Yale French North American Studies

11/17/2022

10/12/2022

Please join us October 12 & 13 for this year's Festivals Acadiens et Créoles symposium.
This year's event is a combination live & virtual symposium- hosted at the A. Hays Town House at the Hilliard Art Museum in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Chair: Roger Mason, Frost School of Music | University of Miami

Sponsored by Festivals Acadiens et Créoles, CODOFIL, & Center for Louisiana Studies with the participation of the University of the Antilles and Sorbonne University, Paris, France.

For full schedule and more information, please visit https://www.francomusicforum.org/

Direct Zoom link:
https://ullafayette.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ZaXjUAbIQZeMm6s7DBE2Lw

07/18/2022

If you're exploring Ste. Genevieve on , you might be keeping an ear out for some French. While you likely won't hear many conversations in French today, it was one of the primary languages in the area for roughly 150 years.

French colonists brought their language to North America, and it adapted to the new environment alongside the people. The colonists were, after all, experiencing a different way of life and interacting with new animals and plants that they did not yet have names for. Just like someone born and raised in New York will speak English differently than someone who has spent their whole life in Texas, French colonists spoke their own dialects of French in the colonies.

The dialect found around Ste. Genevieve is called Paw Paw French. It includes words borrowed from other languages like "ouaouaron," a word for bullfrog likely borrowed from Wyandot, an Iroquoian language. Paw Paw French also included new combinations of existing French words like "bête piante," stinky beast, meaning a skunk.

As more and more German and American migrants came to Ste. Genevieve, the French language became less common. But if you , you may hear some of the French influence in the names that still adorn the town.

How has your own way of speaking been influenced by where you live?

06/15/2022

For over 20 years after St. Louis was founded, there were no doctors here.

04/15/2022

"On an October day in 1719, more than 100 women filed out of Paris’s Salpêtrière prison. Chained to one another and wearing only their shifts, they climbed onto carts that took them out of the city. They knew they had been banished from Paris, but they could not imagine the place they were being sent. Half a world away lay their new home, the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, where France had recently begun to establish a colony. [...] By discovering these poor women from the colonial past, 'Mutinous Women' conveys a fascinating history and a reminder that all kinds of people helped to build what became the United States."

Many of the women that France first settled in its American colonies had been arrested for prostitution—or poverty—and shipped away.

04/13/2022

"If you’re mapping your community onto a landscape and you’re mapping it onto your language in the same way, then you could theoretically move the language and thereby move the place. Not perfectly, but you know, to a large degree and still be psychologically OK. Right? Because it’s still the place, even if it’s in a new space. But if you lose both, then what have you got? If you’ve matched your community onto both the physical space and this linguistic space, and now both are gone, like, what are you anchored to anymore?"

have spoken French. But rising sea levels are submerging entire communities, forcing people to abandon their homes. As native French speakers move away, will the language survive in this most French of American states?

02/28/2022

Pélagie Amoureux is perhaps the most well-known member of the Amoureux Family in Ste. Genevieve. Even though she had been enslaved, she refused the expectations placed upon her. She chose to create a family with a white man of French descent, a union that was illegal in Missouri at the time. Pélagie gained her freedom in 1832, yet was forced to raise her children in a home separate from her husband Benjamin. During those years, Pélagie stood up for herself and her rights by taking three different men to court.

In 1852, Pélagie and Benjamin were finally able to move into a home together. They continued to raise their children in what today is called the Bauvais-Amoureux House, where Pélagie lived until her death at age 85. She was an example to others throughout her life, a woman who established an identity for herself, not one prescribed by the community.


Photo: Three women, including Pelagie who is seated in the middle, from an Amoureux Family photo, courtesy of descendants of the Amoureux Family.

02/04/2022

Timbre canadien à l’effigie de Mathieu DaCosta, interprète à l’époque de Champlain. Encore une fois, nous nous retrouvons au début de févrie...

01/23/2022

For National Handwriting Day, a 1750 note from the Montreal-born Marie-Catherine Michel de Villebois, then aged ten, to her father in Louisiana. Now at the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec / Grande Bibliothèque.

12/25/2021

Vierge à l’Enfant
Jean-Antoine Aide-Créquy (1749-1780)
1774
Le Monastère des Augustines de Québec

12/23/2021

https://benfranklinsworld.com/episode-318-ste-genevieve-national-historical-park/

History of Ste Genevieve NHP