Antoine Philippe de Marigny

French explorer
The basics

Quick Facts

IntroFrench explorer
PlacesFrance
wasExplorer
Gender
Male
Birth1 January 1722
Death1 January 1779 (aged 57 years)
The details

Biography

Antoine Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville (17 July 1721 – 6 November 1779), Chevalier de St. Louis, was a French geographer and explorer. Born in Mobile in 1722, he was part of the Creole elite of French Louisiana. His family was part of the minor provincial nobility of France, tracing back to Pierre Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville, who was ennobled in 1654. Antoine's parents were François Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville, a native of Bayeux who arrived in Canada in 1709 and Louisiana by 1714, and Madeleine le Maire, who remarried to the colony's royal engineer, Ignace François Broutin, after her husband's death. In 1748, Antoine de Marigny married Françoise de Lisle, thought to be the daughter of Guillaume Delisle. They had two children: Pierre Enguerrand de Marigny, and Madeleine Philippe de Marigny. He also seems to have had at least two children by an enslaved Native American woman.

Like his (probable) father-in-law Guillaume de Lisle, Geographer to the King, Antoine was an accomplished cartographer. He made a detailed map of Louisiana in 1763. During the tumultuous Kerlerec administration, Antoine took the side of Kerlerec's Commissary-Commissioner, Vincent de Rochemore; Antoine and Rochemore were both arrested and sent back to France (along with the royal colonial treasurer Jean Baptiste d'Estrehan). In France, they continued their dispute with Kerlerec and were imprisoned in the Bastille for a short time, before eventually prevailing and seeing Kerlerec sentenced to exile. Antoine returned to New Orleans, where he died in 1779 and was interred at the St. Louis Cathedral.

Antoine's son, Pierre Enguerrand de Marigny (also known as Pierre Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville), married Jeanne Marie d'Estrehan, daughter of Jean Baptiste d'Estrehan. They were the parents of Bernard de Marigny, for whom the famous Faubourg Marigny neighborhood is named.

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