Thomas Pichon (30 March 1700 – 22 November 1781), also known as Thomas Tyrell,[1] was a French government agent during Father Le Loutre's War. Pichon is renowned for betraying the French, Acadian and Mi’kmaq forces by providing information to the British, which led to the fall of Beauséjour. He has been referred to as "The Judas of Acadia."[2]
Pichon retreated to London in 1757, where he entered on an affair with the French novelist Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, whose marriage had been annulled. Never a master of the English language, in 1769 he moved to Saint Helier, Jersey (a remnant of the Norman conquest where French was spoken), in which place he died on 22 November 1781.
Pichon has been called repeatedly Le Judas de l'Acadie by a 20th-century French-Canadian priest-historian,[8] and elsewhere his conduct has been uniformly deplored.[4] Between 2012 and 2015, historian and novelist A. J. B. Johnston made Pichon the central character is a series of three novels.
^Albert David, Le Judas de l’Acadie, Revue de l’université d’Ottawa, III (1933), 492–513; IV (1934), 22–35; Thomas Pichon, le `Judas’ des Acadiens (1700–1781), Nova Francia (Paris), III (1927–28), 131–38.
Thomas Pichon. Lettres et mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle, civile et politique du Cap Breton, depuis son établissement jusqu'à la reprise de cette Isle par les Anglois en 1758, La Haye, Pierre Gosse / Londres, John Nourse, 1760, [New York, Johnson Reprint, 1966].
Geneviève Artigas-Menant, Lumières clandestines : les papiers de Thomas Pichon, Paris, Honoré Champion, 2001 ;
Geneviève Artigas-Menant, « Un Français chez les Micmacs en 1752 : Thomas Pichon », Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 1992 ; 305: pp. 1593–97 ;
(in English) John Clarence, Webster ; Alice de Kessler Lusk Webster, Thomas Pichon, “the spy of Beausejour,” an account of his career in Europe and America, Sackville, N.B., Tribune Press, 1937.
[L.-T. Jacau de Fiedmont], The siege of Beauséjour in 1755; a journal of the attack on Beauséjour . . ., ed. J. C. Webster, trans. Alice Webster (Saint John, N.B., 1936).
J. C. Webster, Thomas Pichon, “the spy of Beausejour,” an account of his career in Europe and America . . . ([Sackville, N.B.], 1937).
Thomas Pichon's life is the inspiration for a series of novels by Canadian historian and novelist A. J. B. Johnston.
Johnston, A.J.B. (2015). Crossings, A Thomas Pichon Novel. Sydney: Cape Breton University Press. ISBN978-1-77206-020-1. EPUB 978-1-77206-022-5, Kindle 978-1-77206-023-2, Web pdf 978-1-77206-021-8
Johnston, A.J.B. (2014). The Maze, A Thomas Pichon Novel. Sydney: Cape Breton University Press. ISBN978-1-897009-76-5. EPUB 978-1-927492-71-0, MOBI 978-1-927492-72-7
Johnston, A.J.B. (2012). Thomas, A Secret Life. Sydney: Cape Breton University Press. ISBN978-1-897009-74-1. EPUB 978-1-897009-89-5, MOBI 978-1-897009-90-1
