More than two centuries have passed and countless pages of history have been written, yet an iconic gem lost in the chaos of Waterloo is making headlines today. That is the magic of auctions, where the most fascinating objects from another age suddenly feel like they were dropped on the table yesterday. This time, Sotheby’s Royal & Noble Jewels sale will offer a unique brooch set with old mine-cut diamonds that once belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte. The piece will go under the hammer on November 12 at the Mandarin Oriental in Geneva.
Anyone familiar with Napoleon’s taste for jewels also knows he did not treat diamonds as decoration, he treated them like artillery. They were part of his image. They signaled power, rank, and imperial authority, and he used them to project that authority across Europe. The French emperor’s brooch, recovered from the battlefield, was reportedly abandoned by Napoleon himself as he fled after his crushing defeat at Waterloo in 1815. It was then taken as a spoil of war and presented to King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia just three days later, on June 21, 1815. According to Sotheby’s, the jewel was held for generations by his descendants in the House of Hohenzollern.
Visually, it is a beautiful circular brooch, about 45 millimeters across, set with almost one hundred old mine-cut diamonds in two rows. Sitting in the center is an oval diamond weighing just over 13 carats, which would have been eye-catching even in Napoleon’s day. The brooch was crafted in a Parisian atelier around 1810 and was likely worn on formal occasions, possibly even as a hat ornament.
Now, more than 200 years later, this same brooch will almost certainly end up pinned to the lapel or locked in the vault of a twenty-first century tycoon. Sotheby’s expects it to sell for between $150,000 and $250,000. The true value here is not only the carat weight, it is the provenance, because this is not just a jewel, it is war loot from the fall of an empire.
In addition to the brooch, Forbes reported, the Prussians also seized Napoleon’s hat and sword as battle trophies and presented them to King Friedrich Wilhelm III on June 21, 1815. The brooch stayed with the Hohenzollerns for generations and, more recently, passed into a private collection. It is now resurfacing in public for the first time.
