Diasporas of French Radicalism: Refugee and Exile Printers of Louisiana

France’s nineteenth-century revolutions forced thousands of refugees and exiles from their homelands. From the Napoleonic Wars to the events of the July Revolution of 1830, the February Revolution of 1848, and the subsequent Paris Commune, successive waves of Frenchmen were expelled or driven to flee. Many of those displaced settled in France’s contemporary and former American colonies. Some were drawn by shared language or the prevalence of French cultures in these areas, but their options for resettlement were also frequently limited by ongoing warfare. Multiple coalitions of empires battled to quash the nascent French Republic, conflicts over Spanish succession and the subsequent invasion of Spain by France followed abruptly, and sporadic conflict with Great Britain continued. These and other factors made Louisiana and the French Caribbean the most attractive destinations for many of the displaced. Those who had chosen to settle in the islands often faced displacement once again, as anticolonial conflicts in both France’s and Britain’s Caribbean colonies, including France’s most financially successful colony of San Domingue, forced thousands to resettle. This meant that French émigrés from Haiti, Cuba, Guadalupe, Jamaica, and others continued to arrive in Louisiana during much of the early nineteenth century. To a lesser extent, Frenchmen also came by way of eastern seaboard cities within the United States, such as New York and Charleston, where some had settled hastily and often temporarily. The arrivals by way of America augmented the numbers of those who arrived directly from France as the political and economic situation remained unstable there well beyond midcentury.¹

French refugees and exiles who settled in Louisiana during the era of revolutions were numerically significant among the arrivals there, and played a disproportionately influential role in the emergence of French-language newspapers and literature. Many of these exile and refugee writers expressed radical political and social ideas, some which targeted the foundations of the dominant Creole cultures of Louisiana. They assaulted the Catholic Church and hierarchies of social class. They advocated not only the abolition of slavery but also the centrality of universal human equality. They questioned mercantile exchange and the personal ownership of property. They even advocated violence and revolution as the means to change the social inequalities that were omnipresent in nineteenth-century daily life. These ideas set French exiles and refugees apart from the communities of French Creoles whose families had arrived during the previous century. They demonstrated the distinctness between the multiple visions for progress imagined by those of French origin in Louisiana.

This distinction among the political and social visions expressed by Louisiana’s francophone writers is important because it demonstrates the breadth of French cultures that they emerged from and defined. Rather than serving to reinforce the political notions and cultural practices of an entrenched French Creole elite against a growing tide of “Americanization,” French exile and refugee writers who had more recently arrived on American soil often aggressively opposed the ideas of “Frenchness” envisioned by these existing communities.

Newly arrived Frenchmen participated heavily in Louisiana print culture from the earliest years. In Louisiana, as in much of the rest of the United States, newspapers were the dominant form of printed material disseminated to the public. Much of the most popular literature was also published in this format; serial and short stories, along with poetry, were popular inclusions in many papers and the outright focus of others. Unlike most areas of the contemporary United States, newspapers were not established in Louisiana before the turn of the nineteenth century. Colonial policy dictated presses could only be operated by those granted royal monopolies, and for nearly all of the colonial period, only one press was operational in the whole of the Louisiana territory. This meant that immigrant printers arriving in Louisiana in the first half of the nineteenth century entered a virtually open field, where few had amassed the necessary equipment to dominate and few native Creoles had been trained in these trades.² Bibliographers have identified 124 French writers born outside of Louisiana who arrived there during...