Review of Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast, by Joan DeJean

The story of the French colony of Luisiane (Louisiana) is one of the most compelling in all of the Gulf Coast’s rich history. Indeed, one might say it ranks among the most interesting in all of American history, for the enormous swath of land the French claimed as part of the colony stretched from the shimmering shores of the Gulf of Mexico all the way up to the central continental plains. A nearly seven-decades long episode involving international rivalries, political intrigue, the formation of critical alliances with Native groups, the creation of settlements, and devastating armed conflict, it is an era which witnessed the birth of such historic cities as Mobile and New Orleans and helped imbue the region with a distinctive cultural heritage. Yet the colony, which existed from 1682 until 1763, featured far more struggle, privation, stagnation and frustration than triumph. It grew slowly, suffered several setbacks, and never developed as the French hoped it would. Its inhabitants struggled mightily from lack of food, lack of supplies, and lack of attention for long stretches in its history. Perhaps none of Luisiane’s people endured worse conditions than some of its founding colonists, most of whom we know little about as individuals.

For this reason and many more, Joan DeJean’s Mutinous Women is truly a landmark volume in the historiography of the beleaguered colony. DeJean manages to present some of Luisiane’s most important but least understood settlers as real people, and explains how their contributions and experiences helped the colony not only develop as it did, but in a way played a significant role in the history of the greater Gulf Coast. The focus of her book are the women forcibly deported to the colony from France in the early 1700s, the “mutinous” women condemned to Parisian jails and marked by authorities as so far beyond reclamation that they were banished to what at the time was one of the most remote and least developed European settlements in the New World.

Nearly the first half of the book, in fact, is about these women’s lives in France, the first of whom arrived in the colony in 1719 on a ship named La Mutine after a harrowing voyage from Le Havre. Most of these women, as DeJean explains in incredible detail, were in truth poor, illiterate, and unable to resist or perhaps even comprehend the system of greed and corruption in which they were falsely charged with all manner of crimes in order to meet the needs of Luisiane’s corporate owners at the time. They were, quite literally, rounded up as targets of convenience, accused of crimes without the benefit of honest investigation or opportunities for defense, and sent packing. DeJean’s research into their stories—hundreds of them—is incredible. While her narrative presents their lives in as much detail as she can find and is a remarkable reference source for its completeness, many readers will wish she had summarized the overwhelmingly similar sagas which she explains in such detail in the first half of the book.

The narrative picks up pace as DeJean explores the story of how these women became the founding mothers of Luisiane. Her account of their living conditions, their marriages and the families they raised, and the communities they helped found is nothing less than a history of the colony. It is a lively one at that, extending far beyond the individual women and painting a vivid picture of what life was truly like on the Gulf Coast frontier in places such as Mobile, Biloxi, and New Orleans, and, to a lesser degree, French settlements in what are now Arkansas and Illinois.

DeJean, a Louisiana native who is trustee and professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of a dozen books on French and French colonial history, clearly approaches her topic with a personal interest and enthusiasm. Despite some occasional repetition—she includes numerous almost identical immigrant stories and pauses many times to place repeated emphasis on the irony of how some of the deported women ended  up ranking among the colony’s most successful and respected inhabitants—the book is informative and an enjoyable read. If you have an interest in Gulf Coast history and the French colonial period especially, you will want to know about this book. It is truly a major contribution to the historiography of the region and its subject.

JMB