Louis-Antoine, Comte de Bougainville (12 November 1729 – 31 August 1811) was a French military officer, explorer and nobleman.

[citation needed] In 1755, he was sent to England as secretary to the French embassy in London, where he was made a member of the Royal Society.

[citation needed] In 1756, Bougainville was stationed in Canada as captain of dragoons and aide-de-camp to the Marquis de Montcalm.

He sailed back to France the following winter, under orders from the marquis to obtain additional military resources for the colony.

Having distinguished himself in the war against Britain, Bougainville was rewarded with the Cross of St Louis and promoted to colonel.

With a small elite troop under his command, among which were the Grenadiers and the Volontaires à cheval, he patrolled the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, upstream from the city; he prevented the British several times from landing and cutting communications with Montreal.

He was among the officers who accompanied Lévis to Saint Helen's Island off Montreal for the last French stand in North America before the general capitulation of September 1760.

[3] Shipped back to Europe along with the other French officers, all deprived of military honors by the victors, Bougainville was prohibited by the terms of surrender from any further active duty against the British.

At his own expense, Bougainville undertook the task of resettling Acadians who had been deported to France by the British because of their refusal to sign loyalty oaths.

A formal ceremony of possession of the Islands was held on 5 April 1764, after which Bougainville and Pernety returned to France.

[4] Although the French colony did not number more than 150 people, for financial motivations (Bougainville having paid for the expeditions) and diplomatic reasons (Spain feared that the Falklands would become a rear base to attack her Peruvian gold), Bougainville was ordered by the French government to dismantle his colony and sell it to the Spanish.

Spain agreed to maintain the colony in Port Louis, thus preventing Britain from claiming title to the islands.

He pretended that these parts belonged to his Britannic majesty, threatened to land by force, if he should be any longer refused that liberty, visited the governor, and sailed away again the same day.

Bougainville left Nantes on 15 November 1766 with two ships: Boudeuse (captain : Nicolas Pierre Duclos-Guyot) and the Étoile (commanded by François Chenard de la Giraudais).

Other notable people on this expedition were the astronomer Pierre-Antoine Veron; the surgeon of Boudeuse Dr. Louis-Claude Laporte; the surgeon of the Étoile Dr. François Vives; the engineer and cartographer aboard the Étoile Charles Routier de Romainville; and the writer and historian Louis-Antoine Starot de Saint-Germain.

Bougainville described it as an earthly paradise where men and women lived in blissful innocence, far from the corruption of civilization.

Bougainville's descriptions powerfully expressed the concept of the noble savage, influencing the utopian thoughts of philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau before the advent of the French Revolution.

Diderot used his fictional approach, including a description of the Tahitians as noble savages, to criticize Western ways of living and thinking.

He managed to rally eight ships of his own division, and bringing them safely into Saint Eustace after the defeat of Comte de Grasse.