Octave Louis François Étienne Fariola (30 May 1839 – c. 1914), also known by the aliases Eugène Libert, General O'Fariola, Octave De Libert, and, from the mid-1870s onward, Fariola de Rozzoli, was a Belgian-born soldier, Union Army officer, and later farmer and civil engineer. He is best known for his service as lieutenant colonel of the 96th United States Colored Infantry during the American Civil War, and for his role as chief of staff of the rebel forces during the Fenian Rising of March 1867 in Ireland. Following the collapse of the rising he was imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol and subsequently transported to Queensland, Australia, where he farmed under an assumed name before working as a surveyor in New South Wales and later as an engineer in the service of King Rama V of Siam. Genealogical research undertaken in the 2000s established that Fariola's claims to French, Italian and aristocratic descent, and to a Louisiana birth, were fabrications, and that he was in fact born into a bourgeois military family in Liège.
Early life and family Fariola was born in Liège, then part of Belgium, the son of Louis François Fariola, an army paymaster (officier payeur), and Marie Marguerite Octavie Libert. The civil status register of the city of Liège records his birth as having taken place at 11 pm on 30 May 1839, although a family tree compiled by genealogist Denise Dowdall gives the date as 31 May 1839. His father, Louis François Fariola, was born in Locarno, in the Swiss canton of Ticino, on 8 March 1791, the son of Étienne Marie Jean Jacques Fariola and Josephine Babazzottini. Ticino was, at the time, an Italian-speaking canton that had briefly declared itself an autonomous republic under Napoleonic support. Louis François joined the Army of the Netherlands in 1816 and served for most of his career as a sergeant in the Battalion of Sappers and Miners, later transferring into the newly formed Belgian Army following Belgian independence in 1830. He appears among a list of naturalisation bills brought before the Belgian Chamber of Representatives in 1840. He was, like many military men of the period, a Freemason. He ended his career in 1846 as a sub-lieutenant and paymaster. Louis François Fariola died in Ixelles, Brussels, on 21 November 1852, when Octave was thirteen years old. Fariola's mother, Marie Marguerite Octavie Libert, was a native of Liège, born there in 1807, and is described in contemporary records as a woman of independent means (rentière) of good reputation. The Libert family was long established in the Liège area.
Education and Belgian military career As was customary for the children of non-commissioned officers, Fariola was educated at the school of the Enfants de Troupe before entering the elite Royal Military Academy in Brussels, from which he graduated first in his class in 1857. He was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Carabiniers, one of Belgium's heavy cavalry regiments, and held that rank until his resignation from the Belgian army in October 1862. Fariola later claimed to have served as a volunteer under Giuseppe Garibaldi during the Expedition of the Thousand at Marsala in Sicily in 1860, and described himself as one of Garibaldi's celebrated Redshirts. However, his surviving military file at the Royal Military Academy contains no record of any leave of absence from the Belgian army during this period. Researchers have questioned the veracity of the claim. Historian Daniel Frankignoul notes that Fariola gave differing and contradictory accounts of the episode over the years, including a 1909 newspaper interview in which he claimed his father, rather than he himself, had fled Italy after a conspiracy, a claim contradicted by other evidence. On 15 October 1861, Fariola married Jeanne Catherine Philomène Neukind (also recorded as Neutkhens) at the Church of St Mary, Schaerbeek, Brussels. She was born in Brussels around 1845 and later died in Marseille in 1890. The couple's daughter, Octavia, was born in Paris in 1862.
Emigration to the United States After resigning his commission, Fariola spent several months in Paris before travelling to the United States. The passenger list of the SS City of New York records his and his wife Jeanne's arrival in New York on 27 July 1863; the couple gave their place of origin as Great Britain, and Fariola described his own occupation as "musician". He later claimed his purpose in travelling to America was to settle a family inheritance in Texas rather than to join the Union war effort, though genealogical searches found no trace of either the Fariola or Libert families having settled there.
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