Saunhac · du Fossat · Soniat

Gui de SaunhacChevalier, Baron du Fossat

17 September 1727, Château du Fossat ✦ 1794, New Orleans

Coupé : d'or au lion de gueules et de gueules au lion contourné d'argent

A French officer who crossed the Atlantic in 1751, built the colony's forts, judged its people under a Spanish king, and wrote its history — leaving New Orleans a family name it still carries.

At a glance

Name
Gui (Guy) de Saunhac, Baron du Fossat — later written Soniat du Fossat
Born
17 September 1727, at the Château du Fossat, Soturac in Quercy (present-day Lot), France
Died
1794, New Orleans, Spanish Louisiana, and buried there
Family
House of Saunhac, nobility of Rouergue attested from 1165; the du Fossat branch, seated at the Fossat from about 1538
French service
Volunteer, Régiment de Béarn (1746); lieutenant, Régiment de Monaco (1747); wounded at the siege of Maastricht (1748)
To Louisiana
1751, as a lieutenant in the detached companies of marines, under Louis XV; the Marquis de Vaudreuil then governor
Married
1753, Françoise Claudine Dreux, daughter of Mathurin Dreux of Gentilly
Children
Ten; three sons carried the name
Spanish service
Captain, Battalion of Louisiana (1769); alcalde of New Orleans (1775, again 1786)
Wrote
Synopsis of the History of Louisiana, from the Founding of the Colony to the End of the Year 1791

The House of Saunhac

The Saunhacs were an old noble family of Rouergue, the rugged upland province in the south of France that is now the Aveyron. Their earliest certain record is from 1165, when Hugues de Saunhac, archdeacon of Rodez, made a donation to the abbey of Loc-Dieu; the family's nobility was formally confirmed in 1698 on proofs reaching back to 1418. In 1386 Jean III d'Armagnac granted his share of Belcastel to his squire Guillaume de Saunhac, and that branch held the castle — which still stands above the Aveyron — until the middle of the sixteenth century.

The house threw off many branches: Belcastel, Ampiac and Villelongue, Castan, Talespues, and du Fossat. The last of these began with François de Saunhac, whose father Jean had married Marguerite de Caussade in 1489 and so brought the Caussade lands into the family. François settled at the Château du Fossat, above the Lot near its junction with the Garonne, and the Saunhacs held it into the nineteenth century. It was in that house, two centuries later, that the Baron was born.

Family tradition long claimed Guillaume de Sonnac, Grand Master of the Knights Templar who died at Mansourah in 1250, as a Saunhac of Rouergue. It is a good story, and an old one — but the Rouergue historian Gaujal examined it in 1859 and rejected it, pointing out that the Grand Master is recorded as of a distinguished family of Languedoc, not of Rouergue. Better attested are the family's seneschals and chamberlains, its gentlemen of the king's chamber, its colonels and its bishops.

The arms

Coupé : d'or au lion de gueules, et de gueules au lion contourné d'argent. Per fess: in chief, Or, a lion Gules; in base, Gules, a lion contourné Argent.

The shield is divided horizontally into two equal halves. The upper half is gold, bearing a red lion rampant facing the viewer's left, as lions do by default. The lower half reverses both field and beast: a red field with a silver lion, contourné — turned the other way. The two lions therefore face away from each other, one above the other, a striking and unusual arrangement.

This is the blazon recorded by Régis Valette, and by Hippolyte de Barrau and Jougla de Morenas before him, though Barrau gives the lower lion as gold rather than silver. Other Saunhac arms appear in the old armorials too — d'azur au lion d'or entouré de huit besants du même posés en orle, and d'or au lion de sable couronné de gueules, entouré de douze carreaux de gueules posés en orle, the latter usually attached to the Belcastel branch. Medieval families were rarely as tidy about their arms as later heralds wished.

