Cultural Precedents and Lessons
Editor's Column from LCV Fall 2008

Few places reflect their history, founders and cultural origins with the passion and consistency of Louisiana and its colonial city of New Orleans. The cast of rogues responsible for the discovery, founding and settlement of Louisiana would have set in stone—if we had any stone—a tradition of venality, self-indulgence, public deception, not to mention depravity, and their inevitable consequences, that seems all too familiar to us today.

Like their 20th century counterparts, the 18th century developers of Louisiana deceived the government and moneyed class and enticed investors into speculating in Louisiana. In an astonishing precursor to our more modern experience and its predictable consequences in which both the poor and the middle class were traduced into vulnerable, low-lying marshes and lake beds, previously regarded as uninhabitable such as Lakeview, Broadmoor and New Orleans East by depicting them as exemplars of modernity (“The New York of the South,” crowed the most egregious), the founding fathers of Louisiana lured the greedy and unwary with embellished tales of the New Arcadia, of bucolic climate, of mines of precious metals, of fortunes to be made.

The founders of the Louisiana colony and eventually New Orleans, the brothers Lemoyne, Sieurs d’Iberville and Bienville were notable explorers, adventurers and larcenous to the core. Equal opportunity opportunists, they pilfered from the crown, merchants, the citizenry, their own soldiers, allegedly even one another, and recruited to their cause a band of brothers to complement their own character. As related by Ned Sublette in his delightful new book, The World That Made New Orleans, historian Carl Brasseaux, himself quoting Jesuit missionaries, describes the hardy woodsmen or coureurs de bois as “when not engaged in fur trading, which actually occupied only a small portion of their time, hundreds of voyageurs annually devoted the bulk of their energies to traveling, ‘drinking, gambling, and lechery.’” In an interesting note foreshadowing the complex interracial sexual relations that came to characterize Louisiana identity, Sublette observes that the first slaves in Louisiana were not African, but Native American women peddled to the soldiers garrisoned in New Orleans as sex slaves. The first introduction of African slaves into Louisiana followed in 1709, a decade after the founding of Louisiana, another legacy of the Sieur de Bienville.

Notorious Namesake
Stranded in presentism and all too generally ignorant of our own past, except for habitually lazy and uninformed references to “our culture,” we deprive ourselves of the real joy, humor and richness a thorough excavation of our history by scholars reveals. Few know for example that the Duc D’Orleans, Regent of France, whom New Orleans honored with its name, was a notorious roué, infamous for his depravity and orgiastic carousing into the wee hours of the morning. As Sublette wryly observes, we have “tried to keep his customary hours ever since.” Francine du Plessix Gray characterized the period of the Regency in France under the Duc as “the most dissolute period in French history and might well vie with the late Roman Empire as the most debauched era of Western civilization. Tis a pity no brass commemorative plaque graces Bourbon Street to give us historical context for our present indulgences.

Competing with the Duc is the ironically named Scotsman John Law, a gambler and womanizer, a visionary financier who initiated the concept of paper credit into the French monetary system, issuing paper shares for his Company of the West (later the Company of the Indies), manipulating greedy speculation that inflated the value of the initial shares ten-fold in the so called “Mississippi Bubble,” only to spectacularly collapse under the weight of the colony’s inability to generate any significant wealth, dragging down with it the finances of France itself. If this sounds eerily familiar to contemporary American readers more familiar with Enron and sub-prime financing, perhaps it ought to give us all pause about just have significantly we have—or have not – evolved and how inattentive we are to the abundant lessons of history.

Foreshadowing
Even the present depopulation of New Orleans has historical precedent. Having reached its historic population high water mark in 1960, over the next forty-five years we saw 175,000 of our citizens voluntarily drain away before we lost another 150,000 to the ravages of Katrina, leaving us at half our peak. So under populated was the Louisiana colony that Law’s first efforts were to increase its population; to accomplish this he was authorized to dragoon and outright kidnap our earliest settlers, scouring the alleys, prisons and brothels of France for convicts and prostitutes. In 1719, 150 French girls rioted in resistance to being forcibly emigrated to the Louisiana colony and the following year prisoners overpowered their guards and fled into the countryside, “in terror of being sent to Louisiana.” Ironically, the principal forces populating Louisiana, and ultimately informing its cultural and racial identity, were the importation of African slaves and, in the early 19th century, the arrival of the refugees, white and black, fleeing the Haitian revolution.

All of which is to simply say, we might see more clearly going forward if we first would cast a backward glance.

—Michael Sartisky, Editor-In-Chief