The Story of French New Orleans: History of a Creole City par Dianne Guenin-Lelle (review)

Reviews 199 native populations. But Marie’s story does not end there: she maintained correspondence with Claude; correspondence that supplemented her formal Relations writings and allows us to understand how hard it was for her to abandon her son. It is within the context of Marie’s writings that Dunn sagaciously explores abandonment (e.g., within seventeenth-century French family life), the marginalization of motherhood in the Christian tradition, and maternal sacrifice. Canisius College (NY) Eileen M. Angelini Guenin-Lelle, Dianne. The Story of French New Orleans: History of a Creole City. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2016. ISBN 978-1-49680486-0. Pp. xv + 200. $65. This well-researched, interdisciplinary study on the history of colonization of Louisiana and its largest city New Orleans uncovers the complex factors behind the persistence of an imagined“Frenchness,”self-fashioning, and“cultural slippages”(168) that permeate colonial history and the Louisianan urban landscape. Guenin-Lelle shows that creolization and nineteenth-century French Creole literature underline that Louisiana is an in-between space, unique in North America. The first chapter contextualizes the founding of Louisiana by Bienville (discussing key historical events, the slave economy and the Code noir, colonial governance) and synthesizes a number of historical analyses and travel accounts. The chapter’s strength lies in the author’s comparative analysis of political propaganda materials (Le Nouveau Mercure), historical source documents and travel accounts by Pierre Le Moyne de Iberville, La Page du Pratz, Gérard Pellerin and other settlers. This multi-layered approach opens up a palimpsestic, intertextual dimension and makes the challenges encountered by French and French Canadian settlers palpable to contemporary readers. The second chapter on the history of the architectural layout and street name policy of New Orleans is particularly original. Here, Guenin-Lelle convincingly argues that urban planning and successive street naming policies in the historic French Quarter (after Catholic Saints and political players such as the Burgundy, Toulouse and Dumaine streets), reflected continental France’s political agenda of cementing political stability in the aftermath of Louis XIV’s death and the demise of John Law and the Company of the Indies. In chapter three, she argues that the French language functioned as a “unifying force of the disparate communities that immigrated to [...] New Orleans” (85), an essential element of the city’s obsession with“self-fashioning”and“mythmaking”(96). GueninLelle offers a detailed discussion of colonization efforts in the New World (covering the French, Spanish, and American colonial periods) in the context of the continental French monarchical sociocultural and political agenda of Louis XIV and his successors. Her nuanced analysis of race ideology, the evolution of the concepts of créolité (chapter four) in Louisiana (as opposed to the Francophone Caribbean), métissage, cultural contact zones, French universalism, and the malleability of the term creole in the nineteenth century might have benefitted further from a discussion of the French concept of assimilation and ideological, racialist discourse and stereotyping prevalent during the third Republic in France.In the final two chapters,Guenin-Lelle successively traces the intertwining of history (Spanish and French rule, immigration waves from Acadia and Haiti), culture, fiction, historical novels (writers such as Alexandre Latil and Victor Séjour) and journalistic output (the rich French Creole literary tradition of the nineteenth century that provided a New World rather than a Eurocentric Perspective) and Louisianans’continued persistent adherence to an“imagined French past” (121). This study is a must read for historians, scholars, and teachers of French and Francophone literature, culture, and history. It would be a valuable resource in a course focusing on Francophone culture and history, or the history of French colonialism in the Americas, and in particular Louisiana. Utah State University Christa C. Jones Linhart, Danièle. La comédie humaine du travail: de la déshumanisation taylorienne à la sur-humanisation managériale. Paris: Érès, 2015. ISBN 978-2-7492-4632-1. Pp. 158. 19 a. Le point de départ de cet essai est que la plupart des grandes entreprises françaises ont décidé de “miser sur les qualités humaines plus que professionnelles des salariés” (15). Or, l’objectif de l’auteure est de démontrer que l’orientation...