FLORIAN - The Most Traveled Man on Earth

Note on the Life of Jean Baptiste <strong>FLORIAN</strong>
Jean Baptiste Florian Jolly de Pontcadeuc had a remarkable if sadly short life. He was
born in 1767 to an aristocratic family in Brittany as the cloud of the French Revolution
loomed over French society. He was educated in France and England, and retained ties
to England almost all his life. His education was interrupted by the Revolution, and he
and his wife Marguerite Marie le Det de Segray (or Segrais), also an aristocrat, were
almost guillotined. He escaped the mob in June 1793 by climbing out the upper back
window of his chateau, clambering down by an almost-too-short ladder. Marguerite
escaped by disguising herself as a peasant, carrying her babies to the coast in panniers on
a donkey.
Arriving penniless in England, they sought assistance from the famous Palmerston family
and set up a school for young ladies in Kent. Jean Baptiste taught at the school and wrote
some amazing books, including one partially titled A Complete System of Human
Knowledge and also the Outline of the History of Britain. He and his entire family
including his wife and four daughters were artists and avid art collectors. He was a
historian, mathematician, linguist, composer, artist, writer and polymath. But he was not
content in Britain, and tried to overthrown the reign of terror in France by participating in
the ill-fated Quiberon expedition and invasion of France in 1795. He was granted
English citizenship by order of the King in 1806, and a contemporaneous copy of the
large naturalization document still survives.
Still not content, Florian decided to seek fortune and safety in America, specifically
Louisiana, with its many French émigrés. He departed from Falmouth for Halifax and
New York in 1808, and his letters from America present a fascinating and charming
picture of life in the US in 1808-1809. He floated down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers
to New Orleans, meeting up with his brother in law and new business partner, and joining
the Masonic Lodge of New Orleans. Finally he was reunited with his beloved Marguerite
and their four daughters, only to be torn apart by his sad death from yellow fever only
two years later, in 1811. He was only 44 years old, but he had packed so much creativity
and adventure into one life that it seems like he had lived almost a dozen.
<strong>The</strong> letters of Jean Baptiste describing America were so interesting that they were
purchased from a descendant by the Library of Congress, where they remain today.
Other family letters still exist in France and in translation and in original form in Mobile,
Alabama, where the four daughters of Jean Baptiste and Marguerite moved in the 1830s.
<strong>The</strong> art and the art collection (one of the earliest major collections in the South) of the
Florian family were dispersed over the years, but remnants still remain in the Mobile
Public Library and the Mobile Museum of Art.
<strong>The</strong> story of Jean Baptiste Florian and Marguerite de Segray and their family is so
powerful that 200 years later, their numerous relatives and descendants in America and
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