French Noble Emigrés in Bath and Jersey

Those of you who have been reading The French Genealogy Blog for a while may have discovered that we despise the principle of aristocracy, the premise that those born to privilege, power and vast swathes of property are somehow superior human beings. It is an illogical premise promoted only by its beneficiaries, and one that almost daily evidence disproves; generations of power and wealth have not produced people of superior intelligence or beauty or prowess or morality. Rather, there would seem to be some evidence to indicate that numerous generations of people who delude themselves that they are better than others and that those they consider to be inferior are somehow sub-human have produced a disproportionate number of psychopaths.

Nevertheless, if you have them among your ancestors, we see no reason not to research them and we remind you that we have written about such research a number of times:

• Ancestors Among the French Nobility
• Nobles on the Net
• The Cabinet des Titres
• The Beleaguered Nobility of Brittany
• Aristocracy Comes and Goes
• Everyone Wants a French Noble Among Their Ancestors

Today's topic is an interesting aspect of researching those nobles known as émigrés for having left France, their heads on their shoulders, during the French Revolution, specifically, researching those who went to England. The émigré period, when people of the nobility went abroad to escape both the Revolution and the First Empire but, with the First Restoration, felt it was safe to return, is generally given as being from 1795 to 1814.

Family life did not freeze while they were away; some died, some married and many were born, events which were recorded in notebooks of the local Catholic churches in their places of exile. Gildas Bernard wrote that these notebooks were produced in "various chapels in London and others in Southampton, Winchester, Bath, Jersey, Guernesey".¹ They contain a great deal more than the usual detail, for the nobles involved were keen to assert their identities. However, the notebooks were not discovered until 1949, in the French Embassy in London. Before that, diligent researchers of a different kind of nobility went to Jersey and to Bath and conducted original research in the records of the churches there, publishing their work in :

• Les Familles françaises à Jersey pendant la Révolution, by the Comte Régis de l'Estourbeillon in 1889. This is a massive work of more than six hundred pages. Families are listed alphabetically but really, as the names have so many articles and extensions, that is not much more help in finding them than one has with the correct Arabic names given alphabetically in Brill's Encyclopaedia of Islam. For each family, a brief history is given, then major alliances are listed, then the heraldic escutcheon is described. After this, the events that were recorded in the church during the family's exile are listed in full.
• "Les Emigrés Bretons réfugiés à Bath pendant la Révolution", by Charles Robert in Revue de Bretagne, de Vendée et d'Anjou, June 1898. A much smaller work because there were fewer refugees in Bath, this simply reproduces, verbatim, the baptism, marriage and burial entries from the church register.

One of our Dear Readers showed us a rather delightful way in which some of the information given in the works above can be verified. When they returned, the émigrés went to work reclaiming their property and re-establishing themselves. Some, wanting to be sure that all was in order, went to the local courts with all of their documents, including their certificates of baptism, marriage or a relative's death abroad, to have all of them legally accepted in France. Some then went to the town hall with the court approval and all of the documents and had all of the births, marriages and deaths entered into the civil registers.

Thus, the family of the Marquis de Kermel de Kermesen were living in Bath when a number of children were born. Charles Robert in his article confirms this in his lists of births there. In the Guingamp civil register of births for 1833, the births, and a very great deal more about the family, are entered, as can be seen in these pages from the website of the Departmental Archives of Côtes-d'Armor. It took eight pages.

If this happened more than once, which seems likely, then you, Dear and Noble Readers, could try starting at the end of the trail to trace your returned émigré ancestors. Try searching in the civil registers of the towns where one of them was living, examining the pages through a number of years after their possible return. Try searching in the Jersey or Bath publications mentioned above. You may get lucky and find them in both!

UPDATE: Dear Reader Monsieur O sent via e-mail the link to the Bath Burial Index, which you may search for French ancestors who may have died there during their self-imposed exile.

