Grandson of Voruz, orphaned at 3, with his left arm amputated: Jean-Baptiste Étienne was for half a century the master of the Briord hunt, until his death in 1949.
On 22 October 1949, in his town-house on the Rue Linné in Nantes, died Jean-Baptiste Étienne, "the old huntsman", the last owner of Briord before the period that separates us from the estate's contemporary renaissance. He was seventy-nine. With him disappeared, in the lapidary phrase of the daily Ouest-France, "an old Nantes figure". And with him closed a half-century during which Briord had been, under his impetus, one of the centres of Breton venery, a place of hunting with hounds, an Art Nouveau architectural laboratory, and the family home of an atypical bachelor — a bon vivant, an eccentric, universally known in Nantes society.
Jean-Baptiste Étienne was born in 1870. He was the only child of Gustave Étienne, a Nantes sugar refiner ("the Étienne shipping flag, yellow, blue and red with the initials JBE"), and of Emma Louise Voruz, daughter of the industrialist Jean-Simon Voruz, whom he had married in 1867. Emma died in 1871 at the age of thirty-five. Struck by this bereavement and fallen into madness, Gustave followed her to the grave less than two years later. It is said that Gustave died of grief. Jean-Baptiste was three. He was taken in by his grandfather Jean-Simon Voruz, who became his legal guardian and would manage, until his grandson came of age, not only the family patrimony but also the estate of Briord, bought back for him in 1885.
Jean-Baptiste grew up at Briord, whose château his grandfather was gradually transforming. He lived his childhood there in an estate that Voruz had modernised (running water, electricity, hot-air heating), that he had restored (raised tower with dome and lantern, staircase rail with military trophies, mascaron with a woman's head on the door), and of which he had made a modern dwelling worthy of the Nantes high bourgeoisie of the late nineteenth century.
His status as an orphan exempted him from military service. His fortune was considerable. Besides the town-house on the Rue Linné where his aunt Berthe Voruz also resided, he owned the residence of La Prairie-d'Amont in Nantes (paternal inheritance), Briord (main residence), a property at Aigrefeuille, villas at La Bernerie (Les Roches Grises) and at Pornic (Ker Colo, Villa Isabelle, Les Terrasses), and the château of Le Vigeant in the Vienne. He would have in his service, it is said, a secretary charged essentially with clipping the coupons of his shares to collect their dividends. He had no active share in the Voruz factory, managed by his uncle Fernand and sold, as to its mechanical division, in 1898.
One physical trait marked his silhouette: following a shooting accident in his youth — "a companion dismounts with a cocked gun, the shot goes off and takes away his left arm" — Jean-Baptiste Étienne was amputated and had his left arm replaced by a metal hook. From then on, at the Briord hunt, firearms would be forbidden and the quarry despatched with the hunting knife. This hook would become his distinctive sign.
The chronicle reports a disturbing discovery made much later, during the demolition of the "little château" of La Prairie-d'Amont: at the bottom of a cupboard, the workmen found a glass jar filled with formalin in which was preserved the left arm of "Little Étienne" — a memento of his eccentric side that Jean-Baptiste had carefully kept.
Jean-Baptiste Étienne contracted young the passion that would define him. In 1891, he learned that the Marquis de Baudry d'Asson wished to part with his hounds. He had the means: he bought the pack. The following year, in 1892, he founded his own hunt — he was just twenty-two. The Briord Hunt was born.
The hounds had their base at the Briord kennels from May to September. When the hunting season came, the huntsman Félix Lardeau and his second Labranche took to the road, crossed by the ferry at Le Pellerin, and made for the forest of Le Gâvre, where Jean-Baptiste had bought a vast manor house with stables and outbuildings. It was there that the hunts with hounds took place, gathering the Marquis de Coislin, de Boisfleury, de Lareinty and de La Haye-Jousselin. The hunting society was presided over by Count François de La Rochefoucauld-Bayers, owner of the Fresnay hunt (created in 1884).
In 1900, the Count de La Rochefoucauld was in his sixties and sought a successor. Jean-Baptiste Étienne answered the call. The merging of the two packs took place in 1902: 120 hounds, including 60 Vendée crossbreeds from Baudry-d'Asson and 60 Saintongeois from Fresnay. The staff joined too, notably the huntsman Prosper Guinel and his second Henri Lefeuvre. The royal-blue livery was worn with facings and a black waistcoat; the buttons were gilded, adorned with a stag's head and the motto "Breiz" (from La Rochefoucauld). The full motto of the hunt was "Breiz, Rallye Briord, Hardi, en avant". And the horns made the fanfare "La Briord" ring out in the undergrowth.
