André Jeunet Collection

André Jeunet (1896-1979) was born in Bourg-la-Reine, a suburb south of Paris, on September 20, 1896. He was drafted into the French army when he was eighteen years old and served as a Simple Soldat from March 1915 to April 1919. Jeunet trained in Autun and, even though he was an avowed pacifist, fought in the trenches with the 139e Régiment d’Infanterie at Somme, Verdun, and Chaulnes in France, and later with the 34e Régiment d’Infanterie Coloniale near Monastir in the Balkans.

After World War I, Jeunet worked as an architect and married Aimée Révil-Signorat with whom he had one child, Cécile, born in 1924. When Cécile was a teenager, Jeunet was drafted back into the French army serving once again as a Simple Soldat, this time in World War II. Near the end of that war, Cécile met her future husband, Louisville, Kentucky native Richard Spalding, stationed at Aèrodrôme Farman near Versailles, servicing SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force). The couple reunited in 1948 and married in Paris. In 1949, they moved to Louisville, where Spalding became a professor of music at the University of Louisville. André and Aimée Jeunet visited the Spaldings in Louisville in 1951 and officially immigrated to the United States in 1958. André continued his architectural career with several Louisville firms, including Joseph & Joseph. He died in Louisville on September 3, 1979, and his wife passed away in 1990.