Diverse Origins

Francophone New Orleans had roots in Europe, West Africa, and the Caribbean. Under the French and Spanish colonial governments, Canadian and Caribbean settlers in Louisiana lent their colonial experience to the newly arrived European soldiers and settlers, the Native American tribes in the colony, and West African slaves to create a complex and uneasy colonial culture. While the 1803 Louisiana Purchase and the appointment of William C.C. Claiborne as the first American governor of Louisiana, foretold of the eventual Americanization of the city, the arrival of various groups of French-speaking immigrants provided reinforcements to Creole New Orleans. In the decade after the Louisiana Purchase, more than 10,000 refugees from the Haitian Revolution arrived in New Orleans. These refugees found in Louisiana a three-caste racial order--white, free people of color, and black slaves--that roughly matched the social order in pre-revolutionary Saint Domingue. The cultural and linguistic connection between France and Louisiana also attracted French immigrants to the state. Throughout the century many political refugees from France also arrived in the city--whether from the tumultuous years of the French Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon I, the Revolution of 1848, or of other political and social upheaval on the continent. These “Foreign French” residents strengthened the Francophone culture of New Orleans and often took leadership roles in Creole political and cultural institutions.

See: Carl A. Brasseaux. “The Foreign French”: Nineteenth-Century French Immigration into Louisiana, 3 vols. (Lafayette: The Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1990).

Gwendelon Midlow Hall. Africans in Colonial Louisiana: the development of Afro-Creole culture in the eighteenth century (Baton Rouge : LSU Press, 1992).

Case 2 Gallery: