Claude-René Pâris de Soulanges was a French aristocrat and naval officer. He was lord of Preuille and the last count of Soulanges.
Family
He was descended from the family of the lords of Soulanges, a fiefdom near Ancenis in the diocese of Nantes in Britanny. The Pâris family originated either in England or the Flanders plain and gave its name to a château in Basse-Bretagne. Claude-René was the eldest son of Claude-Louis Pâris, knight and lord of Soulanges, and his wife, Françoise de Gatinaire, daughter of Claude de Gatinaire, lord of Gatinaire, Preville and Marguerite Merisson. His parents had married on 28 May 1728 at the château de la Preuille. Claude-René's brother-in-law was count Charles Jean d'Hector, the pre-revolutionary commander of the French naval force at Brest.
He was made a captain and a lieutenant of the company of gardes de la Marine and of the pavillon in the département of Rochefort in 1772. He was given his commission as a capitaine de vaisseau on 4 April 1777, a year before France entered the AmericanWar of Independence. He joined the fleet gathering at Brest in 1778 under the comte d'Orvilliers, commanding the 64-gun Sphinx at the battle of Ushant on 27 July. He was given permission to marry again after his first wife's death and did so on 3 May 1778 to Émilie-Françoise de Kerouartz, which whom he had one child, Claudine, who married Jacques-Nicolas Le Forestier de Kerosven, comte de Boiséon then Dominique-François Fourrier de Nacquard. In spring 1780 he fought in the Antilles campaign under the comte de Guichen. On 17 April at the battle of Martinique, still in command of the Sphinx, he formed part of the French rearguard which faced George Brydges Rodney's British fleet. By brevet of 9 May 1781 he was granted an 800 livre pension from the order of Saint-Louis. He was put in command of the naval squadron at Toulon on 14 January 1785 and director of the ports and arsenals there around the same time. In 1786, Pâris served as Chef d'escadre in the 12-ship Escadre d'évolution, on the frigate Félicité. He was at Cherbourg when a naval review and a simulated naval battle took place as Louis XVI visited the harbour. He was made a contre-amiral on 28 January 1792 but on 16 December the same year he emigrated to Britain after the French Revolution.
