14 Facts About Jean Chouan

Jean Chouan was a counter-revolutionary, an insurrectionist and a staunch royalist.

Much of the biographical material on Jean Chouan is based on the work of Jacques Duchemin des Cepeaux, in a work written in 1825 at the request of the king, Charles X, who ruled France from 1824 until 1830.

The story of Jean Chouan is, therefore, almost certainly in large part legendary.

Jean Chouan is a romantic hero who, with a small band of devoted followers living in the forest, stage courageous raids against a hated regime.

Nonetheless, it should be remembered that there is a history, indisputably true, associated with the figure of Jean Chouan; it is the history of a bloody and costly civil war in western France.

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Jean Chouan's children were violent, quarrelsome, lazy, and resolutely ignorant.

In 1780, when he was twenty-three years old, Jean Chouan was a wanted man.

Jean Chouan was wanted for a more serious crime: with his friend, Jean Croissant, Chouan was alleged to have killed a customs agent, Olivier Jagu, with repeated blows of a billy-club, in a Saint-Germain-le-Fouilloux inn.

Jean Chouan had gone into hiding by fleeing the area where he was well-known and enlisting, under a false name, in the 37th Infantry Regiment in Turenne in central France.

From family recollections and papers gathered by Jacques Duchemin Cepeaux, he concluded that Jean Chouan spent his time of absence in a distant garrison of the king's army.

Jean Chouan was more fortunate than his friend, Jean Croissant, who had been apprehended, tried, and convicted earlier.

Jean Chouan was not confronted by key witnesses; some were dead, others had recanted, and others were excused from testifying.

The widow's son was a priest, Alexis Ollivier, so Jean Chouan took on an air of semi-respectability that helped to deflect any new suspicions about his criminal character.

Jean Chouan, given his situation as a displaced employee of the abbe, Alexis Ollivier, could not remain passive.