BiblioVault - Books about French Americans

At the Hearth of the Crossed Races

A French-Indian Community in Nineteenth-Century Oregon, 1812-1859

Melinda Marie Jetté

Oregon State University Press, 2015

Despite the force of Oregon’s founding mythology, the Willamette Valley was not an empty Eden awaiting settlement by hardy American pioneers. Rather, it was, as Melinda Jetté explores in At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, one of the earliest sites of extensive intercultural contact in the Pacific Northwest.

Jetté’s study focuses on the “hearth” of this contact: French Prairie, so named for the French-Indian families who resettled the homeland of the Ahantchuyuk Kalapuyans. Although these families sought a middle course in their relations with their various neighbors, their presence ultimately contributed to the Anglo-American colonization of the region. By establishing farming and husbandry operations in the valley, the French-Indian settlers enhanced the Willamette Valley’s appeal as a destination of choice for the Anglo-Americans who later emigrated to the Pacific Northwest via the Oregon Trail.

Upon these emigrants’ arrival, the social space for the people of the “crossed races” diminished considerably, as the Anglo-Americans instituted a system of settler colonialism based on racial exclusion. Like their Native kin, the French-Indian families pursued various strategies to navigate the changing times and Jetté’s study of French Prairie takes on the relationships among all three: the French-Indian families, the indigenous peoples, and the Anglo-American settlers.

With At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, Jetté delivers a social history that deepens our understanding of the Oregon Country in the nineteenth century. This history of French Prairie provides a window into the multi-racial history of the Pacific Northwest and offers an alternative vision of early Oregon in the lives of the biracial French-Indian families whose community challenged notions of white supremacy, racial separation, and social exclusion.

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Bonapartists in the Borderlands

French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815-1835

Rafe Blaufarb

University of Alabama Press, 2005

Provides an important revision of the causes of the failure of France's Vine and Olive Colony in Alabama, placing it within the context of America's westward expansion

Bonapartists in the Borderlands debunks the standard account of the Vine and Olive Colony, which stresses the failure of aristocratic, luxury-loving French to tame the wilderness. Rafe Blaufarb recounts how Napoleonic exiles and French refugees from Europe and the Caribbean joined forces with Latin American insurgents, Gulf pirates, and international adventurers to seek their fortune in the Gulf borderlands. The US Congress welcomed the French and granted them a capacious tract of rich Black Belt land near Demopolis, Alabama, on the condition that they would establish a Mediterranean-style Vine and Olive colony.

Blaufard shows that it was not a lack of grit that caused the enterprise to fail. Rather, the Napoleonic officers involved in the colony sold their land shares to speculators to finance an even more perilous adventure—invading the Texas borderlands contested by Spain and the US. Their departure left the Vine and Olive colony in the hands of French refugees from the Haitian slave revolt. They soon abandoned vine cultivation and fused with the neighboring communities of Anglo-American slaveholding cotton planters and speculators.

Rafe Blaufarb examines the underlying motivations and aims that inspired this endeavor and details the nitty-gritty politics, economics, and backroom bargaining that resulted in the settlement. He employs a wide variety of local, national, and international resources: from documents held by the Alabama State Archives, Marengo County court records, and French-language newspapers published in America to material from the War Ministry Archives at Vincennes, the Diplomatic Archives at the Quai d’Orasy, and the French National Archives.

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Francois Vallé and His World

Upper Louisiana before Lewis and Clark

Carl J. Ekberg

University of Missouri Press, 2002

Winner of the Kemper & Leila Williams Prize in Louisiana History for excellence in historical scholarship for the year 2002, awarded by The Historic New Orleans Collection, The Louisiana Historical Association.

In François Vallé and His World, Carl Ekberg provides a fascinating biography of François Vallé (1716–1783), placing him within the context of his place and time. Vallé, who was born in Beauport, Canada, immigrated to Upper Louisiana (the Illinois Country) as a penniless common laborer sometime during the early 1740s. Engaged in agriculture, lead mining, and the Indian trade, he ultimately became the wealthiest and most powerful individual in Upper Louisiana, although he never learned to read or write.

Ekberg focuses on Upper Louisiana in colonial times, long before Lewis and Clark arrived in the Mississippi River valley and before American sovereignty had reached the eastern bank of the Mississippi. He vividly captures the ambience of life in the eighteenth-century frontier agricultural society that Vallé inhabited, shedding new light on the French and Spanish colonial regimes in Louisiana and on the Mississippi River frontier before the Americans arrived.

Based entirely on primary source documents—wills and testaments, parish registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials, and Spanish administrative correspondence—found in archives ranging from St. Louis and Ste. Genevieve to New Orleans and Seville, François Vallé and His World traces not only the life of François Vallé and the lives of his immediate family members, but also the lives of his slaves. In doing so, it provides a portrait of Missouri’s very first black families, something that has never before been attempted. Ekberg also analyzes how the illiterate Vallé became the richest person in all of Upper Louisiana, and how he rose in the sociopolitical hierarchy to become an important servant of the Spanish monarchy.

François Vallé and His World provides a useful corrective to the fallacious notion that Missouri’s history began with the arrival of Lewis and Clark at the turn of the nineteenth century. Anyone with an interest in colonial history or the history of the Mississippi River valley will find this book of great value.

