A door to a French Revolution-era watchtower in England is engraved with more than 50 drawings, including gruesome depictions of people being hanged.
A wooden door discovered recently on the upper floor of a French Revolution-era watchtower offers an intimate look at the lives of British soldiers who spent hours at a time stationed there during the war, experts say. The door is covered in carved markings and illustrations that seem to reflect the soldiers’ daily experiences, and, for the most part, they do not paint a cheerful picture.
Among several notable dates and ostensible surnames engraved into the wood are a handful of eerie drawings, in which stick figure-like people are being hanged. One of those drawings may even depict the hanging of Napoleon Bonaparte, the French emperor and military commander whose threats to invade the United Kingdom toward the end of the 18th century forced a massive British military mobilization.
Those defensive preparations in England turned out to be unnecessary because the French invasion never actually happened, and Napoleon was not hanged in the end but rather died in poor health in exile on the remote island of St. Helena in 1821. Some controversy and debate over what exactly caused his decline and death still exists today.
But, before Napoleon’s exile, and amid successful military campaigns during the French Revolution, England in the 1790s began to shore up its own resources in case of a possible attack.
