French St. Louis: Landscape, Contexts, and Legacy ed. by Jay Gitlin, Robert Michael Morrissey, and Peter J. Kastor

Abstract

Reviewed by: French St. Louis: Landscape, Contexts, and Legacy ed. by Jay Gitlin, Robert Michael Morrissey, and Peter J. Kastor Justin M. Carroll (bio) Keywords St. Louis, Missouri, Mississippi River, Francophones, Trade, Louisiana Territory French St. Louis: Landscape, Contexts, and Legacy. Edited by Jay Gitlin, Robert Michael Morrissey, and Peter J. Kastor. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. Pp. 319. Cloth, $65.00.) French St. Louis: Landscape, Context, and Legacy, edited by Jay Gitlin, Robert Michael Morrissey, and Peter J. Kastor, evolved from a symposium at the Missouri History Museum to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of St. Louis in February of 1764. This collected volume features articles from a variety of scholars at different stages of their careers; this creates a unique synthesis of perspectives and concerns. Together, they work toward pushing the study of St. Louis beyond the traditional civic mythologies and boosterism that often define the commemoration of American urban spaces into more critical realms, complicating both past and present in the process. Thematically, these scholars move the historical framework surrounding St. Louis into four new and exciting directions: [End Page 662] 1. The first quarter of the book contextualizes the founding and early years of St. Louis within the processes and structures of empire and frontier. 2. The following section situates St. Louis within the larger regional context of the Francophone world of the Mississippi River and the port city of New Orleans. 3. The next quarter opens new avenues of archival research and historical methods to recover ignored voices or lost landscapes. 4. The final quarter explores the persistence of French communities in St. Louis into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each chapter in this collected volume merits attention and reading by scholars and citizens interested in St. Louis, the larger Mississippi River Valley, Native North America, and the transatlantic French Empire. However, this review will focus on individual chapters from each section to highlight the diversity and depth offered by French St. Louis. For example, Robert Michael Morrissey's chapter, "Empire by Collaboration: St. Louis, the Illinois Country, and the French Colonial Empire," challenges persistent myths of the French Empire in North America and shows how, in places like Kaskaskia, outside of present-day St. Louis, "collaborative, opportunistic, and often quite functional" relationships developed between French settlers, Native Americans, and French officials (29). The inhabitants of the Illinois Country were hardly the submissive or dependent subjects of a distant and absolutist regime in Versailles as stereotyped by the British Empire and later American historians, but rather negotiated and directed the course of empire and day-to-day life in pragmatic and self-interested ways. In the context of regionalism, for example, Lawrence N. Powell's chapter, "You Are Who You Trade With: Why Antebellum St. Louis Industrialized and New Orleans Didn't," offers an excellent exploration of the diverging paths these two French-speaking communities followed in the nineteenth century. Despite similar colonial trajectories and intimate early entanglements, institutional differences connected to the evolution of plantations and enslaved labor in the South and the development of small-scale urbanization and market-oriented farms in the Midwest radically reoriented the trajectories of St. Louis and New Orleans. Economic patterns and antebellum politics disconnected borderland states like Missouri from the lower South during the early nineteenth century. By the end of [End Page 663] the Civil War, Powell shows "how St. Louis became the anchor of an urban region, while New Orleans became the American anomaly: the nation's only city system without an urban region" (133). Beyond the vistas of empire and region, John H. Lawrence's "The View from Upper Louisiana: Pierre-Clément de Laussat's Concerns and Contacts, 1803–1804" demonstrates how archive-building and translation, alongside careful scholarly attention, can profoundly reshape existing narratives. His article centers on the archive of Pierre-Clement de Laussat (1756–1835), a French colonial prefect in New Orleans between 1803 and 1804. Before the U.S. purchase of the Louisiana Territory, Laussat's brief tenure resulted in the creation of 600 manuscripts—reports, letters, proclamations, surveys, and other documents. Now housed at The Historic New Orleans Collection, these sources, most untranslated, reveal "the...