Louis-Pantaléon de Noé, Count of Noé, (November 8 or December 22, 1728 – February 25, 1816) was a Creole–French general and peer. The son of a Gascon officer and a Creole landowner, he grew up in the colony of Saint-Domingue before serving as an officer during the War of the Austrian Succession and then the Seven Years' War. He later returned to Saint-Domingue to manage his plantations, where hundreds of slaves produced coffee and especially sugar.
Returning to Gascony, he lived the life of a grand lord while having his plantations in Saint-Domingue managed. He emigrated during the Revolution and returned to France in 1802. Financially strained, he sought help from a former slave of one of his family's plantations, Toussaint Louverture, who had become the hero of the Haitian Revolution.
In his later life, he became a lieutenant general and a peer of France during the Restoration. After his death, his family maintained the memory of his relationship with Toussaint Louverture. In Victor Hugo's novel Bug-Jargal, many details allow the identification of the two main characters as Louis-Pantaléon de Noé and Toussaint Louverture.
Biography
Family and Childhood in Saint-Domingue (1728-1740) Louis-Pantaléon de Noé was born on November 8, 1728, according to his military record, or on December 22, 1728, as he himself indicated under the First Empire. There might be confusion between the date of birth and the baptism date. His mother likely gave birth in the "big house" of the Bréda plantation in Haut-du-Cap, owned by his grandparents, in Cap-Français, in the French colony of Saint-Domingue.
Louis-Pantaléon de Noé was the son of Jean-Louis de Noé (1691-1730) and his wife Marie-Anne de Bréda (1708-1761). Jean-Louis de Noé, commonly known as Louis, came from an ancient noble family of Gascony, the Noés, lords of L'Isle-de-Noé, allied notably with the Colberts and the Pardaillan de Gondrins. Louis de Noé had an elder brother, Marc-Roger de Noé, heir to the marquisate of Noé.
Jean-Louis de Noé held the title of count and began a career as a naval officer, which brought him to Cap-Français, Saint-Domingue, where he married Marie-Anne de Bréda by contract signed on November 27, 1725. She was the daughter of Pantaléon I de Bréda, who left her a plantation located in the Limbé district, west of Cap-Français, where about fifty slaves worked. It was thus a marriage between a younger Gascon with a prestigious name but relatively little wealth and a Creole heiress.
The newborn Louis-Pantaléon was entrusted to the care of a black slave nurse, Madeleine, whom we know from a gift he made to her forty-seven years later, in 1775, when she had become free through manumission. On December 21, 1730, Jean-Louis de Noé died from a sword blow received from another officer during a drunken dispute.
Until the age of 8 and his departure for metropolitan France in March 1737, Louis-Pantaléon de Noé grew up on his native island. Then his mother, Marie-Anne Bréda de Noé, took her two children, Louis-Pantaléon and his younger sister, Marie-Anne, with her. She first settled in Paris, then in Auch, and remotely managed her properties in Saint-Domingue. Her son began his military career in 1740, when he was not yet twelve years old.
Officer (1740-1773)
On June 6, 1740, at the age of eleven, Louis-Pantaléon de Noé became a second lieutenant in the infantry regiment of Noailles. He was promoted to ensign on November 1, 1741, and then to lieutenant on December 9, 1742, in the same regiment.
As the War of the Austrian Succession began at the end of 1740, young Louis-Pantaléon experienced his first combat during the Battle of Dettingen on June 27, 1743, a French defeat during which he was slightly wounded. In 1744, he participated in the sieges of the cities of Ypres, Menin, and Freiburg-im-Breisgau, during which he was wounded again. On February 19, 1745, Louis-Pantaléon de Noé became a cavalry captain in the La Viefville regiment. He fought in Italy in 1746 (battles of Tidone, Tanaro, and Piacenza) and in Flanders in 1747 at the Battle of Lauffeld, during which he received a new injury. After the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, he remained a cavalry captain.
In June 1756, he received the cross of Knight of the Royal and Military Order of Saint Louis from King Louis XV at Versailles. It's unclear what connections he may have had to receive such a considerable honor. He then continued his military career in the Gendarmerie of France, the elite units that protected the king. During the Seven Years' War, he was seriously wounded during the Battle of Minden and remained disabled, as he wrote in a letter: "having spent the entire war in the gendarmerie, wounded badly enough to be crippled and able to serve in the cavalry only with difficulty." On February 1, 1762, he became a colonel of infantry, indicating that he had the means to purchase a regiment, the Royal-Comtois Infantry regiment. This regiment was assigned to the surveillance of the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts.
In 1769, he obtained permission to leave his regiment, entrusting it to Lieutenant Colonel La Motte-Geffrard, to focus on his private affairs in the colony of Saint-Domingue, where he arrived in the second half of the year. His regiment, sent to the Isle of France, now Mauritius, mutinied. The leaders were judged in July 1773, and on July 28, 1773, Count de Noé, then in Saint-Domingue, was relieved of his command in favor of Stanislas-Catherine de Biaudos de Castéja.
Aristocratic planter (1769-1775)
Louis-Pantaléon de Noé's mother, Marie-Anne de Bréda, died in Toulouse on August 24, 1761, leaving her property to Louis-Pantaléon and his sister Marie-Anne. She had already sold her Limbé plantation and bequeathed to her children a sugar plantation called Les Manquets, shares in a tile factory and a pottery, all in Cap-Français, as well as significant debts. In 1765, Louis-Pantaléon's sister renounced her inheritance in his favor. He entrusted the management to merchants established in Saint-Domingue before coming himself in 1769.
