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

by Joan DeJean

The secret history of the rebellious Frenchwomen who were exiled to colonial Louisiana and found power in the Mississippi Valley In 1719, a ship named La Mutine (the mutinous woman), sailed from the French port of Le Havre, bound for the Mississippi. It was loaded with urgently needed goods for the fledgling French colony, but its principal commodity was a new kind of women. Falsely accused of sex crimes, these women were prisoners, shackled in the ship’s hold. Of the 132 women who were sent this way, only 62 survived. But these women carved out a place for themselves in the colonies that would have been impossible in France, making advantageous marriages and accumulating property. Many were instrumental in the building of New Orleans and in settling Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, and Mississippi. Drawing on an impressive range of sources to restore the voices of these women to the historical record, Mutinous Women introduces us to the Gulf South’s Founding Mothers.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Historical, Feminism, American History, France, Book Club

448 pages, Hardcover

First published April 19, 2022

About the author

Joan DeJean has been Trustee Professor at the University of Pennsylvania since 1988. She previously taught at Yale and at Princeton. She is the author of eleven books on French literature, history, and material culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including most recently How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City (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 lives in Philadelphia and, when in Paris, around the corner from the house where, in 1612, this story began.

Reviews

[Lucy Doughty · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish the book was organized differently! It was too easy to get lost in the names as it stands now - but there were so many themes by which the material could have been presented for flow and interest. Still a fascinating story but I feel like I missed out on some impact...

[Tarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe it’s just because I am descended from at least one La Mutine survivor, but I could not put it down. Despite having read a great deal about my ancestor, Anne Francoise Roland, and having access to a lot of court papers related to her deportation (thanks to the research of some cousins), I still learned a lot about her and her family specifically. I knew her grandson through her son, Francois Sarrazin, became a Quapaw chief. I had never heard of Antoine Sarrazin planning the Pointe Coupee slave rebellion. I descend from Anne through her Bordelon sons (both, multiple times over). It was great to learn so much more about her and her life in the colony as well as her family in Paris. I also enjoyed learning about the other women on La Mutine and I am so thankful a bit of their identity was given back to them. Such a well researched, well written book.

[Samantha Matherne · Rating 4 out of 5]

My interest in this book stemmed from a basic genealogical search that led to me learning an ancestor on my father's maternal side came to Louisiana from France forcibly on La Mutine. A search about that ship brought up the book's title and information about it. My library being in southeast Louisiana meant that of course we have a copy of Mutinous Women. I remember first seeing the book as a new nonfiction title added to the collection while at work late last year, and its contents did intrigue me because of a love for history, particularly Louisiana history. One day I expected to maybe read it, but the newfound family connection drove the book into my hands immediately.

The book is not written as narrative nonfiction, but I feel its more accessible to audiences that enjoy history without being written in a super academic way. Parts of the early chapters that repeatedly detail where the deported women came from and their alleged crimes felt dull, but on the whole I had a great reading experience. From my education, I know some core parts of the history contained within, but much information was new to me or expanded on what I previously learned. DeJean could not tell the stories of these women without laying out history of Louisiana as a land and colony, but the main focus of the work is on the people who created that history. French leaders and other powerful people are often not presented in a positive light, but the early days of Louisiana were not giving any allusion to the "Big Easy" nickname New Orleans knows itself as today.

Anne Francoise Rolland, my ancestor, features prominently throughout the book along with her relations through marriage in Louisiana including the Bordelon family that I descend from. Learning about family history through historical records is fascinating for me, and I'm truly excited to grow my knowledge of these ancestors as best I can when I have time. Already, I have found sources outside this book that document further historical impacts of this side of my family and spontaneously learned similar connections to history from another area of the country about my mother's paternal ancestors.

Do your research, if you're even a little curious about family history. You cannot begin to guess what you may find. I have discovered that I am twice a Daughter of the American Revolution through Antoine Bordelon I and from a relation on my mother's side. Yes, I'll be adding this book to my personal library eventually.

[Audrey Ashbrook · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mutinous Women by Joan DeJean is the true story of the women deported from Paris, France to Louisiana on a ship named La Mutine in 1719. Of the 132 women aboard, 62 survived and went on to become members of the "New World" trying to build along the Gulf Coast in the French colonies. Nearly all of the women had been falsely accused of sex crimes, trafficking, or other offenses and jailed in Paris before being forcibly removed to Louisiana. 

I appreciate the time and research DeJean put in to tell this story. These women, unjustly treated, had fascinating lives in an important time in history. I love that DeJean honors them here, telling us their stories, because these women were incredibly brave and astute and had a great impact on early Louisiana.

I would have loved it if this book had been organized differently, perhaps focusing on one woman at a time. After the women arrived in Louisiana, often their stories were not told in a linear fashion, and time jumped back and forth often and around to different people. It was confusing to follow. 

