Most Robichaux families in Louisiana descend from Acadian forebears. According to Bona Arsenault, Louis Robichaux of Loudun, west-central France, was the first person of that surname to settle in Acadia, in 1642.* Between 1765 and 1785 many Robichaux families exiled from Acadia found homes in Louisiana. At least two, René (m. Marguerite Martin) and Marin, were with Broussard's group of refugees who arrived in New Orleans (via the West Indies) in 1765, many of whom went to the Attakapas; that same year both René and Marin died, leaving no male descendants.

Again, ca. 1766 two brothers, Bruno (Bruneau) and Amable Robichaud, sons of Joseph Robichaud and Marie Forest of Port Royal, Acadia, settled along the west bank of the Mississippi, probably near the site of Donaldsonville in Ascension Parish.

That same year Amable died, leaving his widow, Anastasie Dugas, with three young sons, Henri, Jean-Baptiste, and Louis-Eusèbe.

Remarried to Joseph Roger ca. 1770, Anastasie reared her Robichaux sons in the upper Lafourche area;5 all three became progenitors of most of the Robichaux families who in the nineteenth century settled along Bayou Lafourche and in Terrebonne Parish,6 today the main stronghold of the Louisiana Robichauxs.

Amable's brother, Bruno, and his wife Anne-Félicité Broussard, may have moved to the Attakapas Post sometime after 1766;7 their elder son, Firmin, who soon became a stockman in the Attakapas prairies, in 1788 married Marianne Surette, beginning one of the several Robichaux lines of the Bayou Teche area.

Finally, in 1785, three Robichaux families arrived in Louisiana as part of the large group of Acadian refugees from France. One, headed by Joseph Robichaux of St. Malo, first went to St. Gabriel on the Mississippi River,9 but his sons, Jean-Baptiste and François-Xavier, by 1788 had moved to the Lafourche;10 later Francois-Xavier (m. 1790 Marguerite Landry) migrated to St. Martinville in the Attakapas.

Another, headed by Anne Hébert (widow of Pierre Robichaux) settled along the Lafourche with her sons Joseph and Jean-Pierre, whose descendants moved into Terrebonne Parish during the nineteeth century.

The third refugee family from France consisted of Marie LeBlanc (widow of Charles Robichaux) and her son Charles, Jr.;13 settled at St. Gabriel on the Mississippi, Charles in 1792 married Jeanne-Marie Henry of Baton Rouge,14 but little is known of his descendants.

Today more than a third of Louisiana's Robichaux households live in Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes, whereas nearly a fourth are concentrated in the Bayou Teche area, reflecting their ancestors' choices of abode during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Several Robichauxs in the Lafourche-Terrebonne area became prominent antebellum planters. For example, a grandson of progenitor Amable Robichaux, Jean-Baptiste, Jr. (m. 1818 Marie-Madeleine Breaux) was one of the pioneer planters along Bayou Terrebonne, where he settled near Montegut with his large family in 1841.

Again, a great-grandson of Amable (through his son Louis), Eugène-Godefroy Robichaux, in 1854 married into the wealthy Triche family of Bayou Lafourche and eventually acquired several sugar plantations in the vicinity of Thibodaux and Lockport. Most of the Robichauxs of that area, however, were probably petits habitants, many of whom tilled small farms along the bayou near Raceland and Lockport.

Of the several lines of Robichauxs that settled on the Teche, probably those begun by the first arrivals, Bruno and François-Xavier of St. Malo, produced fewer descendants than did some late-comers. Church records suggest that most of the Robichauxs who now live in or near New Iberia and Franklin stem from Simon, a grandson of Amable, who with his wife Domitille Louvière moved from the Lafourche to the Teche in the 1840s.

Moreover, ca. 1858 a nephew of Simon, Jean-Léon Robichaux, transferred his family from Raceland to Charenton, adding to the Lafourche element in the Lower Teche