French, Cajun, Creole, Houma

A Primer on Francophone Louisiana

Carl A. Brasseaux

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780807147795
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Landeskunde

In recent years, ethnographers have recognized south Louisiana as home to perhaps the most complex rural society in North America. More than a dozen French-speaking immigrant groups have been identified there, Cajuns and white Creoles being the most famous. In this guide to the amazing social, cultural, and linguistic variation within Louisiana's French-speaking region, Carl A. Brasseaux presents an overview of the origins and evolution of all the Francophone communities.
Brasseaux examines the impact of French immigration on Louisiana over the past three centuries. He shows how this once-undesirable outpost of the French empire became colonized by individuals ranging from criminals to entrepreneurs who went on to form a multifaceted society -- one that, unlike other American melting pots, rests upon a French cultural foundation.
A prolific author and expert on the region, Brasseaux offers readers an entertaining history of how these diverse peoples created south Louisiana's famous vibrant culture, interacting with African Americans, Spaniards, and Protestant Anglos and encountering influences from southern plantation life and the Caribbean. He explores in detail three still cohesive components in the Francophone melting pot, each one famous for having retained a distinct identity: the Creole communities, both black and white; the Cajun people; and the state's largest concentration of French speakers -- the Houma tribe.
A product of thirty years' research, French, Cajun, Creole, Houma provides a reliable and understandable guide to the ethnic roots of a region long popular as an international tourist attraction.

CHAPTER ONE
The Remarkable Diversity of Louisiana’s
French-Speaking Population, 1699–1999

SINCE THE LATE 1860S WRITERS FOR THE POPular media have flocked to Louisiana in search of the state’s exotic landscape, quaint settlements, and peculiar French-speaking denizens. In their quest for the unusual and the exotic, journalists have created and perpetuated stereotypes with sweeping generalizations based upon superficial impressions gathered during inevitably brief visits to the Pelican State. One of the more persistent stereotypes created by these self-proclaimed instant experts depicts Louisiana’s French-speaking community as a social and cultural, sometimes even a racial, monolith. This simplistic view, which is continuously reinforced in the print and electronic media, flies in the face of recent historical, geographical, and ethnographic studies, which characterize southern Louisiana’s cultural landscape as one of the most complex, if not the most complex, in rural North America.

The region’s rich cultural and linguistic mosaic is the result of its role as a French melting pot, one that French ethnographer François Weil recently characterized as a unique “living laboratory.” Since its establishment as a French colony in 1699, Louisiana has drawn thousands of French-speaking immigrants representing at least eighteen distinct groups, including voyageurs; the 1699 Canadian settlers; voluntary immigrants of the John Law era; forced immigrants of the early eighteenth century; French military personnel (many of whom opted to remain in the colony); Alsatian religious exiles;¹ Acadian exiles; Saint-Domingue refugees; refugees from the French Revolution; Bonapartist exiles; successive waves of nineteenth-century French (known within Louisiana’s Francophone² community as les français étrangers), Belgian, and Swiss immigrants seeking economic opportunity; French Jews fleeing religious persecution in provinces along the German border; French, Belgian, and Canadian Catholic missionaries; Alsatian and Lorrainer refugees from the 1870 Franco-Prussian War; Lebanese Christian immigrants; twentieth-century French and Belgian war brides; European and French-Canadian teachers in the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana’s bilingual programs; and Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugees fleeing the communist takeover in their homelands. Distinctive subgroups existed within each of these immigrant groups.

Over the course of many decades following their peregrinations, many of these groups have lost their identity as they were absorbed either by more established Francophone groups in Louisiana or by America’s mainstream culture. Groups undergoing the assimilation process, however, frequently retained vestiges of their parent cultures and thus remained undissolved lumps in southern Louisiana’s still simmering cultural gumbo.

