[Texas]. [Champ d'Asile]

Le Champ d'Asile. Le Laurier sous leurs pas y croitra sans culture [caption title]

Paris: Jean fils, Quai des Augustins, [1819]. Aquatint engraving, 13.25 x 9.75 inches. Mildly trimmed, minor dust-soiling, moderate foxing, tape remnants along verso of one edge. About very good. Item #3868

A very rare engraving relating to early Texas, picturing residents of the short-lived and ill-fated French colony in Texas, known as the Champ d'Asile. This print depicts soldiers, exiles of the Napoleonic Wars, establishing an agricultural colony in Texas, with one subject farming and two others smoking next to a barrel in the background - perhaps a comment on Texas' potential for tobacco production. Another colonist, in the foreground, is shown in an embrace with an officer, likely representing General C.F.A. Lallemand (one of the founders of the colony) in an expression of his gratitude for the colonist's hard work. The central image is surrounded by banners representing Napoleonic battles from Moscow to Waterloo, which are identified by name. The caption in the lower margin translates to "The laurel under their path will grow without culture." The image was engraved by "Charon" after the original art by "Aubry."

The Champ d'Asile (or Camp Asylum) settlement was founded by General Charles Lallemand and a group of loyalist Napoleonic officers who fled France for America in 1815. Although the settlement was billed as a peaceful one, Lallemand in fact had grand schemes of conquest, and sought to establish himself between the United States and the tottering remnants of Spain's American empire. With this goal, 400 settlers landed on the Trinity River near Galveston in 1818. At the same time, a vigorous propaganda machine in France produced promotional tracts, novels, poems, and songs (for all of which, see Streeter Texas, 1068-77), all celebrating the idyllic proposed settlement and attempting to raise support for it. Streeter refers to the prints produced to celebrate the colony as "an interesting lot."

This print was part of that promotional effort, and was among a series of prints showing various aspects of the colony. These engravings of Champ d'Asile are among the earliest graphic works purporting to show any part of Texas, though the present image reveals just a pinched portion of the colony itself. Needless to say, the reality of the colony's health was much grimmer than portrayed in any of the prints or publications. Few of the settlers had any real experience in the kind of work needed to start such a settlement in such a distant and unfamiliar location, and sickness soon reduced the number of working hands. The Spanish mustered enough strength to expel the survivors in 1820, though the short life of the colony inspired a French patriotic attachment to Texas for years to come.

"Although Champ d'Asile, a colony of Bonapartist refugees founded on the Trinity River in 1818, endured barely six months, its impact on the future of Texas was strong. The concern aroused among United States and Spanish diplomats over this intrusion into disputed territory caused two immediate results. United States pressure forced pirate Jean Laffite and his men, who had assisted the French colonists, to leave Galveston. And French presence at Champ d'Asile precipitated the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819, which eliminated the Neutral Ground agreement and established the Sabine River as the Louisiana-Texas boundary and the border between the United States and New Spain. The body of thought, art, and literature evoked in Paris around Champ d'Asile also had important long-term effects on Texas" - Handbook of Texas online.

This particular engraving is one of the rarer among those produced to advertise Le Champ d'Asile. OCLC reports just a single institutional holding, at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (deposited there in the year of publication).
De Vinck 10268. Streeter Texas 1077 (note).

Price: $4,500.00