ARMANDY comtesse d' (EN)

Glassmaking and dynamite: an alliance between two industrialist families

The Comtesse d’Armandy (1860–1949), née Pauline Catherine Françoise Barbe, on 20 September 1860 in Strasbourg, was born to Marguerite Joséphine Julie Quennec (Épinal, 1838–1876, Paris) and François Barbe, known as Paul Barbe (Nancy, 1836–1890, Paris), a graduate of the École Polytechnique (1855) and a lieutenant in the 6^th Régiment d’Artillerie-Pontonniers (artillery and pontoon regiment).

Her mother, Julie Quennec, came from a family that owned glass manufactories in the Vosges region, and in Progens in the Canton of Fribourg in Switzerland. As of 1862, the father of Julie Quennec and grandfather of the Comtesse d’Armandy, Théodore Quennec (1803, Vannes–1870, Progens) became co-owners, with the French industrialist, Jean Baptiste Jérôme Brémond, of the Société des Mines et Verrerie in Semsales, Switzerland’s principal glass and crystal factory throughout the nineteenth century. Upon Théodore Quennec’s death, his eldest son, the engineer Henri Joseph Quennec (1838–1899), took over the running of the glassworks, and in 1901 the company was entirely owned by the Quennec family. Julie Quennec had another two brothers: Nicolas Léon Quennec (1840–1877), naval lieutenant and Officer of the Royal Order of Cambodia (AN (French national archives), LH/2245/82) whose heir was Pauline Barbe the year before her marriage (CHA, Vincennes, GR 10 YD 1087), and Lucien Théodore Quennec (1843–1905), who married the Comtesse Barbara Nicolaevna, called BarbeHendrikoff (1855–1945). The son of the latter and first cousin of Pauline Barbe, Léon Quennec (1883–1974) was one of the legatees of the Comtesse d’Armandy in 1949 (Archives of the Musée de l’Armée, bequest file from 1950). An infantry captain commanding troops in Tunisia when he was made Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1931 (AN (French national archives), 19800035/1255/44818), Léon Quennec was sent to Tunisia for the first time in 1910, then transferred in 1925 to the staff of the occupation division in Tunisia. As of this date he lived as a colonist in Pavillier (present-day Menzel M’hiri) in the region of Kairouan.

The Comtesse d’Armandy’s father, Paul Barbe, also came from an industrial family in the East of France. At the head, since 1861, of the family industries of the Maison Barbe Père et Fils et Cie, which grouped together the foundries of Tusey near Vaucouleurs (Meuse) and the blast furnaces of Liverdun (Meurthe et Moselle), the engineer Paul Barbe became—as a result of his industrial and capitalistic activities—one of the pioneers of the second French Industrial Revolution (Bret, P., 1996). In 1868, after the patent for the invention of dynamite by Alfred Nobel (1833–1896), the Nancy-born engineer collaborated with the Swedish industrialist and chemist to commercialise the explosives, intended in particular for the mining industry. Benefiting in France from legislation in favour of the private industry of explosives introduced in 1875, Paul Barbe then strove to consolidate the capital of the Nobel company and merge the activities into two huge parent companies—one Anglo-German and the other known as ‘latine’ (French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italo-Swiss companies, and their branches established in Latin America at the point when the Isthmus of Panama was pierced); this was known as the Société Centrale des Dynamites, of which he became Managing Director in 1887 (Praca, E., 2007). Nobel’s partner also established major agricultural businesses in Algeria and Cochin-China (the cultivation of ramie, a plant used for fabrics) and was the administrator of the Messageries Fluviales in Cochin-China(Robert, Bourloton, and Cougny, 1889–1891). In the meantime, the businessman, who had long frequented political circles due to his intense activity as a lobbyist, was elected as a radical-socialist member of parliament for Seine-et-Oise (1885–1890), and subsequently appointed Minister of Agriculture in 1887. Now a figure associated with high finance and a politician, Paul Barbe was one of the parliamentarians involved in the scandal of the Panama Canal and also engaged—along with other directors of the ‘Dynamite Centrale’—in illegal speculations on glycerine, which, after his death in 1890, shook the Nobel empire (Bret, P., 1996).

