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Decipherments whose priority belongs to other researchers, which we redid on our side with our own controls.
On this page we claim no first reading: we state who found it first, what our re-reading confirms and what it adds.
King Joseph’s cipher letter, December 1812
A fully enciphered dispatch, published in 1969 as a letter from Marshal Berthier to Napoleon dated 22 December 1812, reads with the Great Cipher of 1812, the code of the French armies in Spain. Its writer is, in all likelihood, King Joseph, writing from Madrid.
Priority. The key and the writer were first identified by Ilia Chirtulov (result received by Satoshi Tomokiyo on 4 October 2026, reported on Cryptiana on 12 October 2026).
Our re-reading (12 October 2026), made without knowledge of that result:
- 325 groups read one by one in the deciphering table of the Great Cipher of 1812 (photographs by J.-F. Bouchaudy, Service historique de la Défense);
- none of 1,000 shuffled tables gives a text as French as the real table;
- 8 groups of the online transcription corrected from the 1969 photograph;
- a sister letter printed in 1854 (Joseph to the Minister of War, Madrid, 23 December 1812) says the same things.
Cryptiana · Unsolved ciphers (“Solved”, Ilia Chirtulov) ↗ · Vilcoq 1969 on Persée ↗