The Founding French Fathers

Pierre, Sieur d'Iberville

Jean-Baptiste, Sieur d'Bienville

Angela Merici, Foundress of the Ursulines

Because the French, not the British, founded and settled New Orleans, the city developed a unique outlook from its inception. Even after the city’s close relationship with France had ceased, the French attitude at the heart of the city’s culture was the framework upon which New Orleans built its own traditions.

The French were Catholic, not Protestant like the founders of most other New World settlements which eventually became American cities. The French Catholic did not share the unremittingly severe, sober view of life with the New England Puritans, for one. While religious, the French Catholics also enjoyed good food and sensual pleasures. Mardi Gras, the most famous and raucous of New Orleans festivals, is a Catholic holiday after all. And in French, Mardi Gras means “Fat Tuesday”—a time of indulgence before the self-imposed austerity of Lent. The tension between the sacred and profane, the joyous and the mournful (as with jazz funerals, for example), has long formed an essential part of the Crescent City’s character.

Early in New Orleans history, a coterie of Ursuline nuns were invited to establish a convent to give the colony spiritual guidance and instruction. They inducted people of all races, enslaved and free, into Catholicism and solidified New Orleans’ Catholic character. (In addition, they started a Catholic girl’s school in 1727, the oldest one in America still operating.) The Catholic nature of New Orleans helped attract future populations of immigrants that shaped the city, from Italians who for a while turned the French Quarter into “Little Italy” to the Irish who built a canal important for New Orleans’ growth, from the Haitians who introduced voodoo in the early 19th century to the Vietnamese who arrived after the Vietnam War.

Louisiana was claimed for France in 1682, and two brothers of the surname Le Moyne, formally known as Sieur d’Iberville and Sieur de Bienville, founded New Orleans seventeen years later. La Nouvelle Orléans was named in honor of the Duke of Orleans, France’s ruling regent until the young Louis XV could take the throne, but the French name was also chosen to encourage French settlers who would have balked at coming to a place with an Indian name like Biloxi or Natchitoches. Two French engineers laid out the first 66 squares of a walled village, what later would be known as the French Quarter or the Vieux Carré (Old City). Streets were named after lesser royalty in the Duke’s court. Indian hunters, German farmers, and trappers traded their goods in a clearing where the French Market stands today.

Even during forty years of Spanish rule, New Orleans remained unequivocally French. Schools taught lessons in French, newspapers published in French, and New Orleanians looked to France for culture and fashions. In 1803 when New Orleans permanently passed into American governance, the French Creoles found themselves at odds in many ways with the Americans moving in. Since then, New Orleans has become an American city, but its French heart is still beating.