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Acquired in 1788 from an unknown dealer by Jean Rennes, 2nd Marquis du Fourquevaux, this dagger passed from his ownership after only a few years. The Marquis was primarily a tenant farmer, relying on crops from Forquevaux to cover his extravagant spending. However, the harvest of 1788 was a spectacular failure, contributing to the general famine in France at the time and utterly ruining the Marquis. He sold off all his property and holdings at auction, a process interrupted by his death in 1791 during the Reign of Terror.

Purchased by a General in the National Guard, Auguste Des Jardins of Lyon, the dagger appears in his official 1811 portrait after the campaigns in Germany and Poland. Official dispatches indicate that General Des Jardins had a reputation as a whiner, constantly complaining that the areas in which he operated did not have sufficient forage and that his men were constantly shortchanged in the supply chain. This was apparently borne out when the general and most of his command starved to death near Minsk in 1812.

The dagger was lost for some time after that, with rumored owners in Ireland and India. It appears next in a catalogue of items seized from a Jewish importer in Amsterdam by Nazi officials in 1943. A local SS official used it as a ceremonial dirk for a time before giving it to his mistress, who died in the Hongerwinter of 1944-1945. It was recovered by American troops in 1945 at the salt mine at Merkurs, and recognized by one of the MFAA members as belonging to the Aachen set.

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The blade is named after its earliest known owner, Henri Delacroix, 5th Duc du Richat. Records seized in 1789 and now part of the Archives Nationales indicate that the Duc purchased the blade at auction for 12 écu d’argent. The auction, which dispersed the worldly goods of a metalworker who had vanished and was presumed to be dead, furnished a number of other impressive antiquities at surprisingly reasonable prices.

The Duc was taken enough with the dagger that he wore it on his person, ostensibly for self-defense. Its prominence in the Duc’s 1787 portrait in the Louvre indicates that he enjoyed flouting it, though the painting does notably show a much different handle than the later extant photographs. When the Duc disappeared in 1788, failing to appear in his chambers and presumed to have drowned during a late-night walk, the dagger passed into his estate’s general collection.

After being looted the following year, the dagger did not reappear in the official record until 1863, when it was listed in a catalog of antiquities for sale by Hans Colbert, a dealer in Aachen. His catalog photograph of the Richat Dagger is the only know represenation from life, as both Colbert and his house photographer, Jean-Baptiste Girodoux, vanished before the dagger could be sold.

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