Upon arriving in Saint-Domingue, Count de Noé settled in the city of Cap-Français, where he cultivated social relations with other members of the white upper class, notably François-Antoine Bayon de Libertat, who managed the Bréda plantations then owned by Pantaléon II de Bréda, Louis-Pantaléon's uncle.
In 1772, Louis-Pantaléon de Noé formed a partnership with one of his cousins, Louis-François-Pantaléon du Trousset, chevalier d'Héricourt. They pooled their assets from Les Manquets, creating the Héricourt-Noé plantation located next to Cap-Français, in the Acul-du-Nord district. It was a large sugar plantation, covering about 700 hectares, one of the largest in the region. Sugarcane was cultivated, crushed (in mills), and transformed into sugar (through heating) by slaves, through exhausting labor. In 1774, the two partners owned over 400 slaves on their plantation.
During his stay in Saint-Domingue, Louis-Pantaléon de Noé also interacted with free people of color, the most famous being Toussaint Bréda, who later took the name Toussaint Louverture when he became the hero of the Haitian Revolution. Toussaint was a slave on the Bréda plantation before being emancipated, either by Count de Noé himself or by Bayon de Libertat, who managed the Bréda plantation. The tradition that reports Toussaint as the slave of Louis-Pantaléon de Noé is incorrect, as he did not own the Bréda plantation at that time; it belonged to his uncle. Among Louis-Pantaléon's servants was Blaise Bréda, a "free person of color," who was his cook and owned two houses and slaves himself.
Once their financial situation was restored, the two associated cousins considered returning to France. The allure of the metropolis, the boredom of a monotonous life, and the constant fear of a possible revolt by the slaves on their plantation, who outnumbered the whites by far, likely explained this decision. Before leaving, they chose two trusted men to manage their plantation: a proxy, authorized to act on their behalf, Antoine-Alexis Mosneron de Launay, and a steward, a kind of accountant, Charles de Lépinaist. They arrived in the metropolis on July 29, 1775.
Absentee landowner (1775-1791) In April 1778, Count de Noé and his cousin, the Chevalier d'Héricourt, bought two coffee plantations from their attorney for Les Manquets, Mosneron de Launay, this time located on the hills of Port-Margot. These two plantations totaled 136 plots of land and nearly fifty slaves, almost all recently deported from Africa (known as "Bossales"), except for one native of Saint-Domingue. The Chevalier d'Héricourt returned to Saint-Domingue two months later, realizing that this purchase turned out to be a bad deal, and, upset, parted ways with Mosneron de Launay at Les Manquets. Louis-Pantaléon de Noé also returned in 1778 but stayed in Saint-Domingue for a very short time. The two partners quickly sold their coffee plantations.
The Chevalier d'Héricourt took charge of the direction of the sugar plantation at Les Manquets but fell ill and died on August 25, 1779. The plantation passed entirely to Count de Noé, who compensated the other rightful heirs. He entrusted the management to three successive attorneys. First, from 1779 to 1789, François-Antoine Bayon de Libertat, the same one as at the Bréda plantation. He was dismissed for mismanagement in 1789. His successor was Jean-Jacques-Philippe Langlois de Laheuse until April 1790. At that date, a new attorney was appointed, Joseph-Nicolas Duménil, who managed the plantation until the slave revolt of August 1791.
During this period, the sugar cane planted area in the Les Manquets plantation increased from about 200 hectares in 1780 to nearly 340 hectares in 1791. The annual sugar production varied from about 180 tons in 1780 to approximately 260 tons in other years. The plantation yielded at least 30,000 pounds per year to Count de Noé.
Sources do not allow us to precisely know the experience of the slaves, but it appears that they were poorly fed, mainly on bananas, vegetables, and other starchy foods, poorly dressed, and housed in economically constructed huts, subjected to exhausting work for which they were not numerous enough. Consequently, they had precarious health, and epidemics seemed frequent. The slaves resisted as best they could, including engaging in temporary or longer-term escape attempts. Bayon de Libertat, in his letters to Count de Noé, claimed to promote childbirth among slave women, which allowed for the renewal of the workforce at a lower cost than purchasing Bossales from the slave trade.
In 1786, upon the death of his uncle Pantaléon II de Bréda, Count de Noé inherited, in joint ownership with his sister Marie-Anne de Noé de Polastron, his cousin Louis-Bénigne-Pantaléon du Trousset, Count d'Héricourt, and his cousin Julie du Trousset d'Héricourt de Butler, the two Bréda plantations, one in Haut-du-Cap in Cap-Français, and the other in Plaine-du-Nord. These were two sugar plantations, where more than 360 slaves worked in total, three-quarters of whom were adults born in Africa. These plantations were managed, like Les Manquets, by Bayon de Libertat, whose trusted man was Toussaint Bréda. After Bayon de Libertat's dismissal in 1789, who seemed to prioritize the management of his own sugar mill located in Limbé, it appeared that irrigation works and the construction of new mills were necessary. Like at Les Manquets, small-scale maroonage was endemic to the Bréda plantations.
It seems that it was in Count de Noé's plantation at Les Manquets that the Saint-Domingue slave revolt began on the night of August 22–23, 1791.
Gascon Grand Lord (1775-1789)