The marriage of Pauline Barbe and the Comte Eugène Buisson d’Armandy

She was still a minor and under the legal guardianship of her father, when at the age of seventeen Pauline Catherine Françoise Barbe married the Comte Eugène Sylvestre Buisson d’Armandy (Toulouse, 1848–1936, Paris) on 31 July 1878 in Paris. Drawn up by the notary Maître Bourget (38 Rue Saint-Georges in Paris), the ‘Déclaration d’apport de mariage’ (‘Declaration of marital contribution’) of the future spouses (CHA, Vincennes, GR 10 YD 1087) specified that Pauline Barbe’s contribution came from the heritage left by her mother, who had died two years earlier and estimated the income of the future wife to be ‘about twelve thousand francs, in mortgage-backed securities and annuities from the French State and industrial donations’. Signed before the same notary, the ‘marriage contract’ of the future spouses (CHA, Vincennes, GR 10 YD 1087) mentioned with regard to Eugène Buisson d’Armandy the property of the Château des Cinq-Cantons in the communes of Carpentras and Loriol (Vaucluse), which he inherited from his father. Concerning Pauline Barbe, aside from the assets of the mortgage-backed securities (including one at ‘ninety thousand seven hundred and seventy-one francs’, which his father owed her) and State annuities, mention was also made of ‘two hundred stamped subscription shares in the Dynamite company’ at an estimated worth of ‘eighty thousand francs’. Several annual reports from the army underlined the extent to which the officer and graduate of St Cyr (1866), Eugène Buisson d’Amandy, ‘married very well’ in marrying ‘a wife who would be rich one day’ (CHA, Vincennes, GR 10 YD 1087, inspection in 1882).

Eugène Buisson d’Armandy was the son of General Édouard Buisson d’Armandy (1794–1873), a polytechnicien and graduate of St Cyr, whose career in the French army was interrupted between 1816 and 1831 after he was discharged for his Bonapartist opinions (CHA, Vincennes, GR 7 YD 1309). During this exile he travelled around the Middle East and Central Asia and eventually to India (Colozzi, R., 2007); Édouard d’Armandy worked for a Sultan of Oman in Mascate (in her will, the Comtesse d’Armandy mentioned, amongst the objects intended for sale, a ring donated by ‘the Iman of Mascate to her husband’s father, the Major General Édouard d’Armandy, when he was on a mission near him’, archives of the Musée de l’Armée); he then moved to Persia, where he worked for the King of Qajar, Fath Ali Shah (1771–1832) until 1821 and the outbreak of the Turco-Persian War. Upon his return to France in 1823, he was appointed Consular Agent in Mocha in Yemen (The Thomas Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress, Washington; letter sent by Édouard Buisson d’Armandy to the diplomat David, B. Warden), then Vice-Consul of Damiette, in Egypt (Colozzi, R., 2007). After the 1830 Revolution, Édouard d’Armandy was restored by royal ordonnance to his former rank of artillery captain (CHA, Vincennes, GR 7 YD 1309). He was sent to Algeria, where his greatest exploit was the taking of Bône on 27 March 1832 (Buisson d’Armandy, E., 1882), with the support of ‘Captain Yusuf’ (Joseph Vantini) who lead the Regiment des Chasseurs d’Afrique. Promoted to the rank of squadron leader and made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur (AN (French national archives), LH/392/40), he lived in Bône until 1838, taking part in two French expeditions against Constantine, before being posted once again to North Africa from 1850 to 1854 as a Major General and artillery commander in Algeria (CHA, Vincennes, GR 7 YD 1309 and Francfort, L., 1893, pp. 272–273).

