prompted the Prussian king to buy the manuscript. Microscopic and chemical analyzes of the manuscript revealed a forgery, which was recognized by the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Simonides was arrested for fraud; during a search in his apartment, materials and scientific works were found, from which he drew information. Struck by the number of manuscripts at the disposal of Simonides - about two and a half thousand, and some of them are quite voluminous. One manuscript consisted of 770 pages. Simonides argued that the Urania manuscript was a copy of the lost original, and the Berlin court acquitted him. On his return to London, Simonides was accused, perhaps without good reason, of forging papyri with ancient texts. He died in Alexandria. The question of whether some of his manuscripts are genuine or fake, still has not received a convincing solution.

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