Jean Chouan
Encyclopedia
Jean Chouan was the nom de guerre of the Frenchman, Jean Cottereau, who was born at Saint-Berthevin
, near Laval
, in the department of Mayenne
on 30 October 1757 and died 18 July 1794 at Olivet, also in Mayenne. He was a counter-revolutionary, an insurrectionist, and a staunch royalist
.
Of the four Cottereau brothers, — Jean, Pierre
, François
, and René
, — Jean, the second-born, was the one called chouan ("the silent one") by their father. Others say his nickname came from an imitation of the call of the tawny owl (the chouette hulotte) he customarily used as a recognition signal. Less flatteringly, Jean's young comrades nicknamed him "the boy liar" (le Gars mentoux or le garçon menteur).
The 1926 Luitz-Morat film, Jean Chouan, starred Maurice Lagrenée as Chouan.
So, Chouan's role in history is, at best, questionable, and archives, even those belonging to aristocrats living in the region, indicate that he was completely unknown prior to the Bourbon restoration
in 1814. One thing is certain: the republicans, in their effort to quell the insurgency, contributed to the birth of the legend. The name, Jean Chouan, may, in fact, have been invented by republican authorities who were unable to name the true leaders of the insurrection against their own 1789 revolution
, the revolution that had unseated the royal house of Bourbon
in the first place.
There is, in much of the Jean Chouan material, a slight whiff of Robin Hood
and his merry men
. Chouan is a romantic hero who, with a small band of devoted followers living in the forest, stage courageous raids against a hated regime. How much of this is romantic legend and how much is historically factual will probably always be open to debate, but, in either case, the shoddiness of the history of this "hero" embarrasses many historians. The tales, true or not, have proved to be a rich source of literary inspiration. Most notably, Honoré de Balzac
drew from this history in writing the last of his series of novels, La Comédie humaine
, — a work called "The Chouans
". Nonetheless, it should be remembered that there is a history, indisputably true, associated with the figure of Jean Chouan; it is the history of a bloody and costly civil war in western France.
), lived with his wife, Jeanne Cottereau (born Jeanne Moyné), as a tenant at la Closerie des Poiriers (literally, the "pear orchard enclosure"), a farm halfway between the villages of Saint-Ouën-des-Toits
and Bourgneuf-la-Forêt
in Mayenne, France
. (An 'enclosure' is, in fact, a small farm, usually less than twenty acres in extent, and the name comes from the need for farmers to enclose their properties with fences or hedges to prevent cattle, sheep, and other domesticated animals from running free.) Tenancy on this piece of property had been established by the Moyné family about 1750.
The elder Cottereau, like his father before him, made his family's living by criss-crossing the wooded regions of western France, from the forest between Mondevert
and Le Pertre
to the forest of Concise, felling trees, stacking and seasoning the timber, and making wooden shoes, which he sold in the villages of Mayenne.
From the local parish registers, particularly those of the parish of Olivet, where the Closerie des Poiriers was located, it is clear that this was a region deep in economic misery throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. For example, in several birth records, there is the notation, "né sur la lande" (born on the land), indicating that the child's parents were likely to have been casual workers sleeping rough. So great was the misery of the forge workers at Port-Brillet
, owned by the prince of Talmont-Saint-Hilaire
, Antoine Philippe de La Trémoille
, that they took part in the French Revolution
, joined the National Guard and became ardent Republican patriots. Workers at La Brûlatte
behaved similarly.
The Cottereau family came from a line of merchants, notaries, and priests, and, unlike most of his neighbors, Pierre was literate and respectable. His children, however, were violent, quarrelsome, lazy, and resolutely ignorant.
Without doubt, their father's prolonged absences, cutting timber in distant forests, carving shoes, selling his sabots over a wide swath of Mayenne, deprived the Cottereau children of an authority figure. Further, since their mother was illiterate, as was common at that time, the Cottereau children were also largely unschooled. Their father died in 1778 when Jean Chouan was twenty-one years old. Pierre the younger, Jean's only elder brother, proclaimed himself a sabotier like his father, but he was neither so skillful nor so industrious as his father had been. To survive, all six Cottereaus, four brothers and two sisters, became involved in salt-smuggling.
