Coins, Tokens, Historical Medals and Paper Money

FRANCE, Assemblée Nationale, 1848, a silver award medal, unsigned, fasces surmounted by hand and flanked by cornucopiæ, rev. legend in wreath, named (Cen. Lucien Murat), 50mm (cf. ICE 6, 196). Several edge bruises, otherwise about very fine; of American interest £100-200

Lucien Charles Joseph Napoléon, Prince Français, 3rd Prince Murat (1803-78) was the second son of Joachim Murat, king of Naples, and his consort Caroline Bonaparte. Ushered out of Italy as a boy of 12 after the execution of his father, he was educated at Schloss Frohsdorf in Austria and, upon returning to Venice in 1822, was forced to flee as an enemy of the state. After numerous adventures, including being shipwrecked off the coast of Spain and captured by the Spanish, Murat arrived in the US in April 1825 after the personal intervention of President Monroe. Domiciled in the US from 1825 to 1848, Murat travelled extensively in Texas, California and in the Carolinas, before settling down with his wife, Caroline, the daughter of a Scottish emigré, at Bordentown, NJ. He continued to visit France in the late 1830s and early 1840s, seeking to reclaim his family’s right to the throne. When news reached him of the fall of Louis Philippe in 1848 he and his wife hastened to France where, as Citizen Lucien Murat, he was elected a member of the Assemblée Nationale and, in 1849, as minister for Turin. In 1861 he tried to regain the throne of Naples, but was dissuaded by his maternal first cousin, Napoleon III. During the Franco-Prussian War Murat was imprisoned at Metz and after the fall of the Second Empire moved back to the US, although he was to die in Paris in April 1878