Un petit fonds Saint-Domingue... En Mayenne

Quatrième de couverture

Les Archives de la Mayenne conservent le chartrier du château de Fresnay, dont neuf cartons constituent un « petit fonds Saint-Domingue » auquel Revue Musicorum et les Archives consacrent tout un volume. Ce fonds contient des informations sur la vie des familles Chabanon, Vezien et Pardaillan, liées par l’histoire de l’île de Saint-Domingue au XVIIIe siècle. Grâce aux regards croisés des auteurs rassemblés dans ce volume, portés sur toutes ces données, se dégage une analyse de l’investissement colonial de la famille Chabanon et de ses descendants, des réseaux de sociabilité de ses membres sur l’île et en métropole ainsi qu’une description des difficultés rencontrées au moment de la Révolution et de leurs conséquences. Le marquis Charles de Bailly recueille tout l’héritage de sa femme Victoire de Pardaillan en 1830 au château de Fresnay, où s’achève le voyage du « petit fonds Saint-Domingue ».

The Mayenne Departmental Archives de la Mayenne hold the cartwright of the Château de Fresnay, nine of which constitute a “small Saint-Domingue collection” to which Revue Musicorum and the Archives devote an entire volume. This collection contains information on the life of the Chabanon, Vezien and Pardaillan families, linked by the history of the island of Santo Domingo in the eighteenth century. Thanks to the crossed views of the authors gathered in this volume, focused on all these data, an analysis of the colonial investment of the Chabanon family and its descendants, the sociability networks of its members on the island and in home country emerges, as well as a description of the difficulties encountered at the time of the Revolution and their consequences. The Marquis Charles de Bailly received all the inheritance from his wife Victoire de Pardaillan in 1830 at the Château de Fresnay, where the journey of the "Petit Fonds Saint-Domingue" ended.

Préface

Le « petit fonds Saint-Domingue » : destinée d’un fonds d’archives de part et d’autre de l’Atlantique

This collection is part of the cartwright of the Château de Fresnay (Le Bourgneuf-la-Forêt), the private property of the Maynard family. In 1830, when the nine boxes constituting the family history of the Chabanon, de Vezien and Pardaillan families were added to the other archives of the castle, Charles Gaspard, Marquis de Bailly and his wife, Victoire de Pardaillan, had been living there since 1815 after having restored it in 1811, on their return from Portugal. The entire cart is deposited in the Archives de la Mayenne in Laval [508 J 115-123]

Cyril Daydé

Considérations sur l’état présent de la colonie française de Saint-Domingue (1776), Michel René Hilliard d’Auberteuil

Michel René Hilliard d'Auberteuil's Considerations on the Present State of the French Colony of Saint-Domingue, published in 1776 and immediately banned by a decree of the King's Council, had two dimensions. This was undeniably critical with the denunciation of the "abuses" of the royal administration, which generally arbitrated in favour of metropolitan merchants at the expense of agricultural settlers who sometimes made the mistake of preferring to be non-residents. But the Hilliard d'Auberteuil’s Considérations takes stock of all the social forces at work on the island, evaluates trade, and describes precisely the techniques that are effective in the island's four major crops (sugar cane, indigo, coffee, cotton). Finally, it evaluates the financial investments required in each of these situations.

Jean-Jacques Tatin-Gourier

Des formes et des usages de la cartographie à/de Saint-Domingue

In the Archives départementales of Mayenne, we can find the “Petit fonds de Saint-Domingue”, inside which is a map of the whole island of Hispaniola. This handsome document, without outside signs (as maritime roads) another else one wind rose, has a scale: one centimeter = one French mile, or about four kilometers.

The French colony of Saint-Domingue (the western part of the island) experienced in the first half of the eighteen century an economic development, whose foundations are plantation economy, slave trade and sugar trade. This “perle des Antilles” is subject, since her discovery by Europeans, to various cartographic initiatives. After the French and Indian wars (1757 – 1763) and the loss of New France, the interest for the colony raises. The maps are more and more accurate, the attention is turning to global knowledge of territory, to its defence, its boundaries, to terrestrial roads rather than maritime ones.