Before 1790, the gabelle
was a very unpopular tax on salt. Traditionally, France has been composed of a collection of regions, former duchies
, principalities
, or independent kingdoms
, most of which enjoyed long periods of sovereignty, periods when they were all-but-completely divorced, politically, from the rest of France. Well-known examples of the regions are Normandy
, Burgundy, Brittany, and Aquitaine
. As an accident of the historical development of an integrated France, these regions had different tax rates for commodities like salt.
Whenever there is a disparity in prices or taxes between two neighboring jurisdictions, there will be smuggling. For example, La Croixille
is a town in the department of Mayenne, which was (and is) a part of the region of Maine
, in the eighteenth century, a high-salt-tax region. Across the River Vilaine, the neighboring town of Princé
, was, with respect to salt, in a tax-exempt region, Brittany
. The huge disparity between the price of salt in the two towns prompted active smuggling, with salt purchased cheaply in Brittany being moved across the river and sold for a high price in Mayenne. A perpetual guerrilla war between customs officers and salt-smugglers simmered in the valley of the Vilaine.
Those who engaged in this tax-avoidance traffic were known as "false-salters". The term, "false-salter", referred to criminal attempts to falsely represent lightly taxed salt as salt that had already been heavily taxed. An unarmed person caught "false-salting" was subject to condemnation to the galleys and deportation; by law, an armed false-salter could be executed. Between 1730 and 1743, 585 salt-smugglers were deported to New France
(Quebec
).
Jean Chouan and his brothers, François and René, were actively involved in this kind of commerce, and, although they knew the territory intimately, including all of the places in the forests of the borderlands where illicit salt might be hidden, they were stopped on several smuggling trips and narrowly avoided arrest.
Aside from their smuggling activities, the Cottereaus conducted a number of shady enterprises in the Misedon woods that surrounded their house at the Closerie des Poiriers. Sometime before 1780, Jean Cottereau, in the company of his brother, René, and a few others, were in the forest drinking moonshine
alcohol, in breach of the laws of Olivet, when they were surprised by two local constables, Pierre Bériteau and Jean Guitton. A brawl ensued. When it was over, a surgeon from Laval declared that one of the two was so badly injured that he could not stand to be transported to hospital. Instead, he was transported to an inn at Saint-Ouën-des-Toits, where he remained for several weeks. The Cottereaus, called before the bar of justice, were ordered to pay for the injured man's medical treatment, and for his room and board during the period of his confinement.
This episode was just one of a large number of transgressions engaged in by Jean and his brothers. The thuggish Cottereaus, over a period of several years managed to injure or cripple almost all their neighbors, usually for nonsensical reasons, and, inevitably, one or more of them was brought to court and forced to pay compensation to their victims in order to avoid imprisonment or deportation. This ruined the family financially.
inn.
Sentenced to death in absentia
, his execution took place in effigy
, along with that of his accomplice, Jean Croissant. He had gone into hiding by fleeing the area where he was well-known and enlisting, under a false name, in the 37th Infantry Regiment at Turenne
in central France. Other sources indicate that his mother, suspecting that he had been abducted by the crown and summarily imprisoned (or executed), went to Versailles to ask for his pardon from the king. This is doubtful. In fact, the possibility that Chouan was already in custody is contradicted by the fact that the proceedings initiated against him in 1780 were resumed in 1785. From family recollections and papers gathered by Jacques Duchemin Cépeaux, he concluded that Jean Chouan spent his time of absence in a distant garrison of the king's army.
