M. France
Wife: Marie Lefebvre
D. after 1642 in (probably) France
Jean Bourgoin was a 17th century Frenchman whose whose story is sketchy in many ways, but there are two known things about him. One is that he fathered a woman who had many descendants. And the other is that he had quite a career involved with the king of France.
Jean was a bourgeois (middle-class) man from Paris, living during his adulthood in the parish of Notre-Dame. Based on the dates of some of his activities, he was likely born around 1590. At some point he married a woman named Marie Lefebvre; they probably had several children, of which one (possibly the youngest) was Marie-Marthe, born in about 1638.
Researchers of Jean’s life have noted that he held the office of Secretary of the Chamber of the King in 1628, but there is much more to his story than that. Jean started out as the clerk of a financier who worked in the government, and he used his behind-the-scenes knowledge to later author several pamphlets that were used to support King Louis XIII. It seems from their content, that he was working for the king, either directly or indirectly, when he wrote them.
Portrait of Louis XIII.
Louis XIII had inherited the throne from his father, who was assassinated when he was 9-years-old in 1610. When a child became king, a regent ruled in their place, in this case Louis’ Italian-born mother, Marie de’ Medici. As Louis came of age, his mother continued to rule, along with a faction of men who served as her advisors. One of the advisors was an Italian man named Concino Concini, and his unpopularity caused revolts within the country led by a man named Conté. In 1617, Louis defied his mother by taking charge, having Concini assassinated, then ordering that she be exiled.
Part of the political process was the publication of pamphlets written to arouse the public to join one side or the other. Jean was the author of one such pamphlet in 1618 called La Chasse aux Larrons (The Hunt for Thieves), which was an argument in support of the king. The booklet contained about 100 pages, giving a negative view of the queen mother and Concini, and was said to be “ripe with rhetoric” and made use of “anti-Italian stereotypes.” Jean’s main point was that the finance department in the government needed to be overhauled, and advocated for a Chambre de Justice to expose how they’d been stealing money from the treasury. He suggested that the king was the one who could straighten things out.
Title page of La Chasse aux Larrons.
Over the next decade, Jean authored many more pamphlets. One was entitled Offers & Proposals made on February 7th, 1623, to the King, to return to His Majesty the funds taken and stolen by the Officers of Finance. That year, a rebuttal to Jean’s writing was published by the king’s rivals, called The Table of Slander, in favor of the Financiers, against the impostures of Bourgoin & the accomplices. It’s hard to say how much impact Jean’s pamphlets had, but it was said that at least one financier was hung in effigy and others were penalized in some way. It was also said that the pamphlets supporting the king were much more widely read than the ones supporting the opposing side, and this may have encouraged Louis to keep up the print attacks against his enemies.
Not much more is known of Jean outside of what he wrote while working on behalf of Louis XIII. In 1642, he was appointed Commis de l'extraordinaire des guerres, and then he disappeared from records. His daughter, Marie-Marthe, migrated to New France in about 1661, and Jean was likely dead by that time.
Known Children:
1. Marie-Marthe Bourgouin — B. abt 1638, Paris, France; D. 19 Dec 1682, Ste-Famille, Ile-d’Orleans, New France; M. (1) Nicolas Godbout (1635-1674), 9 Jan 1662, Quebec, New France; (2) Antoine Marcereau, 11 Jul 1675, Ste-Famille, Ile-d’Orleans, New France
Sources:
Our French-Canadian Ancestors, Gerard Lebel (translated by Thomas J. Laforest), 1990
Monarchy Transformed:Princes and their Elites in Early Modern Western Europe, Robert von Friedburg, John Morrill, 2017
Louis XIII of France (Wikipedia article)
“Political Pamphlets in Early Seventeenth Century France: The Propaganda War between Louis XIII and His Mother, 1618-1620,” The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 42, 2011
French Absolutism: The Crucial Phase, 1620-1629, A.D Lublinskaya, 2008