To understand why this document is inside the family records of a plantation, we need to put it into its context. Then, we must wonder about the uses of this map by the owners and/or the managers of the plantation. One map is not only a space’s representation, but also an identity document.

Bernard Gainot

De l’Académie royale de musique à la Comédie du Cap français,

l’itinéraire de Louis-François-Barthélémy Piffet (Amiens 1734 – Port-au-Prince 1779)

Louis-François-Barthélémy Piffet is a musician belonging to the institutions of the Ancien Régime, the “Twenty-four violins of the King” and the Royal Academy of Music. He made a career in Paris, also being a soloist at the Concert Spirituel. By crossing the Atlantic he will be confronted with a colonial musical life whose functioning is very different, and the change in his career allows us to visualize the profound transformations at work in the profession of musician in the second half of the 18th century.

Bernard Camier

Musique militaire française au temps de l’Expédition de Saint-Domingue : le témoignage d’Elie Brun-Lavainne (1803-1804)

Direct accounts of overseas military music are rare at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. Even rarer are those evoking the Saint-Domingue Expedition (1801-1803) led by General Leclerc (1772-1802) and the violent repression that followed. Despite his youth, Élie Brun-Lavainne was an eyewitness to these events. He wrote an interesting account in Mes souvenirs, an autobiographical work published in 1855.

In it, he explains how his father, music director of the National Guard in Dunkirk (Nord) and later of the 46th half-brigade, and himself, then aged 11 (he played the triangle), found themselves embarked in Dunkirk harbor on the corvette La Malicieuse, bound for the expedition to Saint-Domingue. A violent storm deports Élie and his father. When they disembarked in Port-au-Prince 44 days later, they were hired to play in the military band of Rochambeau's (1755-1813) General Guard-in-Chief of the Saint-Domingue army, who had succeeded Leclerc.

There's comical narration, interesting economic considerations, a reflection on music and theater in Port-au-Prince, the death of his father from the yellow fever that decimated the French army, some impressions of Creole music, and the hunt for slaves seeking to escape the French attempt at colonial and slave-owning takeover. After a few months in forced exile, Élie Brun returned to France in the spring of 1804. He pursued a life as a military musician, and later as a writer.

By contextualizing his testimony and making use of the analytical resources offered by recent musicological research, we find in Élie Brun-Lavainne a few of characteristic elements of these metropolitan military musicians in a colonial context.

Patrick Péronnet

Les Chabanon et Saint-Domingue : une histoire de familles.

Families genealogy : Chabanon, de Vezien, de Pardaillan, de Bailly.

 Laurine Quetin

La fratrie Chabanon à Saint-Domingue : « quelques circonstances de [notre] vie »

The six Chabanon children born in Saint-Domingue between 1728 and 1744 each had a different destiny. The eldest preferred literature and music to the military career that the other three embraced. The two sisters made marriages that are a sign of the family's social ascent thanks to sugar cane plantations. Everything fell apart after 1791 because of the French Revolution.  

 Laurine Quetin

Marie-Laurence de Chabanon, de Saint-Domingue à Paris (1792-1799)

The Archives de la Mayenne have a collection on the life of several families in Saint-Domingue and France in the 18th century : Chabanon, de Vezien, de Pardaillan et de Bailly. This collection also traces all the difficulties encountered by these families at the time of the French Revolution. Thanks to Marie Laurence de Chabanon, a member of the Chabanon siblings, who passed on all the documents to her children, the archives offer the management of their plantations, wills, and inventories after death as well as numerous letters. Having lost these plantations burned in 1791 in Saint-Domingue, Marie-Laurence de Chabanon settled in Paris and lived with difficulty without money and in poor health. She died in September 1799.

 Laurine Quetin

La séparation de biens entre Marie-Laurence de Chabanon et J. J. Bacon de la Chevalerie

The second marriage in 1762 of Marie Laurence de Chabanon, to Jean-Jacques Bacon de la Chevalerie, ended with a separation of property concluded in Paris in 1793. The letters preserved in the archives show how painful this separation of property was.

