Jean Chouan () was the nom de guerre of the Frenchman, Jean Cottereau, who was born in Saint-Berthevin, near Laval, in the department of Mayenne on 30 October 1757 and died 18 July 1794 in Olivet, Mayenne. He was a counter-revolutionary, an insurrectionist and a staunch royalist.
Of the four Cottereau brothers—Jean, Pierre, François, and René—Jean, the second-born, was the one called chouan ("the silent one") by their father. Others say his nickname came from an imitation of the call of the tawny owl (the chouette hulotte) he customarily used as a recognition signal. Less flatteringly, Jean's young comrades nicknamed him "the boy liar" (le Gars mentoux or le garçon menteur).
The 1926 Luitz-Morat film Jean Chouan starred Maurice Lagrenée as Chouan.
Reliability of sources
Much of the biographical material on Jean Chouan is based on the work of Jacques Duchemin des Cépeaux, in a work written in 1825 at the request of the king, Charles X, who ruled France from 1824 until 1830. Cépeaux is unapologetically a royalist partisan, and he presents a number of claims that may be unfounded. The story of Jean Chouan is, therefore, almost certainly in large part legendary. The persistence of the legend can be explained by the fact it has been continuously nourished by a small faction of Catholics and royalist-legitimists who have remained active up to the present day.
Chouan's role in history is, at best, questionable, and archives, even those belonging to aristocrats living in the region, indicate that he was completely unknown prior to the Bourbon restoration in 1814. One thing is certain: the republicans, in their effort to quell the insurgency, contributed to the birth of the legend. The name, Jean Chouan, may, in fact, have been invented by republican authorities who were unable to name the true leaders of the insurrection against their own 1789 revolution, the revolution that had unseated the royal house of Bourbon in the first place.
There is, in much of the Jean Chouan material, a slight whiff of Robin Hood and his merry men. Chouan is a romantic hero who, with a small band of devoted followers living in the forest, stage courageous raids against a hated regime. How much of this is romantic legend and how much is historically factual will probably always be open to debate, but, in either case, the shoddiness of the history of this "hero" embarrasses many historians. The tales, true or not, have proved to be a rich source of literary inspiration. Most notably, Honoré de Balzac drew from this history in writing the last of his series of novels, La Comédie humaine—a work called "The Chouans". Nonetheless, it should be remembered that there is a history, indisputably true, associated with the figure of Jean Chouan; it is the history of a bloody and costly civil war in western France.
Origins
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.