The restless governor

 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Houdetot_-_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9ral_Duplessis.jpg

 

Jean-Baptiste Vigoureux Duplessis, who gave permission for Robin the American to manage the sugar plantation, was appointed governor of Saint Vincent on May 21, 1780, and given leave to return to France on November 12, 1781. His year in Saint Vincent was a sequence of crises. “J’ai été continuellement étourdi des tracasseries qu’il y’avait dans cette isle,” the governor of the Windward isles, Bouillé, wrote to Duplessis in November 1781, and then, to the administration in Paris, “je vous supplie de ne pas renvoyer M. Duplessis à ce gouvernement.”

The complaints included that Duplessis had used soldiers and public inventory to build a house for himself; that he had interfered with the hospital’s purchases of cattle (“les officiers sont-ils des marchands de boeufs?”); and that he had repaid the 8,000 livres owed to a mulatto in the service of the king by providing “un indien évalué à 2,000 livres,” “l’esclavage de cet indien etant plus que douteux.” The most serious charges were brought by the Caribs, unvanquished in the aftermath of the First Carib War, and France’s allies in the conflict with the British. The king had sent them numerous presents, from silver guns and sabres to shirts, hats and handkerchiefs, which Duplessis had retained. In an “odious plot,” he planned to force the Caribs to emigrate to Trinidad, or to the mainland of Spanish America; a premonition of the mass deportations implemented by the British in the Second Carib War. “J’ai cru devoir les rassurer sur la crainte de les faire vendre que vous leur aviez inspirée,” Bouillé wrote to Duplessis.

Duplessis was born in 1735 in the French outpost of Chandernagor in West Bengal. At the age of two, according to a 16-page manuscript summary of his services in his dossier of the Légion d’Honneur, he was sent to France. At the collège du Plessis, he «distinguished himself in all his classes, » in his own account, and won first prize for a translation of Homer at the age of fourteen. In 1752, he joined the regiment of the Ile de France (the modern Mauritius.) There followed a dizzying sequence of assignments : Madagascar, where he captured three kings ; Pondicherry; Madras, where he saved the life of the Comte d’Estaing; Muscat; Bandar-Abbas; Bencoolen; Sumatra, of which he became the French governor;  Mahé, where he was a prisoner of war. He returned to France in 1780, and was appointed governor of Saint Vincent ; in 1786 or 1788, according to his account, he was awarded the Order of Cincinnatus, for services to American independence. In 1791, when he was on the way to India, he was appointed governor of the Ile Bourbon (Réunion.) In 1794, he was imprisoned by revolutionary officers on the island. In 1796, he was back in France, and appointed by the Directoire as general in the army of the interior. In 1800 he was named by the First Consul as commander of the veterans of Paris; in 1804 he was president of the military commission that judged the conspiracy against Napoleon; later that year, he was made commander of the Légion d’Honneur; he became a count of the restoration monarchy in 1814, and died in 1825. 

 

AN-COL: C8 A 79 Fo 10; C8 A 80 Fo 141; C8 A 80 Fo 144; C8 A 81 Fo 52. AN, LH//2714/52; https://www.leonore.archives-nationales.culture.gouv.fr/ui/notice/373532. Six, Dictionnaire biographique.