The free people of color in New Orleans occupied a precarious middle position between black and white, between their French education, language, and culture and their American citizenship, between relative financial independence and profound social oppression. The Gens de Couleur Libres of New Orleans were free, but they faced many restrictions in a city where they aroused both jealousy and suspicion. In 1845, defying the ban put on the publication of works by people of color, New Orleans educator and poet Armand Lanusse gathered eighty-five poems written by seventeen free black Louisiana poets and published them under the title Les Cenelles. While Lanusse remained in the increasingly hostile New Orleans to continue his activism in the defense of people of color, several of the other contributors to Les Cenelles left Louisiana. Pierre Delcour, Camille Thierry and Victor Séjour preferred life in France, where they might encounter the luminaries of the French literary world, to the increasingly restrictive atmosphere of their Louisiana home.