The Irishwoman Who Drained the Marsh of Marseillette

Famed soldier in the United Irishmen Miles Byrne refers in his Memoirs to a tract of wetlands bought by a Mrs Doyle Lawless near Carcassonne. In fact, he alludes to a link between her and Napoleon, when he says: “We have no Bonaparte [there in Ireland] to encourage and protect us, as Mrs Lawless had at Carcassonne”. Who was this Irish woman, and how did she end up draining the marsh near Carcassonne? Thanks to the extensive work of Christophe Monié, an amateur historian and genealogist from nearby Aigues-Vives, we now know much more about the family of Mary-Anne Lawless (neé Coppinger), a widow from Dublin who received a Gold Medal from King Louis XVIII for her agricultural work.

Mary-Anne and the Marsh of Marseillette

There had been various proposals in the past to drain the saltwater marsh of Marseillette, including Notes on the Draining of the Marsh of Marseillette in 1790 by an unknown author, and proposals from French revolutionary Jean-Pierre Fabre de l’Aude in 1792. However, the book Cartulary and Archives of the Municipalities of the Ancient Diocese and of the Administrative Borough of Carcassonne states that: “The material success in draining the march of Marseillette can be attributed to an Irishwoman (Mrs Lawless), who, after having acquired the marsh of Marseillette, in 1801, from third parties who had themselves acquired it from the national domain, for about 10 years, drained and cultivated it, but with insufficient capital. This lady, her heirs, and their successors, did not find fortune in this laudable but difficult enterprise.”

Interestingly, there is a double Irish link with the prior owners, associates Howard and Wilkins. From County Antrim, John Tennent, who went by the pseudonym of Thomas Howard, had trained with a Coleraine merchant, but became a United Irishman and French soldier. There is a portrait of him from c. 1810 in the Ulster Museum. The other owner, a Scottish legal advocate called Thomas Wilson, and whose alias was Theodore Wilkins, later married Matilda, who was the widow of Irish revolutionary Theobald Wolfe Tone. Wilson was a friend of Tone and his wife. Police files in the Archives Nationales record that Wilson went to Carcassonne in March 1798 to purchase “national goods”, which were properties confiscated during the French Revolution.

There seem to have been a number of connections between the Lawless family and the United Irishmen, with Mary-Anne sending 22,800 francs from Carcassonne to Thomas Markey in 1814. Markey, Captain John Tennent, and others like General William Lawless are often mentioned together by Miles Byrne and in other records. A further link to Valentine Lawless (also a distant cousin of General William Lawless) is referred to later.

Lawless bought 1000 hectares (half) of the land from the two associates in 1801, and the final two quarters on 18th and 22nd May 1804, totalling 2000 hectares. She obtained authorisation to establish her residence in France one week later, the 29th May 1804.

The main draining work started in 1804, with a deadline of 1808, and additional aqueducts were built and others widened to help with the draining. The land area was described as being 7 km in diameter in one direction. Speaking for the government, Montalivet, the general director for bridges and roads, said that “the pond of Marseillette has disappeared: rich harvests grow where we could once see but its waters”.

The results were impressive, but there was still work to do according to a 1808 engineer’s report (more detail given in 1839 by Desalles), with some of the land in quite good condition, and other parts still too saline and only suitable for “salicor” like glasswort. 24 farms for smallholders were said to have been created on the land (the map shows 20), with produce including wheat, oats, barley and fodder (“paumelle” or spring barley). The same book also describes some minor boundary line disputes with neighbours. 

For her work, Mrs Lawless was awarded a Gold Medal by King Louis XVIII in 1820, which was presented to her in 1821 by the Interim Prefect of Aude.

Mary-Anne Lawless died in Pau on 21st September 1838 with outstanding debts on the land, and with various expropriation attempts by the mortgage bank to seize the property. Her daughter also fought a number of cases in relation to the property. Caisse Hypothécaire acquired the lands at auction for 1.2 million francs in 1844. After the sale, Maria-Frances again endeavoured in court to retrieve rent that she claimed was due to her.

Later produce from the lands, even to this day, has included rice, fruit (apples) and wine.

The Lawless Family

Mary-Anne’s husband was John Lawless, a woollen draper and carpet manufacturer on High Street and later Dame Street, who was an associate (perhaps relative) of Nicholas Lawless, father of United Irishman Valentine Lawless. 

They had a son named Doyle in 1787. A daughter Henrietta was born in 1789, but we believe she may have died young. In 1790, their daughter Maria-Frances Lawless was born. Another son Richard was born in 1793. There was also a half-sister Anne, from John’s previous marriage to a Mary Thunder, and we have found out that Anne was born in 1770 and was married in 1792. 

John disappeared from the Wilson’s [Dublin] Directory in 1796, and was replaced by his wife Mary-Anne in the directory, according to WJ Fitzpatrick in his book on Valentine Lawless. According to John’s will from 1793, he died on the 27th May 1795, with children Anne, Doyle, Frances and Richard mentioned.

Mary-Anne and family moved to France in 1801 with three children on 20th November 1801 according to a French Who’s Who. We can assume that these three were Doyle, Maria-Frances and Richard, as all three lived in France, and assuming that Henrietta had died beforehand. They lived in Paris first and likely in Carcassonne from 1804.

