Pierre Cottereau, a lumberjack and maker of wooden shoes (
sabots), lived with his wife, Jeanne Cottereau (born Jeanne Moyné), as a tenant at
la Closerie des Poiriers (literally, the "pear orchard enclosure"), a farm halfway between the villages of
Saint-Ouën-des-Toits and
Bourgneuf-la-Forêt in Mayenne,
France. (An 'enclosure' is, in fact, a small farm, usually less than twenty acres in extent, and the name comes from the need for farmers to enclose their properties with fences or hedges to prevent cattle, sheep, and other domesticated animals from running free.) Tenancy on this piece of property had been established by the Moyné family about 1750. The elder Cottereau, like his father before him, made his family's living by criss-crossing the wooded regions of western France, from the forest between
Mondevert and
Le Pertre to the
forest of Concise, felling trees, stacking and seasoning the timber, and making wooden shoes, which he sold in the villages of Mayenne. From the local parish registers, particularly those of the parish of Olivet, where the Closerie des Poiriers was located, it is clear that this was a region deep in economic misery throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. For example, in several birth records, there is the notation,
"né sur la lande" (born on the land), indicating that the child's parents were likely to have been casual workers sleeping rough. So great was the misery of the forge workers at
Port-Brillet, owned by the prince of
Talmont-Saint-Hilaire,
Antoine Philippe de La Trémoille, that they took part in the
French Revolution, joined the National Guard and became ardent Republican patriots. Workers in
La Brûlatte behaved similarly. The Cottereau family came from a line of merchants, notaries, and priests, and, unlike most of his neighbors, Pierre was literate and respectable. His children, however, were violent, quarrelsome, lazy, and resolutely ignorant. Without doubt, their father's prolonged absences, cutting timber in distant forests, carving shoes, selling his
sabots over a wide swath of Mayenne, deprived the Cottereau children of an authority figure. Further, since their mother was illiterate, as was common at that time, the Cottereau children were also largely unschooled. Their father died in 1778 when Jean Chouan was twenty-one years old. Pierre the younger, Jean's only elder brother, proclaimed himself a
sabotier like his father, but he was neither so skillful nor so industrious as his father had been. To survive, all six Cottereaus, four brothers and two sisters, became involved in salt-smuggling. Before 1790, the
gabelle was a very unpopular tax on salt. Traditionally, France has been composed of a collection of regions, former
duchies,
principalities, or independent
kingdoms, most of which enjoyed long periods of sovereignty, periods when they were all-but-completely divorced, politically, from the rest of France. Well-known examples of the
regions are
Normandy,
Burgundy,
Brittany, and
Aquitaine. As an accident of the historical development of an integrated France, these regions had different tax rates for commodities like salt. Whenever there is a disparity in prices or taxes between two neighboring jurisdictions, there will be smuggling. For example,
La Croixille is a town in the department of Mayenne, which was (and is) a part of the region of
Maine, in the eighteenth century, a high-salt-tax region. Across the
River Vilaine, the neighboring town of
Princé, was, with respect to salt, in a tax-exempt region,
Brittany. The huge disparity between the price of salt in the two towns prompted active smuggling, with salt purchased cheaply in Brittany being moved across the river and sold for a high price in Mayenne. A perpetual guerrilla war between customs officers and salt-smugglers simmered in the valley of the Vilaine. Those who engaged in this tax-avoidance traffic were known as "false-salters". The term, "false-salter", referred to criminal attempts to falsely represent lightly taxed salt as salt that had already been heavily taxed. An unarmed person caught "false-salting" was subject to condemnation to the galleys and deportation; by law, an armed false-salter could be executed. Between 1730 and 1743, 585 salt-smugglers were deported to
New France (
Quebec). Jean Chouan and his brothers, François and René, were actively involved in this kind of commerce, and, although they knew the territory intimately, including all of the places in the forests of the borderlands where illicit salt might be hidden, they were stopped on several smuggling trips and narrowly avoided arrest. Aside from their smuggling activities, the Cottereaus conducted a number of shady enterprises in the
Misedon woods that surrounded their house at the Closerie des Poiriers. Sometime before 1780, Jean Cottereau, in the company of his brother, René, and a few others, were in the forest drinking
moonshine alcohol, in breach of the laws of Olivet, when they were surprised by two local constables, Pierre Bériteau and Jean Guitton. A brawl ensued. When it was over, a surgeon from Laval declared that one of the two was so badly injured that he could not stand to be transported to hospital. Instead, he was transported to an inn at Saint-Ouën-des-Toits, where he remained for several weeks. The Cottereaus, called before the
bar of justice, were ordered to pay for the injured man's medical treatment, and for his room and board during the period of his confinement. This episode was just one of a large number of transgressions engaged in by Jean and his brothers. The thuggish Cottereaus, over a period of several years managed to injure or cripple almost all their neighbors, usually for nonsensical reasons, and, inevitably, one or more of them was brought to court and forced to pay compensation to their victims in order to avoid imprisonment or deportation. This ruined the family financially. ==Before the French Revolution==