Louisiana’s colonial heritage created the recipe by which these cultural ingredients were added, blended, and folded into the new syntheses that are now such integral parts of southern Louisiana’s cultural makeup. The model for Louisiana’s complex development was created with the colony’s establishment in 1699. The 1699 French expedition to the Gulf Coast included at least three distinct groups of French speakers: a large party of Canadian adventurers led by future Louisiana governor Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, the crews manning the French naval vessels assigned to the colonization expedition, and at least fifteen buccaneers from Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). This simplistic grouping, of course, ignores distinctions within each group based upon class, cultural, and linguistic differences, which paled by comparison to the stark divisions separating one group from the other. Differences were especially pronounced between the Canadian and French contingents, and Louisiana’s population was quickly polarized into two camps. Indeed, even when confronted by the harsh realities of frontier life which frequently threatened to overwhelm the entire colony, Canadians and Frenchmen were frequently at odds as Continental cultural and class pretensions exacerbated ethnic differences along the colony’s great sociological divide.

Cultural and class antagonisms were further inflamed by the colony’s demographic and economic stagnation. Louisiana was, for much of the early eighteenth century, a sparsely populated backwater outpost. Founded as a strategic outpost to neutralize the growing threat of British expansion across the North American continent, it was, as historian Mathé Allain has astutely observed, “an indispensable buffer zone between the English and the Spanish colonies.” Louisiana’s strategic significance, however, did not translate into rapid demographic development and unwavering royal support.

Because of the colony’s military role, French Louisiana’s garrison constituted the single largest component of the colonial population throughout the period of French rule (1699–1763). Only for a few fleeting years during the proprietary period (1712–31) would civilian immigration exceed the influx of soldiers. The military’s dominant role in colonial life was especially pronounced in the first decades of colonization. In 1704, five years after the establishment of the French beachhead at Biloxi, the colony of Louisiana remained a military outpost including only 180 soldiers, 27 families with 10 children, and 11 Native American slaves. In 1713 there were 35 families in a colony extending from the Appalachians to the Rocky Mountains. Two years later the total population numbered only 215, 160 (74 percent) of whom were members of the French garrison.

The demographic composition of the colony began to change significantly after the colony reverted to private control. During the initial period of royal rule Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, Louisiana’s first governor, had argued that the colony’s strategic importance warranted heavy royal expenditures to underwrite the cost of transporting to the Gulf Coast large numbers of Frenchmen. Large-scale French immigration, Iberville argued, was essential if the colony was to withstand the population pressures of the neighboring British possessions, which were populated, the governor estimated, by at least 60,000 families. Iberville’s petitions were neither unprecedented nor unreasonable, for the French Crown had heavily subsidized French emigration to Canada. Yet the requests of Iberville and his successors were summarily rejected by the French Crown, which, before Louis XIV’s death in 1715, grudgingly agreed to provide transportation to Louisiana only to relatives of settlers already established there. The message was clear: the French monarchy was preoccupied with European affairs, particularly the nation’s almost incessant warfare on the Continent, and Louis XIV’s ruinously expensive capital improvements programs. Funding for the large-scale settlement of Louisiana would have to come from other sources.

Alternate sources of funding soon materialized. Unable to divert to Louisiana the meager resources necessary to maintain its small and increasingly neglected military base, Louis XIV opted to transfer control of Louisiana to French financier Antoine Crozat, with the understanding that the new colonial proprietor would send to the struggling colony annual installments of colonists. Crozat’s decision to assume control of Louisiana was based primarily upon misinformation regarding the colony and its mythical mineral resources and trade opportunities provided by the French Crown and its agents. When the promised riches failed to materialize, Crozat, overwhelmed by the financial burden of administering the colony, moved quickly to cut his losses, and the anticipated influx of French settlers did not occur.

The continuing fragility of the Louisiana outpost, whose strategic importance was magnified by the French loss of Acadia in 1713, gained the attention of French authorities following Louis XIV’s death. The Council of the Navy, established to administer French naval and colonial affairs during the ensuing regency of Louis XV, became concerned that, if not reinforced, the colony would either collapse or invite invasion by rival European powers.

