Marguerite Brazier

Marguerite Brazier Bonneville (1767 – 1846) was a Parisian woman, the wife of author Nicholas Bonneville, mother of explorer Benjamin Bonneville, and companion of Thomas Paine.

Life in France

Both Marguerite and Nicholas de Bonneville were active figures in the French Revolution, and Marguerite was influenced by the radical Dutch feminist Etta Palm d'Aelders. (See here for an explanation of the "d' ".) Beginning in 1797, the couple hosted the revolutionary and author Thomas Paine in their home.

With Paine in America

The two lived in New Rochelle, New York, where Marguerite cared for Paine in his ill health, sometimes living with him, and where he helped provide for her, and for her sons' educations. Bonneville wrote, “hile he lived, I thought it a duty, as well as a test of my own political principles to support him against the persecutions of an unprincipled faction.” Conway furthermore wrote, on the basis of an 1829 French biographical dictionary, that Bonneville had received all of Paine's papers and began editing his autobiography, which was never published.

According to Conway, in 1833 Bonneville returned to America where she lived with her son, the American explorer and military figure Benjamin Bonneville. Conway suggests that the mother and son, both Catholic, may have suppressed Paine's writings and destroyed them out of religious sentiment, and to avoid the embarrassment of the earlier libel lawsuit.

Bonneville died in 1846 at her son Benjamin's house in St. Louis.