Until the Great War, the hunts rode in the forests of Le Gâvre, Paimpont, Chinon, Lanouée, sometimes Domeneche, Plessé or Vioreau in the north of the department, or Princé in the Pays de Retz. There they hunted the stag and often "the pig" (the wild boar). Two horsewomen were frequently noticed there, the Misses Renée and Fanny Marion de Procé.
In the aftermath of the war, Count de La Rochefoucauld had died (1918). The question of continuing arose. "We carry on", decided Étienne. The Briord hunt continued until 1937, the year it was "disbanded". Jean-Baptiste Étienne was then 67; he hung up his horn. The faithful Prosper Guinel — "a legend in the world of hunting with hounds" — had retired in 1933, at 75. During those forty-five seasons, about ten stags and 30 to 40 wild boar would be hunted each year.
Between the wars, Jean-Baptiste Étienne held the office of wolf-hunting lieutenant (lieutenant de louveterie), a volunteer auxiliary of the public authority in matters of wildlife management. His territory was vast: the districts of Paimbœuf, Nantes and Saint-Nazaire (except a few cantons of the latter). He also managed his own estate of Briord, with successive gamekeepers: Jean-Joseph in 1908, Ollivier in 1934, Albert Menant in 1939. He was also president of the Association of Wolf-Hunting Lieutenants of France.
The archives preserve a few incidents: in 1910, the huntsman Prosper Guinel found one of the hounds "with its tail cut off, its jaw shattered and its body pierced with four knife wounds" — the animal, which specialised in hunting badger and roe deer, did not survive. Some time later, the steward Jean-Baptiste Bauvineau found that 32 grafted Muscadet vine stocks had been cut (a loss of 1,800 francs). In 1939, two young poachers wounded the keeper Albert Menant during an altercation. Jean-Baptiste Étienne would arouse a few resentments.
The château had already been improved by his grandfather Voruz; Jean-Baptiste added his own modifications. He had the wrought-iron lanterns installed above the entrance steps. Above all, he had fitted out in the basement — on the site of Joseph Charette's former kitchen — a vast hunting hall, where the hunts could enter directly with weapons and boots without soiling the vestibule and the drawing rooms. On a floor of cement tiles, a long table framed by high-backed chairs welcomed the company in a neo-Gothic décor: a vault with moulded ribs, a wrought-iron chandelier set around an ornamented keystone (the work of the Nantes ironworker André Chauvet), a monumental fireplace, panelling adorned with carved benches. The works required the partial or total replacement of the original vaults with concrete vaults or metal joisting.
To the outbuildings were added a kennel for the Briord pack, a stable dedicated to the hunting horses, a circular drinking trough and a horse footbath.
A traveller — it was said that he had brought back from a stay in the Far East a Chinese bedroom. Jean-Baptiste Étienne had this room set up on the first floor of the tower. There one found a ceremonial marriage bed in red and gilded wood, a mirror and a table in the same style, a set of chairs, a two-door wardrobe in which hung embroidered silk gowns, and on the walls three old embroidered silks. It is indeed said that the château was awarded a prize at the 1900 World's Fair for its interior decoration — a claim it has not been possible to confirm absolutely.
Briord also had its Ottoman drawing room, with a divan whose uprights were decorated in the Egyptian style, curtains and hangings forming a tent, tables and poufs. Exoticism was in fashion; Briord did not escape it. An article published in 1911 in the magazine La vie à la campagne gives a vivid description of it. This double exotic reference — Chinese bedroom and Ottoman drawing room — recalls, though no direct link can be established, the studio of the architect Georges Lafont in Nantes, where the members of Le Clou gathered, and whose alcove was arranged as a "Moroccan salon" with an orientalising décor.
Briord was not only a place of hunting. One entertained there. As early as 1895, Jean-Baptiste Étienne, who already owned a "petrol car", invited the Nantes Cyclists' Club to a paper chase he had traced himself: 13 kilometres around Port-Saint-Père, on 13 October. The company wore white sweaters for the riders and "fresh and elegant dresses" for the ladies. A lunch at the château closed the day — "the champagne flowed freely" — and the architect Lafont raised a toast "to the eldest, M. Voruz senior".