Because of Louisiana’s continuing strategic importance, the problem demanded attention, but the Crown lacked the will and the economic means to bring the matter to a satisfactory resolution. Even though the period seemed ripe for voluntary French emigration to Louisiana because inflation following the War of the Spanish Succession had reduced many poor French families to desperate circumstances, enlargement of the colony’s civilian population during the regency posed a major challenge to the French government. Mathé Allain has noted that “it took exceptionally hard times to convince Frenchmen to migrate to Louisiana,” but even “exceptionally hard times” could not force the nation’s most destitute—and thus most eligible—families to overlook the hardships of life in Louisiana. Because these hardships were becoming increasingly well known in the coastal provinces, the government entertained no illusions about enticing the poor to emigrate voluntarily.

Even if destitute volunteers had stormed governmental offices demanding passage to Louisiana, however, there is little likelihood that they would ever have reached the colony. Nicolas Desmaretz, comptroller of royal finances, was an ardent opponent of colonial ventures because he believed that the resulting “emigration would drain France of much needed population.” Shortly before Louis XIV’s death, Desmaretz had denied Crozat’s request to establish a lottery to underwrite the cost of subsidizing French emigration to Louisiana and a subsequent request by Jéôme Phélypeaux de Maurepas, comte de Pontchartrain, the French minister of the Navy and Colonies, to send ten boys and ten girls to Louisiana. Desmaretz rejected the latter request because he could not be dissuaded that twenty emigrants “would not depopulate a kingdom of twenty million inhabitants.” The Council of the Navy consequently determined to populate the colony with French criminals, vagabonds, and other “undesirables.”

The French effort to bolster Louisiana’s population by means of forced emigration began in 1716, with an abortive attempt to send to the colony a contingent of salt smugglers and girls taken from poorhouses. Louis XIV had resisted the concept of forced emigration on constitutional grounds, but the Sun King’s successors had no such inhibitions. Antoine Crozat, in one of his last memos to the Crown as Louisiana’s proprietor, argued successfully that salt smugglers, who would normally have been condemned to slavery aboard the Mediterranean galleys for having violated the royal monopoly on salt, were suitable emigrants because the galley fleet had a surplus of oarsmen. Thus, they would not have been missed in France. Nor did the regency believe that the realm would miss the thousands of homeless people who were becoming a nuisance on the streets of the nation’s capital. Disposal of such undesirables through forced emigration entailed little political risk given the considerable popular support for the deportation of nonviolent criminals because it was believed that the harsh circumstances of frontier life would force them to reform.

Having less sanguine expectations regarding the prospects of redeeming criminals and channeling them into productive lives, the Company of the West, which was chartered in August 1717 as Louisiana’s new corporate proprietor, was not enthusiastic about the proposed scheme of forced emigration. Yet, because of its ties to the French stock market, the Company of the West and its successor, the Company of the Indies (1718–31), managed to generate immediate profits from its Louisiana colonization venture. Given the unlikelihood of discovering precious metals in the colony, the company’s chief executive officer, John Law, understood that profits had “to come from trade, agriculture, and colonization.” Law, therefore, acquiesced to political pressure from the French Crown to permit forced emigration, while, under his leadership, the company mounted an unprecedented public relations campaign to foster voluntary emigration to Louisiana.

While John Law was about the business of creating a propaganda machine, the government’s plans to transport undesirables to Louisiana proceeded apace. Because of logistical problems, France’s forced emigration program was slow to produce any settlers for Louisiana, and very few, if any, convicted smugglers made their way to Louisiana in 1717. By the spring of 1718 the regency had expanded the convict deportation program to include army deserters, vagabonds, beggars, prostitutes, indigents, and other outcasts. As a consequence, Louisiana became a de facto penal colony. Police dragnets established by the Regency Council in 1718 and 1719 resulted in the deportation of 1,000 to 1,200 French men and women to the Mississippi Valley. In 1721 Louisiana officials reported that forced emigrants totaled 1,278. Unsuited to frontier life, most of these deportees remained noncontributing dependents of the colonial government, establishing a criminal underworld in New Orleans.

