Louisiana's French Amalgam
by Gary
M. Lavergne
Louisiana's French heritage has
been the subject of much prose and poetry. Since Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem, "Evangeline",
romanticized the Acadian Odyssey, numerous novels, works of
historical fiction, histories, documentaries, and motion pictures
of the recent past tended to melt all French cultures into a
generic "Cajun" culture. Louisiana is very likely
the most ethnically diverse of the fifty states. Pockets of
German, Irish, Czech, Anglo-Saxon, Indian, Spanish, and Italian
communities can be easily located and identified. The
general tendency of writers is to add French to the above
influences and to equate French with Cajun. As Glenn Conrad
writes in "Attakapas Gazette", "No matter the
interpretation placed on the content and status of the South
Louisiana lifestyle, there seems to be an iron-clad rule that the
piece must end by quoting a South Louisiana 'Cajun' saying
laissez les bon temps rouller." Louisiana's historical
French heritage is not that simple; to homogenize it is to deny a diversity.
The Center for Louisiana
Studies of the University of Southwestern Louisiana is engaged in
ongoing research on identifying the cultural contributions of the
several groups of French-speakers who settled Louisiana in th
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hopefully, their noble
work will do much to analyze the various cultures of the
Louisiana French.
In another article in the
"Attakapas Gazette" entitled "How Acadian is
Acadiana?" (Winter 1986), Conrad identified four distinct
groups of French-speakers to arrive and settle in Louisiana
between 1700 and 1900. The first group were soldiers,
administrators, entrepreneurs, and adventurers who settled in
Louisiana between the founding of the colony in 1699 and the
surrender of it to Spain in 1766. The Louis Lavergne from
Quebec who married Elizabeth Tomelin in New Orleans in 1725, and
her father, Pierre Tomelin, would be good examples of this
category. Historically, Sieur de Bienville, the founder of
the City of New Orleans and the "Father of Louisiana"
would be another member of this class of Frenchman. Many of
these Frenchmen were not interested in settling as much as
engaging in business, commerce, or getting wealthy through
investment and speculation. Many, like Pierre Tomelin, came
to Louisiana directly from France. Others, like Louis
Lavergne, made their way to New Orleans from Canada via the
Mississippi River. In South Louisiana, such family names as
Delahoussaye, Fontenot, Boutte, Soileau, Patin, Bonin, Lavergne,
and many others pre-date the arrival of the Acadians and, as
such, are not Cajuns themselves. These families and their
descendants who remained in Louisiana after cession to Spain were
generally referred to as Creoles. Today, the term Creole
has additional and varied meanings. Successive generations of
Creoles were given over to a lifestyle generated by a plantation
or mercantile economy.
The second group of French
immigrants to Louisiana were exiled Acadians from what was Acadie
and is today called Nova Scotia. For approximately five
generations, French peoples lived and worked in the frigid
climate of the Canadian maritime provinces. The Acadians
were forcibly ejected from their homes shortly after the Seven
Year War (1756-1763) between France and Great Britain. The
forced migration has been called the "Grand Derangement".
The term "Cajun" originated circa the Civil War and was
used as a pejorative term until it was adopted by the
Acadians themselves. Geneveive Massignon's "Le Prarles
Francais d'Acadie" is a helpful source in identifying
Acadian surnames, as is the 1714 census of Acadie. Acadian
names found in this genealogy include:
Aucoin
Brasseaux David
Guidry Pitre
Benoit
Breaux Doucet
Hebert Poirier
Bergeron Broussard
Dugas Lalande
Prejean
Bernard Chaisson
Duhon Landry
Richard
Blanchard Comeaux
Dupuis LeBlanc Savoie
Boudreaux Cormier
Foret Leger
Simon
Bourgeois Daigre
Fournier Lejeune
Sonnier
Bourque Daigle
Girouard Martin
Thibodeaux
Trahan
Cajuns bitterly resisted
attempts by other Frenchmen to make them peasant class. Social
friction between Acadians and Creoles resulted in an insularity
for the Cajun culture for many generations. For a significant
period of time, Cajuns cooperated in the near suppression of their
own culture by not encouraging, even punishing their own child
when they spoke French in public or in school. They tended to be
more rustic, engaging in farming, fishing, and cattle raising.
The third group of settlers to
enter Louisiana were refugees from slave insurrections on the
West Indian island of Hispanola, especially that part that is
present-day Haiti. From 1793 and on into the 1830s,
thousands of refugees poured into New Orleans and spread across
Louisiana. This group of French speakers were so similar in
culture to the original French settlers, or Creoles, that they
were quickly assimilated into that element of French-American
society. In South Louisiana, some of the family names of
this group would include Domengeaux, Pecot, Sigur, and Sorel.
The final wave of French
immigrants to Louisiana came over in waves during the nineteenth
century after various upheavals in France. The Napoleonic
Wars of the early 1800s and the era of the Franco-Prussian War
saw the movement of thousands of French families from Europe to
America, and Louisiana in particular. Some family names
from this group are Bloch, Faul, Petitin, Monie, Coussan, and
Croucet. These nineteenth century immigrants eventually
settled into a lifestyle of small business operations in tiny
centers of South Louisiana.
As Conrad suggests, recent
popular literature has done more than any of many other factors
to blur the distinctive cultural characteristics of Louisiana's
French-speaking groups and their descendants. The media
blitz that followed the "Cajun Craze" of the 1980s was
compounded by the French Louisianians themselves and several
would-be historians. Very often, articles, monographs, and
books about "famous Cajuns" contain references to
persons who aren't Cajun at all. Many Lavergnes do not know
that they are not Cajuns but of Creole descent; it doesn't
matter, because most Louisianians of this generations, they don't
know the difference anyway. Moreover, it doesn't matter because
most of the twentieth century Louisianians are much like the
subject of this family tree, an amalgam of all Louisiana's
French, plus much, much more.
(Please do not copy Mr.
Lavergne's article without his express written consent.)
The complete vitae of Gary
M. Lavergne!!!
February 15, 1999: I heard from Gary again
today with news that the entire book, Lives of Quiet Desperation
is now on-line :-) Be sure to check it out!! Lives
of Quiet Desperation: The Ancestry Of A Louisiana Frenchman!!
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