When Maria-Frances married Marquis de Bausset in 1810, the family lived at the quarter called Carrée des Marchands or Merchants Square in Carcassonne, which was between Rue Mage (now Rue de Verdun) and Rue Mercière (now Rue Barbes), extending from the Poor Clare Convent, later Pierre Grassalio’s house (and whose windows can now been seen in La Cité) to “La Place”. Richard Lawless died in 1812, at which time the family lived at rue de la Mairie, now rue Aimé Ramond, in a Mr Devoisin’s house.

Maria-Frances Lawless, Marquise de Bausset

Maria-Frances was born to John Lawless and Mary-Anne Lawless (née Coppinger) in Dublin in 1790, and baptised with godparents from the Lawless and Coppinger families. While her family may have been wealthy, there still has been some debate as to how she ended up marrying someone in Napoleon’s circle.

According to the book Historical Gallery of Contemporaries, her husband, the Baron de Bausset was “a nephew of the Bishop of Alais [later Cardinal Louis-François de Bausset], and was a chamberlain to Napoleon and one of the prefects of his palace”. His full name was Baron Louis-François-Joseph de Bausset-Roquefort of Sauvain (Hérault). The Historical Gallery of Contemporaries said that: “The Baron de Bausset, who had no personal fortune, but obtained, in 1810, from Napoleon, several shares in the Languedoc Canal [du Midi], and in the newspaper Journal of the Empire. […] The Baron de Bausset married, around this time, Miss Lawless, Irish, enjoying a considerable fortune or endowment, via her mother who had a concession made to her, by the Imperial Government, for the marsh of Marseillette, near Carcassonne.”

They married in 1810, and had two children, Marie-Louise, born in Paris in 1812, and Louis-François-Joseph, born in Carcassonne in 1814. In what can only be described as fodder for a motion picture, persistent rumours in Sauvian over the years were that Napoleon had exchanged his daughter (to become Marie-Louise) for the son of the Baussets, in order to have a male heir! The Marquis spent a lot of time with Napoleon and he also wrote Private Memoirs of the Court of Napoleon. He died in 1831 at the age of 61.

Having been involved in multiple unsuccessful court cases regarding rent from the marsh, then-Carcassonne resident Maria-Frances was shown to have a fiery temperament when she appeared before the Carcassonne Tribunal in 1847 for multiple instances of contempt and assault against two magistrates, Vice-President Lacombe and Judge Maraval. As well as calling both prevaricators in public, she was reported to have hit and spit at Maraval in his own home. Maraval had been involved in a case the previous year between her son and a Toulouse tailor, and also in a number of the cases regarding the rent from the marsh. The court read out a statement on her behalf, but she was sentenced to five years in prison (one year after appeal). She later wrote from prison to Queen Marie-Amélie seeking a pardon, but it is unknown if the letter was actually sent or her request granted.

In a tragic end, her daughter Marie-Louise de Bausset was murdered by her husband François Sicard in 1852. She had three children. Her mother had been opposed to the marriage, and the children’s grandmother Mary-Anne Lawless had also changed her will multiple times due to disputes with Sicard. Sicard was not imprisoned long, if at all, and died in 1854.

Doyle Lawless

We have some more details about the brother Doyle who was born in Dublin in 1787, thanks to an 1826 court case covered in The Court Spectator.

The article describes the aforementioned purchase by Mrs Lawless in some detail, although some of the facts differ slightly from those above. It says that Mrs Lawless was widowed in 1793, and that she left Ireland in 1801 for Carcassonne with just two children: her son and her daughter, both of them were minors. She is said to have bought several buildings near Carcassonne, including the marsh, which she had drained. 

She sent her son [Doyle] to Prytanée National Military School [of Saint-Cyr] to study in November 1801. Entry to the school was reserved for “orphan” sons of those lost in combat, although admission to the school would normally be for French nationals. It seems that John Lawless was eligible as having given service to Napoleon by opposing their common enemy, England.

On leaving school, he returned to Carcassonne to help his mother with their agricultural enterprise. He would have acquired residency as a minor via his mother (soon after her own) on 8th June 1804, and he also declared residency on 22th December 1812 at the Town Hall in Carcassonne. 

In 1812, he is said to be living with his mother, and then carries out service with the National Guard. He then moved to 12 rue d’Artois in Paris in 1816, where he lived until he was arrested in 1818. On 4th February that year, he was imprisoned in Sainte-Pélagie due to unpaid debts. His creditors were named as Lannes, Mangin, Mrs Petit-Jean d’Inville, and Casanove.

In court in 1826, a case on his behalf claimed he should have been released after five years, given that he was a foreign national but also a legal French resident. Doyle’s lawyer made a strong case with all the necessary facts regarding the dates that residency would have been acquired, and the court decided that he should be released.
A later case involving debts to Auguste Cazanove of Sète (we assume this is the same Casanove as above) was held in November 1838, where Doyle revoked any inheritance claim to the marsh of Marseillette to Cazanove. After that, there are few mentions of Doyle Lawless. He died on 13 May 1857 (recorded as Doyle Lowles), and according to the Daily Burial Registers of Parisian Cemeteries, he was buried the next day at Montmartre.