[Denise · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars rounded down.

I really enjoyed the story this book was trying to tell. I had never heard any of the stories contained here and the history was fascinating. But I think the author made a pretty big misstep in her organization. There were just too many women she was trying to follow. And their stories weren't set out in a linear fashion. It's like we get a couple paragraphs about a woman's history in one chapter, three chapters later we get one sentence about her, two chapters later we get a paragraph about her life 10 years later, in the next chapter we get three paragraphs about her life 5 years earlier, etc. And it's this same organization for dozens of women. There aren't enough details to keep any of them straight (not the fault of the author, there's obviously a lack of record keeping to take into account) when the reader is inundated with so many bits and pieces about so many different women. The lack of cohesion was a real detriment to my enjoyment of the book overall.

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Joan DeJean gives us an interesting look at how Europeans established themselves in the New World. And if you thought the idea of Europeans setting up shop where people were ALREADY living was bad... it gets worse! Interesting but worse.

The short of it is, women weren't super keen to travel to the "New World." At least, not at the same rate that men were. Turns out that populating a faraway land isn't easy without a decent birth rate. DeJean covers the history of the French kingdom's attempts to up the New World numbers (sometimes with consenting participants, sometimes with... non-consenting ones), but for the most part she focuses the book on the few but striking stories of women who deportations to Louisiana were recorded. Not surprisingly, few of these already scant stories end well.

In an attempt to get two birds with one stone, France decided to send "undesirable" female convicts to the French territory of Louisiana (which is actually much bigger than present-day Louisiana). Many of these women were falsely accused. Some might have been "guilty" (using quotation marks here because let's just say, not all laws were prosecuted in good faith when the people doing the deporting were profiting from this endeavor) but still did not deserve the ordeal they underwent as a result.

And yet, some managed to build a lasting legacy in spite of these horrors. Others did not. It's fascinating to read DeJean's research bring these women's clearly terrifying experience to life. These titular "mutinous women" were far from home, without any say as to where they would be deposited, and essentially at the mercy of people who only saw them as cheap labor and marriage material to bear more kids (who could also eventually become a labor force). Grim, I know, but it's a little known aspect of French-American history, and I'm glad I know more now.

Recommended if you are interested in France's history of American colonization, women in the early 18th century criminal justice system, and the history of several states that used to make up the French-controlled territory of Louisiana.

Thank you to Basic Books and Netgalley for granting me an eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[Lafayette Public Library Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an exhaustively researched book about convict women who were deported to populate the new French Colony in 1719 (Louisiana). These are not the same women as the "Casket Girls," who came to the New World by choice. This is the story of women who were forcibly expelled from France because they were in some ways "undesirable." A confluence of world events at the time came together to incentivize the warden of a notorious women's prison, Salpetriere, to inflate the crimes of female petty criminals (or simply poor women who were in the wrong place and wrong time) and select them for deportation to Louisiana. The story of these women has never been told, so this book is an important one. It has slight echoes of the African slave trade, because the women were chained together on a harrowing 4-month transatlantic sea voyage. The difference is that the women, although reviled as convicts in their homeland, were allowed freedom and a fresh start in Louisiana. When they arrived, there was absolutely no infrastructure in the new land, which they had to build from scratch. DeJean does a very admirable job of piecing together scant pieces of documentation to trace what happened after their arrival - the women married and settled in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Illinois. The survivors have living descendants today, and lived out their lives in peace and prosperity - something that would have been impossible if they had stayed in France. DeJean's research is praiseworthy, but the middle is a bit of a confused jumble, and it was practically impossible as a reader to keep all of the Maries and Annes straight. A less academic structure may have served this story well.

[Megh Toth · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very heavy book, reads like a thesis paper and 370 pages of that is a lot! In short, France was corrupt and chose women to make this journey to Louisiana. Many women were wrongly accused of crimes, families turned female members in to authorities to try and "save them", and false documentation proved detrimental to these women who helped shape New Orleans into its modern-day self! I read up to page 118 before I ditched...

[Shelly Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is not for everyone; however, for those willing to perservere through the mountain of names, places, events, and research it's a fulfilling read!

Joan DeJean is to be applauded for her meticulous and piercing research to disseminate the details of 132 women falsely accused - and never legally convicted - in the early 1710s and "exported" to French Colonial Louisiana under the harshest conditions possible. Truly, it was shocking to read and imagine how 62 women survived being shackled and force marched, before experiecing their own "middle passage" and abandonment on an island strip of inhabitable land for months.

Every chapter, every few pages, I found myself processing historical information I've never read or studied before. The author expertly provided sufficient context of the era before and after 1719-1720 with the emergence of stocks, quickly rising wealth, and the ultimate crash orchestrated by John Law.

