Mathurin-Michel AMOUREUX was born in
the small
French
seacoast town of Bourgneuf-
en-Retz, near Nantes
on Dec 4, 1747
and died
in Ste. Genevieve, MO. 84 years
later on April
26,
1832.
His father, a retired military
officer,
was
certified in foreign
languages and the
family
appears to have been well to do...
Mathurin-Michel,
his father and both
grandfathers bore the
appellation
"noble Homme" indicating that these
families
had
become
prosperous enough to
reach
the bottom of the
rung of
the noble
class,
which
was a matter of considerable
advantage in the
18th century
France.
Mathurin-Michel's
surviving
papers
indicate
that he had
received an excellent
education, further
proof of the family's
financial
circumstances.
By the 1780's, Mathurin-Michel was a
large
scale
merchant
at the
seaport of
Lorient, in
southern Brittany,
where he had
dealings with
numerous foreign merchants,
in London,
Philadelphia and elsewhere.
At this point, Mathurin-Michel seduced the
orphaned
daughter
of a
sea captain,
Perrine
Janvier, who produced
his only
known
daughter
in 1871. In the following
year, Amoureux
married
Perrine and
acknowledged the child
as his own and
the couple
produced four
or
five sons.
One of Amoureux's clients in this period
was
the
American
naval
hero John Paul
Jones, who
carried
operations against the
British
from Lorient.
Jones
eventually was
hired by Catherine
the Great
to improve
the Russian navy. He had left property
with Amoureux
to be sold. Amoureux had
a number
of exchanges
of correspondence
with Thomas
Jefferson, then U.S.
Ambassador
to France, about
the
sale of
these items
and the transmittal of
the
proceeds to Jones.
At the outbreak of the French Revolution
in
1789,
Amoureux,
like
others in the
business class
and the
lesser nobility, sided
with
the
Revolutionaries. British
blockades
of French ports
during the
revolutionary
wars
apparently crippled
his business, but
worse
was
to
follow: in 1793
much of
western France rose in revolt
against the
revolutionary regime because of it's brutal
persecution
of the
Catholic religion. The
conflict
was
extremely bloody and
many
thousands of
revolutionary
soldiers and
their sympathizers
were slain before the
government succeeded in
suppressing the
counter-revolution at the cost of
some
200,000 lives.
During this storm period, the pro-Catholic
counter-revolutionaries
pillaged Amoureux's
house
at Lorient,
completing his financial ruin.
Amoureux
emigrated to
the United States
(with only his 14
year old
daughter,
Marie)
leaving his wife and
sons
behind. Perrine
lived
for
a time in a refugee camp
near
Rennes in Brittany,
a baby son died
at
Nantes.
The privileged life
that the
family
had enjoyed
before the Revolution had come
to
an
end. It
appears that Amoureux
remained
forever
bitter
against
the Catholic
church because of his losses
at
the hands of
it's
defenders, and so when he
died in
Ste.
Genevieve he
did
not have
a Catholic
funeral,
although his widow did when she
died
in
1845.
In the U.S., Amoureux seems to have
settled
at first
at
Georgetown in the District
of Columbia.
He apparently
had
succeeded
in bringing some
money with him, for he
traveled
about looking for
opportunities
to open a
business of some sort,
and
corresponded with
old business
associates
in
Philadelphia
and elsewhere to seek their
advice
(he considered a winery,
a general
store and other
ideas).
He also wrote
periodically
over the next
year or
more to
acquaintances in various American
ports
(such as Boston) to inquire
whether
Perrine
and their
children had arrived there.
At some point in 1795, the family had
apparently
somehow
been
reunited, and
began to
move west.
Amoureux appears as
a property
owner
and taxpayer
in a couple of
different places in
Kentucky
(1797 and
1801).
At this time his youngest
son,
Benjamin was
born
in
Frankfort on the 17th of
November
1797.
Soon after in 1801,
Amoureux arrived
in New
Madrid,
Missouri
where his superior
education and
his knowledge
of the French
language procured
him an
appointment as
probate judge and
recorder
after Missouri
passed
under
American control in
1804.
In 1812 Mathurin-Michel and his family
came
to Ste.
