A French Aristocrat in the American West: The Shattered Dreams of De Lassus de Luzières by Carl J. Ekberg (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 80 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY A French Aristocrat in the American West: The Shattered Dreams of De Lassus de Luzières Carl J. Ekberg A t the end of the eighteenth century, the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys attracted a host of men with grand plans. Many imagined creating communities that would bring the progress of western European civilization to a new level of sophistication and secure their reputation and families for generations. They are easily dismissed as dreamers or schemers intent on nothing other than personal profit and aggrandizement. But doing so misses the remarkable sense of possibility that permeated the Age of Revolution. Especially in the late 1780s and early 1790s, before the image of the French Revolution as the logical extension of the American Revolution had given way to an association with violence and the spread of anarchy to the Caribbean and the Americas, many people believed they lived in an unprecedented era in which human beings could improve themselves and their world. Relatively accessible, fertile, sparsely populated, and hotly contested, the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys held great promise for those seeking to promote long-term change by constructing physical environments that would facilitate commerce—social, cultural , and economic—among educated people throughout the world. We know a good deal about visionary Americans and the resistance of American Indians to plans they knew threatened them directly. We know far less about British, French, and Spanish adventurers in transAppalachia . A French Aristocrat in the American West represents another important step toward filling that scholarly lacuna. Carl J. Ekberg, professor emeritus of history at Illinois State University, provides a brief overview of the life of a middle-aged French aristocrat who, like a considerable number of his Royalist peers, abandoned France in 1790 to start over in North America. Born in 1738, Pierre-Charles de Hault de Lassus de Vrain de Luzières was a middling nobleman in Flanders who shared the widespread (and accurate) fear of people of his rank that the French Revolution would not end well for them. Unfortunately, he was among those aristocrats who purchased land around what became Gallipolis, Ohio, from Joel Barlow, the Scioto Company agent in Paris. Arriving in the Ohio Valley, the defrauded French émigrés discovered they held utterly worthless paper titles. Rather than continue in an isolated location without protection from Indians or the skills necessary to clear land and build a town, many made other arrangements. De Lassus de Luzières went to Pittsburgh, bought land and considered his options. In 1792-93, friends persuaded him to travel down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans. While on this journey, he committed to relocating to his family to Upper Louisiana near the town of Ste. Genevieve in what is BOOK REVIEWS SPRING 2011 81 now Missouri and developing an “industrial complex” (44) around producing, processing, and marketing wheat. He worked with French and Spanish officials to gather information, create a new administrative unit, and contemplate the development of a grand commercial empire that would link the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys with the wider Atlantic World through the regular exchange of American products, European goods, and universal ideas. Officials working within the confines of small budgets and limited manpower were delighted to have men eager to populate, improve, and govern distant regions within their empire. A committed monarchist, De Lassus de Luzières was hardly a late eighteenth-century radical. He despised the growing numbers of vulgar Americans pushing west, especially after France’s 1803 sale of Louisiana to the United States. But as Ekberg—the dean of studies of the French presence in the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys in the eighteenth century—shows, visionary schemes for the development of the continent were the province of conservatives as well as radicals and French as well as American settlers. Like most of his contemporaries, De Lassus de Luzières did not fulfill his vast ambition before his death in 1806. But he did succeed in carving out a comfortable position for himself and his family and in shaping the future of a small part of North America. Much as readers will enjoy Ekberg’s meticulous reconstruction of the life of...