Abbeville is a city in, and the parish chair of, Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, United States, 150 miles (240 km) west of New Orleans and 60 miles (97 km) southwest of Baton Rouge. The population was 12,257 at the 2010 census. At the 2020 population estimates program, the population of the city was 11,927. Abbeville is the principal city of the Abbeville micropolitan statistical area, which includes everything of Vermilion Parish. It is also allocation of the Lafayette metropolitan statistical area and the larger Lafayette–Acadiana whole statistical area.

Formerly called La Chapelle, the home that became Abbeville was purchased by founding dad Père Antoine Désiré Mégret (Père is French for ‘Father’), a Capuchin missionary on July 25, 1843 for $900. There are two theories how the town was named. The theory that is generally accepted is Mégret named the town after his house in France. The second theory which in addition to cannot be discounted states that it is a immersion of “Abbe” for Abbé Mégret and “ville” the French word for town – thus Abbé’s town. Some hold for the second theory is found because the town in France is pronounced “Abbville” by its denizens. However, in 1995, Fr. Jean Desobry discovered the diocesan records of Amiens the proof of Mégret’s birthplace. In the archive, the dossier of Fr. Antoine Jacques Désiré Mégret was found, and that he was born on May 23, 1797, at Abbeville and became founder of Abbeville in Louisiana. Dr Mary-Theresa MacCarthy wrote in her article Un Autre Abbeville in the 1996 edition of Bulletin de la Société des Antiquaires de Picardie (translation by Father Herbert),

Settlers were primarily descendants of the Acadians from Nova Scotia that moved to the area around 1766 to 1775. The town was incorporated in 1850.
There were two people living upon the land at the time, Joseph LeBlanc and his wife Isabelle Broussard, whose former home Father Megret converted into a chapel. The chapel burned in 1854, and in 1910 St. Mary Magdalen Catholic Church, Rectory were built, its and cemetery established, and yet stand today.

Father Megret modeled his native plan for the village after a French Provincial village. In a map he expected in 1846, the town was 38 to 40 acres (160,000 m) in size. It was bounded on the north by St. Victor Boulevard, on the south by Lafayette Boulevard, on the east by “the Sisters of Charity”, and on the west by Bayou Vermilion. At this lessening in grow old the town was called “Abbville”.