François Levaillant was a French author, explorer, naturalist, zoological collector, and noted ornithologist. His mother's name was Catherine Josephine. He was among the first to consider the use of colored plates of birds in his descriptions. His descriptions of bird behavior were also considered to be pioneering.
Background
Levaillant was born on August 6, 1753, in Paramaribo, Netherlands Guiana (now Surinam). He was born Vaillant, but later in life came by as Levaillant. The son of a wealthy trader from the vicinity of Metz who had become French consul in the Dutch colony, Levaillant presumably acquired a love of travel and exploration from his family. At the age of ten he went with them to Holland and later spent two years in Germany and seven in the French countryside, where he developed a love of hunting, began to study birds and learned taxidermy.
Education
Levaillant didn't attend any universities, instead, in 1772, he joined the Berry cavalry regiment as a cadet officer in Metz but was eventually rejected as an officer because he was not tall enough.
Career
While visiting Paris in 1777 Levaillant became a devotee of the cabinets and collections of natural history and resolved to explore the remotest part of the globe. Having fixed on Africa as the least-known continent, he sailed from Holland for the Cape of Good Hope on 19 December 1779, arriving there on 29 March 1781. While he was hunting near the Bay of Saldanha, his boat was attacked by a British flotilla, and he lost his personal effects except for his gun, ten ducats, and the light clothes he was wearing. The colonists, however, outfitted him for his first tour of the interior, a six-month circular trip up from the east into the veld.
His second trip, in 1783, lasted nearly a year and was attended with great physical difficulty as he traveled north along the left bank of the Orange River into land occupied by warring tribes. Protected by his faithful Hottentot retinue, Levaillant managed to hunt with the savage Hausa and to bring back his collections relatively unscathed. Returning to France in 1784 he was imprisoned for a time but survived the Revolution and retired to a small estate at La Noue, near Sézanne in Champagne. Here he wrote the books that have survived controversy and accusations of substitute authorship.
Although his ornithological work consists essentially of magnificently illustrated books, devoid of scientific terminology, they were among the first to reveal to Frenchmen (and later Germans and Englishmen) the wonders of Africa and of the tropics. Levaillant was the first Frenchman to bring a giraffe to the Jardin des Plantes. Through his books and collections, he popularized the wonders of the exotic fauna in which he had delighted. Decorated under the Empire with the Legion of Honor, he died at his country estate in 1824. In his best-known book, Voyages de F. Le Vaillant dans l’intérieur de l’Afrique, he mentions two of his African friends: Klaas, a Hottentot companion for whom Klaas’ cuckoo is named; and “the fair” Narine, an African maiden (whose relationship to the explorer has always been thought romantic) for whom the lovely Narina trogon is named. Levaillant’s ornithological production was great, though unscientific. His principal work was the magnificent Histoire naturelle des oiseaux d’Afrique; the general artistic supervisor is thought to have been Jean-Baptiste Audubert.
Levaillant married Suzanne de Noor in 1773, but they divorced when divorce became legal during the French Revolution. By then he had already started a relationship with Pierrette Foyot, whom he married in Paris in June 1789. Pierrette was the daughter of judge Didier Francois Foyot of Sezanne. A dowry of 50,000 francs helped the couple and they had four children. Foyot's family gave them an estate at La Noue, near Sézanne and Levaillant moved between La Noue and Paris where he kept up a business as a naturalist. After Foyot's death in May 1798, Levaillant lived with a younger woman, Rose Dubouchet, with whom he had four children. Four of his sons served in the French army, all earning the Légion d'honneur. Through Foyot's family, he was a grand-uncle of the French poet Charles Baudelaire, who read Levaillant avidly as a young student.