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French in Michigan

Russell M. Magnaghi

Michigan State University Press, 2016

Compared to other nationalities, few French have immigrated to the United States, and the state of Michigan is no exception in that regard. Although the French came in small numbers, those who did settle in or pass through Michigan played important roles as either permanent residents or visitors.
The colonial French served as explorers, soldiers, missionaries, fur traders, and colonists. Later, French priests and nuns were influential in promoting Catholicism in the state and in developing schools and hospitals. Father Gabriel Richard fled the violence of the French Revolution and became a prominent and influential citizen of the state as a U.S. Congressman and one of the founders of the University of Michigan. French observers of Michigan life included Alexis de Tocqueville. French entrepreneurs opened copper mines and a variety of service-oriented businesses. Louis Fasquelle became the first foreign-language instructor at the University of Michigan, and François A. Artault introduced photography to the Upper Peninsula. As pioneers of the early automobile, the French made a major contribution to the language used in auto manufacturing.

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The French in Texas

History, Migration, Culture

Edited by François Lagarde

University of Texas Press, 2003

2005 — San Antonio Conservation Society Citation

Original articles that explore the French presence and influence on Texas history, arts, education, religion, and business.

The flag of France is one of the six flags that have flown over Texas, but all that many people know about the French presence in Texas is the ill-fated explorer Cavelier de La Salle, fabled pirate Jean Laffite, or Cajun music and food. Yet the French have made lasting contributions to Texas history and culture that deserve to be widely known and appreciated. In this book, François Lagarde and thirteen other experts present original articles that explore the French presence and influence on Texas history, arts, education, religion, and business from the arrival of La Salle in 1685 to 2002.

Each article covers an important figure or event in the France-Texas story. The historical articles thoroughly investigate early French colonists and explorers, the French pirates and privateers, the Bonapartists of Champ-d'Asile, the French at the Alamo, Dubois de Saligny and French recognition of the Republic of Texas, the nineteenth-century utopists of Icaria and Reunion, and the French Catholic missions. Other articles deal with French immigration in Texas, including the founding of Castroville, Cajuns in Texas, and the French economic presence in Texas today (the first such study ever published). The remaining articles look at painters Théodore and Marie Gentilz, sculptor Raoul Josset, French architecture in Texas, French travelers from Théodore Pavie to Simone de Beauvoir who have written on Texas, and the French heritage in Texas education. More than seventy color and black-and-white illustrations complement the text.

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French Roots in the Illinois Country

The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times

Carl J. Ekberg

University of Illinois Press, 1998

Winner of the Kemper and Leila Williams Book Prize for the Best Book on Louisiana History, French Roots in the Illinois Country creates an entirely new picture of the Illinois country as a single ethnic, economic, and cultural entity. Focusing on the French Creole communities along the Mississippi River, Carl J. Ekberg shows how land use practices such as medieval-style open-field agriculture intersected with economic and social issues ranging from the flour trade between Illinois and New Orleans to the significance of the different mentalities of French Creoles and Anglo-Americans.

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Reborn in America

French Exiles and Refugees in the United States and the Vine and Olive Adventure, 1815-1865

Eric Saugera, translated by Madeleine Velguth

University of Alabama Press, 2011

The history of the Vine and Olive Colony in Demopolis, Alabama, has long been clouded by romantic myths. The notion that it was a doomed attempt by Napoleonic exiles in America to plant a wine- and olive-growing community in Alabama based on the ideals of the French Revolution, has long been bolstered by the images that have been proliferated in the popular imagination of French ladies (in Josephine-style gowns) and gentlemen (in officer’s full dress uniforms) lounging in the breeze on the bluffs overlooking the Tombigbee River while sturdy French peasants plowed the rich soil of the Black Belt. Indeed, these picturesque images come close to matching the dreams that many of the exiles themselves entertained upon arrival.

But Eric Saugera’s recent scholarship does much to complicate the story. Based on a rich cache of letters by settlement founders and promoters discovered in French regional archives, Reborn in America humanizes the refugees, who turn out to have been as interested in profiteering as they were in social engineering and who dallied with schemes to restore the Bonapartes and return gloriously to their homeland.

The details presented in this story add a great deal to what we know of antebellum Alabama and international intrigues in the decades after Napoleon’s defeat, and shed light as well on the other, less glamorous refugees: planters fleeing from the revolution in Haiti, whose interest was much more purely agricultural and whose lasting influence on the region was far more durable.

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Salut!

France Meets Philadelphia

Lynn Miller and Therese Dolan

Temple University Press, 2021

One highly visible example of French influence on the city of Philadelphia is the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, modeled on the Champs-Élysées. In Salut!, Lynn Miller and Therese Dolan trace the fruitful, three-centuries-long relationship between the City of Brotherly Love and France. This detailed volume illustrates the effect of Huguenots settling in Philadelphia and 18-year-old William Penn visiting Paris, all the way up through more recent cultural offerings that have helped make the city the distinctive urban center it is today.

Salut! provides a magnifique history of Philadelphia seen through a particular cultural lens. The authors chronicle the French influence during colonial and revolutionary times. They highlight the contributions of nineteenth-century French philanthropists, such as Stephen Girard and the Dupont family. And they showcase the city’s vibrant visual arts community featuring works from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Rodin Museum, the Barnes Foundation, and the Joan of Arc sculpture, as well as studies of artists Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, and Henry Ossawa Tanner. There is also a profile of renowned Le Bec-Fin chef Georges Perrier, who made Philadelphia a renowned culinary destination in the twentieth century.

With lavish illustrations and enthusiastic text, Salut!celebrates a potpourri of all things French in the Philadelphia region.

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