Lefebvre

Underneath the name is the Latin faber, the worker in metal, worn down in Old French to fevre and picked up with the definite article: le fevre, the smith, the man a parish knew by his work rather than by his father. The b is not a sound and has not been one for centuries. It is a fossil of the Latin faber, held in the spelling long after the speech had dropped it, which is why one household in one register can surface as Lefebvre, Lefèvre, Le Febvre and Lefebure without anybody having changed their name.

That the word still meant faber to the men carrying it shows in what they called themselves when they wrote Latin. Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples printed his books as Jacobus Faber Stapulensis; the anatomist born around 1570 as Jean Lefebvre made his career in Italy as Jean Faber. Asked for a learned name, a Lefèvre did not invent one, he translated the one he had. Counted across French births registered between 1891 and 1990, Lefebvre stood thirteenth among all the surnames of the country, and the name is Belgian as well as French.

Jacques Lefèvre was born at Étaples in Picardy around 1455, of humble parents, and was already an ordained priest when he reached the University of Paris, where Hermonymus of Sparta taught him Greek. He was in Italy before 1486, in time to hear the lectures of John Argyropoulos, who died that year, and travelled there again in 1492 to study at Florence, Rome and Venice, coming home saturated in Aristotle and drawn, against the grain of his training, towards Plato.

Back in Paris he took charge of the Collège du Cardinal Lemoine and published at a pace that reads like a one-man syllabus: paraphrases of the whole of Aristotle's natural philosophy in 1492, introductions to the Metaphysics and the Nicomachean Ethics in 1494, the Politics in 1506. On one day, 22 July 1496, the press of Johannes Higman and Wolfgang Hopyl issued three of his volumes together, Boethius on arithmetic, the arithmetic of Jordanus Nemorarius with his commentary, and his own four books on music.

His pupils were the men who would carry the next thirty years of French learning and religious argument: Beatus Rhenanus, François Vatable, Charles de Bovelles and Guillaume Farel, who later joined his old master at Meaux to train preachers before leaving for Switzerland and a founding part in the Reformed churches. In 1507 Lefèvre moved into the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and turned from philosophy to scripture.

The first fruit was the Quintuplex Psalterium of 1509, four Latin psalters set side by side with a fifth version of his own, followed in 1512 by the fourteen epistles of Paul with a fresh Latin rendering and a commentary of real independence. In 1517 he argued in print that Mary the sister of Lazarus, Mary Magdalene and the woman who anointed Christ's feet were three women and not one, a book condemned by the Sorbonne in 1521 and answered by John Fisher.

He left Paris for the whole of 1520 and settled at Meaux, where Guillaume Briçonnet, now bishop there, made him vicar-general on 1 May 1523. His French New Testament appeared later that year, contemporary with Luther's German one, and every subsequent French translation descends from it. He worked from the Vulgate deliberately, because he meant it for ordinary believers, and the prefaces said plainly that scripture is the only rule of doctrine and that a man is justified by faith. Copies were ordered burned and he went into exile.

The court saved him. When Francis I was taken prisoner at Pavia on 25 February 1525 the parlement condemned Lefèvre and suppressed his works, and the measures were quashed when the king returned months later. He was made royal librarian at Blois in 1526, published the Pentateuch in 1528 and in 1530 the complete Bible, the first printed edition of the whole scripture in French. Marguerite d'Angoulême, by then queen of Navarre, brought him to safety at Nérac in 1531, where John Calvin is said to have visited him in 1533. He died there around 1536, a Roman Catholic to the end, having wanted the church mended rather than broken.

Olivier Lefèvre d'Ormesson, born 28 December 1616, was the third Olivier of a magistrate house: his father André died dean of the Council of State in 1665 and his mother Anne le Prévost came of a line of judges. He was a counsellor in the Parlement in 1636, master of requests to the Council of State in 1643, intendant in Picardy in 1656 and of Amiens and Soissons in 1662. That same year he was appointed judge and rapporteur in the trial of Nicolas Fouquet, the disgraced superintendent of finances, and the most famous trial of the reign.

He took two years over it and refused to deliver what the crown wanted. He took apart the conspiracy assembled against the accused at the instance of the king's council, declined the death sentence being demanded, and saved Fouquet's head. Tradition puts the answer to the royal envoys in his mouth: the court gives judgments, not favours. He lost the Picardy intendancy in 1664, and the reversion of his father's seat on the Council of State, promised to him, went to a magistrate who had voted for death.

In 1667 he sold his charge of master of requests for 234,000 livres and withdrew to the château of Ormesson, where he kept the company his integrity had earned him: Madame de Sévigné, to whom he was related, Racine, Boileau, La Fontaine, and André Le Nôtre, who laid out the park at his request. He kept a Journal from 1643 onward and wrote a treatise on the ornamenting of gardens with Guillaume de Lamoignon. He died on 4 November 1685, and his family counted the disgrace, not the million livres he left, as its glory.

Claude Lefèbvre was baptised at Fontainebleau on 12 September 1632, son of the painter Jean Lefèbvre, and trained in the Fontainebleau workshop of Claude d'Hoey. In 1654 he went to Paris to study under Eustache Le Sueur, and on Le Sueur's death the next year passed to Charles Le Brun, under whom he probably helped prepare cartoons for the tapestry series of the History of the King and painted a Nativity for Louis XIV. Le Brun judged his compositions poor and steered him into portraiture, which proved the most useful advice anyone gave him.

