 A Boule de Moulins, filled with artificial correspondence (Musée de La Poste, Paris). | |
| Date | January 1871 |
|---|---|
| Location | France |
| Cause | Need for mail transport between Paris and the provinces during the Prussian siege |
| Participants | Pierre-Charles Delort, Émile (or Louis-Émile) Robert, Isca (or Jacques) Vonoven |
| Outcome | Complete failure, none of the 55 balls reached Paris in time |
A Boule de Moulins was a method of transporting mail from the provinces to the city of Paris, used during the siege of the 1870 war. As the mail to be transported in this way in hollow spheres is first centralized in Moulins (Allier), these balls are called "de Moulins".
Three people came up with the idea of placing the mail in watertight zinc cylinders, given a spherical shape by means of fins, which were immersed in the Seine well upstream of Paris, not far from Montereau-Fault-Yonne. Rolling downstream on the river bed, these balls were to pass through the lines of the besiegers and be collected in a net set up on the outskirts of the capital. However, operations were delayed by lengthy discussions with the Post administration, as winter advanced and ice encumbered the course of the Seine.
Despite promising trials, the process proved a complete failure, with none of the 55 Moulins balls dropped between January 5 and 28, 1871 reaching Paris before the end of the siege, although more than half of them have since been found, from the Seine-et-Marne to the mouth of the Seine. The letters they contained were handed over to their addressees or descendants, or found their way into the collections of the Musée de La Poste and private collections.