On 15 June 1911, the whole aviation committee — of which Jean-Baptiste Étienne was president — was received at the château. Two dozen notables, including the mayor of Nantes Paul Bellamy, the chief engineer Michel, the architect Éluère, and Sieur Pinard. Having set out from Nantes by motor car, they lunched in the basement dining room and posed before the photographer's lens on the front steps.
In July 1930, the Society of Regionalist Gastronomes, of which Jean-Baptiste Étienne was a member, held its congress at Nantes. He invited his fellow members to Briord on the return from an excursion in the Pays de Retz. With "a gracious courtesy", he offered them in the great dining room "a certain delectable malmsey" accompanied by "delicious cakes whose recipe the gastronomes hastened to note".
In May 1929, Jean-Baptiste Étienne stood in the municipal elections of Port-Saint-Père and was elected on the list of the outgoing mayor Émile Chocteau. He was thus the second master of Briord — after Pelet de Lautrec (1871-1874) — to sit officially on the municipal council of the commune that houses his estate.
He was also president (since 1911) of the Buzay Canal Syndicate, administrator of the Automobile Club of the West, honorary president of the Nautical Sport Society of the West and of the Nantes Rowing Circle, founding member of the Nantes tourist office, honorary president of the Saint-Hubert, and founder in 1888 of the Nantes Racing Society, which he had presided since 1906. Officer of Agricultural Merit since 1934.
During the Second World War, Jean-Baptiste Étienne managed Briord from a distance, as he did his other properties, several of which had been requisitioned. The château was occupied for a time by German troops; he even applied for a tax rebate in December 1943 for having been unable to occupy his property!
By decree of 30 August 1949, he was appointed Knight of the Legion of Honour on the proposal of the Minister of Agriculture. The information record describes him as "a farmer, president of the Association of Wolf-Hunting Lieutenants of France". The recommendation states: "A very important landowner, M. Étienne has always shown great activity in the agricultural circles of Loire-Inférieure. Very attached to questions of irrigation, he founded thirty-eight years ago the Buzay Canal Syndicate. [...] M. Étienne's morality, as well as his conduct during the Occupation, allow his admission to the Order of the Legion of Honour."
On 12 October 1949, he sent to the Grand Chancellery a letter naming his delegate. But a brief illness carried him off ten days later — on 22 October 1949 — before he could receive the distinction. His warrant would be signed on 12 January 1950, posthumously.
The historian of venery Claude Pédron left a final image of Jean-Baptiste Étienne, taken on the cathedral square in Nantes, on a winter's day in 1947:
"A car stops on the cobblestones. It is a blue and black Peugeot, from the 1930s. A chauffeur in gabardine and leggings takes off his cap and opens the rear door. A bit of fur coat appears, then an arm without a hand, a metal hook in its place. The whole belongs to a well-padded man, with a white goatee, his eye sharp and assured despite his small stature. 'Come, I'll introduce you…' whispers one of my friends in my ear, 'my father shoots duck at his place in Briord'. And so it was that, thanks to this somewhat surreal encounter, I kept the memory of M. Jean-Baptiste Étienne, an atypical figure of Nantes society and famous among the huntsmen of the great West, since he owned scent hounds for nearly half a century."
With the passing of Jean-Baptiste Étienne in 1949 ended a chapter of the history of Briord that had lasted exactly sixty-four years — from the acquisition by his grandfather Voruz in 1885 to his death in 1949 — and that had been, under his impetus, one of hunting with hounds, of society life, and of the cultured, well-travelled upkeep of a dwelling he loved.
After the estate of Briord remained, without any real project or works, in the hands of the Say family and their heirs for 70 years, the chain re-forms, in the twenty-first century, in the hands of Eric Peters, who signed the promise of purchase in July 2021 and became the owner on 12 February 2022.
Under his impetus was born the Terre de Briord project, whose very purpose is to preserve and pass on this long memory — from Séris de Rezay in 1225 down to Jean-Baptiste Étienne in 1949. The horns of "La Briord" no longer resound in the undergrowth of Le Gâvre; but their echo, in the archives and in the stones, has found those who still hear it.