In the distant 1685, Louis XIV signed an edict in Fontainebleau revoking the Edict of Nantes. Freedom of religion, given to the Huguenots by the light hand of Henry of Navarre, was eliminated. Protestant nobles flocked to Russia. One of them was Georges, then Egor, de Marny. Here he commanded the Vyborg regiment, was the commandant of the Vyborg fortress, but most importantly, he became the father of another Egor. Egor-Barbot (this is the second name) de Marny, who became the founder of a fantastic dynasty.
Yegor Egorovich followed in his father's footsteps. But in the spring of 1775, he was sent to serve in the Nerchinsk mining battalion, a unit for the protection of convict mines and factories. And he got sick of "geological science". He conducted experiments on roasting ores, built furnaces with an "elliptical core". His reports on search expeditions in Siberia attracted the attention of Major General Mikhail Soymonov, the first rector of the Mining Cadet Corps. The latter convinced Catherine to make Barbot de Marny, by that time his middle name had been changed "for greater convenience" into part of the surname, by the head of the Nerchinsk factories.
The proposals for optimizing the work of enterprises from the "Russian Frenchman" were obviously innovative - he began to rely on freelance, not hard labor (it was here that the Decembrists would be exiled in half a century). One of the main brainchilds of Barbot de Marni was the first museum beyond Lake Baikal, called the mineral cabinet. The basis of his collections were samples of ores and minerals collected in different parts of the region.
Nikolai Egorovich's son continued the family business. He worked in Siberia and the Urals, engaged in "ore mining" and managed "state-owned factories". He passed away during the Patriotic War, fighting alongside his fellow countrymen. The French phrase "Noblesse oblige" applies in this case, as the situation requires it.
His son Pavel Nikolaevich graduated from the Corps of Mining Engineers in 1826 and was graduated as a shikhtmeister of the 14th class. He became the caretaker of the Miass gold mines, accompanied Humboldt's expedition through the Ilmen Mountains. He worked as the manager of the Troitsk gold mine, then as the director of the Miass plant. For excellent service, he became a staff captain. He discovered the richest mineral mine in the Shishim Mountains near Zlatoust, a graphite deposit on the Cheremshanka River and a corundum deposit. Barbotovskiye is named after him, and three mine workings are named after him.
Already his son, Nikolai Pavlovich, who had been walking with his father through the vast empire since childhood, graduated from the Institute of the Corps of Mining Engineers with a small gold medal in 1852. For academic success, he was immediately promoted to lieutenant engineer. Then there is the Urals, where the young man participated in the Hoffmann and Greenwald expedition, which aimed at geological filming. A few years later, he received the gold medal of the Imperial Geographical Society for his work on the study of the Kalmyk steppe, where he was already the head of the party. After studying abroad, in Germany and Belgium, Nikolai Pavlovich was invited to work as a teacher of geology and geognosy at the Mining Institute, where in 1866 he became a professor.
And then, the geography of his travels with students is quite impressive - Galich, Volyn, Podolsk, Kherson, Kursk, Kharkov, Yekaterinoslav, Kiev, Ryazan, Voronezh, Simbirsk, Saratov, Tambov, Astrakhan, Perm, Vologda and Arkhangelsk provinces. The scientist proved that of the sedimentary formations of the Aral-Caspian region, the main place belongs to the Cretaceous, not the tertiary system, laid the route of the Orenburg railway, completed the first description of the Krivoy Rog iron ore deposit, participated in the study of coal deposits in the Moscow region.
"We cannot predict how our word will respond." Surprisingly, it was with the indirect complicity of Nikolai Pavlovich that the theorist of anarcho-communism, Peter Kropotkin, got to Petropavlovsk. In March 1874, the Third Department already suspected him of distributing banned literature. Pyotr Alekseevich was ready to escape abroad, but then he was invited to speak at the Geographical Society with the justification of his theory of the "ice age". To put it simply, the scientist assumed that the huge boulders in the vast north of Russia are the result of the onset of glaciers and the melting of ice floes. The main opponent of this theory, due to its unproven nature, was de Marni.:
«The meeting took place, and our geologists recognized that all the old theories about the deluvial period and the spread of boulders across Russia by floating ice floes were based on nothing, and that the whole issue needed to be studied anew. I had the pleasure of listening to our outstanding geologist, Barbot de Marny, say: "Whether there was an ice sheet or not, we must admit that everything we have said about the effect of floating ice floes so far has not been confirmed by any research." I was offered the position of head of the Physical Geography department, but I asked myself: "Will I not spend this very night in the Third Department?» - Kropotkin writes in his "Notes of a Revolutionary."
Subsequently, Kropotkin would explain this by stating that "... I limited myself to drawing up a map containing my views and attaching an explanatory essay." After the publication of his profound work "Studies on the Ice Age", written in the Trubetskoy Bastion, the professor of mining recognized his arguments as sound.
One of his sons, Nikolai Nikolaevich, lived a short life. After graduating from the Mining Institute in 1886, he was assigned to work in the management of the mountainous region of the Caucasus. There, he studied the geological structure and mineral resources of the area, conducting research in the fields of historical and applied geology. Unfortunately, he passed away at the young age of 32.
The second son is Evgeny Nikolaevich. He graduated from the same University ten years later than his brother. He worked in the gold mines, served as the manager of the Bakalsky mine. He conducted the first magnetometric survey in Russia for the exploration of Kachkanar ores. He was sent to the copper ore deposits of Bulgaria and Alaska. From 1901 he was the curator of the Mining Museum, until 1906 he taught mineralogy at his alma mater. Before the revolution, he managed gold mines in the Middle and Southern Urals, on the Lena River.
In March 1918, he played a decisive role in the nationalization of the Omutninsky factories, becoming one of the members of the new authority at the factories — the Business Council of the Omutninsky Mining District. The result of his efforts was the formation of the North Vyatka Mining District, which included all the Omutninsky plants. Thanks to him, the production was saved from destruction. In the summer of 1920, he headed the Glavzoloto Central Committee.
In 1921, he became a professor at the Mining Institute, where he headed the Department of gold and Platinum business. A generation of Soviet geologists grew up on his work, and the very existence of a "golden cushion" in the USSR is forever associated with the name of Eugene Barbot de Marni. He died in Leningrad in 1939.
His son, Pavel was preparing to enter the same university. In 1921, he was arrested for participating in an underground White Guard organization and shot.
There is only one dynasty of mining engineers in the Russian Empire who served it not out of fear, but out of conscience. If we were to trace the family tree of today's elite, which gives rise to either major or managerial positions in higher places, we would have to ask ourselves - maybe that is why their "partners" feared the "vastness" of Russia. Even yesterday's Frenchmen gave an amazing example of working "for the good of the Fatherland", not in the offices of the capital but in the taiga and on production sites. And they did so not for their own self-interest, but because they simply could not behave otherwise. After all, "noblesse oblige."
As for money, Gentlemen Barbota de Marni left the life of poor people, but they left their contribution to the country in the form of explored deposits and built mines, reformed factories, introduced technologies, without any doubt, billions. And the general library of their scientific works quite "pulls" on the hall in the library of their native university.
