1807: Gotha

Potential marriage partners for royals

If you were a member of one of the royal houses of Europe, you would buy the Almanac de Gotha to make sure the information about your family had been correctly maintained. Being recorded in this almanac meant you existed for the outside world and belonged to a company of the elect. You could also investigate the origins of a potential marriage partner. If it appeared that your intended was from a lower class, then a morganatic (left-handed) marriage was in the offing. If the woman was of low degree, she and her children would be barred from certain privileges and particularly from her husband's inheritance.

Napoleon

If you were not mentioned in the Gotha, or mentioned only marginally, you could resign yourself or cause a disturbance. Napoleon chose the latter. On 20 October 1807, three years after he had been crowned emperor, he wrote an angry letter to his minister of Foreign Affairs: 'Le dernier Almanach de Gotha est mal fait'. The Bonaparte family was the most important in France, not the House of Bourbon. Why had so little attention been paid to the French nobility compared with the German? Napoleon ordered the minister to write a letter to his colleague in Saxen-Gotha in order to correct the next year's volume. But the publisher, Karl Wilhelm Ettinger, had already printed the edition for 1808. So he quickly made a special edition for France in which the changes demanded by Napoleon were inserted. The copperplates of his enemies Nelson and William Pitt were removed, as was the illustration of his brother-in-law Murat, who had fallen into disfavour.

History

The Almanac de Gotha has had a long history. It was first published in French for the year 1764 by Andreas Reyher. After Reyher, various publishers from Gotha took responsibility for the almanac. The Mevius and Dieterich companies were followed by Ettinger, who published the book from 1776 to 1816. Starting in 1770, the German Gothaischer Hof-Kalender was coupled with the Almanac de Gotha. Shortly thereafter, both almanacs were enriched by the addition of copperplates by famous artists such as Daniel Chodowiecki. After 1816, the helm was taken over by Justus Perthes, whose name remained on the title page until 1944. The invasion of the Russians during the Second World War brought an abrupt end to the publication of this famous almanac. The Soviets occupied the print shop in Gotha and set fire to the huge genealogical archive. Fortunately, after more than 50 years, the Almanac de Gotha has risen up out of its ashes like a phoenix: it has been back in publication since 1998 and even has its own website: www.almanachdegotha.org.