Genevieve
where he held office
as Justice
of the Peace
for a
number of years,
and seems to
have conducted a
thriving
mercantile business with
his sons. Once
again,
his superior
education gave
his status
in the
community
and his previous
business experience was of great value.
He did not achieve
wealth, however, and in
an
effort to
increase his
property he
made
periodic
attempts to
collect on old business
debts
in France
and also to assert
whatever
claims he had to
possible inheritances from
various relatives in
France.
Slavery in Ste. Genevieve was as old as
the
town
itself, and
even
older dating from
the black
mine laborers
brought across
the
Mississippi by
Renault. Even the
relatively
rare practice of
enslaving
Native Americans
was not unknown in
colonial Ste.
Genevieve,
because
of the general
scarcity of European
women
on the
frontier.
Creole men
frequently developed liaisons with
Indian a
nd Negro women, and often lived as
man
and
wife in the community.
Although both law and custom dictated
against
legal
sanctions for
such unions, in
the laisse faire,
live-and-let-live, easygoing
world
of
colonial
French
culture they were
not
unusual. But because
slaves
had
value
as property, events took
place
which are
very much
at odds
with today's social
values.
For example, when Felicite Beauvais
freed
her
slave
"Pelagie"
on June 12, 1833, she
also freed
Pelagie's
child,
*Felix (photo above),
who was in
reality also the son of
Beauvais'
fellow Creole
townsman, Benjamin C.
Amoureux.
Joseph, son
of Benjamin was
forced to purchase his own
daughter, Clara,
from L. C. Menard,
apparently
the owner
of
Joseph's wife Elizabeth at the time
of
Clara's
birth.
Although their relationship was evidently
one
of
permanent
commitment, they could
not legally
marry
in Missouri because
laws
in effect at the
time prohibited
interracial
marriages. No
official
record of it has been
found, but a tradition in the
family
was that
Benjamin
and Pelagie crossed the
Mississippi
by boat
at night and
were secretly married
by a sympathetic Catholic
priest on the
Illinois side.
At the time of Pelagie's death in 1890,
long
after the
days
of
slavery, her obituary
listed her as
the 'relict'
(widow)
of
Benjamin
C. Amoureux. It
states: "At her
home in Ste.
Genevieve,
on Tuesday,
November 11, 1890,
Mrs. Pelagie
Amoureaux, relict
of
Benjamin
C. Amoureux,
aged 85 years
2 months
and
6 days. The
deceased leaves
five children,
of
who
two, Felix and Joseph Amoureaux
are
well
known citizens of
Ste. Genevieve.
The funeral took
place on Wednesday."
In Ste. Genevieve's small
world of
French
culture
the community had
long
since
accepted this
type of living.
Descendents of
Benjamin and Pelagie
occupied
the
house
for
over
70 years,
leaving It in the 1920's,
and the
house,
now
some two
centuries old, still
bears
the Amoureux name, despite
a
succession
of
owners. It is in
this interplay between
structure
and personality that this
house
assumes an identity,
and take
it's place
in history.
*The St. Gemme Beauvais/Amoureux
House
was built
using
a
method of
construction quite
common in 18th century
Ste.
Genevieve.
Characterized by their wall
construction,
'Poteaux-en-terre' buildings
were
constructed
from heavy hewn
timbers
set vertically into
an earthen trench, the
upright logs
were
placed
close
together,
with the interstices filled with a
mixture
of
mud and animal hair or an infill of
stone rubble.
Buildings of this
type had no
foundation and support
came from
the rot
resistant
cedar log walls, today this
architectural style
is quite rare, with
Ste.
Genevieve
claiming three of the five
known
surviving houses in
the
United States. It
was
built in
about 1792 by Jean
Baptiste
St.
Gemme Beauvais.
(Photo of the Amoureux house below)
More photos of the Amoureux's . . .
See
Amoureux
Photo Gallery
Amoureux records (Federal Census,
Marriages,
Burials) . . .
See
African-American
Genealogy-
Missouri Roots
Amoureux Family Trees -
Rootsweb Search Engine
(Submitter: Frank Barker)
Note:
Some of the information on this
webpage
was
taken from
the display
boards in the
Amoureux house
(provided
by Tony Pregaldin),
other information and
some of the photos were provided by
Amoureux
descendents.
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