He was received into the Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture in 1663, at thirty, in anticipation of a portrait of Jean-Baptiste Colbert he had not yet finished; he worked on it for several years and presented it on 30 October 1666, and taught François de Troy and the younger Jean Cotelle as assistant professor from 1664. At the court of Charles II in England he was marked by the example of Van Dyck, and at the Salon of 1673 he showed ten pictures, nine of them portraits.

Few of his canvases survive; most of what is known of him comes through the engravers who copied him, Gérard Edelinck, Nicolas de Poilly and Pieter van Schuppen. He died in Paris on 25 April 1675, and has been confused ever since with Rolland Lefèbvre, another portrait painter of the name who died in London two years later.

Clément Lefebvre, born about 1630, was a well known organist in Rouen and the first of the family the records name at the work, a workshop that held the organs of Normandy for three generations. He worked on the instrument at Le Havre cathedral in 1670, and in 1685 he and his son Germain worked on the organ for the church of Saint-Michel; another son, Jean-Baptiste, kept that same organ in order from 1724 to 1735. Clément died on 29 September 1709. His son Charles, born 22 May 1670, carried the work on.

Charles took the Norman commissions one after another: the organ of the abbey church of Saint-Ouen in 1724, the restoration of the 1661 instrument at Saint-Éloi between 1731 and 1733, thirty-three stops on three keyboards and a pedalboard, and in 1732 alone a twenty-two stop organ for the Charles-Nicolle hospital chapel in Rouen, a rebuild of Antoine Josseline's organ at Saint-Maclou, and the first of two spells of repair at Gisors.

His son Jean-Baptiste Nicolas, born in February 1705, became one of the most celebrated organ makers in eighteenth-century Europe, and the instruments got very large. With his brother Louis and their cousin Clément he was commissioned in 1737 to build a new organ for the abbey of Saint-Étienne at Caen, sixty stops on five keyboards, finished in 1747. He built the sixty-seven stop, five keyboard organ of Saint-Martin de Tours in 1761, worked at Rouen cathedral from 1763 to 1772, and was still at the Montivilliers tribune organ in 1784, the year he died. The shop's records keep the indignities beside the triumphs: in 1741 the Saint-Ouen organ was taken down to spare it the damage the church's stores of wheat and grain were doing to it, and nobody wrote down when it went back up.

A second craft dynasty of the name worked in tapestry across the seventeenth century, in Paris, Brussels and Antwerp. Pierre le Fèvre was in Florence when an offer from the French crown drew him to Paris in 1647, where he was well paid, styled tapissier to the king and given a workshop in the garden of the Tuileries. He went back to Florence in 1650 and returned five years later, and died in 1669 leaving a son, Philip, still weaving in Florence in 1677.

The son who had come north with him, Jean, never left France. When the Gobelins factory was established he was given the direction of the high warp looms jointly with the Flemish weaver Jean Jans, and ran the second workshop, the one in the Tuileries garden. The Toilet of a Princess was his, three Bacchanalia pieces carry his name woven into the selvedge, and Cardinal Mazarin owned his hanging of the History of Saint Paul.

Alexandre Claude Lefebvre de La Faluère, baptised at Veigné on 23 September 1674 and son of a treasurer of France who was mayor of Tours, served as grand master of the Waters and Forests of Paris from 1703 until 1745, forty-two years in the office that governed the woodland round the capital. Louis XV put him in charge of replanting the bois de Vincennes; his name is cut into the obelisk raised in 1731 to commemorate the work, and one of the roads through the wood is still the route de la Faluère.

François Lefebvre de Caumartin, born at Châlons-en-Champagne on 16 December 1668, was the son of an intendant of Champagne and godson of the cardinal de Retz, who gave him the abbey of Buzay in commendam when he was seven. He was keeper of the books of the king's cabinet, elected to the Académie française at twenty-six in 1694 and to the Académie des inscriptions in 1701, bishop of Vannes in 1717 and bishop of Blois from 1719 until his death in 1733. He published nothing of his own and left a library of close to ten thousand manuscripts and printed books. Saint-Simon, not a generous judge, allowed that he had a great deal of wit and of learning.

Antoine-Louis Lefebvre de Caumartin was provost of the merchants of Paris from 1778 to 1784. Jean Le Fèvre de Saint-Remy, lord of Saint-Remy and la Vacquerie, wrote his chronicle in the fifteenth century and died in 1468, and Joseph-Antoine Le Febvre de La Barre governed New France, so the name was on both shores of the Atlantic well before the great emigrations.

François Joseph Lefebvre, born in 1755, rose to marshal of France; his wife Catherine Hubscher was the woman remembered as Madame Sans-Gêne, and his son Marie Xavier Joseph was a brigadier general who died in 1812. Charles Lefebvre-Desnouettes reached the rank of general of division, Marcel Lefèvre flew with the Normandie-Niemen squadron, and Eugène Lefebvre was one of the earliest French aviators.

Nicaise Le Febvre was a French apothecary of the mid seventeenth century and Jean Le Fèvre an astronomer at the end of it; Alexandre Louis Lefebvre described insects, Gustave Lefebvre worked on Egypt and on Greek, and Henri Lefebvre spent a long twentieth-century career as a sociologist. Lefèvre-Denise was founded at Nancy in 1840 and is still known for its bergamot sweets, and Lefèvre Utile grew into the biscuit group that trades on its founders' initials as LU.

Paris has a boulevard Lefebvre and half a dozen streets and squares of the name, Brussels a rue Victor Lefèvre, and Quebec a municipality simply called Lefebvre. At Memramcook in New Brunswick the Monument Lefebvre is a national historic site of Canada, a fair measure of how far a French byname for the man at the forge travelled once the people carrying it went to sea.