Mon premier ancêtre en Nouvelle-France était Michel Robineau dit Desmoulins. Il est arrivé vers 1700.
My first ancestor in New France was Michel Robineau dit Desmoulins, who arrived around 1700. I’ll get to his crossing and his life in Montréal in due course but first I want to dwell on something smaller and stranger: his name. Why was Michel Robineau also known as Robineau dit Desmoulins? Where did that second name come from and what did it mean?
To answer that, we need a short detour into the curious world of the “dit” name.
The French word dit translates literally as “said.” What it meant in practice depends entirely on who you ask. To some researchers it is an a.k.a. or “also known as”; to others it’s a nickname, an alias, or a distinguisher. Many dit names began life as a nom de guerre — a name adopted by, or assigned to, the soldiers of a particular military company. The most common explanation is that the French in New France used dit names to tell one another apart, especially in the army. Why the English military never felt the same need to distinguish its endless Smiths and Joneses remains, as far as I can tell, a complete mystery.
As with most things in history, the practice is controversial – mostly because there don’t seem to be any hard and fast rules about it. But a few recurring reasons stand out.
The first is simple distinction. Imagine a small town with two Jean Roys who happen to be cousins. Both are tailors — the family trade. To keep them straight, one becomes Jean Roy dit Tailleur (Jean Roy the tailor), while the other becomes Jean Roy dit Le Grand because he’s tall. Problem solved.
The second is military. Dit names were often handed out to soldiers within a single company, sometimes following a theme. In the Dugré company, the story goes, every soldier’s dit name began with the letter D; another troop supposedly took its names from parts of the body. The dit name became a kind of unit badge — hear the name, know the company.
A third reason was respect. Casual adoptions were common between roughly 1600 and 1800, often because a mother had died in childbirth and a sister or aunt took in the children. Under French law the child kept the family surname but frequently tacked on the adoptive father’s name as a dit name.
A fourth was origin. The usual way to show where someone came from was the prefix de, as in Jacques de St. Dennis — Jack from St. Dennis. But some colonists used a dit name instead, as with Henry Beauclerc dit Normandie. A fifth was religious homage. New France was Catholic — non-Catholics were barred from the colony — and some people took dit names honouring a favourite saint, becoming François St-Jean or Michel St-Pierre.
And then, around the middle of the nineteenth century, the dit names quietly faded. They began disappearing from official records like the census around the time of Confederation in 1867 without any law being passed. In that era the clergy kept all the records in Québec — baptisms in place of birth certificates, with no civil marriages — so the theory is that the bishops simply instructed parish priests to stop using dit names and to standardize family surnames. In a world where the Church held the pen, that instruction would have been remarkably effective.
So — back to Michel. How did he get tagged with “Desmoulins”? I have a few theories, and you’re welcome to add your own.
It could have been assigned at random by his military superiors. Possible, but that would end this discussion rather quickly and isn’t nearly as fun.
It could reflect his character — perhaps he was a Don Quixote type, tilting at windmills. But the research paints him as a farmer near Montréal, not exactly a man on a quixotic quest.
It could be that he was a fan of a famous Desmoulins. For about ten glorious minutes I imagined he had named himself after Camille Desmoulins, one of the firebrands of the French Revolution. Then I remembered the Revolution happened some sixty years after Michel died in 1738. Theory busted.
It could be that he came from a related place. There’s a town in France called Esmoulins, about 300 kilometres from Paris. Michel Robineau “d’Esmoulins” could plausibly slur into “Desmoulins.” It’s a stretch, though: people in the 1600s rarely moved far from where they were born and 300 kilometres in that era was a serious undertaking, not the three-hour drive it is today. Theory wobbling.
It could be a New France landmark. Near Terrebonne, where his unit may have been based, there is an Île des Moulins. Promising — until I learned the island wasn’t given that name until the 1800s. Theory busted.
Which brings me to my favourite explanation, and it turns on a vanished hill. Michel was baptized at Saint-Roch in Paris, and the church sat in the shadow of the Butte des Moulins — the “hill of the windmills.” The hill was levelled between 1667 and 1677, only a few years before Michel was born around 1683 but a neighbourhood doesn’t forget its landmarks overnight. People very likely still called the area Butte des Moulins well into his childhood. From there it is no great leap for a young man enlisting in the army to reach for “Desmoulins” as his nom de guerre. It’s the theory that fits the geography, the timing, and the man, and it is the one I quietly believe.
One last wrinkle makes all this worth caring about. Michel’s children were born Robineau dit Desmoulins, but over the generations the family split the difference: some kept Robineau, others kept Desmoulins or Dumoulin. So somewhere out there are Desmoulins and Dumoulin cousins who share a common ancestor with me — a Parisian farmer named after a hill of windmills that no longer exists.
See the References and further reading section at the end for sources on dit names and the Butte des Moulins.
References and further reading:
- “Dit / Dite Names,” catudals.com: http://www.catudals.com/2011/05/dit-dite-names.html
- “The Nicknames and Dit Names of French-Canadian Ancestors,” The Discover Blog: https://thediscoverblog.com/2014/01/30/the-nicknames-and-dit-names-of-french-canadian-ancestors/
- Franco-Gène, “Dit Names”: http://www.francogene.com/quebec/ditnames.php
- “Dit Names,” RootsWeb: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~unclefred/DitNames.html
- “The Devil’s in the Dit Names,” Habitants and Voyageurs: http://habitantsandvoyageurs.blogspot.ca/2010/05/devils-in-dit-names.html
- “Butte des Moulins,” Wikipedia (French): http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butte_des_Moulins
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