[Berthier] - Bachelin (Auguste)
Alexandre Berthier Prince et Duc souverain de Neuchâtel, Prince de Wagram, Marechal de France. La principauté de Neuchâtel (1806-1814) et le bataillon de Neuchatel. Notice historique. Neuchâtel : S. Delachaux, (1863).
4to. 29 x 21.3 cm. pp 88. With a portrait of Berthier on the frontispiece and an engraved plate (Swearing in at the Temple du Bas) by Ab.-Louis Girardet as well as a lithograph in hand colour (Uniforms of the Neuchâtel battalion) by A. Bachelin. Half Morocco, gilt lettering, top edge gilt. Some rubbing to binding, first few leaves age toned.
Provenance: Archibald Philip, The Earl of Roseberry, Prime Minister of England, with his ex libris
At the turn of the 19th century, the King of Prussia was defeated by Napoleon I and was forced to give up Neuchâtel in order to keep Hanover. Napoleon's field marshal, Berthier, became Prince of Neuchâtel, building roads and restoring infrastructure, but never actually setting foot in his domain. After the fall of Napoleon, Frederick William III of Prussia reasserted his rights by proposing that Neuchâtel be linked with the other Swiss cantons (to exert better influence over all of them). On September 12, 1814, Neuchâtel became the capital of the 21st canton, but also remained a Prussian principality. It took a bloodless revolution in the decades following for Neuchâtel to shake off its princely past and declare itself, on March 1, 1848, a republic within the Swiss Confederation. Prussia yielded its claim to the canton following the 1856–1857 Neuchâtel Crisis.