When he married Pauline Barbe, Eugène Buisson d’Armandy was an infantry captain and he took part in the Senegal Campaign from 1869 to 1870 (he was decorated with the Colonial Medal with the ‘Sénégal’ clasp in 1888), then that of Cochin-China in 1873, before a hurried return to France after the death of his father, of whom he was the sole descendant. Promoted to the rank of Infantry Colonel in 1901, then Brigadier General in 1906 (assigned to the 25^th infantry brigade in Lons-le-Saunier), Eugène d’Armandy was awarded the Légion d’Honneur (Chevalier in 1888, Officier in 1904, and Commandeur in 1910, AN (French national archives), LH 392/41) and several foreign medals during his military career: Officer of the Royal Order of Cambodia in 1887, Commander of the Nichan Iftikhar, Tunis, and Commander of the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus (Kingdom of Italy) in 1904.

The d’Armandy couple’s relations included Charles Marie Quennec (1855–1936), who ended his career at the Préfecture de la Seine as director of the Octroi de Paris (AN (French national archives), 19800035/249/33225), and Ernest Joseph Marie Quennec (1862–1936), Vice-President of France in Annam and the Tonkin since 1891 (AN (French national archives), 19800035/545/62352), and administrator of the province of Bac Giang in 1904 (Lloyd, G., 2018, p. 365); it seems that the two brothers were not relatives of Pauline d’Armandy’s maternal family (Le Figaro, 24 March 1899, Issue 83).

The correspondence of the Buisson d’Armandy couple—complemented by the donation made to the Musée de l’Armée, in 1904 and 1934, and the correspondence of the Comtesse d’Armandy that accompanied the significant donation to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon, in 1937—only gives limited insight into the couple’s lives and their travels and sojourns abroad. A letter from Paul Gasq, the director of the museum in Dijon, addressed to his collaborator, the curator François Marion, sums up the limited information at his disposal in 1936: ‘As Madame the Comtesse d’Armandy had lived in Egypt for eleven years and as her family had forged alliances in Russia, she was able to buy all these objects. As they were childless, she and her husband (the General passed away one month ago) travelled around the world’. The move to Egypt may have occurred in the first years of the twentieth century, as in 1905 the Comtesse d’Armandy was one of the passengers on the mail steamer that ran between Alexandria and Marseille (The Egyptian Gazette, 5 June 1905).

Childless, the Comtesse Pauline d’Armandy passed away on 4 July 1949 (AP (Paris archives), 8D 239). Prior to this, she had donated her collection of works and objets d’art to the Musée de Dijon in 1937, after the death of her husband, General Eugène d’Armandy (on 25 January 1936, AP(Paris archives), 8D216), ‘bringing to pass the wish [that they had] expressed together the previous year’ (archives of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon, Aa21).

The museums that benefitted from the Comtesse d’Armandy’s generous donations

In the 1940s, the Musée Militaire in Fontainebleau held the ‘souvenirs’ of Édouard and Eugène Buisson d’Armandy donated by the Comtesse d’Armandy (CHA, Vincennes, GR 7 YD 1309, letter dated 2 November 1947 from Hugo de Fichtner, founder of the Musée de Fontainebleau in 1938, sent to the administrative archives of Paris). In Paris, the Musée de l’Armée also benefitted from successive donations made by the Buisson d’Armandys (in 1904 and 1934) and the Comtesse’s bequest in 1950: two portraits of Édouard Buisson d’Armandy (inv. nos. 08095 and 6067) and 120 tin soldiers.

Above all, the collection of pictures and objets d’art compiled by the Comtesse d’Armandy, mainly between 1878 and 1937, was given to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon in 1937 (archives of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, Aa 21). Pauline d’Armandy made this donation to the Dijon museum (after also considering the Musée de Grenoble) both in her name and that of her husband, who had recently passed away. In correspondence that began in 1936, she informed Paul Gasq, the museum’s director, about the most remarkable paintings and drawings in her possession (School of Cimabue, Flemish School, Boily, Vestier, Lauwrence, Vernet, Millet, and Gasté), and about ‘various other collections’: ‘Egypt, China, Tibet (pictures), Persia, and objects that come from the emperors of Russia (gifted to my family)’.

