The Latin Race in Louisiana

During the Civil War, the French-educated Creole elite of New Orleans played an important part in efforts to persuade France to support the Confederacy. Charles Gayarré’s La Race Latine en Louisiane and Alfred Mercier’s Du Panlatinisme: nécessité d'une alliance entre la France et la Confédération du Sud (Of Panlatinism: the Necessity of an Alliance between France and the Southern Confederacy) both argue that France’s interest lie in defending the South and its “latin” race from the aggressions of the Anglo-Saxon North. These racial arguments posited and defended the purity of the white Creoles and drew a strict color line between white and black in Francophone New Orleans. During Reconstruction many of the city’s free people of color assumed leadership roles in Louisiana’s government. This led to open hostility between the Afro-Creole and white Creole segments of the city and spawned the racist rhetoric we see in “Elle Fut Nommée La Ville Du Croissant,” a contemporary cartoon. Louis Placide Canonge, a newspaper editor and stage director, translated most of H.R. Helper’s white supremacist tract Nojoque: Une Grave Question Pour Un Continent. Canonge preserves Helper’s violent hatred of African Americans, but omits in his translation attacks against Roman Catholics and the Pope that might have offended his Catholic readers. After the Civil War, many Francophone New Orleanians insisted on the absolute racial purity of their ancestors. Gayarré briefly flirted with the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing party before the Civil War and later insisted that the term “Creole” referred only to the pure white descendants of European settlers in Louisiana.

See: Edward Larocque Tinker. Les écrits de langue française en Louisiane au XIXème siècle. Essais biographique et bibliographique. (Paris: H. Champion, 1932).

Case 8 Gallery: