1 Family and Education (1651-1669) John Baptist de La Salle was born in Reims on April 30, 1651. His par- ents were Louis de La Salle, a magistrate of the presidial court at Reims, and Nicole Moét, the daughter of the Seigneur de Brouillet They had been married in August 1650; he was 25 years old at the time, she was 17. Altogether they had 11 children in 20 years of mar- ried life. Four of the De La Salle children died in infancy. In addition to John Baptist, the oldest, two girls survived, Marie and Rose-Maric, and four boys, Jacques-Joseph, Jean-Louis, Pierre, and Jean-Remy. Ancestry ‘The legendary ancestor of the De La Salle family was Johan Sala, a Catalonian knight in the service of Alfonso the Chaste, King of Oviedo in Spain. Johan died in the year 818 in the war against the Moors, his legs broken in battle, There is a legend, originating only in the nine- teenth century, that ascribes the origin of the three broken chevrons in the family coat of arms to this incident. During the tenth century Armand Sala, a putative descendant of Johan, built a castle for his family, which thereafter was known by the name De La Sala. In the twelfth century the De La Sala knights were dispersed widely throughout France, serving in the armies of the var- ious local princes. In this way the name assumed its French form of De La Salle, Under these circumstances it is not surprising that the name became rather common throughout France. There is no ge- ncalogical evidence, however, to connect aay of the various families named De La Salle to the original Sala family. The name De La Salle surfaces again in the fourteenth century with Bernard de La Salle, a captain of Aquitaine, who had only one son, a bastard, who left no heirs. Bernard’s brother, Hortingo de La Salle, fought on both sides of the struggle between the Italians and the Avignon papacy. He was rewarded in 1376 with a castle in Aougny in northern France. It is possible that the De La Salle family of Reims may be among his descendants, but there is no historical evi- dence to prove it.Family and Education (1651-1665) 7 ‘The De La Salle family of Reims always taced its ancestry to Menault de La Salle, a cloth merchant who lived in Soissons in the late fifteenth century. His grandson, Lancelot de La Salle II, moved the family to Reims in 1561. Louis de La Salle, the father of John Baptist, was the youngest of the six surviving children of Lancelot de La Salle III and his wife, Barbara Coquebert. ‘Thus, despite the claims of the early and more recent biogra- phers, the De La Salle family did not belong to the nobility. They were rather wealthy members of the upper bourgeoisie and some of them, including the Father of John Baptist, married women of noble rank. These women, however, lost all claim to noble rank once they were married to a bourgeois. During the nineteenth century, as the process leading to the can- onization of John Baptist de La Salle was moving forward, there was an attempt on the part of two other families named De La Salle to claim relationship. The De La Salle family of Rochemaure in the Au- vergne boasted a distinguished prelate named John Baptist de La Salle, who lived from 1723 until 1787. The son of Count Joseph de La Salle of Rochemaure, he had been vicar-general of the diocese of Vi- enne, When Pope Leo XIII conferred a noble title on Felix de La Salle of Rochemaure in 1899, the pope erroneously referred to the new pa- pal duke as a member of the same “house of De La Salle” as the Founder of the Brothers who was about to be canonized the follow- ing year. There is no evidence, however, of any direct connection be- tween the two families. ‘Then there was Frangois de La Salle du Change, a priest who lived from 1775 until 1874. He was an historian and archivist as well, belonging to the De La Salle family of Périgueux, In 1859 he wrote to one of the Rochemaure family: “You ought to know that the Founder of this interesting Institute was Father De La Salle, one of our ances- tors (sic!) . . . a fact verified by several letters from the superiors of that order.” Whatever documents Father Francois had in his posses- sion were later lost in a fire. In any case it seems certain that both the superiors of the Brothers and the various De La Salle families were finding connections to noble origins and to the Founder where there was no solid basis in historical fact. Brother Clair Battersby, in his 1957 biography, claims that the family of the Founder belonged to the “nobility of the robe,” as dis- tinct from the hereditary nobility derived from knighthood, the “no- bility of the sword.” It is true that the judges in the courts of Paris were given noble titles on this basis. The magistrates in Reims, how- ever, such as Louis de La Salle, were merely members of a provincial8 The Work Is Yours court with limited jurisdiction and not thereby ranked among the no- bility. Furthermore, the De La Salle name does not appear in the con- temporary lists of those families entitled to be ranked with the “nobility of the robe.” Nobility, therefore, is not essential to understanding the privi- leged circumstances in which John Baptist de La Salle grew up. At the time of his birth, his father and mother shared the spacious mansion known as La Cloche with the paternal grandparents and the family of his only paternal uncle, Simon de La Salle d’Etang, Lancelot de La Salle, the grandfather, died the year John Baptist was born; the grand- mother, Barbara Coquebert, died two years later, By a codicil in her will she provided that the rooms in the house would be shared by the families of her two sons, Simon and Louis, the father of John Baptist. As the family of Louis de La Salle grew, he was able to buy from his brother Simon the exclusive rights to the spacious mansion.