THE COUNT LOPPINOT
Newsday’s Millennium Special
January 1, 2000
Page 10
Lopinot in the foothills of the Northern Range was once the retreat
of one of the most respected and prominent persons of British Trinidad.
While
the existing building is not the actual dwelling house of the French Count
Loppinot, it was however built upon the site and is not far from his grave in
the valley of Lopinot, where his earthly remains were buried in 1819.
Charles
Joseph Comte Loppinot de la Fresilliere was a reactionary royalist of the
ancien regime. He left France in 1781,
eight years before the revolution, and via Louisiana he arrived in St. Domingue
(Haiti), where he was appointed commandant at Port-au-Prince.
He
must have been a very charismatic person.
So much so that when the slave revolt in what is now Haiti came to pass,
his slaves smuggled him and his family onto a ship to Jamaica, hidden in
barrels and declared as a cargo of sugar.
In that way, he was able to survive the uprising.
In
1793, Loppinot was appointed Governor General of St. Domingue and Commissioner
for all the Windward and Leeward Islands of America by the future King Louis
XVIII. In compensation for the loss of
his estates in Haiti, Loppinot was granted a parcel of land in Trinidad, and he
arrived here in 1800 with his family and slaves. At least that is what the Count thought. Trinidad’s Governor Thomas Picton, however,
had not been informed of Loppinot’s grant, so that when the Count arrived in
Trinidad, he found himself landless. He
had to borrow money and purchased half share in a sugar estate in Tacarigua at
a heavy loss.
Subsequently,
his rank and military experience earned him good positions with the British
administration of Trinidad.
When
the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s army was defeated at Waterloo and the Emperor
himself was banished to Elba, Loppinot lost not time and from 1814 onwards he
tried with much royalist fervour to win back St. Domingue for the restored King
Louis XVIII. He seriously believed that
after he would resume the Governor Generalship of St Domingue, the people would
‘prefer slavery under a benign monarch to freedom under a black tyrant’, as
Michael Pocock writes in his book “Out of the Shadows of the Past”.
Loppinot
always remained a patriotic Frenchman, in spite of the fact that he had enjoyed
British protection and generosity for several decades. When in 1814 the news reached him that the
recapture of St Domingue was impossible, he was deeply disappointed. Much more embittered he was, however, that
the restored Bourbon Kings in France did not even so much as acknowledge any of
his many correspondences, politely and courtly written. An old world had definitely come to an end,
and the Count, who came out of the whole affair with much to his credit, lived
out his last years in the verdant slopes of Lopinot.