DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm gonna do it justice. Picture this: the spring of 1818. Napoleon Bonaparte has been finished for years, his empire scattered to the four winds, and the men who fought under him — generals, veterans, soldiers who knew nothing but war and glory — are suddenly men without a country.
Two of those men, Generals Charles Lallemand and Antoine Rigaud, gathered those veterans around them, and together with other French settlers, they set their eyes on a place most folks back in Europe couldn't even find on a map. Texas. After many trials and adventures — and the marker says that plain as day, many trials and adventures, so you know the road to get here was not a gentle one — they arrived on the banks of the Trinity River.
Spring of 1818. And there, in the wilderness of what would one day be Liberty County, they laid the foundation of something they called the Champ D'Asile. Say it slow: Champ D'Asile.
It means, in the old tongue, a field of asylum. A refuge. They carved it out of the land and called it, and I'm reading this right off the marker now, a last refuge for peace and liberty.
Those are heavy words. Last refuge. Not a first attempt, not an experiment — a last one.
These were men who had given everything to a cause and watched it burn, and they were done with war and done with empire, and they wanted something the world had not yet given them. They even put it into words, in French, words the marker preserves to this day: Nous voulons vivre libres, laborieux et paisables. We want to live as free men through our labor, and in peace.
That's not a battle cry. That's a prayer. Generals and veterans of one of the mightiest military machines the world had ever seen, planting crops on a Texas riverbank and asking only to be left alone.
The State of Texas saw fit to remember them in 1936, and honestly, it's the least we could do. Because whatever became of the Champ D'Asile, whatever trials followed those trials, those men crossed an ocean and found the Trinity River and wrote their hopes into the ground. And in Texas, that counts for something.
What the marker says
To Generals Charles Lallemand, Antoine Rigaud, the veterans of the Napoleonic Wars and other French settlers, who, after many trials and adventures, came to Texas in the spring of 1818 to found on the banks of the Trinity River the Champ D'Asile: a last refuge for peace and liberty "Nous voulons vivre libres, laborieux et paisables" (We want to live as free men through our labor, and in peace.) Erected by the State of Texas 1936