Creativity through destructive tendencies: Utopian designs in early modern French travel literature on Louisiana
Description
Seventeenth and eighteenth-century French writers on Louisiana produced a wealth of propaganda on the colony known as Louisiana. This literature contained extensive descriptions of the colony's environment, peoples, and history. Stated within this literature were French plans for building a new society in Louisiana. French writers on Louisiana intended to improve upon the Ancien Regime French society which had proven unsatisfactory, violent, and inadequate in the eyes of many of its members. Despite their plans to remake their society in a better form in Louisiana, the French writers failed in their endeavors to construct a non-violent community in the territory. The reason for this failure was the fact that the Louisiana French showed definite destructive proclivities in their social construction. The Louisiana French believed that the sacrifice of the natural environment and of non-white peoples living in the colony was acceptable if made for the greater good of the civilization they tried to build. The French in Louisiana exploited the environment and destroyed Native American culture and African-American freedom in their pursuit of social-construction. The decision to exploit the landscape and the peoples of Louisiana resulted in a society that was violent, much like Ancien Regime France, as seen by the revolts and conspiracies that resulted from European policy in the region. The French writers and other philosophes revealed this violence in their records of the history of the colony and their anti-imperialist literature