The abundance of information and detail about the women, the economics, the land, the colonies, meant that this book takes time to read and process. At times, I wished she'd included an appendix with the list of all the known women with the briefest biographical blurb possible. The Maries all started to blend together. (sorry, but true) I was particularly fascinated with the evolution of the cities we know today, particularly Natchez and New Orleans and Des Allemands.

"Is a miscarriage of justice any less grievous because it took place three centuries ago? Should the suffering inflicted upon Frenchwomen in 1719 remain buried if it affects the living...? Don't their descendants deserve to know about the women who founded families and cities on these shores?"

Everyone should read through the Acknowledgements and recognize that a book of this caliber is a partnership with archivists, librarians, archeologists, historians, and friends. One completed during a pandemic meant that many of these connections went above and beyond to provide information and assistance.

NOTE: I wish that this was available in audiobook format.

[Elizabeth Boquet]

Amazing archival recovery research. DeJean has painstakingly uncovered a century's worth of women's history in this region that had previously been completely covered up. It reads, not surprisingly, like a very first pass at this kind of history--not fictionalized character development or narrative force or anything like that. Just detail after detail after detail. By the latter 1/3 of the book, I did begin to get a sense of who these women were, as DeJean traced their marriages, fortunes and misfortunes, deaths of children and husbands, etc. But that's really not the point of this kind of text. The point is to reveal, reveal, reveal, one after the other, the horrific circumstances these women were subjected too, the near impossibility of colonizing the Gulf Coast region of the US, and the sheer fortitude of anyone who survived this passage.

[Holly Vaughan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was very intrigued and interested in this book since I’m from Louisiana. The author obviously did extensive research, however, I found the book hard to follow and wished it had been organized differently. There are so many women listed, and they are all either named Marie or Marie Anne… it was hard to keep track of who was who. Information was also often repeated, and the timeline often went back and forth again and again. Sometimes it felt like I was just reading a long list of people in a phone book. But I do appreciate that this author is shedding light on these women and how they came here! I just wish it didn’t read like a long textbook.

[Meghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall I found this interesting and intriguing, but I also echo other reviews of formatting, temporal organization, and storylines. Colonial Louisianan era history is obviously complex, and this book dealt with a small slice of that history. Eventually I gave up trying to keep the various Maries and Annes and Françoises straight (not to mention their spouses and places of residence) and just read the story. I do wish there’d been a chart of the women who recurred numerous times; each woman is worthy of being known but there were a large number mentioned perhaps once and not again.

[Janilyn Kocher · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had never heard of this batch of women before. I always like to read about previously overlooked groups in history. I like it when nuggets of information are flushed out of history and revealed.
I thought the subject was fascinating and the scholarship was good. The writing was a bit dry and my attention drifted often while reading the book.
Thanks to Basic books and NetGalley for the advance read.

[Deanna O'Nap · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great story but read like a text book.

[Martha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating account of a little known episode in French history and how it influenced the events of colonial Louisiana. The story of John Law’s manipulation of the French financial system was eerily reminiscent of Elon Musk, DOGE, and the cryptocurrency craze—but in 18th century France the people who suffered the consequences were women who were basically snatched from the streets of Paris and deported against their will to the Louisiana wilderness where Law was promoting a colony. The author did some amazing research and managed to follow many of the women who somehow managed to survive their brutal experiences. In fact, she followed some of them to the third generation and towards the end it became a little difficult to keep them all straight, especially since so, many of them were named Marie. Still, a very interesting look at the early history of Louisiana.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joan DeJean is a master of the craft of history. French Louisiana has always been a favorite subject for me as a history major from college. I have never read a narrative of Louisiana put together so well to give the forgotten colony so much life. Some critique that the organization of the book is not to their liking. However, I argue that if you pay attention to the stories of the individual women, with the constant remembrance of who they are throughout the various periods and towns, it ties together as a web to explain the life of Louisiana in itself. This is a beautiful historical nonfiction narrative that I will pick up again for research purposes.

[Mike Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you enjoy local history (New Orleans and Gulf Coast), then this is a good read. The author goes into great detail about two boat loads of women who were rounded up and exiled to the Louisiana colony. The first third of the book details how it happened in Paris and the rest of the book follows their exploits once they got here. Sort of amazing that the records even exist. Might have flowed better without all of the minutia.

[Mikaela · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish this was organized better. Lots of research went into it, but it was confusing to follow.

[Olivia Adelman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ladies and gents I’m not kidding I started this book in August and just finished. it was a momentously boring read filled with record keeping and archives BUT the story is truly fascinating so buckle up

[theatre darkens, old timey projector starts whirring, picture begins to play] :

John Law, a Scottish investor, decides he can make it big in France in the late 1600s by helping to create France’s first ever stock market. The French aristocracy go crazy with the idea of quick cash and speculation runs rampant. Speculation surrounding what investments? The French colony of Louisiana. This man scrapped together a massive marketing campaign beguiling the French people into thinking Louisiana was a thriving cash cow colony. In reality it was a SWAMP.