The wholesale arrests generated a shrill outcry from the general population, prompting Louis XV to interdict all deportations to Louisiana on May 9, 1720. The negative popular image of Louisiana, however, persisted for decades afterward, resulting in a virtual halt in voluntary French emigration to the distant outpost generated by Company of the Indies propaganda.

But during its heyday the propaganda campaign had produced impressive results. The company’s broadsides and propaganda tracts in the widely read Mercure de France contained glowing depictions of Louisiana, an idyllic land in which precious metals and gems awaited anyone with enough initiative to scratch the soil. The natives were friendly and submissive, and the soil was miraculously fertile. Despite the great expenditure of money, ingenuity, and energy in John Law’s high-powered public relations campaign, disappointing numbers of voluntary emigrants materialized. Charles Le Gac, one of the company’s chief agents in Louisiana, reported in his memoirs that 7,020 European immigrants reached the colony between October 25, 1717, and May 1, 1721. This figure includes 122 officers, 43 bureaucrats, 977 soldiers, 302 laborers employed by the company, 119 concessionaires or their agents, 2,462 indentured laborers, 1,278 salt smugglers and other forced emigrants, 1,215 women, and 502 children. Approximately 2,600 of these voluntary immigrants were German, Alsatian, and Swiss immigrants.

At first glance these numbers appear impressive, until one realizes that only 39 percent of these immigrants were expected to be immediately productive. The small overall number of laborers recruited for settlement in Louisiana despite an unprecedented advertising campaign can be attributed directly to the colony’s unsavory reputation in France’s Atlantic seaports. There, for example, where Louisiana had traditionally been viewed as a dangerous, Indian-infested wilderness, in which life was difficult at best, artisans were offered large monetary inducements to emigrate. Yet between 1717 and 1721 only 302 skilled workers voluntarily migrated to Louisiana. Most of these artisans were from south-central France, an area lacking direct contact with the colony. Of the 111 artisans recruited for service in Louisiana by the Company of the Indies’ La Rochelle representatives in 1718 and 1719, only 8 were from the Atlantic seaports, while 89 were from the Midi.

Negative reports about Louisiana began to circulate nationally when 1,000 French and German settlers returned to France between 1719 and 1722 with stories of the deaths of hundreds of wretched voluntary and forced emigrants in Louisiana. As a consequence, popular revulsion for Louisiana had become so great in France that by 1722 voluntary emigration to the colony was stymied. Indeed, French emigration to Louisiana was reduced to such a trickle that the arrival of 95 to 120 Alsatian Lutherans condemned to religious exile in Louisiana’s German Coast area in 1753 was a noteworthy demographic event.

As with French immigration, African immigration into Louisiana peaked in the early 1720s and then declined drastically. Of the 5,951 West African slaves known to have been introduced into Louisiana between 1719 and 1763, 5,470 (92 percent) arrived before 1730. Two-thirds of these slaves were drawn from Senegambia, where the Company of the Indies owned the slave concession. Louisiana documentation indicates that the vast majority of the slaves introduced during the French period were Bambara people from present-day Mali. The cultural homogeneity of these Africans facilitated the emergence of a black Creole society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when white planters manumitted significant numbers of their slave mistresses and natural children, thereby creating explosive growth in Louisiana’s formerly small free black community. Enjoying most of the legal rights but few of the social privileges of whites, these free persons of color modeled their existences upon the lives of Louisiana’s white Creole elite. They spoke French, embraced Catholicism, and, through the acquisition of slaves and extensive landholdings, established themselves as Louisiana’s black elite. Their modern descendants are commonly called Creoles of Color.

