What Happened To The French Family?

By most accounts, the Dupont de Ligonnès family was a regular middle-class family. The mother, father, and four bright, popular children lived normal lives in the peaceful, upper-middle class suburbs of Nantes, France until April of 2011.

Xavier Pierre Marie Dupont de Ligonnès, the patriarch of the family, was a descendant of the old French aristocracy. His father, Bernard-Hubert Dupont de Ligonnès, was a count, and Xavier took great pride in his noble heritage, saying: "I think I've got a superiority complex, you could call it that... I belong to a group of people who are intelligent, determined, balanced and in good moral and physical health. Such people are rare compared to the masses," via Newsweek. Born in Versailles, Xavier was raised in a strict, upper-class Catholic society that was well-to-do but also conservative and stuffy. When Xavier was around 10, his father tired of the claustrophobic society of Versailles and left the city, leaving him in the care of his grandmother, according to Air Mail. Xavier kept up the expected aristocratic appearances, but he also longed for adventure.

When he was 20-years-old, he met Agnès Hodanger, another young member of the Versailles bourgeois, and although they claimed to be in love, he was not ready to settle down. He left town, and when he returned, he found Agnès had become pregnant by another man. In an act that defied conservative social norms, he married her anyway, and adopted the boy as his own.