Franco-Americans

FRANCO-AMERICANS. French influence on the course of the US Left is historical, diffuse, and fragmented--geographically and through time. Its impact is difficult to assess except for the well-known case of Eugene Victor Debs (1855-1926), born in Terre-Haute, Indiana, to parents who immigrated from Alsace, France. French and Franco-American figures lacked the influence of the concentrated urban force of Debs's rail workers, New York's Jewish textile workers, the United Mine and Steel Workers, or the United Auto Workers. They did, however, share the legacy of the trans-Atlantic revolution that inspired millions to stand up, denounce slavery and demand liberty. A critical mass of French revolutionaries gathered in Philadelphia through the 1790s and influenced such notables as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, not least in opposing hereditary, corporate, and clerical privilege. Decades later, French settlers abetted the proliferation of utopian, socialist, and anarchist experiments in many parts of the United States and in south Louisiana launched anti-colonial struggles.

The financial panic of 1837 did plenty to induce cooperation and “intentional communities” along lines made famous by Joseph Fourier (1771-1837). An interesting and effective utopian was Étienne Cabet (1788-1856), who reached New Orleans in 1848. His Voyages en Icarie (1839) inspired those inclined to “remake human society.” As the founder of the Icarian movement, with special appeal to artisans and factory workers, he set up colonies in Louisiana and Texas, but most residents lost faith and returned to France. Other Icarian communities thrived in Iowa, Missouri, and California. The most successful was Nauvoo, Illinois, which by the 1850s had attracted more than 500 residents. A farming community, Nauvoo established saw mills and a whiskey distillery, sponsored an orchestra and theater, and published English- and French-language newspapers. By this time, no fewer than 300 such communes had been built.

Francophone immigrants joined movements based on industrial labor primarily after the Civil War. Entire villages of rural Québéquois flocked to New England's burgeoning light industries (timber, paper, textiles, shoes, rubber) and swelled the proletarian sectors of Worcester, Fall River, Lowell, and Pittsfield, Massachussetts; Brunswick, Lewiston, and Waterville, Maine; and Woonsocket, Rhode Island. The coal fields of Pennsylvania also attracted a significant number Francophone workers. In New York City, Francophone radicals, some followers of Fourier and Victor Considerant (1808-1893), gathered in this hub of post-1848 refugees. They moved smoothly into the Marxist International Working Men’s Association (First International, 1864-1876) and, in 1872, commemorated the failure of the Paris Commune. They produced leaflets and put out French-language publications and sent organizers westward. Among these, Joseph Dejácque, a paper hanger, introduced the term libertaire and then found his way to New Orleans, where he exerted wide influence.

The most prominent figure of the late nineteenth-century francophone socialist movement in the United States was Louis Goaziou, a Breton coal miner who appeared in New York in 1880. By 1883, he was working in Hastings, Pennsylvania by 1883. He published a newspaper, popular among miners, that lasted into the twentieth century. Goaziou was active in the Knights of Labor and in the United Mine Workers, though his years in the mines were only few. Instead, he worked as a vital socialist publisher until World War I.

In the South, Francophone radicalism did not mirror its northern, urban counterpart. In sharp contrast, Louisiana served as a backwater of the French Revolution and its disaporas and fostered a complex radical heritage. The neophyte Louisiana Left was inflected by anti-colonialism and multi-racialism, both radical for their time and place. French veterans of the Napoleonic wars turned up in New Orleans, adding to the unique political mixture. Jacobinism also played a role and fused easily into more localized anarchism.

In early nineteenth-century Louisiana, the literate créole sector, still tied to Paris, organized to produce dramas, political groups, feuilletons, newspapers, magazines, and music to retain their inclusion in French Atlantic society. Though the francophone media were artistic and romantic, their goal was subversive: to block the political ascendancy of the 'Méricaines' and resist externally-imposed US-style race and caste policies. Frustrated by the failures of 1848 revolutions, they found new local causes, such as slave emancipation or protecting the civil rights of the gens de couleur, as they inspired others to protest and organize around meetings, seances, newspapers. Père Maistre, a veteran of 1848, promoted slave emancipation and socialism. Slick at real-estate, he created a parish and a commune for slaves.

During the 1850s, under increasing pressure, the hybrid créole caste struggled to preserve their pre-American status and ultimately to protect the marginalized slaves and Black lumpen surrounding them. These were inspired by the French Revolution's egalitarian legacy, as well as by French socialist supporters. Hundreds were slaveholders, some with French educations in engineering and medicine. From this population emerged not only a French-language literary movement, mostly forgotten, and the first 'civil rights' struggles (the Plessy Case, 163 U.S. 537: 1896), as well as the earliest pre-recorded and recorded jazz groups, performances, and virtuosi. Among the French socialist writers were: J.C. Houzeau (1820-1888), Charles Testut (1819-1892); Lucien Delabarre Sanial (1836-1927), Joseph Déjacque (1821-1864), Claude Paschal Maistre (1820-1875), and Elysée Réclus. Testut's novel of slavery, Le Vieux Salomon (1858), is the first 'marxist novel' produced in the United States.

The insurgent French socialist impetus that had coalesced in south Louisiana during the late antebellum years ultimately ran out of steam. Many exiles returned to France, or elsewhere in Europe, and many died early. The era of “The Rights of Man,” and the Atlantic Revolution drew slowly to a close—forgotten by most. The literary Créole renaissance, driven and enabled by romantic French radicalism, slowly gave way late in the century to a more irrational, even mystical, escapist form of quiet “spiritualism,” then fashionable throughout the country.

The French impact on American socialism was not very significant compared to other European immigrant groups. The major activity of the post-1848 exiles, promoting egalitarianism, publishing papers and promoting utopias, clearly inflamed the domestic politics of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Outside Louisiana, though, the legacies of anarchists, utopians and laborites merged with the larger labor picture in the persona of Eugene Debs.

Bell, Caryn Cossé. Revolution, Romanticism & the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997.

Sutton, Robert. Les Icariens: The Utopian Dream in Europe and America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1994.

Vermette, David. A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans: Industrialization, Immigration, and Religious Strife. Montreal: Baraka Press, 2018.