Painter, photographer, keen on naval model make, gardener, historian passionate about Tonnerre… Christian Horiot is a tireless jack. He has just published a new book, the second volume of Famous unknown or even known thunder.
This Thunderrois has an intimate link with his city and spends his time exhuming whole sides from the history of the territory. He decided to take an interest in the local characters who marked the little and the big story in their own way.
He conducts his investigation
This second volume is published under the aegis of the Société d’Archeologie et d’Histoire du Tonnerrois (SAHT). “I think I could largely make a third book,” he said, laughing. Tonnerrois is rich in characters who have marked their era or who have had extraordinary destinies. In the past four years, each time a name appeared in my research, I made a sheet, which I completed as I go. »»
Christian Horiot loves to search, seek in the archives, go up the family trees. His office, in the basement of his house, is a real Ali Baba cave. Books and documents overlap between his two computers. Each character has been the subject of an investigation.
“It’s a bit like a ball of wool that we shoot and we do not know where we are going to stop”
In this second book, he highlights real family sagas, such as that of the Genet de Dannemoine family.
Originally from Épineuil, and after a few financial setbacks, the Genet settled in Dannemoine as a bakers. One of the sons, Edme Jean, left very young in Paris to make a fortune, not supporting the condition in which his relatives had fallen. He finds himself alongside Cardinal Alberoni who takes him to the Spanish Court. It will come back with 400,000 pounds.
A governor, a snail specialist
In this book we also get to know Louis d’Ailleboust de Coulonge and Argentenay, born around 1612 in Ancy-le-Franc, who was governor and lieutenant general of New France (Quebec). But also with Gaston Boisseau de Dannemoine who, in 1887, created a factory for the preparation of Burgundy snails with this famous recipe for parsley butter, already broadcasting more than 8 million gastropods per year around the world at the time.