Rue Baslieu

Baslieu was a wealthy French settler in Pondicherry who died around 1755, just before the Seven Years War that would destroy the city he had lived in. He had no children. He decided his fortune should go to the poor children and widows of Pondicherry: a private act of philanthropy in a colonial town where no public welfare system existed.

He placed the money with the Compagnie des Indes, the French East India Company that ran the colony and seemed, at the time, the safest institution in French India. It was not. The Company suspended payments in 1764 and was absorbed by the French crown in 1769. Baslieu's legacy was caught inside a bankrupt institution. The poor children and widows he had intended it for waited more than fifteen years before the money finally reached them.

By then, Pondicherry itself had been razed to the ground by the British in 1761, rebuilt, besieged again in 1778, and returned to France in 1783. The city that Baslieu had known no longer existed. His money, slowly working its way through the wreckage of the Company's finances, arrived in a very different Pondicherry than the one he had meant it for.