Klotz oder Clod oder Kloche

 

                                                         

Angoulême is a European town. It was in Balzac's description a place of “the most fatal immobility,” in a province of villages where "no one went." It was also -- like every other small town -- a scene of expectation and opportunity. It was in particular, over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a place of continuing movement across almost the entire continent of Europe.

Eine Hochzeit in der Provinz is a history, in part, of individuals who emigrated to or returned from distant lands; "Americans," in the contemporary sense of the residents or former residents of the French Atlantic colonies. But there were also women and men who had come to Angoulême from Italy and Spain, from Ireland and Holland, from Switzerland and Portugal and Poland. There were Dutch papermakers and Portuguese prisoners of war; one of the daughters-in-law of the family at the centre of the book was from Venice, or possibly Naples. There was a drama over inheritance, in the 1770s, involving a surgeon from the town who had emigrated to Saint-Domingue (the modern Haiti), and his uncle, a wigmaker in Berlin.

The largest of the multi-European dynasties was founded by an immigrant to the town, Johann Georg Klotz, who arrived in Angoulême from the German lands some time before 1717, when he was married to the daughter of a bonnet-maker. He was a cook, and later an inn-keeper. He and his family are the subject of one of the short histories in the book, "Klotz oder Clod oder Kloche" (Eine Hochzeit in der Provinz, ss. 102-104.) (The reference is to the multiple different ways in which the parish clerks of the town spelled the family name.)

The story of the Klotz family ends, in the book, with Johann Georg's twenty-two grandchildren who were baptised in the town, and with one of his granddaughters who was born near Versailles, and returned to Angoulême during the French revolution, where she became the proprietor of a large house in the town, the confiscated property of a family of army officers.

But this was only the beginning of the dynasty of the Klotzes. Eine Hochzeit in der Provinz is a work of history, with an uneasy relationship to the contiguous activity of "family history," in the sense of ancestry or genealogy. Historians and family historians use the same sources, and some of the same methods, in very different inquiries. The historian is interested in how it really was, wie es eigentlich gewesen; the family historian is interested in who the individual in the present really is. In the book, I put aside any exploration of the relationship between the two kinds of inquiry by ending the story well beyond living memory. In relation to the Klotzes, the story ends in 1791.

It has been alarmingly easy, all the same, to follow the multi-European history of the Klotzes much further in time, and even into the present. The universe of ancestry websites and digitized birth records changes continuously over time; in the book, I describe the process of looking for individuals by name, and then looking for them again, as a schlechte Unendlichkeit, in Hegel's sense of living with limits over which one has no influence. In the case of the Klotzes, there are hundreds more individuals to be found.

Château de la Rochebeaucourt. I do not know where Johann Georg Klotz was born, and when. But the destiny of his family is a story, in general, of the importance of education. Johann Georg and his wife could both sign their names, when they were married in Angoulême in 1717. So could all their children. The first, Marie Anne, married a painter and sculptor of religious statues in Angoulême. The second, Thomas, who was a cook like his father, married the daughter of the local school teacher in a village in the Dordogne. The third child, also called Marie Anne, married a prominent inn-keeper, who became the protagonist, a few years later, in a notorious affair of the "cabalists and usurers" of Angoulême. Jacques, the fourth child, described himself as a "bourgeois de Paris" when he was married at the age of thirty-two to the daughter of the "concierge du Chateau de Dampierre," near Versailles, where he was employed by a Spanish-Neapolitan army officer. Françoise, the last to be married, was married in Angoulême to a teacher in the local college, described as a "master of arts."

Françoise and the younger Marie Anne became the matriarchs of imposing dynasties in and around Angoulême. Françoise's son was an official of the revolutionary administration of the town, and became professor of mathematics in the college; his son was the general secretary of the prefecture of the Charente, of which his grandson was also an official. The children of Marie Anne and her husband, the former cabalist, were part of the propertied bourgeoisie of the Charente. Their son Guillaume Nouel, who was Johann Georg's grandson, married a woman who was born in Cap Français, Saint-Domingue, and was the sole heiress of a plantation for which she received compensation of 78,750 francs in the Haitian indemnity of 1833.

It was the work of only a few hours to find so many of the grandchildren of Johann Georg Klotz -- who arrived to make his fortune in Angoulême at some point in the 1710s, from somewhere in the German lands -- and to find many of their own grandchildren at well. These were the fifth generation of Johann Georg's family; individuals who were connected, by family memory, to their grandparents, who were in turn connected to Johann Georg and Moricette.

I end with only one of these grandchildren's grandchildren, in the female line, and with his own granddaughter. He was the son of Guillaume Nouel's daughter, and he was an eminent army officer in the early twentieth century. He became an expert on, of all things,  colonial railways in Africa, especially in the German and English colonies. He was later a member of the French military mission to Poland in the aftermath of the first world war. His extensive dossier in the records of the Légion d'Honneur is a journey across the making of modern Europe. His original titre as chevalier was missing, he wrote in 1918, and could not be found "on my return from Romania;" he was in Lviv, in 1921, when he received the news that he had been promoted to officer of the Legion; he wrote again, later in 1921, from Ujest in Upper Silesia; he was formally admitted to the order in Warsaw at the end of 1921; he received his brevet, at last, in 1922, in Gleiwitz or Gliwice.

This inquiry into the European destiny of Johann Georg Klotz, to mark the publication of Eine Hochzeit in der Provinz, was an uncomfortable combination of history and family history. One reason for the uneasiness has to do with a sense of unfairness in respect of individuals in the past. The eminent army officer with the Polish connections is long dead, and it is not evident that the story of his distant ancestors would have mattered to him in any way: that one of his sixteen great-great-grandfathers was an itinerant, sociable cook from somewhere in the German lands, or that one of his two grandmothers was compensated in the Haitian indemnity. But there is something awkward, all the same, about the circumstance that an entirely unrelated individual, a historian of other societies and other times, should be in a position to tell so much of the history of his family and his past.

The other reason is more profound, and it has to do with the relationship of history and family history. This is a time of prodigious expansion in interest in family history. Historians, and in particular micro-historians, coexist in the archives -- as in the reading room of the Archives municipales d'Angoulême -- with local historians and family historians. The vast, fluctuating universe of online and digitized sources is a space, by now, that has been shaped far more for family historians than for historians. It is the space in which the historians of the future will exist.

The naturalist novel, for Emile Zola, whose great sequence of novels, the Rougon-Macquart, was the story of a family in France over five generations, is a “continuous compilation.” This is an anxious prospect for historians, in our own fluctuating times. It is always possible to look for one more event, or one more connection, and the grandson's grandson is not, as it happens, the end of the story.
The officer with the Polish connections is indeed long dead. His granddaughter is not. She is an eminent jurist, the daughter of a hero and heroine of the resistance in World War II, and a "grand officer," since 2020, of the Légion d'honneur. Johann Georg Klotz was her grandfather's grandfather's grandfather. She is flourishing, as I write in the winter of 2024; Johann Georg, who was married in 1717, was in all likelihood born in the seventeenth century. These are also the ruses of history.

 

© Emma Rothschild 2024