 Laurine Quetin

“Il ne faut pas déranger le service public pour un point d’étiquette. » Les lettres du duc de Penthièvre au comte de Pardaillan (1782-1791)

Written between 1782 and 1791, these twenty-five letters from the Duke of Penthièvre to Count Pierre de Pardaillan, son-in-law Marie Laurence de Chabanon, evoke the deterioration of his health and paint a picture of the profound change in society on the eve of the Revolution.

 Laurine Quetin

Chabanon: un patrimoine aux pieds d’argile

As far as possible, the ‘small archives file from Saint-Domingue’ 508 J sheds light on the everyday life, the construction but also the development and financial survival challenges that both the de Vezien sugar estate in Trou-du-Nord and the Chabanon sugar estates in Limonade (“La Plaine Vaseuse” and “L’Îlet”) had to cope with during the second part of the 18th century till the eve of the French Revolution.

‘A property with feet of clay’ reminds us that wealth was a mere façade for many sugar estate owners who were in high debt. The Chabanon and de Vezien estates did not reverse this main trend because owners had to face significant financial hardship.

 Jean-Louis Donnadieu

L’habitation de Vezien au Trou-du-Nord, une sucrerir parmi d’autres

‘The de Vézien sugar estate in Trou-du-Nord, an estate among many others’ focuses on a sugar estate during the 1770s with its maintenance works and the making of sugar loaves, showing how income fluctuated. We also get some information about the slaves who worked there.

 Jean-Louis Donnadieu

La Plaine Vaseuse, une grande habitation entre déclin et rebond

 ‘La Plaine Vaseuse, a large estate between decline and expansion’: Marie Laurence de Chabanon inherited this sugar estate and ran it carefully while defending her interests and her children’s. Apparently, this property went through tough times in the 1740s and 1750s before diversifying its activities as it became a pottery, brick and tile factory for a few years. The owner also had an indigo factory project and developed the sugar cane production. We have some information about the enslaved people there.

 Jean-Louis Donnadieu

La « suite » de Madeleine Bouchaud, veuve Chabanon (1780)

‘Madeleine Bouchaud or widow Chabanon’s suite (1780)’ reminds us that the Chabanon family ‘s mother enjoyed a pleasant way of life in both L’Îlet sugar estate and a house in Cap-Français.

 Jean-Louis Donnadieu

Les Robillard de Péronville, une famille partagée entre la métropole et Saint-Domingue

Among the debtors of the Chabanon family, a debt and a note preserved in the Pardaillan collection (AD 53) mention the name of Robillard de Péronville. This family comes from a long line of principal treasurers who managed the financing of the war in addition to the military budget. With Jean Guillaume, born in Besançon in 1727, who served in the army from 1753, the family was divided between France and Saint-Domingue. While building up a colonial estate in parallel with his military career, the Le Bonnet dwelling, located in the Plaine du Nord, near the Cap-Français  (which we studied during our Master's degree in “History, Culture and Heritage” in 2021), Jean Guillaume became the patriarch of a family that frequented the high circles of the society in Saint-Domingue, while the metropolitan branch roamed the corridors of Versailles and practised the tobacco trade.

Despite the death of Jean Guillaume and the burning of the house in the early days of the Saint-Domingue Revolution in the summer of 1791, the family bounced back into the financial world under the Empire. She was compensated after 1825 for the loss of her land in Saint-Domingue, thus ending the Robillards' adventure in Saint-Domingue.

 Elodie Lambert

Préparer la guerre depuis Saint-Domingue et la Martinique (1777-1778) : regards croisés entre le minutier de Pardaillan et les Mémoires de Bouillé

Count of Pardaillan’s « minutier » is a very interesting document to reach the knowledge of the orders given before the open war between France and Britain, in the context of the American War of Independence. As the commander of the southern part of Saint-Domingue from 1777 to 1780, Pardaillan wrote various instructions and letters sent to officiers under his orders. He had also a role of transmission for the instructions from d’Argout, governor of Saint-Domingue, who received those from the Court.

Studying this « minutier » may have been less instructive if it was not compared to another valuable testimony, recently published: the Memoirs of Bouillé about his action from the Martinique during the American War of Independence, with the relations he had with the Court.

The comparison between Pardaillan and Bouillé gives us a sight on the orders taken and the organization of the French rising power from 1777 to 1778, before entering officially the War.

 Fadi El Hage