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French Colonial Policy and the Education of Women and Minorities: Louisiana in the Early Eighteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Clark Robenstine
Clark Robenstine*
Affiliation:
Educational foundations, University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette
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Extract

In speaking of the settlement of America, Lawrence Cremin observed that “it is [the] fact of empire that holds the key to the dynamics of early American education.” This was as true of French colonial efforts in the New World as it was for those of the English, though French colonial motivation was tempered by the vague notion of “for the glory of the King,” which revolved around defensive military needs while giving lesser consideration to economic imperialism. And with the French, as for the English, education played a significant and necessary role in colonial policy which attempted to achieve social and cultural dominance. Within a scant decade of the establishment of New Orleans as a permanent settlement in the Louisiana Territory in 1718, provisions were made for the education of the females of the area—white and minority. While meager efforts had been made to provide education for the male youth, those efforts were not well received by the small local population and ultimately were short lived. Consequently, the first lasting element of institutionalized education in French colonial Louisiana, the Ursuline school and convent, put a unique emphasis on female and minority education. How this unusual development merged with, and reflected, colonial political goals is the central concern of this essay.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , Summer 1992 , pp. 193 - 211
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Cremin, Lawrence A., Traditions of American Education (New York, 1977), 4.Google Scholar

2 Cremin, Lawrence A., American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607–1783 (New York, 1970), 13, 22. Of utmost importance in the struggle for dominance was the number of households in the English colonies by 1689. For example, Massachusetts had approximately eight thousand households, and Virginia over seven thousand. See ibid., 238–41.Google Scholar

3 Certain characteristics of the period render extant source material somewhat confusing. Intense and interrelated personal, political, and religious rivalries in the Louisiana colony resulted in a mass of correspondence crossing the Atlantic detailing charges and countercharges of competing factions or individuals against each other. According to one twentieth-century scholar of French Louisiana, these letters and mémoires to the home government “were not only written by [colonial] officials, but by anybody who could hold a pen.” In the bitter struggle for power in the colony, “all arms were fair: detraction, defamation, calumny, nothing was thought too ugly to satisfy one's spite against a personal enemy, or if by so doing there was the slightest chance of securing one's own advancement.” Delanglez, Jean, The French Jesuits in Lower Louisiana, 1700–1763 (Washington, D.C., 1935), 213.Google Scholar

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33 French males form the group noticeably missing here. The reasons for this are 1) that they were already Catholic, even if some practiced the faith badly; and 2) that the belief was that “civilization depends more upon the training and education of the feminine sex than the masculine.” To the extent that some practiced the faith poorly, French males were to be “helped” by the presence of morally strong, religiously faithful women-to-be-wives who, by their very influence, would set the men back on the “right” path. For evidence of this belief in the civilizing role of women, see Theresa, Mary Carroll, Austin, The Ursulines in Louisiana, 1727–1824 (New Orleans, 1886), 4; Baker, Vaughan, “Les Louisianaises: A Reconnaissance,” and Allain, Mathe, “Manon Lescaut et ses Consoeurs: Women in the Early French Period, 1700–1731,” Proceedings of the Fifth Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society, 1979, ed. Cooke, James (Lanham, Md., 1980), 6–15 and 18–26, respectively; and, Allain, , Not Worth a Straw, 83–87.Google Scholar

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40 Mention should be made here of changing European attitudes toward women, and especially young girls, which had some effect on the educational situation in colonial Louisiana. Philippe Aries chronicles a changing conception of childhood such that in the first half of the seventeenth century, there was a growing concern for the education of young girls. Whereas before they had stayed at home with the women of the house or else in a convent receiving only religious instruction, girls now received a broader (relatively speaking) education from religious orders, such as the Ursulines. As already noted, the education of young girls was the purpose of the Ursuline Order, and the Ursulines had gone to New France in 1639 for that reason. Increasingly then, according to Aries, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the “great event” in this respect was the revival of an interest in education essentially for children. The traditional apprenticeship for children (especially males) was replaced by the school. And largely, this education was for sociability and civility. See Aries, Philippe, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Baldick, Robert (New York, 1962), esp. 298, 383–86, 403–13. I suggest that this changing conception of childhood was, of course, mitigated by the realities of the Louisiana frontier context and resulted in a necessary reemphasis on apprenticeship for boys, while formal education for girls remained. This would account for the noticeable lack of local support for the Capuchin school for boys and the noticeable local enthusiasm for the Ursuline school for girls. On the use of apprenticeship for boys, see Holtman, Robert B. and Conrad, Glenn R., eds., French Louisiana: A Commemoration of the French Revolution Bicentennial (Lafayette, La., 1989), 122.Google Scholar

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49 Tranchepain, to Raguet, , 9 Mar. 1729, p. 283, vol. 12, ser. B, Ministry of the Marine. The dispute over Beaubois and the Ursulines, and the pertinent correspondence, between 12 Aug. and 15 Nov. 1728, is chronicled in pp. 236–82, vol. 11, ser. B, Ministry of the Marine. Vols. 8–12, ser. B, Ministry of the Marine, covering 1725–29, contain additional letters which pertain to the longstanding jurisdictional dispute between the Jesuits and Capuchins.Google Scholar

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51 Maduell, Charles R., The Census Tables for the French Colony of Louisiana from 1699 through 1732 (Baltimore, 1972), 17–27, 114–22. My minimum criteria for “family” are husband and wife, with or without children.Google Scholar