Once the initial wave of African and European immigration had crashed upon Louisiana’s shores in the early 1720s and then rapidly receded as death from disease, malnutrition, and exposure claimed hundreds of victims, it appeared that the colonial population would stagnate or even decline. But it did not; in 1763 there were approximately ten thousand settlers in lower Louisiana.

It is clear from all accounts that the most significant French immigration of the last four decades of the French period resulted from routine reinforcements and gradual enlargement of Louisiana’s meager military garrison. Extant military, civil, judicial, and ecclesiastical records indicate that 7,104 men and women served the ancien régime in the Mississippi Valley and Gulf Coast regions; this figure does not include most of the Swiss mercenaries whose personnel dossiers have not yet been thoroughly analyzed. This impressive total belies the fact that Louisiana remained a minor outpost throughout its existence as an ancien régime colony and the fact that contemporary French officers and enlisted men considered the colony the worst posting in the empire (even worse than Cayenne, an insalubrious French possession adjacent to Devil’s Island off the South American coast).

Yet many officers, enlisted men, and administrators did stay following their discharges. These royal servants–turned-settlers succumbed to the siren song of land (which was available only to the nobility in France) and economic opportunity. The number of these retirees remaining in Louisiana was restricted by royal regulations between 1731 and 1763. Extant documentation indicates that 1,421 French soldiers and Swiss mercenaries were eligible to remain in the colony as settlers. The number of soldiers who opted to remain is not known, but, if only half the eligible retirees took advantage of the opportunity, former soldiers easily constituted the largest immigrant group in post-proprietary Louisiana (1731–63). (To put this figure into perspective, the 95 to 120 Alsatian religious exiles sent to Louisiana in the 1750s form the second largest group.)

The number of soldier-settlers increased significantly following the general discharge of September 15, 1763. As a result of the 1763 Treaty of Paris, which partitioned Louisiana and transferred portions of the former French colony to Great Britain and Spain, the French monarchy ordered the dismantling of the Louisiana garrison. The colony’s officers, soldiers, and administrators were given the option of remaining in Louisiana and receiving a generous land grant as well as a stipend and six months’ rations to facilitate their transition to civilian life, retiring to France on a paltry pension, or continuing their service in Saint-Domingue. On May 2, 1763, Governor Louis Billouart de Kerlérec reported that half of the garrison had been placed on the roster of “old soldiers,” who were evidently physically incapable of withstanding the rigors of starting life anew on the frontier. Thus, despite the great intrinsic value of the royal inducements to remain in the colony, a minority of the 1,200 to 1,300 officers, noncommissioned officers, and enlisted men in the Louisiana garrison opted to remain in the colony. Although contemporary administrative records are silent on the subject, other documentary sources suggest that approximately 280 soldiers became settlers.

Despite their sundry paths to Louisiana, these new frontiersmen came from remarkably similar backgrounds. Because there were very few volunteers, quotas for Louisiana units were often filled with captured deserters from units stationed throughout metropolitan France. Louisiana units consequently lacked the homogeneity of their metropolitan counterparts, which were usually manned by recruits from compact geographic regions. Analysis of 819 French colonial soldiers whose birthplace is known nevertheless indicates that 71 percent of these troops were drawn from just nine provinces forming a large crescent running from the Italian border through Paris to the English Channel, following the Atlantic Coast to the Bay of Biscay, moving inland in the Bordeaux region, and ending at the western border of Languedoc. Thirty-two percent of the total were drawn from two provinces: Île-de-France (the area surrounding and including Paris), which contributed 17 percent, and Brittany, which added 15 percent. The following provinces, appearing in descending order of importance, individually garnered only 4 to 6 percent of the total: Normandy, Burgundy, Poitou, Champagne, Picardy, Aunis, and Guyenne.

A sample of forty-six administrators indicates that most French colonial bureaucrats (77 percent) were drawn from the same geographic...