A life in two worlds

  1. 1727Born on 17 September at the Château du Fossat, the seat of his branch of the family, in Quercy.
  2. 1746Enters the French army as a volunteer in the Régiment de Béarn, during the War of the Austrian Succession.
  3. 1747Commissioned lieutenant in the Régiment de Monaco.
  4. 1748Wounded at the siege of Maastricht in Holland — the war's last great action, fought while the peace was already being negotiated.
  5. 1751Sails for Louisiana as a lieutenant in the detached companies of marines, after Governor Vaudreuil appeals to Louis XV for troops. He settles at New Orleans.
  6. 1753Marries Françoise Claudine Dreux, daughter of Mathurin Dreux, whose plantation Chantilly on Bayou Sauvage gave Gentilly its name. The du Fossat branch takes root in Louisiana.
  7. 1759Made captain of a company. An engineer of ability, he is sent north to the Illinois Country to build and repair forts — among them Fort de Chartres and Kaskaskia, which guarded the western settlements for years.
  8. 1761Recalled to New Orleans, where he continues in French service.
  9. 1766On 5 March, Ulloa arrives to take possession for Spain; Louisiana had been ceded secretly in 1762. The colony changes kings.
  10. 1767With the French king's permission, he enters the service of the king of Spain, and in 1769 is made captain in the Battalion of Louisiana under O'Reilly.
  11. 1772Retired from active service after twenty-six years under arms.
  12. 1775Appointed alcalde by Governor Unzaga in recognition of past service, taking a seat on the Cabildo, the Spanish colonial council. Governor Miró reappoints him in 1786.
  13. 1778Buys a plantation from the Ursuline nuns, two and a half leagues below the city — later the Villeré plantation, where the British would camp before the Battle of New Orleans.
  14. 1791Carries his history of the colony down to the end of the year.
  15. 1794Dies at New Orleans and is buried there, father of ten children and founder of the American Soniat du Fossat family.

In Louisiana

When the Baron du Fossat stepped ashore at New Orleans in 1751 the town was barely thirty years old — a grid of wooden houses on a bend of the Mississippi, chronically short of soldiers and money. He became, in the words of a later biographer, "one of the most active and public-spirited among the colonists." An engineer as much as a soldier, he oversaw the building of the colony's principal defensive works, and his hand shaped the ordinances that governed daily life in the settlement for generations.

The principal fortifications of the lower division of the Louisiana province were erected under his supervision; and to him the people owed many laws and several police regulations. — Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Louisiana, 1892

His career spans the whole strange middle passage of Louisiana's history. He served the king of France for fifteen years, and when the colony was handed to Spain he asked leave of one sovereign to serve the other — and was given it. He put down the uniform in 1772 and took up the magistrate's staff instead, sitting twice as alcalde, one of the judges and councilmen who governed the town under its Spanish governors.

His three sons took the story in different directions. François Guy rode with Bernardo de Gálvez through the campaigns against the English, was at the taking of Manchac and Baton Rouge and saw Mobile and Pensacola stormed, and was made lieutenant for bravery in 1780 — before being called back to France by an uncle's death to take up the Château du Fossat and the title of baron. Joseph and Jean Baptiste stayed. It is through Joseph that most Louisiana Soniats descend.

In old age the Baron turned historian. His Synopsis of the History of Louisiana, written in French and carried down to the end of 1791, is among the earliest first-hand accounts of the colony by one of its own officers. The manuscript survived in the family papers at the Château du Fossat, its title page torn away where the author had signed. In the 1890s his descendant Charles T. Soniat, a New Orleans lawyer, crossed the Atlantic to see the ancestral house, was shown the old documents, carried them home, and — after Alcée Fortier of the Louisiana Historical Society recognized what he had — translated and published it in 1903.

From Saunhac to Soniat

Saunhac→ Saunac→ Saugnac→ Soniat

In French, Saunhac is pronounced roughly "so-nyak." Colonial clerks in New Orleans, writing what they heard, rendered it Soniat, and within a generation the American branch had adopted the new spelling as its own: Soniat du Fossat, often shortened to Soniat. The old French form has died out, so today every Soniat descends from the Baron's Louisiana line — and every Soniat is, by origin, a Saunhac.

The name endures in New Orleans: in Soniat Street uptown, in the Soniat House on Chartres Street in the French Quarter, and in the family's tombs in the city's old cemeteries.

Sources & further reading

On the evidence. The dates here follow the 1903 preface by Charles T. Soniat, who worked from the family's own papers at the Château du Fossat; where the 1892 sketch differs, the two are reconciled rather than chosen between. The Illinois mission of 1759 rests on that family account — the engineer of record for the stone Fort de Chartres was François Saucier, and the Baron's part in the work is not independently documented here. Genealogical compilations give his death as 22 June 1794; the 1903 account gives only the year. The arms are emblazoned after the blazon of Valette, Barrau and Jougla de Morenas; the variants are noted above. The lion itself is the standard heraldic lion rampant from Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain, recoloured here to each tincture.