Name/Title
Champ d'Asile [Song]Description
2-page handwritten song taken from Madame Mas's songbook, dated 1842.Context
Le Champ d'Asile is an ephemeral French colony, founded in Texas in 1818 by one hundred and twenty Bonapartist officers.
Some of the French officers were members of the Vine and Olive Colony, which had been offered to French colonists on March 3, 1817 by a vote of the American Congress. It was located in present-day southern Alabama, at the junction of two rivers named after Native American tribes, on a site which later became the cotton colony of Demopolis with its neighbors, Aigleville and Greensboro.
The colonists were initially led by General François Antoine Lallemand, accompanied by his brother Henri, two convinced Bonapartists. But François Antoine Lallemand succeeded in extracting money from the members of this colony before reselling his shares, not without having speculated on the land. This money allowed him to finance, with French and foreign mercenaries, the founding of a new colony called “Field of Asylum”. It was in fact a military garrison, located in Texas, on the Trinity River, near Moss Bluff and Atascosito, not far from the city of Galveston, on the former site of a Spanish fort built above the banks steep slopes of the river, among the Orcoquisa indigenous people. Among the founders was General Antoine Rigau, taken prisoner by the Russians in 18151. The French arrived, numbering 400, and built four forts, equipped with eight cannons2. Also among them were French refugees from Santo Domingo in America and generals from the Santo Domingo expedition. Of the 400 members, 150 came from the French immigrant communities of New York and Philadelphia. The others, around 250 men led by Charles Lallemand, came from Europe and Santo Domingo. They met again in March 1818 in Galveston2, where the pirate and slave trader Jean Laffite also operated, who had left the area of New Orleans in 1817 to settle in Texas.
The operation brought together funding in several major capitals, and was celebrated by the minting of a coin displaying a rooster on one side and a soldier plowing on the other. One hundred thousand acres of land were purchased. Four forts were built on site, not far from the coast and the small corsair republic installed by the pirate Jean Laffite. But Spain, which claimed sovereignty over Texas, charged Captain Juan Castañeda with destroying these fortifications, which was done on October 10, 1818. The French colonists then retreated to another land in Alabama, not far from the initial colony.
This episode of history is mentioned in my book Les Mummies de Bonaparte about my ancestor Captain Charles Gouget who participated in the establishment of the Vine and Olive Colony in Alabama.