1844–1923
François Gaudart
First Mayor of Karikal; Industrialist
The first elected mayor of Karikal, lawyer, factory owner, and the man whose gift of a Joan of Arc statue to Notre-Dame des Anges is still one of the most visited objects in Pondicherry.
THE MAN WHO BUILT KARIKAL
François Pierre Eustache Gaudart was born in Karikal in 1844, into a family whose French connection went back to the East India Company era. His grandfather had served the Compagnie des Indes Orientales in the eighteenth century; François was born in the third generation of a family that had made itself entirely part of French India's Catholic professional class without ever quite losing its Parisian origins. He trained as a lawyer, was called to the Karikal bar in 1864 at the age of twenty, and practised before both the Karikal and Pondicherry tribunals for over four decades.
His political career was a product of the Third Republic's extension of French municipal institutions to the overseas territories. When the Municipal Act of 1880 created the first elected municipalities in French India, Gaudart was elected the first mayor of Karikal on 30 May 1880 — a position of genuine democratic significance in a territory where formal civic participation had previously been restricted. He went on to serve as General Councillor of French India from 1879 to 1890, and later as deputy mayor of Pondicherry and private counsellor to the French India government. He was awarded the Legion of Honour on 4 August 1914.
His industrial ambitions were on a remarkable scale. In 1902, in partnership with his engineer sons, he founded the Gaudart-Sainte-Elisabeth metallurgical factory in Pondicherry, which at its peak employed between two and four thousand Indian workers supervised by twelve Belgian foremen. The factory's sale in 1919 for approximately 75 million francs was one of the largest industrial transactions in French India's history.
Shortly before his death he donated to Notre-Dame des Anges the marble statue of Joan of Arc — carved in Carrara marble, installed in the year of her canonisation — that still stands in the church today, along with the adjacent public garden. He died in Cannes in June 1923, months after the installation of a gift that remains one of the most visited objects in Pondicherry's White Town.
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