A Visionary Adventurer: Arsène Lacarrière Latour 1778-1837, the Unusual Travels of a Frenchman in the Americas

A Visionary Adventurer: Arsène Lacarrière Latour 1778-1837, the Unusual Travels of a Frenchman in the Americasby Jean Garrigoux, translated by Gordon S. Brown“A nineteenth-century Renaissance man—[Latour] was an architect, a military engineer, a soldier, a historian, and an agent provocateur who represented the type of adventurer who flocked to Louisiana during the early nineteenth century.”–Gene Allen Smith, professor of history, Texas Christian UniversityThe public records of Arsène Lacarrière Latour give no indication of the remarkable life story of the private person, whose roles as architect, engineer-geographer, and political observer went well beyond his activity as a principal actor and the first historian of the Battle of New Orleans. The biography that Jean Garrigoux has devoted to Latour carefully spells out, thanks to the best available French, American, Cuban, Spanish, and Mexican sources, the various stages of a life full of passions and intrigues in the service of the Un