Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast

University of Pennsylvania historian DeJean (How Paris Became Paris) paints an intriguing portrait of the early 18th-century French women who overcame “false arrests and trumped-up charges,” forced deportation, hurricanes, and other hardships to help shape life in the fledgling colony of Louisiana. According to DeJean, corrupt police and prison officials working with the Indies Company conspired to deport more than 130 female inmates as part of a scheme to help populate the colony. Many of the deportees had been arrested on dubious charges of prostitution and begging; in one unfortunate case, a woman was detained “by accident, when a murder took place just outside the cabaret where she had stopped for a beer at the end of a hot day.” DeJean skillfully reads between the lines of the existing police and prison documentation to bring context and nuance to these women’s stories. She also draws on soldier and historian Jean Dumont’s contemporaneous accounts of life in Louisiana, where he met his wife, deportee Marie Baron. Though the deportees arrived in America destitute, some went on to build the first houses on Royal Street in Mobile, Ala., and Bourbon Street in New Orleans, and became matriarchs of prominent regional families. This scrupulous account restores a group of remarkable women to their rightful place in French and American history. (Apr.)