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A cleverly coded letter from the Napoleonic era, which had resisted attempts to decipher it for more than two centuries, has finally been read with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).

Artificial intelligence engineer Carter Church used OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra model to decipher a message sent in 1809, during Napoleon’s preparations for war with Austria. He says all he needed was a single message and a single photo of the document. About six hours later, the code was cracked.

“I didn’t believe it at first,” Church told Live Science. Unlike many situations in which AI can produce a convincing but inaccurate solution, here the result can be mechanically verified and compared with historical sources. The letter was sent from Napoleon’s adopted son, Eugène de Beauharnais, then viceroy of Italy, to French General Auguste de Marmont, who was stationed on the eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea in 1809, far from other French units.

Its purpose was to convey information about the positions of the French and Allied armies throughout Europe. To prevent military information from falling into enemy hands if the letter were intercepted, the message was written in a complex code. The document contains a total of about 1,300 characters, or 155 different symbols. It is a so-called homophonic code, in which a sound or letter can be represented by different symbols.

The problem was that only a poor-quality recording of the letter, published in a French military magazine in 1969, had survived. It was this photograph that Church gave GPT-6 Astra. The model first reconstructed the text from the image, and then during the search found a partial symbol table that had been previously created by cryptography historian Daniel Tant. The table explained the meaning of 33 symbols, about a third of the message, but it had not previously been associated with this particular letter. Astra herself linked the table to the document and tried to apply it to the code she found. Based on this, she was able to reconstruct the meaning of the remaining symbols and translate the entire message.

“Astra himself made this connection during the search,” Church explained.

Historians found the result interesting precisely because the resulting text could be checked against other Napoleonic letters. Napoleon had already specified in an earlier correspondence with Eugène what the message to Marmont should contain, so the scholars had a kind of independent control over the results.

Michael Rowe, a scholar of European history at King's College London, described it as "a kind of Rossetta Stone." The idea is simple: if an artificial intelligence can successfully decipher a text whose content can already be verified by other historical sources, it increases its confidence in its ability to deal with documents whose content is not yet known. However, the message itself does not make a major new historical discovery. It mostly confirms what historians already knew from Napoleon's correspondence.

In the letter, Eugène lists the positions of the French and Allied forces and their commanders, and tells Marmont not to fear his opponents: “When you receive the order to march, you must not allow yourself to be intimidated by a few soldiers or a crowd of people.”

However, the content raises some interesting questions about Napoleon’s assessment of the situation before his 1809 campaign against Austria. Historians have noted, among other things, that the letter lists a much larger number of French soldiers than were actually available. Zack White, a historian at the University of Portsmouth and host of a podcast about the Napoleonic Wars, warned that the AI ​​results should be seen in a broader historical context. Of particular interest is whether the key reconstructed with the help of AI could help decipher other documents from the period.

Ciphers were common in Napoleon's time. Military and diplomatic correspondence traveled great distances, and the possibility of letters being intercepted by enemies was real. But their use was not limited to war plans. Private letters were also coded, including correspondence between members of Europe's elite, and such tools may one day help uncover details of the private lives of historical figures.


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