 

©2019 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

 

 

¹Bernard, Gildas. Guide des Recherches sur l'Histoire des Familles. Paris : Archives nationales, 1981, p. 306

The French in Australia

The editors of Connexion  have again given their kind permission for us to share one of their articles with our Dear Readers, not a few of whom write to us from Australia. Enjoy!

 

It is one of the most tantalising wonders of French history: the possibility that, if events had taken a different turn, Australia could have become a French colony. Michael Delahaye plays a historical game of 'What If..?'

Nicolas Baudin was one of the great French explorers of the Age of Enlightenment.

His final expedition, from 1800 to 1804, was to the largely unknown southern landmass that the French called Nouvelle-Hollande, known today as Australia.

Funding for the expedition was personally agreed by First Consul Napoléon Bonaparte and, typical of the expeditions of the time, it was dedicated to the study and collection of zoological and botanical specimens.

Many of these – wallabies, emus and black swans – would end up in Empress Joséphine’s garden at the Château de Malmaison outside Paris.

The first Europeans to explore the Australian coast were probably the Portuguese in the 16th Century, followed by the Dutch in the 17th, but it was the British who, in the wake of Captain Cook’s expeditions, established the first permanent settlement in 1788 – the penal colony of Sydney.

Baudin’s expedition is remarkable because, while its leader’s intentions were commendably scientific, one crew member’s plan was nothing less than a land grab to dislodge England’s tenuous foothold. Had he succeeded, Australians would now be greeting each other not with a matey “G’day” but – like one in five Canadians – a more restrained “Bonjour”.

His name was François Péron. A former soldier, he was an inveterate self-promoter and social climber. Although only 25 when taken on as one of the expedition’s naturalists, he quickly rose to a position of influence to become a thorn in his commander’s side.

Following Baudin’s death on the return journey, he ended up not just writing the official account of the expedition but writing Baudin out of it.

Péron’s role in the expedition raises intriguing questions: Was he just an amateur strategist or had he been embedded by a higher authority, without Baudin’s knowledge, to conduct a covert spying mission? If so, what part was played by the man who authorised the expedition, Napoléon Bonaparte?

Central to these questions is a document that has only recently been subjected to academic scrutiny – Péron’s so-called memoir. It appears to be a draft report, hastily handwritten on his return, complete with deletions and scrawled marginalia.

It is addressed to Count Fourcroy, director of the Museum of Natural History in Paris and, more to the point, a councillor of state at the heart of government – though there is no evidence it reached him.

For two centuries, the document lay in the Baudin Expedition archive in Le Havre, largely ignored.

It was not published in full, in its original French, until 1998. Then six years ago it was translated into English by two academics at the University of Adelaide, professors Jean Fornasiero and John West-Sooby (French Designs on Colonial New South Wales, published by The Friends of the State Library of South Australia). Viewing the document from an Australian perspective, they put it into a wider, geopolitical context and highlighted Péron’s impudent proposal: that France should annex the embryonic British colony of New South Wales.

International diplomacy in Baudin’s day was conducted in a quaint, gentlemanly way.

Even countries regularly at war, like England and France, would grant passports to members of each other’s expeditions so they could use their ports for repair and revictualling.

This arrangement enabled Baudin, whose two ships had just charted Australia’s south coast, to drop anchor on the eastern seaboard at Port Jackson, the gateway to Sydney.

They stayed there, as guests of the British governor, for five months and were given remarkably free rein, considering that, only weeks before their arrival, their two countries had been officially at war.

Péron was quick to exploit the opportunity to check out the colony and its 6,000-strong population. His memoir reveals a conflicted mix of Anglophilia and Anglophobia – impressed by what the English had achieved in just 14 years but outraged by what he repeatedly calls their “invasion” and their presumption in claiming an entire continent by a unilateral act of possession.

It reads: “Milord, there is not a moment to lose: we must strike a blow at this international bogeyman at all costs, otherwise world trade will be in England’s hands. One of the cruellest blows we can deliver her is to overthrow her nascent empire in the Southern Lands…

“In 25 years, this remarkable colony will be able to defy the combined efforts of France and Spain.”

