“Historic in All Its Branches and Roots”: Charles Gayarré and the Creation of a White Creole Print Culture

My presentation looks at the life and letters of Charles Gayarré. The spokesman for New Orleans’s white Creole population (defined here as the descendants of the French and Spanish colonial settlers), Gayarré, whose literary career spanned much of the nineteenth century, has been called “not only the historian of Louisiana but the history of it as well.” This paper examines how Gayarré created a Louisiana Creole print culture through the publication of his multivolume State history, encouraged other white Creoles to broaden the local literature through prose and poetry, and incited a community-wide effort to formulate a Creole identity through print. Supported by the American democratic right to free expression, an eruption in the printing and dissemination of modern print cultural forms, and a burgeoning Francophone readership, an elite group of Creole French-Americans created a unique New Orleans literature. This culture of letters, based on race, ethnicity, and place, enabled New Orleans’s Creole population to imagine themselves a unified community of readers. These Louisiana Creoles, as they came to be called by the 1840s, lived as liminal figures during the long-nineteenth century. The Creoles negotiated, with great difficulty, a mélange of French and American laws, politics, and economies. They joined American political parties and French-language benevolent societies and wrote and published in French and English. Using their bifurcated identities, the Creoles created an ethos defined by locally cultural, societal, and historical exceptionality. Creole identity plans an integral part in the myth of New Orleans exceptionality, and continues today to characterize the people and the place. Gayarré and the Creoles used myth and historical memory to construct a Creole identity and literary corpus. This paper reconsiders a forgotten literary tradition and highlights how groups use discourses to frame their lives, culture, and place.