[BRIEF NOTE] The End of French Louisiana
Sep. 5th, 2005 08:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldIt's a commonplace for Québécois and other Canadian Francophones to see Louisiana as a worst-case scenario for the French language, as a unit where (as one official sources notes) (French-language) "[l]a culture française est devenue plus folklorique et nostalgique que réelle." The traditional view of the downwards trajectory of the French language since the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 has been adequately summed up by Barry Jean Ancelet at the University of Lafayette's website.
This tidy story is complicated by the fact that the French language did reasonably well in Louisiana, as Jacques Leclerc observes (French-language) at his website, L'aménagement linguistique dans le monde. Successive state constitutions established Louisiana as an American state with a bilingual legislature and judiciary, while the wealthy Creole families of New Orleans remained major cultural figures despite some degree of assimilation. Leclerc argues that the true cause for the decline of the French language in Louisiana can be placed on Louisiana's Reconstruction authorities, which stripped the French language of official status as a reprisal against the generally pro-Confederate Creoles and as a way to assimilate a restive minority.
The Creoles assimilated quickly into the general culture of the South, losing the wealth and status that had helped them sustain their transatlantic connections with France, leaving the poor Cajuns to defend the French language against the impact of a wealthy "American" society with an Anglophone mass culture that looked down on the Cajuns and their distinctive dialect. After the Second World War French has managed a resurgence in Louisiana as a language of identity, but with barely 5% of Louisiana's population speaking French and the shift to English continuing French is unlikely to regain any kind of significant position in Louisiana as a living language.
What doomed the French language in Louisiana, it seems, are the divisions among Louisiana's different Francophone populations, as this page notes in passing. White Creoles looked down upon the Cajuns as peasants speaking a debased dialect; Cajuns saw themselves as having as much in common with Americans as with the Creoles of New Orleans; fears of being seen by Americans as racially contaminated caused both groups to distance themselves from non-white Francophones. If the distance between Cajuns and Creoles could have been closed somehow, French in Louisiana might have stood a chance. As things stood in the 19th century, none of Louisiana's Francophone ethnies saw a reason to do so, and so, Louisiana French began to die.
[T]he Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and statehood in 1812 placed serious pressure on French Louisiana to conform to the language and culture of the United States. With the end of the Civil War, French Creoles understood that their future was necessarily going to be American; they immediately began to send their children to English-language schools. By the turn of the 20th century, their transition to English was virtually complete. Ordinary Cajuns and black Creoles did not get the message until much later, beginning with the arrival of Anglo-American farmers from the Midwest in the 1880s, reinforced by the arrival of Anglo-American oil workers and developers from Texas, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania in the early 1900s. This process was intensified by the nationalistic fervor that preceded and accompanied World War I, by the relief efforts that accompanied the great flood of 1927 and the agricultural and economic depressions of the 1920s and 1930s. As their children were humiliated and punished in schools for speaking the language of their ancestors, Cajuns and black Creoles alike were convinced that the French dialects they spoke were cultural, social, political and economic liabilities.
This tidy story is complicated by the fact that the French language did reasonably well in Louisiana, as Jacques Leclerc observes (French-language) at his website, L'aménagement linguistique dans le monde. Successive state constitutions established Louisiana as an American state with a bilingual legislature and judiciary, while the wealthy Creole families of New Orleans remained major cultural figures despite some degree of assimilation. Leclerc argues that the true cause for the decline of the French language in Louisiana can be placed on Louisiana's Reconstruction authorities, which stripped the French language of official status as a reprisal against the generally pro-Confederate Creoles and as a way to assimilate a restive minority.
Par la suite, les constitutions républicaines radicales, imposées par les troupes de l’Union en 1864 et 1868, réussirent à abolir le statut officiel du français en Louisiane. Il s'agissait sans aucun doute d'une forme de représailles de la part des confédérés envers la Louisiane qui entretenait des contacts réguliers avec la France de l'époque; non seulement la France soutenait la Louisiane dans le conflit, mais bon nombre de familles créoles (blanches) fortunées envoyaient leurs fils faire des études à Paris ou à Bordeaux, et mariaient leurs filles à des Français fraîchement débarqués à La Nouvelle-Orléans; la Louisiane était le dernier État à sortir de la Reconstruction (l'époque d'après-guerre: The Reconstruction) même si c'était le premier État, en raison de l'importance du port de La Nouvelle-Orléans, à se faire «saisir» par l'armée de l'Union. Cela dit, à cette époque, beaucoup de Créoles blancs étaient déjà assimilés.
The Creoles assimilated quickly into the general culture of the South, losing the wealth and status that had helped them sustain their transatlantic connections with France, leaving the poor Cajuns to defend the French language against the impact of a wealthy "American" society with an Anglophone mass culture that looked down on the Cajuns and their distinctive dialect. After the Second World War French has managed a resurgence in Louisiana as a language of identity, but with barely 5% of Louisiana's population speaking French and the shift to English continuing French is unlikely to regain any kind of significant position in Louisiana as a living language.
What doomed the French language in Louisiana, it seems, are the divisions among Louisiana's different Francophone populations, as this page notes in passing. White Creoles looked down upon the Cajuns as peasants speaking a debased dialect; Cajuns saw themselves as having as much in common with Americans as with the Creoles of New Orleans; fears of being seen by Americans as racially contaminated caused both groups to distance themselves from non-white Francophones. If the distance between Cajuns and Creoles could have been closed somehow, French in Louisiana might have stood a chance. As things stood in the 19th century, none of Louisiana's Francophone ethnies saw a reason to do so, and so, Louisiana French began to die.
