Pierre Leclaire

Parents. Son of Alexandre II Le Clerc (1652–1695), Minor Lord of Lorraine.

Children. Father of Louis Jean Baptiste Leclaire, through whom the direct bloodline of the modern House continues into the nineteenth-century Rhineland and ultimately to the present generation.

Pierre Leclaire (c. 1680 – c. 1730) stands as the figure through whom the family fully assumes its modern surname. By his generation the variant spellings used by his Le Clerc forebears have resolved into the single French form Leclaire, recorded consistently in parish and civil registers.

He represents continuity rather than rupture: the ancestral roots of the Le Clerc de Pulligny lineage of Lorraine carried forward, under a new spelling, into the modern era of the family. Through him the direct line of the House passes from the historic Le Clerc de Pulligny branch — by way of his father Alexandre II Le Clerc, Minor Lord of Lorraine — into the documented eighteenth-century Leclaire family.

Pierre Leclaire is the hinge generation between the historic Lorraine family and the modern Leclaire line — the moment at which the family fully assumes the spelling under which it would carry forward into the Revolutionary, Napoleonic and modern periods.