Rare boîte-médaille commémorative de la victoire... Lot n° 47

Précis of the War of Spain according to the official reports until the delivery of king Ferdinand. In Paris, Chez l'auteur, 1823, leporello of 22 circular loose leaves and 2 ff. glued inside the lids of the box with the arms of Paris, of 4,5 cm of diameter, contained in a box-medal in gilded bronze decorated with a laureate profile of the Duke of Angouleme, generalissimo, on the obverse, engraved by F. Henrionnet with the legend "Louis Antoine Duc d'Angouleme. He gave us back the victory"; on the reverse the text "To the glory of the French Army - 1823". First edition. Several lugs of paper which allowed to solidify the leaves have broken. Preserved in its original circular case sheathed in red morocco gilt with a frieze of leaves and fleurs de lys, inside sheathed in blue silk velvet. Attributed to Lévêque, engraver at the Palais-Royal, circa 1823. D. 5 cm (for the medal box). History In 1820, the Spanish liberals obtained from king Ferdinand VII (1784-1833), king of Spain since the defeat of the Napoleonic troops in Spain and the treaty of Valencay of 1813, that he put back in force the Constitution of 1812 and entrusted the power to liberal ministers, putting an end to his absolute authority. In France, the liberal agitation which shook Europe worried the Bourbons and the ultras obtained at the beginning of 1823 that a French expeditionary corps was sent in Spain to return the power to Ferdinand VII, prisoner of the Cortes. Louis XVIII announced that "one hundred thousand Frenchmen were ready to march, invoking the name of Saint Louis, to preserve the Spanish throne for a grandson of Henri IV". He entrusted the honorary (political) command of the expedition to his son Louis-Antoine d'Artois (1775-1844), duke of Angouleme, while the military command was in fact assured by a staff essentially composed of experienced generals of the Empire who had passed to the Bourbons (Oudinot, Molitor, Moncey and Pommeroux de Bordesoulle). The Spanish constitutional troops were definitively defeated after the capture of Cadiz and the victory of Trocadero on August 31, 1831. Chateaubriand (1768-1848), then minister of Louis XVIII, will write in his Memoirs from beyond the grave: "To succeed where Bonaparte had failed, to triumph on this same ground where the weapons of the fantastic man had had reverses, to make in six months what he had not been able to make in seven years, it was a true wonder!"