Long associated with Avoyelles Parish, the name Rabalais was established early in Louisiana. Probably in the early 1730s, Jean-Baptiste Rabalais dit Matelot (the sailor), a native of Poitou Province in west-central France, arrived in New Orleans. There, in 1733, he married Marguerite Belanger, and soon thereafter the couple settled in Pointe Coupee, where their only son, Joseph, was born in 1736.* By 1745 Jean-Baptiste had acquired several properties in the Pointe Coupee area, cultivating tobacco with slave labor.

There seems to be little doubt that this individual, through his son Joseph, was the progenitor of perhaps all of the Rabalais families of Louisiana.

Legend has it that Joseph Rabalais was the first permanent settler of the Avoyelles Prairies (some 50 miles northwest of Pointe Coupee), having visited the area in the early 1770s.

Although the Avoyelles had been temporarily inhabited by French traders prior to that time, the legend is at least partially true. In 1754 Joseph marked Anne-Barbe Boftz, a native of the First German Coast (St. Charles Parish), whose parents had moved to Pointe Coupee some time earlier.

Among their children were two sons, Jean-Baptiste and Joseph, Jr.

After Anne-Barbe's death (ca. 1780?) Joseph remarried, to Élizabeth Malbert, a native of Natchitoches, who bore him one son (Jean-Baptiste, b. 1782).

A few years prior to 1785 Joseph and his family, together with several other members of the Pointe Coupee clans (e.g., Mayeux, Joffrion, Bordelon), migrated to the Avoyelles Prairies.

The Avoyelles census of 1785 indicated that Joseph Rabalais and his son Jean-Baptiste were well established in the area as tobacco planters on land probably east of present Mansura and along the upper portion of Bayou des Glaises.

At that time Joseph, Sr., occupied a total of 30 arpents frontage, the more fertile portions planted to tobacco, worked by 15 slaves who also cared for 150 cattle, 12 horses and 40 hogs.

Joseph Rabalais, Jr., however, did not remain in the Avoyelles, but in 1784 married Louise Malbert, moving to his wife's home along Riverière-aux-Cannes (Cane River) near Natchitoches Post.

There he reared a large family, in 1795 marrying a second time to Marie Bontemps.

Of his ten children, Joseph, Jr., sired only one son, Joseph III. Little is known of the latter's descendants, and possibly the Rabalais line declined in the Natchitoches area late in the nineteenth century;12 only one Rabalais household lives in the area today, at Powhatan, north of Natchitoches city.

It was left to Jean-Baptiste, the elder son of Joseph, Sr., to carry on the Rabalais name in Avoyelles. That he did with vigor, he and his wife, Marie-Louise Bouchard, rearing ten children, including five sons; all of the latter also had large families.

Most of their sons appear to have been small farmers in the Avoyelles during the nineteenth century, but a few became large-scale antebellum planters and slaveholders. For example, Évariste-Paul Rabalais, a great-great grandson of Jean-Baptiste dit Matelot, developed a sizable sugar plantation on Bayou des Glaises near Moreauville during the 1850s, but his place declined after the Civil War.

Although in the past 50 or 60 years there has been much migration of Rabalais descendants to nearby Alexandria and to Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Lafayette, as well as to areas out of state, today more than 25 percent of Louisiana's total Rabalais households remain in Avoyelles Parish