Fortin

Fortin is fort, strong, with a small ending fixed to it, and that ending does visible work elsewhere: a fortin is a fort in miniature, just large enough to shelter a few men at a point that matters. It sits on the map of France at La Chapelle-Fortin in Eure-et-Loir, and Buenos Aires still calls the Velez Sarsfield ground El Fortin, the little fort.

Fixed to a man rather than a wall, that ending is not a measurement but a tone of voice. Fort as a byname stated what any neighbour could see. Fortin softened it and made it relative: the sturdy little one, the small man stronger than he looked, the strong man's son rather than the strong man. It is a byname that works only inside a village, among people who knew both men and needed to tell them apart, and it records nothing a notary could measure, not a trade, not a holding, not a father's name, only how a man was spoken of when he was not in the room. It records no descent either. Any village could make a Fortin, and enough did that the name enters the record from Normandy and from Perche without those families being anything to one another.

Julien Fortin was born in 1621 at Notre-Dame de Vair, in Perche, the son of Julien Fortin, a butcher, and Marie Lavie, and he was seven when his mother died. The connection that carried him out of France came through her side: his maternal grandfather, Gervais Lavie, kept the celebrated Auberge du Cheval Blanc, where Robert Giffard, the Mortagne-au-Perche doctor who held the seigneurie of Beauport in Nouvelle-France, lodged.

Whether the inn is why he went is not recorded. What is recorded is that in 1650 Julien Fortin crossed, the first of the name to settle in Nouvelle-France and the reckoned ancestor of the Fortins of America. In the colony he is Julien Fortin dit Bellefontaine, with the style of sieur, and he married Genevieve Gamache dit Lamarre, sister of the pioneer Nicolas Gamache, seigneur de l'Islet. The marriage set a butcher's son from Perche alongside a landholding family of the lower St Lawrence.

Twelve children were born to Julien Fortin and Genevieve Gamache and four lived: Eustache, Jacques, Joseph and Pierre. He stood godfather to his granddaughter Marie Gagnon, the child of his daughter Barbe and Pierre Lessard, and he died at Cap-Tourmente around 18 June 1689.

The arithmetic of that one household is why the name is everywhere in Quebec. Counted on 31 December 1729, Julien Fortin had 364 descendants, which placed him fifty-sixth among all the pioneers established in Canada. Four sons had become a small population, and a village byname that once marked one man against another in Perche now described nobody.

A wholly separate family carried the name into the French nobility, and its patent had a date. A bourgeois of Falaise who had risen to president of the Election there was ennobled in 1590 by Henri IV for having served his cause. Philippe Fortin de La Hoguette, born at Falaise in 1585, was of that new nobility and chose arms rather than the robe. He entered the king's service, had a hand in the submission of the Protestants of Aunis and Saintonge, was captain of Brouage from 1625 to 1631 and lieutenant of the duc de La Meilleraye in 1627, which brought him into cardinal Richelieu's following, and he was at the siege of La Rochelle and on the Italian campaign of 1629 and 1630.

Ill health then took him down the ladder rather than up it, to sergeant-major of Blaye and lieutenant of Sainte-Foy-la-Grande in 1634. In 1635 he bought the fief of Chamouillac, near Blaye, though he was soldiering still, at the siege of Breda in 1637 and on the descent against Corunna in 1639. He had been attending the Academie des Freres Dupuy since 1622, and the phrase that stuck to him was soldat et philosophe.

His book outlasted his campaigns: the Testament, ou conseils fideles d'un bon pere a ses enfans ran to sixteen editions between 1648 and 1695. At fifty-five he married Louise de Beaumont, then twenty-eight, sister of the archbishop of Paris; the eldest of their five children, Armand, was killed at the siege of Candia. He died in Saintonge around 1668.

Hardouin Fortin de La Hoguette was born at Chamouillac in July 1643, the third son. His mother's brother, the archbishop of Paris, gave him his forename and then his start, a canonry at Notre-Dame; he held the abbey of Sablonceaux in commendam and in 1671 succeeded his uncle as prior of Sainte-Genevieve.

The assembly of 1670 made him agent general of the clergy of France, and the moment that agency ended he was named bishop of Saint-Brieuc, on 12 September 1675, consecrated the following May by Francois Harlay de Champvallon. He presided over the Estates of Brittany at Dinan in 1677, was named to Poitiers on 2 February 1680, where he was credited with the conversion of thousands of Calvinists, and was chosen archbishop of Sens on 9 November 1685. He died at Sens on 26 November 1715, aged seventy-two, and was buried in the cathedral. Two generations after a Falaise townsman was ennobled for service, his grandson held one of the great sees of France.

Charles Fortin de La Hoguette, born about 1646, took up the title of marquis de La Hoguette after his elder brother was killed at Candia. Saint-Simon thought him a very gallant man and much esteemed, and judged that the recency of his family's nobility had held him back. He was cornette in the first company of the Grey Musketeers in 1672, marechal de camp in 1688, and in March 1693 lieutenant-general of the armies and governor of Mezieres.

In the War of the League of Augsburg he joined the offensive against Victor Amadeus II of Savoy, and in 1691 he led 6,000 men into the Aosta valley by La Thuile and Pre-Saint-Didier. Aosta was occupied on 20 June and a column pushed as far as Montjovet before Marshal Catinat recalled him, and he pulled back after levying a war contribution on the district. He was killed on 7 October 1693 at the battle of Marsaglia, near Pinerolo. His only child, Marie-Marguerite, married Louis Armand de Brichanteau, marquis de Nangis, in January 1705; her husband became a marshal of France.

Augustin Felix Fortin was born in Paris in 1763 and studied under his uncle, the sculptor Felix Lecomte. He painted landscape, genre and history, Invocation to Nature and Lesbia among his canvases, but it was for sculpture that he was chiefly noted: the Prix de Rome in 1783, and the Academie royale de peinture et de sculpture in 1789.

In the Chapel of France in St John's Co-Cathedral at Valletta, a Carrara marble plaque marks where Louis Charles, Count of Beaujolais, brother of the future king Louis Philippe I, was buried after his death in Malta in 1808; Fortin completed it in 1819. Jean Nicolas Fortin (1750-1831) worked in the same exacting register, making scientific instruments and editing the Atlas celeste de Flamsteed.

Jean-Baptiste Fortin was born at L'Islet on 29 December 1764, son of Charles Fortin and Marie-Magdelaine Pin. He farmed, and he sat in the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada for Devon from 1804 to 1814 and from 1820 to 1830, then for L'Islet from 1830 to 1838, opening and settling land in the seigneury of L'Islet and serving as commissioner for road building in the seigneuries around it.

In the assembly he went with the Parti canadien and then the Parti patriote, and voted in support of the Ninety-Two Resolutions. He died in office on 6 January 1841, aged seventy-six, and his grandson Louis-Napoleon Fortin (1850-1892), a physician, went on to sit in the Quebec legislative assembly. Pierre-Etienne Fortin (1823-1888) and Thomas Fortin (1853-1933), a physician and a judge, both reached the Canadian House of Commons.

Marc-Aurele Fortin (1888-1970) was a Quebecois painter, and a federal electoral district in Quebec carries his name. The line out of Cap-Tourmente ran further than any parish register could follow: among Julien Fortin's recorded descendants are Jack Kerouac, Celine Dion, Diane Tell and Madonna, born on 16 August 1958, whose mother was Madonna Fortin.