Salwa Nacouzi--The University of Poitiers, France

We will soon celebrate, in 2003, the bicentennial of the transfer of Louisiana from France to the United States. When Louisiana became an American territory, it did not instantly become English-speaking. Because of its large French-speaking population, including an important community of Creoles of color, Louisiana remained the American cradle of French and Francophone arts and culture throughout the Nineteenth Century. For some Louisianians, the preservation of French language and culture in Louisiana, and particularly in New Orleans, became a way for them to maintain ties to their homeland; for others it represented the hope of freedom. The history of Creole Louisiana and its ties to France is often overshadowed by certain well-worn stereotypes. This exhibition--drawn primarily from the Louisiana Collection of LSU Libraries Special Collections, and organized in cooperation with LSU’s Center for French and Francophone Studies--has the modest goal of displaying artifacts that hint at the richness and diversity of Nineteenth Century New Orleans intellectual and cultural life.

The music, theater, literature and other iconographic material of the period show that in this corner of the American republic there existed a conflicted, bilingual society loyal to two homelands at once. Many young Creoles were sent to Paris for their education. Starting at the Collège Louis le Grand and moving on to law or medical school, these young Louisianians were steeped in French science and rhetoric. Exiles from the various French revolutions, from royalists to republicans, found fertile ground in Louisiana for both their journalistic and agricultural ambitions. At the same time, many of Louisiana’s free black Creoles also left in search of a more favorable racial climate. This constant coming and going shaped, for the better part of a hundred years, the life of Louisiana’s people and their cultural institutions. But the Civil War disrupted this society. For their part, many Creole planters lost most of their wealth and social rank during the war and were forced to rely on local institutions for their children’s education. Creole Louisiana was on the defensive, its culture threatened by Anglophone hegemony. In the face of American racial conceptions, Louisiana’s free people of color began to lose their middle social status and their strong connection to France began to unravel. Thus began the long decline of Francophone cultural life; by the beginning of the Twentieth Century French-speaking New Orleans was but a shadow of its former self.

This exhibition, in examining the lives of several men and women of the period, helps us understand the dynamic culture in which these Creoles operated and the deep connections that united Paris and New Orleans. A multi-faceted society, Nineteenth Century New Orleans owed its coherence both to its strong cultural ties to France and to the confidence it had in its unique identity. When France chose not to support the Confederacy, and the South was defeated in the Civil War, the mythic idea of France as a protective mother-culture fell apart in Louisiana. Even though the umbilical cord connecting France and Louisiana had been severed, French art and culture persisted in Louisiana for the remainder of the century.

An exhibition such as this, by clearing away some of the cobwebs of myth from our understanding of this period, permits us to see how the Creoles built for themselves specific group identities from a fluid collective memory. As we begin a new century, we can look back to rediscover this period, and to reexamine the way in which Creole New Orleans synthesized the cultures of the Old and New Worlds.