Napoleon ordered Eugène de Beauharnais to send General Auguste de Marmont a coded account of army positions in 1809. Carter Church reports that he used a computational solver, existing partial decipherment work and historical cross-checks to reconstruct the message from a surviving printed image. The result is a military briefing with troop estimates, locations and a warning to Marmont—not proof that ChatGPT independently solved an authenticated original in six hours.
What was Napoleon’s ciphered letter to Marmont?
The document is a coded letter addressed to General Auguste de Marmont, not a surviving letter shown to have been personally written by Napoleon. On 16 March 1809, Napoleon instructed Eugène, Viceroy of Italy, to send Marmont the army dispositions “in a ciphered letter and by an intelligent officer.” Carter Church identifies the surviving cipher image as a reproduction in J. Vilcoq’s 1969 article “Le Chiffre sous le Premier Empire,” published in Revue historique des Armées. The letter’s original cipher key has not survived with it. (Church’s account)
The image begins with an ordinary French sentence, followed by 24 rows of cipher. Its opening reads, “Vous avez dû recevoir, Monsieur le Général Marmont, mes lettres des 8, 14 et 20 courant”—“You must have received, General Marmont, my letters of the 8th, 14th and 20th of this month.” Church places the coded letter in the last days of March, before Austria crossed the Inn on 10 April 1809.
What does the decoded message say?
In Church’s proposed reading, the letter briefs Marmont on French and allied forces and their positions. It refers to forces around Munich and Passau, the Vistula and Cracow, Dresden, Bayreuth, Ulm and Donauwörth, and Augsburg and the Lech. It also says that Russian forces are marching against Austria and gives the army in Friuli as 80,000.
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The message includes a pointed reassurance about a future order to march: “vous ne devez, alors que vous recevrez ordre de marcher, vous en laisser imposer par quelques troupes ou un rassemblement de canailles.” Church translates this as: “When you receive the order to march, you must not allow yourself to be intimidated by a few troops or a gathering of rabble.” Elsewhere, the decoded French says, “elle court par conséquent à grands pas vers sa perte,” rendered by Church as “She is consequently hastening toward her ruin.”
These figures should be read as claims in a wartime briefing, not as a verified order of battle. Church notes, for example, that the letter gives 30,000 Poles under Poniatowski, while a later estimate he cites is about 17,000. His comparison with Napoleon’s 16 March instruction finds that the sequence of forces and troop figures in the decoded message aligns with the order’s stated military context. The instruction is cited in Correspondance de Napoléon Ier, volume 18, page 358. (Church’s account and citations)
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How did Church report solving the cipher?
Church describes the system as homophonic: a common letter can be represented by several different signs. That makes a basic frequency count less useful than it would be for a simple substitution cipher. His reported workflow combined careful transcription, previously published partial work and computational testing.
- Transcribe the image. Church says he read the cipher line by line and reconciled differences caused by variations in the handwritten signs.
- Use published values as anchors. Daniel Tant’s previously published partial table supplied 33 letter values. According to Church, those values covered 435 of the 1,300 cipher units in the image—about 33%—leaving 865 units to work out.
- Search for plausible French. Church says a simulated-annealing solver scored candidate readings using letter sequences drawn from Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and Marmont’s memoirs. He also tested whether some signs represented whole words rather than letters.
- Check signs across the document. Proposed values were compared with other appearances of the same signs in the image. Church reports that 29 signs were interpreted as whole-word values.
- Run a separate comparison. Church says a run that excluded Marmont’s memoirs and other Napoleonic texts recovered the same reading.
Church’s writeup includes a proposed key, transcription and scripts intended to make the reconstruction inspectable and reproducible. The reported checks lend the claim more substance than a plaintext offered without a method, but they do not by themselves establish the authenticity of every reconstructed value.
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Did ChatGPT really solve a 217-year-old cipher in six hours?
The “six hours” and the specific claim that ChatGPT—identified as GPT-6 Astra—completed the decipherment come from Church’s account and contemporaneous secondary coverage, including All That’s Interesting’s October 2, 2026 report. They are not independently verified in the available accounts. The strongest supported description is therefore that Church reports an AI-assisted reconstruction, with a six-hour timeframe and model identity attributed to him and secondary reporting—not that an independently authenticated historical cipher was conclusively solved by ChatGPT alone.
The distinction matters because the work Church describes was not a model guessing at an unknown text from scratch. It combined a human transcription, Tant’s partial table, a solver guided by French-language patterns and historical cross-checks. The reported outcome is a proposed decipherment whose method and materials are documented, not a general measure of how quickly or reliably AI can break historical ciphers.
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