Jean Chouan was arrested on 18 May 1785 at Bourgneuf-la-Forêt
. Under interrogation, he denied any participation in the murder of the customs agent, but he was sentenced to a year in prison anyway. He was more fortunate than his friend, Jean Croissant, who had been apprehended, tried, and convicted earlier. Chouan was not confronted by key witnesses; some were dead, others had recanted, and others were excused from testifying. Therefore, the prosecutor, Enjubault-Laroche, was unable to cobble together a strong case, and when it was heard on 9 September 1785, the result was a disappointing sentence, a single year in prison.
Freed on 9 September 1786, Chouan was immediately rendered to the Dépôt de Mendicité at Rennes
, under a decree postmarked 2 August 1786, and he stayed there three years. Upon his release, he took work as a servant in the household of Marie Le Bourdais, the widow of Alexis Ollivier, a cousin, then living in Chouan's home parish of Olivet. The widow's son was a priest, Alexis Ollivier, so Chouan took on an air of semi-respectability that helped to deflect any new suspicions about his criminal character.
(Assemblée constituante) to reform the Church and, little by little, to erode its traditional powers and prerogatives. For example, on 11 August 1789, tithes were abolished. On 2 November 1789, Catholic Church property, chiefly farmland and other real estate, held for the purpose of generating church revenue, was nationalized. On 13 February 1790, monastic vows were forbidden, and all ecclesiastical orders and congregations were dissolved, excepting those devoted to teaching children and nursing the sick. On 19 April 1790, the administration of all remaining church property was transferred to the State.
The final stroke was the Civil Constitution of the Clergy
(Constitution civile du clergé), passed on 12 July 1790, which entirely subordinated the Roman Catholic Church in France to the French government. Going forward, bishops (known as constitutional bishops) and priests were to be elected locally, and those casting ballots, the 'electors', were required to sign an oath affirming their loyalty to the constitution. There was no requirement that the electors be Catholic, so this created the ironic situation that Protestants and Jews could elect nominally Catholic priests and bishops. Under the Civil Constitution, new bishops were required to swear their loyalty to the State in far stronger terms than they ever had under any prevailing religious doctrine.
From the beginning of 1791, landowning priests were forced from their parishes, and they were replaced by elected priests, without property, who had sworn an oath to the Civil Constitution. More importantly, the possessions of the clergy, and other property which had been owned by the Church for centuries, were put up for sale in order to refill the coffers of the royal treasury, which, as had become painfully obvious during the crisis of the Estates-General
, were virtually empty.
Naturally, reactions to these new laws were strong and varied. A substantial number of French citizens heartily approved, and even the reformist faction within the Church could not find fault with some of the measures, especially those that denied the Church the right to continue to operate like a business, rather than as a spiritual institution. Others were adamantly, even violently, opposed. Predictably, those who abhorred the ecclesiastical reforms were also those who, most doggedly, supported the monarchy. Reactions also varied geographically. An interesting indicator of local sentiment was the percentage of priests who were willing to swear allegiance to the new Constitution. In dioceses near Paris and in the southeast, more than nine of ten priests were willing to take the oath. On the other hand, the percentage of swearing priests was lowest in Brittany, in some small pockets in the northeast, and in Nîmes and Toulouse in the south, all between one-third and one-half.
Jean Chouan, given his situation as a displaced employee of the abbé, Alexis Ollivier, could not remain passive.
Saint-Berthevin
Saint-Berthevin is a commune in the Mayenne department in north-western France.-References:*...
, near Laval
Laval, Mayenne
Laval is a commune in the Mayenne department in north-western France.It lies on the threshold of Brittany and on the border between Normandy and Anjou. Its citizens are called Lavallois.-Geography:...
, in the department of Mayenne
Mayenne
Mayenne is a department in northwest France named after the Mayenne River.-History:Mayenne is one of the original 83 departments created during the French Revolution on March 4, 1790. The northern two thirds correspond to the western part of the former province of Maine...
on 30 October 1757 and died 18 July 1794 at Olivet, also in Mayenne. He was a counter-revolutionary, an insurrectionist, and a staunch royalist
Royalist
A royalist supports a particular monarch as head of state for a particular kingdom, or of a particular dynastic claim. In the abstract, this position is royalism. It is distinct from monarchism, which advocates a monarchical system of government, but not necessarily a particular monarch...
