Bouchard

Bouchard was a given name for centuries before it became a family name, and its two readings disagree. The French record derives it from a Germanic Bukhard, whose first element bucc- resembles the German Buche, the beech, joined to hard, strong; the rival reading makes that element burg, a fortified place.

Frankish bishops and lords bore it, and it survives in manuscripts and diplomas of the tenth and eleventh centuries held by the Bibliothèque nationale. Bouchard I of Vendôme, called the Venerable, was count of Vendôme, Corbeil and Melun around 976 and count of Paris in 987, and six more counts of Vendôme followed him. It fixed itself to ground as readily as to men: L'Île-Bouchard in Indre-et-Loire names a whole canton, and Le Plessis-Bouchard sits in the Val-d'Oise.

Amaury Bouchard, born at Saint-Jean-d'Angély around 1490, was lieutenant general of the sénéchaussée of Saintonge and maître des requêtes from 1531. In 1522 he walked into the querelle des femmes, the argument over the standing of women in society, with Feminei sexus apologia, a defence of the female sex printed at Paris by Josse Bade. He wrote it against a treatise on the laws of marriage by the jurist André Tiraqueau, who was his friend, so the quarrel ran in print between two men who stayed on terms. Rabelais dedicated a legal pamphlet to him in 1532 and used it to press him for his unpublished De architectura orbis.

Jean-Jacques Bouchard, 1606 to 1641, was born in Paris and died in Rome, son of a secretary to the king in a family of judges lately raised to the nobility. In 1639 he published at Paris a French version of Mascardi's account of the conspiracy of the count of Fieschi, dedicated to Cardinal Richelieu. His journals of the road from Paris to Rome, of the Roman carnival and of the kingdom of Naples waited until Emanuele Kanceff edited them at Turin in 1976 and 1977.

Étienne Bouchard, born in Paris around 1622, reached Canada on 22 September 1653 as one of three surgeons, with Louis Chartier and Pierre Piron. They arrived into a promise already made: the Société Notre-Dame de Montréal, the body that founded Ville-Marie, had undertaken to give free health care to every inhabitant of the fort, and a surgeon's contract was how it was to be kept. Bouchard broke his in 1655 and built a practice so heavy afterwards that he had to take on several assistant surgeons.

He married Marguerite Boissel on 6 October 1657 and they had seven children; he was an officer of the associated surgeons alongside Jean Martinet de Fonblanche and a physician at the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal. Seven ancestors carried the name into North America, and of the seven Claude Bouchard left far the largest posterity. It is why a name well spread through France sits heavier still in Quebec, fifth by share of the population and heaviest of all in the Saguenay and Charlevoix country.

Pierre-François Bouchard was born in 1771 at Orgelet in the Jura and studied philosophy and mathematics at Besançon. His army career began in 1793 as a sergeant-major in the Grenadiers de Paris, one of the soldiers of Year II, and he fought in Champagne and Belgium before being sent in 1794 to the École nationale d'aérostatique. As lieutenant of the balloon corps he taught mathematics at the Château de Meudon, where an experiment to produce hydrogen for observation balloons ended with a gas flask exploding: his right eye was badly damaged, and Nicolas-Jacques Conté, who led the experiment, lost his left.

Conté recommended him to Claude Louis Berthollet, one of the founders of the École polytechnique, which Bouchard entered on 21 November 1796 to study descriptive geometry under Gaspard Monge and the art of fortification. The Ministry of War took him before he had finished, attaching him to the Egyptian expeditionary force on 20 April 1798; he landed in Egypt on 4 July, after the capture of Alexandria.

Set to rebuilding Fort Julien, an old Mamluk work near Rosetta that Bonaparte had renamed for Thomas Prosper Jullien, he found the Rosetta Stone during the works on 15 or 19 July 1799. He knew at once what it was and carried that conviction to generals Menou and Bonaparte; the block let ancient Egyptian writing be read again after more than a thousand years. Sent later as an envoy to the Grand Vizier while defending El-Arish, he was arrested and held in Damascus for forty-two days, then spent seven years in the Peninsular War and led the sappers across the fortified bridge at Amarante. The Restoration made him a knight of the order of Saint Louis, an Officer of the Légion d'honneur and chief engineer of Orléans.

Hippolyte Bouchard was born in 1780 at Bormes-les-Mimosas, near Saint-Tropez, son of André Louis Bouchard and Thérèse Brunet, and baptised André Paul before he settled on Hippolyte. He went to sea in the French merchant fleet, then served in the French navy against the English, and his campaigns took in Egypt and Saint-Domingue. Disillusioned with the direction of the Revolution, he left for Argentina in 1809 to serve the May Revolution.

On 2 March 1811 he fought under the Argentine flag for the first time, at San Nicolás de los Arroyos, and through July and August he had a large part in holding Buenos Aires against a Spanish blockade. In March 1812 he joined the Mounted Grenadiers under José de San Martín and fought at San Lorenzo in 1813, where he took a Spanish colour and was granted Argentine citizenship for it. In 1815 he sailed under the Irish-Argentine admiral William Brown against El Callao and Guayaquil, and that September was licensed as a corsair in the corvette Halcón.

The captured frigate Consecuencia became his own ship and, renamed La Argentina, the vessel of a two-year voyage around the world. He took out his corsair patent on 27 June 1817 and sailed from Ensenada de Barragán on 9 July, the first anniversary of the Argentine declaration of independence. At Tamatave in Madagascar, where the ship lay two months under repair, a British officer asked his help in stopping four slave ships from leaving the island, and Bouchard offered him every man he had.

He blockaded Spanish Manila from 31 January 1818 and took sixteen ships in two months. In August he was at Kealakekua Bay in Hawaii, hunting the corvette Santa Rosa, whose crew had mutinied and sold her to King Kamehameha I. He put on his uniform as lieutenant colonel of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata to meet the king, and got the ship back for his sword, his commander's hat and the honorary rank that went with them.

On 24 November 1818 he put 200 men ashore in a hidden creek seven kilometres from the presidio of Monterey, 130 with rifles and seventy with spears. After an hour of fighting the Argentine flag flew over the fort, and it stayed over the town for six days; the residents were not harmed. To the Spanish colonists of California he was Pirata Buchar. The expedition ended on 3 April 1819 and he turned for Valparaíso, to join San Martín's campaign to liberate Peru. Argentina kept him: a street by the Buenos Aires waterfront carries the name, and so did the destroyer ARA Hipólito Bouchard.

Henri Bouchard, 1875 to 1960, was a carpenter's son from Dijon who trained at the Académie Julian and in the studio of Louis-Ernest Barrias, entered the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts and took the Prix de Rome in 1901. He turned away from models drawn from antiquity and towards peasants, everyday life and ordinary working men, and by 1910 was a professor at the Académie Julian himself. Paris carries a good deal of his work: the four evangelists on the campanile of the Sacré-Coeur, the tympanum of Saint-Pierre de Chaillot, and the bronze Apollo made in 1937 for the gardens below the Palais de Chaillot. With Paul Landowski he cut statues for the Reformation Wall in Geneva.

In Quebec the name went onto the ice. Émile Bouchard, 1919 to 2012, was a Quebec ice hockey player, and the Trophée Émile-Bouchard now goes to the best defenceman in Quebec hockey.