Thomas Arbousset

Jean Thomas Arbousset (January in 13, 1810, Pignan – September 29, 1877 at Saint-Sauvant) was a French Protestant pastor and missionary of the Society of Evangelical Missions of Paris. He exercised his ministry in Lesotho, Tahiti and then in Saint-Sauvant, in Vienne.^[1]

Jean Thomas Arbousset

Biography

Born in Pignan, he decided to become a missionary and trained with Pastor Gachon in Mazères..

He studied at the Maison des missions de Paris at the end of 1829 and continued there until the summer of 1832, when he was consecrated. The missionary society sent him to southern Africa, without destination decided, with Eugène Casalis and Constant Gosselin. They arrived at the Cape at the end of February 1833. They created the mission among the Basutos, in present-day Lesotho. They notably supported the Basutos during the Boer Wars, until they obtained British protection.^[2]

Thomas Arbousset leads explorations of the northern mountains. Translated into the Setswana language about fifty ofchapitres de la Bible.^[3] After twenty-seven years in Lesotho, he returned to France in 1860. His wife, Katherine Rogers, whom he married in 1837 in Cape Town, died on September 14, 1860 in the shipwreck from Aberconway to Falmouth, Cornwall. His eldest daughter Katherine Mariette (1847, Morija in Basotho, 1931, Bourges) being ill, Thomas Arbousset initially considered settling in Menton, but he agreed in 1867, at the request of the Missionary Society, to go to Tahiti, then a French protectorate. There he found a well-established church, created by English missionaries, but in conflict with both Catholic missionaries and the French administration. His action seems to have been effective.

He returned to France at the end of 1865 and became pastor of the Reformed Church of Saint-Sauvant, where he found himself at odds with local conflicts between liberal Protestants and evangelicals. As a result, he was not granted tenure, on the pretext that he did not have a bachelor's degree in theology. The intervention of the Ministry of the Interior allowed him to be authorized to exercise his ministry in October 1866.

Thomas Arbousset died in 1877 at Saint-Sauvant.

See also

• History of Lesotho

Publications

• Relation d'un voyage d'exploration au nord-est de la colonie du Cap de Bonne-Espérance entrepris dans le mois de mars, avril et mai 1836 par MM. T. Arbousset et F. Daumas, missionnaires de la Société des Missions évangéliques de Paris, Arthus-Bertrand, Paris, 1842, 620 p. Missing parameter/s! (Template:P.), available at Gallica
• Tahiti et les îles adjacentes ; par Th. Arbousset. Voyages et séjour dans ces îles, de 1862 à 1865, Grassart, Paris, 1867, available at Gallica