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Dug Napoleonic French 44th Infantry Regt "ship" buttons & "Colonel-General" Regt For Sale
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Dug Napoleonic French 44th Infantry Regt "ship" buttons & "Colonel-General" Regt:
$240.00
These five coat buttons were dug in northern France along the French coast. Every one of them are quite scarce, much more so than your normal French military buttons with regimental numbers from 1-150 or so. Three of these buttons have French sailing ships / "man-of-war" on their faces, and are from the "Royal-Vaisseaux" regiment, which was an infantry unit that had its lineage dating back to being ship's garrison in the early 1700's.
Artist Don Troiani's book on "Military Buttons of the American Revolution" says these R.V. buttons did not start using the #44 at the bottom-edge of the button until after 1776; prior to that the regiment was numbered #26 or #33. I believe these Royal Vaisseaux buttons I'm offering date to the mid-to-late 1780's, or perhaps early 1790's. You typically find hundreds of regimental-numbered French buttons for every one button with the sailing ship design. One of these buttons has the ship design but with no regimental number; perhaps a replacement button carried in a soldier's "house-wife" sewing kit.
The only non-ship button in this grouping is an ultra-rare, seldom-if-ever-seen, "Colonel-General" regiment button, dating it to 1780 or later. They're so rare that Troiani did not even show one of these Colonel-General buttons in his book. The device has breast-plate armour in the center of the button with a flag on top, surrounded on the left and right with stacked flags / typically called "a stand of flags". All of these buttons measure 16mm in width and are "coat" buttons that were worn on the front of the soldier's jacket. The much larger buttons which American collectors call "coat" buttons were actually worn on the two tails of the uniform, similar to a coatee. I know this for a fact because collector and painter Keith Rocco has shown me how the French wore their small and large buttons as I've indicated- small buttons all over the front and larger buttons only on the tail of the jacket. These buttons have been cleaned and I do not recommendany more cleaning- may remove the "good" patina still left on them. I can't stress enough how rare these Royal Vaisseaux and Colonel-General buttons are.
These buttons were dug in France and I am NOT representing them as having been dug around Yorktown, VA. I believe their construction method is too thin (not thick enough) to have been made and issued to French troops in the 1770's. This is my professional opinion, having dug French buttons in VA many times since the late 1960's.
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