Family Development in French Louisiana’s Lower Borderlands, 1700–66

French imperial officials, in the eighteenth century, understood that the success of their North American empires depended upon governing the marriage practices of colonial inhabitants. Officials imposed marriage policies to mitigate the dangers that uncontrolled colonial matrimonies posed to the King’s authority. From bureaucrats' perspectives, marriage policies achieved ideal colonial families by regulating the sexual relationships of inhabitants. Despite these actions, Louisiana inhabitants – Europeans, Africans, Indians, and people of mixed heritage - married according to pragmatic considerations outside the empire’s needs. Thus, the private relationships of inhabitants possessed the potential to produce global implications for France and manifested into administrators’ public grievances.

This project examines the responsibility placed on women by France in developing ideal colonial families and the role that women played in contributing to families that did not match the norm. The metropole expected women as mothers and wives to transfer French culture to their families. Women would ensure that their families sustained strong borders that secured the regulated trade of crops produced by hard-working inhabitants in Louisiana. Officials’ visions of settling inhabitants into family-labor units included controlling the relationships of women. This project argues that inhabitants, especially women, overturned long-standing French social constructs and policies relating to race, gender, and sexuality to create new familial spaces unique to Louisiana’s frontier conditions. These spaces include female heads-of-household, mixed-heritage families, master-slave relationships, concubinage, and relationships that crossed class, language, and other cultural barriers.

When administrators in Louisiana noted that the familial practices in the colony failed to match imperial policies, they often positioned blamed onto women. Officials criticized Indian and African women for immorality, concubinage, and the loss of the French language. Bureaucrats claimed that these women sabotaged imperial goals by negatively influencing European men and women to exhibit behaviors that did not match French norms. Colonial leaders also censured white women for failing to persuade European men to marry and willfully becoming state burdens. Administrators used inhabitants’ deficiencies to determine if intermarriages (race, class, faith, ethnicity) hindered imperial goals and border security. They used these arguments to determine if they should relocate more populations of white women to Louisiana.

Most Louisiana historians examine familial development either in the context of the colony’s race relations or as a sub-component of political studies about a particular settlement. Louisiana historians have hesitated to contribute a statistical marriage portrait, as done in the American Southwest, due to the extensive time needed to catalog records and imperfect accounts. This project provides an original quantitative analysis of census and sacramental records. Visualizations of this data effectively communicate who married whom visually using tools such as Palladio, KnightLab JS, and RawGraphs. Digital maps will track the locations of where intermarriages of race and ethnicity occurred based on the location of French settlements such as New Orleans, Mobile, Natchitoches, and Point Coupee. It will also highlight how the rate of intermarriages changed during the eighteenth century.