.
Of the four Cottereau brothers, — Jean, Pierre
Chouan family
The descendents of Pierre Cottereau, called Chouan, a lumberjack, and of his wife Jeanne Moyné lived in la closerie des poiriers at Saint-Ouën-des-Toits in Mayenne, and gave their surname to the Chouannerie:...
, François
Chouan family
The descendents of Pierre Cottereau, called Chouan, a lumberjack, and of his wife Jeanne Moyné lived in la closerie des poiriers at Saint-Ouën-des-Toits in Mayenne, and gave their surname to the Chouannerie:...
, and René
Chouan family
The descendents of Pierre Cottereau, called Chouan, a lumberjack, and of his wife Jeanne Moyné lived in la closerie des poiriers at Saint-Ouën-des-Toits in Mayenne, and gave their surname to the Chouannerie:...
, — Jean, the second-born, was the one called chouan ("the silent one") by their father. Others say his nickname came from an imitation of the call of the tawny owl (the chouette hulotte) he customarily used as a recognition signal. Less flatteringly, Jean's young comrades nicknamed him "the boy liar" (le Gars mentoux or le garçon menteur).
The 1926 Luitz-Morat film, Jean Chouan, starred Maurice Lagrenée as Chouan.
Note of warning
Much of the biographical material on Jean Chouan is based on the work of Jacques Duchemin des Cépeaux, in a work written in 1825 at the request of the king, Charles X, who ruled France from 1824 until 1830. Cépeaux is unapologetically a royalist partisan, and he presents a number of claims that may be unfounded. The story of Jean Chouan is, therefore, almost certainly, in large part, legendary. The persistence of the legend can be explained by the fact it has been continuously nourished by a small faction of Catholics and royalist-legitimists who have remained active up to the present day.So, Chouan's role in history is, at best, questionable, and archives, even those belonging to aristocrats living in the region, indicate that he was completely unknown prior to the Bourbon restoration
Bourbon Restoration
The Bourbon Restoration is the name given to the period following the successive events of the French Revolution , the end of the First Republic , and then the forcible end of the First French Empire under Napoleon – when a coalition of European powers restored by arms the monarchy to the...
in 1814. One thing is certain: the republicans, in their effort to quell the insurgency, contributed to the birth of the legend. The name, Jean Chouan, may, in fact, have been invented by republican authorities who were unable to name the true leaders of the insurrection against their own 1789 revolution
French Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
, the revolution that had unseated the royal house of Bourbon
House of Bourbon
The House of Bourbon is a European royal house, a branch of the Capetian dynasty . Bourbon kings first ruled Navarre and France in the 16th century. By the 18th century, members of the Bourbon dynasty also held thrones in Spain, Naples, Sicily, and Parma...
in the first place.
There is, in much of the Jean Chouan material, a slight whiff of Robin Hood
Robin Hood
Robin Hood was a heroic outlaw in English folklore. A highly skilled archer and swordsman, he is known for "robbing from the rich and giving to the poor", assisted by a group of fellow outlaws known as his "Merry Men". Traditionally, Robin Hood and his men are depicted wearing Lincoln green clothes....
and his merry men
Merry Men
The Merry Men are the group of outlaws who followed Robin Hood, according to English folklore. An early use of the phrase "merry men" occurs in the oldest known Robin Hood ballad, "Robin Hood and the Monk", which survives in a manuscript completed around 1450. The word "merry" in this and other...
. Chouan is a romantic hero who, with a small band of devoted followers living in the forest, stage courageous raids against a hated regime. How much of this is romantic legend and how much is historically factual will probably always be open to debate, but, in either case, the shoddiness of the history of this "hero" embarrasses many historians. The tales, true or not, have proved to be a rich source of literary inspiration. Most notably, Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....
drew from this history in writing the last of his series of novels, La Comédie humaine
La Comédie humaine
La Comédie humaine is the title of Honoré de Balzac's multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy .-Overview:...
