The City of the Belle Créole

By the end of the Nineteenth Century, the French language in New Orleans was a rapidly fading vestige of the city’s past. The French-speaking, or Francophone, residents of New Orleans saw the importance of their language and culture decline as the city became largely English-speaking and American in character. In 1886, Judge F.P. Poché gave a speech for “Creole Day” at the “American Exposition”. This text describes the many achievements of the city’s “Creole” people and highlights their role in the city’s history. Poché’s speech, given in English and only later translated into French, asserted that the Creoles of New Orleans were the white descendants of European settlers who brought the “light of civilization” to Louisiana. This assumption about the identity of the Creoles is related to the widely used figure of “La Belle Créole.” Whether the name of a tobacco factory, a polka, or a steamboat, the emblematic “Belle Créole” originated in a romanticized and exclusionary representation of Francophone New Orleans. This recurring image points to what historian Joseph Tregle calls a “creole mythology,” a rigid group identity built on glorified cultural and political achievements of the past. This exhibition looks at the music and literature of Nineteenth Century Creole New Orleans in an effort to understand how the many Francophone voices of the city represented themselves and their place in history. Employing the mythic figure of the “Belle Créole” was but one of the many conflicting ways that Francophone New Orleans used music and literature to create, defend, and contest various group identities.

See: Joseph G. Tregle, Jr. “Creoles and Americans” in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization. ed: Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon. (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1992).

Case 1 Gallery: