Ep. 32, Napoleon’s General Comes to Texas: The Story of Champ D’Asile
Wise About Texas
Ken Wise
4.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 9 January 2017
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1818, one of Napoleon Bonaparte’s top generals, and many of his former officers, tried to establish a French colony in Texas. They said it was for agriculture, but they brought a ship full of weapons and built a fort on the Trinity River. Were they going to incite revolution in Mexico, or did they have their sights set on Spanish Florida? Why was the infamous pirate Jean Lafitte so eager to offer them help? Somehow they were going to free Napoleon and use Texas to establish his empire! Learn about the failed French colony of Champ D’Asile in this episode of Wise About Texas.
Jean Lafitte (photo Rosenberg library, Galveston, Texas)
Drawing of Champ D’Asile
A scene from Champ D’Asile
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Howdy and welcome to Wise About Texas, the Texas History Podcast, this is your host Ken Wise and I thank you for listening today and I |
| 0:15.5 | thank you also for loving Texas history as much as I do. I hope everybody had a wonderful |
| 0:20.6 | holiday time with family and friends. I'm recording this episode the first |
| 0:24.7 | week of January 2017 so happy new year as well. We had a warm Christmas down here in |
| 0:30.8 | Texas as we often do and a lot of Texans wish it would |
| 0:34.0 | snow on Christmas day I hear it every year but I'm sure those of you stuck in the |
| 0:38.1 | snow up north might wish for a little relief so I don't know where the sweet spot is but we had a great |
| 0:45.2 | Christmas down here and as I sit in the world headquarters of Wiesabout |
| 0:49.5 | Texas were in the middle of a clear but cold day and those are some of the best winter days down here in |
| 0:56.2 | Texas so I hope the weather's good where you are. I'm very excited for 2017 and |
| 1:00.8 | some new things for this podcast. I'm still working on that website revamp that I talked about and I wish I had a web developer on staff, but I'm I do it all. It's a-man band here at Wiesabout Texas so you're going to have to be |
| 1:16.1 | patient on that website hopefully the website as it is now is working well for |
| 1:20.0 | you and I can promise you it's going to look a lot better when I get done with it and we're working on that. |
| 1:25.0 | It's going to be a busy first quarter for Wies About Texas. |
| 1:28.0 | The legislative session is starting in my day job as a judge. |
| 1:31.0 | I involved a lot in legislative issues, so we'll be spending a lot of |
| 1:34.3 | time in Austin for the next few months which is always a fun fun thing to do. |
| 1:40.1 | We're coming into the 181st anniversary period of the Texas Revolution, so you can bet that some |
| 1:47.2 | of the episodes in the next few weeks are going to be about the Revolution. |
| 1:51.4 | In fact, I'm going to be the keynote speaker at the Texas Independence Day celebration |
| 1:55.9 | held annually at Washington on the Brazos, the birthplace of Texas. |
| 1:59.8 | That's where the convention met to sign the Declaration of Independence in the first Constitution. |
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