America’s French Roots
Join the Federation of Alliances Francaises USA (AFUSA) for an online presentation from author and professor Joan DeJean on her new book Mutinous Women: How French Mothers Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast.
This event will be on Zoom and is free for all Alliance Française members. Please register and consider donating to our cultural programs by using the button above. Registered attendees will receive a Zoom link to their email the day before the event.
About the Book
Everyone expects a family with a French name living in New Orleans to be descended from ancestors born in France. But a family named Guttmann whose members now reside in D.C., New York City, and New Jersey? Hardly.
And yet the Guttmanns are direct descendants of Marie Daudin, daughter of a dock worker in Orleans, France, deported to the French colony called “Louisiana” in 1719. In “America’s French Roots,” Joan DeJean will talk with four Guttmann siblings about how Marie Daudin ended up on a ship named La Mutine, Marie’s life during five decades spent in New Orleans, and the lives of her descendants, their ancestors, through the centuries.
The Guttmanns’ story is far from unique. The Frenchwomen deported along with Marie Daudin by now have descendants living all over this country, and there are surely many Americans today who have no idea that they have French ancestors. “America’s French Roots” may well be far more extensive than anyone realizes.
Mutinous Women is available at basicbooks.com. Click here for a recent review by the Wall Street Journal.
About Joan DeJean
Joan DeJean is a Trustee Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She previously taught at Yale and at Princeton. She is the author of twelve books on French literature, history, and material culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including “The Invention of Paris: Making the City Modern” (2014); “The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual and the Modern Home Began” (2009); “The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour” (2005).
She grew up in southwest Louisiana, in a family and a town in which Louisiana’s French past was the stuff of daily life. For over thirty years, she has divided her time between Philadelphia and Paris, where she has always worked in the very archives in which, in 2016, she happened upon the story of the women banished/deported to Louisiana in 1719.