The register of La Vie du Musée (1935-1938) specified that the donation was made in two phases. On 17 August 1936: ‘Pictures, Russian and French porcelains (old Sèvres and old Saxony); various objects from China, Japan, and Tibet; the Egyptian collection; Vases: Greek, Phoenician, Egyptian, and Peruvian; various coins: Greek, Roman, Russian, etc.; a small Louis XVI commode with fine marble, and so on’. Then, on 30 April 1937: ‘(…) old gold coins, ornaments of all kinds, silversmithed objects, and bandages from Egyptian mummies, a gilt Russian icon in a glass case, etc., and a Chinese blue silk Mandarin dress embroidered in gold (a magnificent garment).’

At the end of the Second World War, the donator once again contacted the museum for a final donation consisting of an ‘Egyptian wooden statuette, [a] silver Russian watch, and [a] large Persian stoneware vase’ (archives of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon, Aa 21, letter from Pierre Quarré, 8 March 1946). This acquisition never materialised, as the Comtesse d’Armandy disapproved of way in which the new director, Pierre Quarré had arranged the museum: the succession of pre-war ‘collectors’ museums’ was transformed into a chronological itinerary, arranged according to schools and techniques, and therefore the disappearance of the ‘Salle d’Armandy’ breached—according to the donator—the terms and conditions of her donation.

Family and travel souvenirs

The donation to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon comprised 561 articles (donation E. 3496), including an Asian collection comprising 120 objects: porcelains (China), jades and hardstones (China), carved sandalwood objects (China), ivory objects (Japan), bronzes (China, Tibet, and Thailand), playing cards (Japan), and tempera paintings on canvas (Tibet) or on silk (Japan).

The Comtesse d’Armandy, who in her correspondence mentioned the ‘pleasure of knowing that other people will have the satisfaction of enjoying what had been the joy of [her] life—in the first place compiling these collections, and then living amongst [her] souvenirs’ (archives of the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Aa21, letter dated 21 December 1945), only provided a few clues about the provenance and compilation of this vast collection.

Part of the collection of porcelains (Saxony) and silverware (Russia, Poland), coins, and above all the ensemble of glass and crystal objects from Russia (some of which ‘came from the emperors of Russia beginning with Peter the Great’), came from the relatives of Pauline d’Armandy, whose maternal uncle, Lucien Quennec, married the Comtesse Barbara Nicolaevna, called BarbeHendrikoff, a descendant of Christina Hendrikov, née Skavronska, the sister of Catherine I, Empress of Russia.

The military affectations of Officer Eugène d’Armandy, particularly during the campaign of Senegal in 1869–1870, and in Cochin-China in 1873, may perhaps explain the presence of extra-European objects in the ensemble donated to Dijon by his widow in 1937. It may also be the case that ‘Oriental’ objects, more specifically from the Maghreb, the Near East, and Iran, came from the heritage of General Édouard d’Armandy, as suggested by a silver ewer that ‘came from General Yusuf’ (inv. no. 442), according to the indications of the Comtesse d’Armandy (archives of the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Aa21).

Above all, the Comtesse d’Armandy’s eleven-year-long stay in Egypt and the couple’s many travels ‘in every part of the world’ (archives of the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Aa21, correspondence of Paul Gasq) were at the origin of the collection of Egyptian antiquities and probably of many Islamic an Far-eastern objects. Their lifelong travels around the world were facilitated by the collector couple’s family relations (Léon Quennec, Pauline’s first cousin, moved to Tunisia) and friends (Ernest Joseph Marie Quennec, Vice Resident of France in Annam and Tonkin).

In 1937, the Comtesse d’Armandy’s collection was placed in a room named after her and specially refurbished for the occasion on the museum’s second floor (the wing on the Rue Rameau), on the site of the former lodges of the École des Beaux-Arts (transferred in 1931). This new presentation was inaugurated on 15 February 1937 (archives of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, press cuttings from 4 February 1934 to 3 November 1946), but did not last very long (barely two years), due to both the outbreak of the Second World War and a museum itinerary that was entirely redesigned immediately after the end of the war.