The Louisiana French in 1900

Abstract

When writing about nineteenth-century Louisiana most commentators have concluded that, because of geographical isolation or Gallic assimilation prowess, the Louisiana French were untouched by change. It is proposed here, however, that the nineteenth century was one of significant transformation in which an aggressive Anglo-saxon nation displaced the French as Louisiana's predominant people. To substantiate this proposition, the written record as well as a gradational paradigm were used to analyze the culminating nineteenth-century geographical patterns of the Louisiana French. The gradational modeling examined as a spatial surrogate of change the intensity of cultural distance-decay outward in a series of gradations or zones from the Gallic regional focus. Fifty-four economic, social, and political variables drawn primarily from the 1900 manuscript census schedules were tested statistically against the gradational morphology. The findings of this study challenge several important traditional interpretations of the Louisiana French.