, — a work called "The Chouans
Les Chouans
Les Chouans is an 1829 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac and included in the Scènes de la vie militaire section of his novel sequence La Comédie humaine. Set in the French region of Brittany, the novel combines military history with a love story between the aristocratic...
". Nonetheless, it should be remembered that there is a history, indisputably true, associated with the figure of Jean Chouan; it is the history of a bloody and costly civil war in western France.
Origins
Pierre Cottereau, a lumberjack and maker of wooden shoes (sabotsClog (shoe)
A clog is a type of footwear made in part or completely from wood.The Oxford English Dictionary defines a clog as a "thick piece of wood", and later as a "wooden soled overshoe" and a "shoe with a thick wooden sole"....
), lived with his wife, Jeanne Cottereau (born Jeanne Moyné), as a tenant at la Closerie des Poiriers (literally, the "pear orchard enclosure"), a farm halfway between the villages of Saint-Ouën-des-Toits
Saint-Ouën-des-Toits
Saint-Ouën-des-Toits is a commune in the Mayenne department in north-western France.-References:*...
and Bourgneuf-la-Forêt
Le Bourgneuf-la-Forêt
Le Bourgneuf-la-Forêt is a commune in the Mayenne department in north-western France....
in Mayenne, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
. (An 'enclosure' is, in fact, a small farm, usually less than twenty acres in extent, and the name comes from the need for farmers to enclose their properties with fences or hedges to prevent cattle, sheep, and other domesticated animals from running free.) Tenancy on this piece of property had been established by the Moyné family about 1750.
The elder Cottereau, like his father before him, made his family's living by criss-crossing the wooded regions of western France, from the forest between Mondevert
Mondevert
Mondevert is a commune in the Ille-et-Vilaine department in Bretagne in north-western France.-Demographics:Inhabitants of Mondevert are called Mondevertais.-References:* ;* -External links:*...
and Le Pertre
Le Pertre
Le Pertre is a commune in the Ille-et-Vilaine department in Bretagne in north-western France.-Demographics:Inhabitants of Le Pertre are called Pertrais.-References:* ;* -External links:* *...
to the forest of Concise, felling trees, stacking and seasoning the timber, and making wooden shoes, which he sold in the villages of Mayenne.
From the local parish registers, particularly those of the parish of Olivet, where the Closerie des Poiriers was located, it is clear that this was a region deep in economic misery throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. For example, in several birth records, there is the notation, "né sur la lande" (born on the land), indicating that the child's parents were likely to have been casual workers sleeping rough. So great was the misery of the forge workers at Port-Brillet
Port-Brillet
Port-Brillet is a commune in the Mayenne department in north-western France....
, owned by the prince of Talmont-Saint-Hilaire
Talmont-Saint-Hilaire
Talmont-Saint-Hilaire is a commune in the Vendée department in the Pays de la Loire region in western France.Richard I of England often had his base in Talmont, and built the fortress of the commune....
, Antoine Philippe de La Trémoille
Antoine Philippe de La Trémoille
Antoine Philippe de La Trémoïlle, Prince of Talmont was a French noble and royalist notable for his military involvement against the French Revolution.-Early life:...
, that they took part in the French Revolution
French Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
, joined the National Guard and became ardent Republican patriots. Workers at La Brûlatte
La Brûlatte
La Brûlatte is a commune in the Mayenne department in north-western France....
behaved similarly.
The Cottereau family came from a line of merchants, notaries, and priests, and, unlike most of his neighbors, Pierre was literate and respectable. His children, however, were violent, quarrelsome, lazy, and resolutely ignorant.