Out of these contradictory emotions arose his audacious plan: that Paris should send a fleet of frigates with a landing party of some 1,800 men, together with eight months’ supplies, to blockade Port Jackson and, counting on a spontaneous uprising by the Irish convicts within, take Sydney.

Success assumed, Péron considered the options: “Three courses of action are available: destroy the colony, grant it independence, maintain possession of it.”
He favoured the last, again with a back-handed compliment to the enemy: “…by securing this region, and particularly by adopting the English plan for administering it, we could gain almost all of the benefits from it that she herself anticipated.”

But how much of this reached Napoléon? There is no evidence he ever saw Péron’s memoir.

That said, on the expedition’s return, Péron is known to have been in contact with both Joséphine and Napoléon about the animals destined for the Empress’s garden. Then, when he came to compile the official account, Péron ensured that the accompanying atlas gave the area charted by the expedition a name: Terre Napoléon.

Further playing to the Emperor’s vanity, he added such geographical features as Golfe Bonaparte in cosy connubiality alongside the smaller Golfe Joséphine.
Napoléon would certainly have received a copy and surely at least flicked through it.

But by 1804 the Emperor’s thoughts were likely elsewhere.

Uppermost would have been his planned invasion of England – to be aborted a year later by the defeat of the combined French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar. Even so, Professor West-Sooby thinks something like Péron’s plan may have lingered in the imperial mind as late as 1810.

Baudin’s visit to Sydney certainly rattled the English.

Following it, they moved quickly to colonise Van Diemen’s Land – today’s Tasmania – and extended their grip along the southern coast, eventually assuming control of the entire continent.

Today, the Queen remains Australia’s head of state.

But though the French may have lost the Great Southern Land, time would bring a small consolation.

In 1911, a descendant of the French geographer-politician Charles Pierre Claret de Fleurieu visited Australia to ask whether some of the names Baudin had given to places might be officially reinstated.

As a result, one of the most beautiful parts of South Australia is today called the Fleurieu Peninsula.

Coincidentally, it produces some fine Cabernet Sauvignon.

 

What was France’s real interest in Australia?

 

Professor John West-Sooby of the University of Adelaide explains what evidence there is to show France’s intentions towards Australia:

What was the true nature of the French and British expeditions led by men like Baudin and Cook?
JWS: Scientific discovery was the first motivation – at least, as publicly declared. That said, given all the geopolitical rivalries, no expedition was entirely “innocent”.

Everybody understood that people going to the Pacific or to the Indian Ocean would also keep an eye out on the position of rivals and the defences of their territory, their colonies and their ports.

Do you believe Napoléon was ever made aware of Péron’s plan?
JWS: There is a document in Napoléon’s correspondence dating from 1810, which is when the French lost Mauritius to the British, and Napoléon was thinking of sending a squadron to take back the island – and there’s a kind of parenthetical comment: “Once they’ve done that, they can head south and attack the colony at Port Jackson.”

So there’s certainly a possibility that the idea, if not Péron’s memoir itself, had circulated in some way up and through the corridors of power. We just have no definitive way of confirming it.

Péron’s plan is very persuasive in its detail. Could it have worked?
JWS: I think it is plausible… I don’t know how many ships it would have taken – enough for a decent landing party and another one to patrol and protect the entrance to the port – but it sounds plausible: “We land, secure the military barracks before daybreak while they’re still asleep, free the Irish convicts who will ask nothing more than to help us overthrow their English masters…” So yes, there’s plenty that’s plausible about it.

Ultimately, there’s the issue of resources. How do you send an expedition of that capacity round the other side of the world when you don’t hold the Cape of Good Hope? In terms of realpolitik, it was a bit fanciful that France might mount that kind of expedition at that time.

Michael Delahaye, 16 August 2019