The death of Louis XIV in 1715 and the accession of his more progressive younger brother as Regent of France might have brought some hopeful changes to Louisiana, France's tiny, struggling outpost on the Gulf of Mexico. However, the continuation of the debilitating regime of the merchant Antoine Crozat and the extreme impoverishment of the French Treasury Following the disastrous wars of Louis XIV meant that no radical changes were possible. Instead, these few years at the beginning of the Regency represented a period of transition for the colony, when the need for a new administrative regime for Louisiana was met in France by a growing awareness of the strategic and economic potential of the Mississippi settlements. All of these conditions prepared the way for the appearance on the scene of the Company of the West in 1717. In his detailed survey of this brief but crucial period of Louisiana's history, Marcel Giraud assesses the new mood and conditions in France -- the personnel and objectives of the Council of the Navy, which oversaw the colony's administration; the advances in scientific opinion and their impact on Louisiana; and the political, fiscal, and economic conditions that created a new appreciation of the colony of official circles -- while describing actual conditions in the colony. Giraud portrays the Louisiana of 1715 as a few clusters of squalid buildings scattered along the Gulf Coast from Alabama to Natchitoches, inhabited by largely dispirited settlers and soldiers who for the most part lacked the barest necessities of life. Crozat's essentially self-serving regime made this a period of virtual stagnation. Rivalries among the colony's administrative personnel, especially between the governors and the Le Moyne family and their supporters, impeded development, as did the inadequacy of the priests sent to minister to the colony; the paucity of women, farmers, and skilled workers; and the infertile soil around the sties chosen for the forts and settlements. Relations with the indigenous populations were hindered by the lack of acceptable trade goods, as were efforts by the French colonists to establish commercial relations with the neighboring Spanish colonies. At the same time, Louisiana bore the encroachments of better-supplied British traders who were moving into Alabama and the Illinois country and developing regular trade with Indian tribes whom the French claimed as their own clients. With his customary thoroughness and scrupulous attention to documentary details, Marcel Giraud provides a vivid description of a struggling colony hovering between extinction and the spark of growth that would, in years to come, establish it as a viable French outpost in North America. Despite the obstacles facing Louisiana during these difficult years of transition, the colony survived to experience new expansion and development under the Company of the West.

What is it about the city of New Orleans? History, location, and culture continue to link it to France while distancing it culturally and symbolically from the United States. This book explores the traces of French language, history, and artistic expression that have been present there over the last three hundred years. This volume focuses on the French, Spanish, and American colonial periods to understand the imprint that French socio-cultural dynamic left on the Crescent City. The migration of Acadians to New Orleans at the time the city became a Spanish dominion and the arrival of Haitian refugees when the city became an American territory oddly reinforced its Francophone identity. However, in the process of establishing itself as an urban space in the Antebellum South, the culture of New Orleans became a liability for New Orleans elite after the Louisiana Purchase. New Orleans and the Caribbean share numerous historical, cultural, and linguistic connections. The book analyzes these connections and the shared process of creolization occurring in New Orleans and throughout the Caribbean Basin. It suggests “French” New Orleans might be understood as a trope for unscripted “original” Creole social and cultural elements. Since being Creole came to connote African descent, the study suggests that an association with France in the minds of whites allowed for a less racially-bound and contested social order within the United States.

Keep in mind that French Louisiana took in a lot more area than the present-day state of Louisiana.

Provides a better understanding of the complexities of the French experience in Louisiana and a better appreciation of the contribution of scholars.

Over the course of its three-hundred-year history, the Catholic Church in Louisiana witnessed a prolonged shift from French to English, with some south Louisiana churches continuing to prepare marriage, baptism, and burial records in French as late as the mid-twentieth century. Speaking French in Louisiana, 1720–1955 navigates a complex and lengthy process, presenting a nuanced picture of language change within the Church and situating its practices within the state’s sociolinguistic evolution. Mining three centuries of evidence from the Archdiocese of New Orleans archives, the authors discover proof of an extraordinary one-hundred-year rise and fall of bilingualism in Louisiana. The multiethnic laity, clergy, and religious in the nineteenth century necessitated the use of multiple languages in church functions, and bilingualism remained an ordinary aspect of church life through the antebellum period. After the Civil War, however, the authors show a steady crossover from French to English in the Church, influenced in large part by an active Irish population. It wasn’t until decades later, around 1910, that the Church began to embrace English monolingualism and French faded from use. The authors’ extensive research and analysis draws on quantitative and qualitative data, geographical models, methods of ethnography, and cultural studies. They evaluated 4,000 letters, written mostly in French, from 1720 to 1859; sacramental registers from more than 250 churches; parish reports; diocesan council minutes; and unpublished material from French archives. Their findings illuminate how the Church’s hierarchical structure of authority, its social constraints, and the attitudes of its local priests and laity affected language maintenance and change, particularly during the major political and social developments of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Speaking French in Louisiana, 1720–1955 goes beyond the “triumph of English” or “tragedy of Cajun French” stereotypes to show how south Louisiana negotiated language use and how Christianization was a powerful linguistic and cultural assimilator.