Without doubt, their father's prolonged absences, cutting timber in distant forests, carving shoes, selling his sabots over a wide swath of Mayenne, deprived the Cottereau children of an authority figure. Further, since their mother was illiterate, as was common at that time, the Cottereau children were also largely unschooled. Their father died in 1778 when Jean Chouan was twenty-one years old. Pierre the younger, Jean's only elder brother, proclaimed himself a sabotier like his father, but he was neither so skillful nor so industrious as his father had been. To survive, all six Cottereaus, four brothers and two sisters, became involved in salt-smuggling.
Before 1790, the gabelle
Gabelle
The gabelle was a very unpopular tax on salt in France before 1790. The term gabelle derives from the Italian gabella , itself from the Arabic qabala....
was a very unpopular tax on salt. Traditionally, France has been composed of a collection of regions, former duchies
Duchy
A duchy is a territory, fief, or domain ruled by a duke or duchess.Some duchies were sovereign in areas that would become unified realms only during the Modern era . In contrast, others were subordinate districts of those kingdoms that unified either partially or completely during the Medieval era...
, principalities
Principality
A principality is a monarchical feudatory or sovereign state, ruled or reigned over by a monarch with the title of prince or princess, or by a monarch with another title within the generic use of the term prince....
, or independent kingdoms
Monarchy
A monarchy is a form of government in which the office of head of state is usually held until death or abdication and is often hereditary and includes a royal house. In some cases, the monarch is elected...
, most of which enjoyed long periods of sovereignty, periods when they were all-but-completely divorced, politically, from the rest of France. Well-known examples of the regions are Normandy
Normandy
Normandy is a geographical region corresponding to the former Duchy of Normandy. It is in France.The continental territory covers 30,627 km² and forms the preponderant part of Normandy and roughly 5% of the territory of France. It is divided for administrative purposes into two régions:...
, Burgundy, Brittany, and Aquitaine
Aquitaine
Aquitaine , archaic Guyenne/Guienne , is one of the 27 regions of France, in the south-western part of metropolitan France, along the Atlantic Ocean and the Pyrenees mountain range on the border with Spain. It comprises the 5 departments of Dordogne, :Lot et Garonne, :Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Landes...
. As an accident of the historical development of an integrated France, these regions had different tax rates for commodities like salt.
Whenever there is a disparity in prices or taxes between two neighboring jurisdictions, there will be smuggling. For example, La Croixille
La Croixille
La Croixille is a commune in the Mayenne department in north-western France....
is a town in the department of Mayenne, which was (and is) a part of the region of Maine
Maine (province)
Le Maine is one of the traditional provinces of France . It corresponds to the old county of Maine, with its center, the city of Le Mans.-Location:...
, in the eighteenth century, a high-salt-tax region. Across the River Vilaine, the neighboring town of Princé
Princé
Princé is a commune in the Ille-et-Vilaine department in Bretagne north-western France.-Demographics:Inhabitants of Princé are called Princéens.-References:* ;* -External links:*...
, was, with respect to salt, in a tax-exempt region, Brittany
Brittany
Brittany is a cultural and administrative region in the north-west of France. Previously a kingdom and then a duchy, Brittany was united to the Kingdom of France in 1532 as a province. Brittany has also been referred to as Less, Lesser or Little Britain...
. The huge disparity between the price of salt in the two towns prompted active smuggling, with salt purchased cheaply in Brittany being moved across the river and sold for a high price in Mayenne. A perpetual guerrilla war between customs officers and salt-smugglers simmered in the valley of the Vilaine.
Those who engaged in this tax-avoidance traffic were known as "false-salters". The term, "false-salter", referred to criminal attempts to falsely represent lightly taxed salt as salt that had already been heavily taxed. An unarmed person caught "false-salting" was subject to condemnation to the galleys and deportation; by law, an armed false-salter could be executed. Between 1730 and 1743, 585 salt-smugglers were deported to New France
New France
New France was the area colonized by France in North America during a period beginning with the exploration of the Saint Lawrence River by Jacques Cartier in 1534 and ending with the cession of New France to Spain and Great Britain in 1763...
(Quebec
Quebec
Quebec or is a province in east-central Canada. It is the only Canadian province with a predominantly French-speaking population and the only one whose sole official language is French at the provincial level....
).
Jean Chouan and his brothers, François and René, were actively involved in this kind of commerce, and, although they knew the territory intimately, including all of the places in the forests of the borderlands where illicit salt might be hidden, they were stopped on several smuggling trips and narrowly avoided arrest.
Aside from their smuggling activities, the Cottereaus conducted a number of shady enterprises in the Misedon woods that surrounded their house at the Closerie des Poiriers. Sometime before 1780, Jean Cottereau, in the company of his brother, René, and a few others, were in the forest drinking moonshine
Moonshine
Moonshine is an illegally produced distilled beverage...
alcohol, in breach of the laws of Olivet, when they were surprised by two local constables, Pierre Bériteau and Jean Guitton. A brawl ensued. When it was over, a surgeon from Laval declared that one of the two was so badly injured that he could not stand to be transported to hospital. Instead, he was transported to an inn at Saint-Ouën-des-Toits, where he remained for several weeks. The Cottereaus, called before the bar of justice, were ordered to pay for the injured man's medical treatment, and for his room and board during the period of his confinement.
This episode was just one of a large number of transgressions engaged in by Jean and his brothers. The thuggish Cottereaus, over a period of several years managed to injure or cripple almost all their neighbors, usually for nonsensical reasons, and, inevitably, one or more of them was brought to court and forced to pay compensation to their victims in order to avoid imprisonment or deportation. This ruined the family financially.
Before the French Revolution
In 1780, when he was twenty-three years old, Jean Chouan was a wanted man. He was being hunted down for having beaten a man named Marchais, who, he suspected, had informed the authorities about his salt-smuggling activities. He was also wanted for a more serious crime: with his friend, Jean Croissant, Chouan was alleged to have killed a customs agent, Olivier Jagu, with repeated blows of a billy-club, in a Saint-Germain-le-FouillouxSaint-Germain-le-Fouilloux
Saint-Germain-le-Fouilloux is a commune in the Mayenne department in north-western France.-References:*...
inn.
Sentenced to death in absentia
In absentia
In absentia is Latin for "in the absence". In legal use, it usually means a trial at which the defendant is not physically present. The phrase is not ordinarily a mere observation, but suggests recognition of violation to a defendant's right to be present in court proceedings in a criminal trial.In...
, his execution took place in effigy
Effigy
An effigy is a representation of a person, especially in the form of sculpture or some other three-dimensional form.The term is usually associated with full-length figures of a deceased person depicted in stone or wood on church monuments. These most often lie supine with hands together in prayer,...
, along with that of his accomplice, Jean Croissant. He had gone into hiding by fleeing the area where he was well-known and enlisting, under a false name, in the 37th Infantry Regiment at Turenne
Turenne, Corrèze
Turenne is a commune in the Corrèze department in the Limousin region in central France. It is characterised by its height and unique position on top of a cliff....
in central France. Other sources indicate that his mother, suspecting that he had been abducted by the crown and summarily imprisoned (or executed), went to Versailles to ask for his pardon from the king. This is doubtful. In fact, the possibility that Chouan was already in custody is contradicted by the fact that the proceedings initiated against him in 1780 were resumed in 1785. From family recollections and papers gathered by Jacques Duchemin Cépeaux, he concluded that Jean Chouan spent his time of absence in a distant garrison of the king's army.
Jean Chouan was arrested on 18 May 1785 at Bourgneuf-la-Forêt
Le Bourgneuf-la-Forêt
Le Bourgneuf-la-Forêt is a commune in the Mayenne department in north-western France....
. Under interrogation, he denied any participation in the murder of the customs agent, but he was sentenced to a year in prison anyway. He was more fortunate than his friend, Jean Croissant, who had been apprehended, tried, and convicted earlier. Chouan was not confronted by key witnesses; some were dead, others had recanted, and others were excused from testifying. Therefore, the prosecutor, Enjubault-Laroche, was unable to cobble together a strong case, and when it was heard on 9 September 1785, the result was a disappointing sentence, a single year in prison.
