A painting depicting a match between Boulogne and the Chevalier d’Éon remains on display at Buckingham Palace.īoulogne’s extraordinary fencing talent led Louis XV to name him Chevalier de Saint-Georges, after his father’s noble title, even though France’s Code Noir prohibited Boulogne from officially inheriting the title because of his African ancestry. His first claim to fame, in fact, was as a champion fencer, the best-known disciple of the renowned master La Boëssière. When he was about 10, he and his mother followed his father and the rest of his legitimate family back to France, where Boulogne was enrolled in elite schools and received private lessons in music and fencing. What we know is that Boulogne, the illegitimate son of a wealthy French plantation owner and an enslaved African-Guadeloupean woman, was born between 1739 and ’49 on the island of Basse-Terre, the western half of the archipelago of Guadeloupe. To make matters worse, a 19th-century novel by Roger de Beauvoir, “Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges,” intertwined fact and fiction so seamlessly that many of its fabrications gradually found a place in Boulogne’s assumed biography. What is known is scantily and contradictorily documented, when not purely anecdotal. Recounting it, however, is an exercise in educated guesswork.

When the announcement was made, headlines resurrected yet another moniker for Boulogne: “Black Mozart.” Presumably intended as a compliment, this erasure of Boulogne’s name not only subjugates him to an arbitrary white standard, but also diminishes his truly unique place in Western classical music history.įew musicians have led a life as fascinating and multifaceted as Boulogne’s. Last month, Searchlight Pictures announced plans for a movie about Joseph Boulogne, the 18th-century composer also known as Chevalier de Saint-Georges.

Mozarts biography