François Bigot

Edmond Lechevallier-Chevignard after Claude Joseph (known as Joseph) Vernet (1714–1789), engraved by Charles Tamisier (active 1855–1864), Matron in the old fashion, Young woman in high hairstyle and small basket, Former soldier, Gentleman with formal dress, in 1762, engraving from Magasin Pittoresque, 1864, n° 32, p. 253. – cropped François Bigot (; 1703 – 12 January 1778) was a French government official. He served as the Financial Commissary on Île Royale (nowadays Cape Breton Island), commissary general of the ill-fated Duc d'Anville expedition and finally as the Intendant of New France, the last before its conquest by Britain. Subsequently, he was accused of corruption, trialed and convicted in France, and imprisoned in the Bastille for eleven months. Before he could be banished, his sentence upon release, he escaped to Switzerland, where he would live until his death.

Early life Bigot was born in Bordeaux into a family that had attained nobility. He was the son of Louis-Amable Bigot (1663–1743), Conseilleur du Roi, Counsellor to the Parliament at Bordeaux and Receiver General to the King; by his wife, Marguerite de Lombard (1682–1766), daughter of Joseph de Lombard, Baron du Cubzagués, Commissioner of the Marine at Guyenne and a representative of an old and powerful Guyenne family. His paternal grandfather had become rich from his commercial activities; his father had a successful legal career and held several important government positions. Bigot was to receive, as would befit a gentleman's son, "a good education which included legal studies." Nothing is known for certain of Bigot's education, but historians believed he took a few courses in law at the Faculté de Droit in Bordeaux.

In 1723, at the age of twenty, when legal studies were normally completed, he used his influence within the French Royal Court to join "the commissary of the marine" as a chief scrivener. He served as a scrivener until 1728, when he was made a commissary. He became chief scrivener in 1729, and resident commissary of the Navy in Rochefort in 1732 at the age of 29. Rochefort was a port that saw many fleets kitted out and made ready for their voyages to the Americas. This appointment, about which he was not too happy, became effective on 1 May 1739. He arrived at Louisbourg on the 9 September having come out on the same ship as the newly appointed governor, Isaac-Louis de Forant.

Louisbourg Bigot wanted to impress his superiors in France. Thus, he began to attend to every aspect of the commissary's duties. He reorganized the bookkeeping and personally supervised operations in detail. In addition, Bigot avoided the conflicts with the governor that had marked the administrations of his predecessors.

After Forant died in May 1740, Bigot befriended François Du Pont Duvivier and Louis Du Pont Duchambon, who were members of the pre-eminent military family in the colony.

L'Affaire du Canada The fraud of which Bigot was accused was not based upon mere forgery or underhanded ways of misusing funds; it was a system of private enterprise on a grand scale with the collaboration of most of the other colonial officials and many army officers and merchants working under the terms of personal understandings or even formal companies.

History records that France freely agreed at the peace negotiations to allow the British to keep New France in exchange for Guadeloupe. Nevertheless, France, seeking a scapegoat for its defeat in North America, obliged Bigot and his friends in a trial that became known as the "Canada Affair" to make good the sum of money that they had supposedly stolen.

When the Seven Years' War began to go badly for France in 1757, the ruling faction of the Duc de Choiseul began to make changes and to look for scapegoats.

Shortly after judgement was delivered on 10 December 1763, Bigot left for Switzerland. He changed his name to François Bar (de Barr), which was his brother-in-law's name, the Sieur de Barre (Bar). The ruins of his residence and storehouse at Louisbourg were excavated and reconstructed in the 1960s by the Canadian Park Service and now form a prominent museum component of the reconstructed Fortress Louisbourg national historic site which explores Bigot's role in the colony.