In a series of letters published in “Le Voltaire” he exposed the faulty and ignorant system of heraldry in vogue, and the deceptive assumptions of titles, coronets, and armorial bearings in modern French Society.
Indeed, he remarked, to judge by appearances, one might imagine that the Revolution had destroyed nothing, but that, on the contrary, it had endeavoured to foster and encourage titles and aristocracy, so rapidly had they increased of late years.
Toison d’Or wished to alter all this, and the salons were greatly disturbed as he went to work chipping off titles and prefixes of nobility right and left. But all to no purpose, except indeed to cast doubts upon all French heraldry since the downfall of the Bourbons.
A title in France costs nothing, and deceives no one who has the slightest knowledge of family history and genealogy.
The following letter appeared in “Notes and Queries,” London, August 25, 1894:
“As there always appears to be a doubt in the public mind as to whether there is any office in France at all corresponding to our heralds’ offices in this country, I ventured to put out this query to a well-known authority in Paris, together with the queries as to whether there is any ground for the statement that the archives of the French Heralds’ College were destroyed by fire by the Commune, and also if there is any Heraldic or Genealogical Society at all corresponding to the Government Office; and I received the following reply:
“‘The old Government had the “Généalogistes du Roi,” for proofs of nobility, and the “Juges d’Armes,” such as d’Hozier and Cherieu. The Monarchical Governments of this century had the “Conseil du Sceau des Titres,” now suppressed. The archives of these officers are now dispersed, part to the Bibliothèque Nationale (Cabinet des Titres), part to the Hôtel de Soubise (in the series M. and MM.), part to the Ministère de la Justice (for the period after 1789). In short, the equivalent of the Heralds’ College of England never existed in France. However, the Conseil du Sceau had some similarity to that body. There is no Heraldic Society, yet some persons, without legal authority, occupy themselves with questions of nobility, but they necessarily cannot be regarded as altogether trustworthy. Not knowing of a Heralds’ College in France, I cannot accuse the Commune of having burnt the archives. The fires of 1871 destroyed the parochial registers (entries of birth, marriage, and death) preserved at the Hôtel de Ville, and in the Library of the Louvre, which included some precious MSS. containing some correspondence of the last two centuries.’”
“ARTHUR VICARS, Ulster.”
It will be seen that reference is made in the above letter to a certain un-official Heraldic Society, but shortly after the above correspondence was published, even that body was dissolved.
In May, 1895, there was sold by auction in the Hôtel des Ventes, in Paris, the whole of the archives accumulated by the French Heraldic College. Although it is true the institution was never anything but a private enterprise, it had had an uninterrupted existence of more than half a century, during which period a great store of genealogical documents had been amassed relating to the titled families of France. It was founded in 1841 by the Marquis de Magny, the compiler of the well-known “Livre d’Or de la Noblesse de France,” but the present generation of Frenchmen did not care sufficiently for rules of precedence and genealogical trees to support the institution. Hence the sale, consisting, it is computed, of 40,000 genealogical trees, and about 400,000 original family documents.