Freed on 9 September 1786, Chouan was immediately rendered to the Dépôt de Mendicité at Rennes
Rennes
Rennes is a city in the east of Brittany in northwestern France. Rennes is the capital of the region of Brittany, as well as the Ille-et-Vilaine department.-History:...
, under a decree postmarked 2 August 1786, and he stayed there three years. Upon his release, he took work as a servant in the household of Marie Le Bourdais, the widow of Alexis Ollivier, a cousin, then living in Chouan's home parish of Olivet. The widow's son was a priest, Alexis Ollivier, so Chouan took on an air of semi-respectability that helped to deflect any new suspicions about his criminal character.
Discontent
The French Revolution broke out in 1789, and it soon became apparent that the victorious republicans intended not only to overturn the monarchy but to redefine relations between the State and the Roman Catholic Church as well. Laws were passed by the new National Constituent AssemblyNational Constituent Assembly
The National Constituent Assembly was formed from the National Assembly on 9 July 1789, during the first stages of the French Revolution. It dissolved on 30 September 1791 and was succeeded by the Legislative Assembly.-Background:...
(Assemblée constituante) to reform the Church and, little by little, to erode its traditional powers and prerogatives. For example, on 11 August 1789, tithes were abolished. On 2 November 1789, Catholic Church property, chiefly farmland and other real estate, held for the purpose of generating church revenue, was nationalized. On 13 February 1790, monastic vows were forbidden, and all ecclesiastical orders and congregations were dissolved, excepting those devoted to teaching children and nursing the sick. On 19 April 1790, the administration of all remaining church property was transferred to the State.
The final stroke was the Civil Constitution of the Clergy
Civil Constitution of the Clergy
The Civil Constitution of the Clergy was a law passed on 12 July 1790 during the French Revolution, that subordinated the Roman Catholic Church in France to the French government....
(Constitution civile du clergé), passed on 12 July 1790, which entirely subordinated the Roman Catholic Church in France to the French government. Going forward, bishops (known as constitutional bishops) and priests were to be elected locally, and those casting ballots, the 'electors', were required to sign an oath affirming their loyalty to the constitution. There was no requirement that the electors be Catholic, so this created the ironic situation that Protestants and Jews could elect nominally Catholic priests and bishops. Under the Civil Constitution, new bishops were required to swear their loyalty to the State in far stronger terms than they ever had under any prevailing religious doctrine.
From the beginning of 1791, landowning priests were forced from their parishes, and they were replaced by elected priests, without property, who had sworn an oath to the Civil Constitution. More importantly, the possessions of the clergy, and other property which had been owned by the Church for centuries, were put up for sale in order to refill the coffers of the royal treasury, which, as had become painfully obvious during the crisis of the Estates-General
Estates-General of 1789
The Estates-General of 1789 was the first meeting since 1614 of the French Estates-General, a general assembly representing the French estates of the realm: the nobility, the Church, and the common people...
, were virtually empty.
Naturally, reactions to these new laws were strong and varied. A substantial number of French citizens heartily approved, and even the reformist faction within the Church could not find fault with some of the measures, especially those that denied the Church the right to continue to operate like a business, rather than as a spiritual institution. Others were adamantly, even violently, opposed. Predictably, those who abhorred the ecclesiastical reforms were also those who, most doggedly, supported the monarchy. Reactions also varied geographically. An interesting indicator of local sentiment was the percentage of priests who were willing to swear allegiance to the new Constitution. In dioceses near Paris and in the southeast, more than nine of ten priests were willing to take the oath. On the other hand, the percentage of swearing priests was lowest in Brittany, in some small pockets in the northeast, and in Nîmes and Toulouse in the south, all between one-third and one-half.
Jean Chouan, given his situation as a displaced employee of the abbé, Alexis Ollivier, could not remain passive.