Jean Chouan
The persistence of the legend can be explained by the fact it has been continuously nourished by a small faction of Catholics and royalist-legitimists who have remained active up to the present day.
Chouan's presence in history is mostly barren and archives, even those belonging to aristocrats living in the region, indicate that he was completely unknown prior to the Bourbon restoration in 1814.
Chouan was a romantic hero who, with a small band of devoted followers living in the forest, stage courageous raids against a hated regime.
Most notably, Honoré de Balzac drew from this history in writing the last of his series of novels, La Comédie humaine—a work called "The Chouans".
(An 'enclosure' is, in fact, a small farm, usually less than twenty acres in extent, and the name comes from the need for farmers to enclose their properties with fences or hedges to prevent cattle, sheep, and other domesticated animals from running free.)
So great was the misery of the forge workers at Port-Brillet, owned by the prince of Talmont-Saint-Hilaire, Antoine Philippe de La Trémoille, that they took part in the French Revolution, joined the National Guard and became ardent Republican patriots.
Without doubt, their father's prolonged absences, cutting timber in distant forests, carving shoes, selling his sabots over a wide swath of Mayenne, deprived the Cottereau children of an authority figure.
Jean Chouan and his brothers, François and René, were actively involved in this kind of commerce, and, although they knew the territory intimately, including all of the places in the forests of the borderlands where illicit salt might be hidden, they were stopped on several smuggling trips and narrowly avoided arrest.
Aside from their smuggling activities, the Cottereaus conducted a number of shady enterprises in the Misedon woods that surrounded their house at the Closerie des Poiriers.
The thuggish Cottereaus, over a period of several years managed to injure or cripple almost all their neighbors, usually for nonsensical reasons, and, inevitably, one or more of them was brought to court and forced to pay compensation to their victims in order to avoid imprisonment or deportation.
He was also 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.
From family recollections and papers gathered by Jacques Duchemin Cépeaux, he concluded that Jean Chouan spent his time of absence in a distant garrison of the king's army.
Therefore, the prosecutor, Enjubault-Laroche, was unable to cobble together a strong case, and when it was heard on 9 September 1785, the result was a disappointing sentence, a single year in prison.
Freed on 9 September 1786, Chouan was immediately rendered to the Dépôt de Mendicité in Rennes, under a decree postmarked 2 August 1786, and he stayed there three years.
[8] Upon his release, he took work as a servant in the household of Marie Le Bourdais, the widow of Alexis Ollivier, a cousin, then living in Chouan's home parish of Olivet.
[9] The French Revolution broke out in 1789, and it soon became apparent that the victorious republicans intended not only to overturn the monarchy but to redefine relations between the State and the Roman Catholic Church as well.
On 13 February 1790, monastic vows were forbidden, and all ecclesiastical orders and congregations were dissolved, excepting those devoted to teaching children and nursing the sick.
[10] More importantly, the possessions of the clergy, and other property which had been owned by the Church for centuries, were put up for sale in order to refill the coffers of the royal treasury, which, as had become painfully obvious during the crisis of the Estates-General, were virtually empty.
On the other hand, the percentage of swearing priests was lowest in Brittany, in some small pockets in the northeast, and in Nîmes and Toulouse in the south, all between one-third and one-half.
