Mutinous Women

While researching coming episodes of What Happened, I received as a Christmas gift a strange, beguiling book about an author’s quest to fill in a series of unexpected historical blanks

History is riddled with episodes in which significant plot twists are lost in the telling, when no one bothers to ask, “Whatever happened to that French orphan, Marie Baron, who supposedly stole a ribbon?”

Here arrives a book by Joan DeJean, a scholar originally from Louisiana who, until her death last month, divided her time between Paris and Pennsylvania, and who had found herself drawn into a series of entwined, largely unknown stories – one of which concerns the remarkable Marie Baron – in a Parisian archive while researching female convicts in 18^th century France. It seems safe to say that DeJean was largely alone on this particular matrix, and we are lucky she got on board.

DeJean’s nonfiction book, Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast, is about a group of destitute women who were framed for bogus crimes in 1719 Paris and exiled to France’s North American colony – Louisiana, aka The Mississippi, where females were in short supply. The women were essentially kidnapped by the crown to populate its faltering overseas holding. (Spoiler alert: France is not the chérie of this particular tale.)

What happened in Paris and later in Mississippi and Louisiana, and how it all came to be ignored in history, is the subject of DeJean’s book, a tour-de-force in uncovering hidden backstories. Somehow, no one seems to have known or cared much about any of it until DeJean came along, three centuries after the fact.

Mutinous Women follows 132 hapless souls who were relegated to the status of banished prostitutes, though in fact they were guilty only of being poor and expendable -- laundresses who were easily accused of theft; maids vulnerable to rape by male employers and resulting accusations by jealous wives; flower girls who seemed to enjoy their lives more than they should have. Most of the women were convicted of trumped up charges without evidence, and a few were essentially kidnapped by the police and shoved aboard unseaworthy ships without benefit of even a show trial.

At the time, women were needed to flesh out France’s Mississippi colony (as it was known starting out, though it was later called Louisiana), which was populated primarily by a scattering of woebegone single men. Apparently few free French women were up for immigrating voluntarily, so the Paris police began arresting useful targets to fulfill the needs of the ambitious, corrupt Scotsman John Law, a grandiose and convincing conman who had been hired by the French court to grow France’s economy, which was plagued by King Louis XIV’s war debt. Law laid claim to a commercial empire that encompassed the colony, to which he introduced African slavery. He also launched the use of paper money and masterminded the first stock market boom in history, a fraud now known as the Mississippi Bubble, centered on the colony. When the bubble burst, it crashed the French economy and ultimately forced the abandonment of the colonial effort, but while Law was riding high, he collaborated with an evil, sadistic female prison warden with a particular loathing of lower-class women who seemed suspiciously fun, and who banished disfavored inmates to the colony as part of a scheme in which the Paris police colluded. Despite the finery of period Paris, there is a post-apocalyptic air to all of this. There is plenty of debauchery, but not where it is supposed to be.

DeJean explores what happened to the captured women, and along the way illuminates the royal mess of 18^th century France, the unfathomable corruption among police and prison officials, the stunningly inhuman treatment of poor women of the era alongside the colony’s Native Americans and enslaved Africans, and ultimately, the remarkable triumph of some of the forced emigres who managed to create a new life in the New World, in some cases getting fabulously rich. Only one of the women, Marie Baron, ever returned to France. The rest planted their DNA in what came to be the United States, mostly in Gulf Coast states and the Mississippi River valley.

There is no question who would be the lead character in a movie based on DeJean’s book: Marie Baron, the penniless Paris orphan who was convicted, without evidence, of stealing ribbon from the period equivalent of a Galleria store, was imprisoned, shackled in the hold of a ship named La Mutine (“mutinous woman”), and survived a rough three-month-long passage to what was basically another planet, where she got dumped on a beach. She eventually made her way to the Natchez outpost on the Mississippi River, where she married a soldier, pieced together a frontier life, then was captured by warring Native Americans who killed her husband and eldest son, and suffered untold tribulations while in their possession. After the authorities traded goods for her and several other captives’ release, Marie Baron married her husband’s best friend. Later, their farm burned and the couple grew weary of filthy, disreputable frontier New Orleans, where people were stealing their vegetables (“Tired of living in a country like that” her husband later wrote), so they returned to France, where she was reunited with long lost cousins. “So, Marie, what have you been doing with yourself the last 18 years?”

As the sole returnee to the country that royally screwed her over, Marie Baron is an outlier, but she shared the same unimaginably harsh experiences with the other mutinous women. After their arrests, the women were imprisoned in squalid quarters, subsisted on starvation diets, dressed in rags, and, following their transfer to Law’s hands by the Cruella de Vil of prison wardens, were paraded through the streets of Paris and onto those unseaworthy ships, where they were shackled together for three months in dark holds, then dumped on barren Gulf Coast beaches. Many died, but among the 62 that survived, most managed to raise families and, in some cases, to become wealthier than their tormenters in France could have ever have hoped to be. Today, their names survive in places and among descendants from Mobile to New Orleans, Natchez and beyond.

DeJean became interested while researching that scholarly work on French history – her specialty, sometimes to a fault. In a Parisian prison archive, she stumbled upon a reference to a woman who was banished to the Mississippi colony “de force,” or involuntarily. As often happens when trying to figure out what happened, the story then branched out in remarkable, unexpected ways.

The book is a weird travelogue of both 18^th century France and its North American colony, and at times is made dense by DeJean’s dutiful scholarship. Also, it can be confusing to follow the interwoven plots of so many characters, every other one of whom seems to have been named Marie. But hats off to DeJean for asking and answering the question of what happened.

DeJean died on Dec. 2, 2023; her survivors include Mutinous Women, which chronicles those remarkable women and what happened to them in the long ago.

Notes

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

Image: Period flyer for The Mississippi, from Creative Commons