Law created a speculation bubble that would’ve made the 2008 US housing crisis look like a boo boo that needs a kiss from mommy and a rainbow band aid. Law somehow convinced the French monarchy to hand over ownership of the colony to his company (think Dutch East India Co.) so a $ invested to that company was a $ in his pocket.

Law claimed the colony could be profitable but there weren’t enough colonists to clear and farm the land. So do you know what his solution was?

In a colluded scheme that involved Parisian police, French prisons, and the French court of justice systems, poor French women were arrested on unfounded grounds of prostitution, imprisoned and then deported via prisoners on ships to Louisiana.


This book follows the narratives of those women

[Christy-JC Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I appreciated this examination of an area about which I know too little. The research here is astounding. She tells the stories with such detail of women who were banished from Paris – for “crimes” they did not commit (really, they were mostly guilty of being very poor) – and how they built lives eventually when they got to Louisiana around 1720.

My big takeaways are that the difficult origins in this area strongly resemble how I think about Jamestown – a mess of disease, violence, and poor support from England/France. I didn’t realize how terrible the French colonies were here for their first couple of decades. Law was the Frenchman credited with/blamed for with directing the bleak settlement, but he was focused on growing tobacco, which never took off. Men in France wanted to sell French goods to the inhabitants, but they were too poor and desperate to buy the imports and they had little to export. The women – whom she restores to our narrative with such detail and surprising breadth and depth – usually married, had children, and (many) survived to old age, much longer than they probably would have in France.

I was curious about the history of Ship Island, where they had to stay for a while at the beginning. Sounds like a bad episode of “Naked and Afraid.” (p. 193 ish)

The main settlements she describes include Biloxi (grim!), Mobile (better – many resourceful women did well there, but a hurricane shifted the focus to New Orleans in 1722 (p. 242 ish), New Orleans (did better; I skimmed), and then parts further north to Illinois (where they grew wheat and benefited from bear oil!) Toward the end here she gets into more conflict and contact with the indigenous people, and I did find myself wondering why they weren’t more present and important in the early parts of the book. She indicates that they were already largely diminished by disease. In this later section, I appreciated her discussion of the fate of the Natchez people in a French land grab and the conflict among indigenous people exacerbated by French-English conflicts (something I discuss in class & an AP theme).

By the end of the century, Napoleon was ready to let go of the colony, she says BEFORE the revolution in (today’s) Haiti. (I teach that Haiti made him realize he couldn’t maintain the region, but perhaps I should look into that.) After a century of difficulties – tobacco’s flop there, slave uprisings, conflict with Native Americans, etc. – Napoleon made the LP sale.

I did wish for a bit more on the history of slavery in the region, as well as the indigenous people, but that wasn’t the main point of the story. Overall, I learned a lot, and was struck by the level of detail and extensive research required to write this important and impressive book. I’m eager to read something else by her – perhaps her study of the ideas about Sappho.

(This is long because I wrote for my own teaching & lecture notes)

[Mary · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have the same complaint as others - the disorganized fashion in which the material is presented is problematic and frustrating. Jumping back and forth between time periods as well as the different stories of the women left me confused. I can’t understand that in one chapter the population of Mobile is greater than New Orleans or Biloxi, but in the next chapter New Orleans is thriving and has decidedly more people than either other place. Also, New Orleans homes are nothing more than shacks but inhabitants have sommeliers to care for their wine, linens, and China. It makes no sense.

[Jaime Long · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF after page 54. While the historical aspects were intriguing at first, the author consistently repeats information and jumps around with dates. This impacts the flow of fluency and honestly just wastes time k owing there are 370 pages to read.

[Alicia Farmer · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a tough one. The author did so much research. And it's a fascinating, and heretofore untold (? I think) story. But it reads like a slightly-more-polished version of the notes, with nothing omitted.

The gist of the book: in the early 1700's, a Parisian women's prison warden partnered with the government to assemble a shipment of several hundred "criminal" women to banish to France's colony in what is now the central Gulf Coast. Almost all of the charges on which the women were arrested and imprisoned were fabricated and/or exaggerated. It was a patent travesty of justice that more or less scooped poor and vulnerable women off the street and sailed them to misery.

As with slavery's middle passage, the trans-Atlantic crossing was overwhelmingly fatal, with fewer than a quarter of the women surviving the trip. Then they were dumped on an off-shore island where there was no shelter and no provisions. More women died there.

Eventually the women who survived that long got hauled over to Billoxi, a crude settlement that served as the colony's first capitol. From there, women scattered, some to New Orleans, some to Mobile, and some farther inland. Many became founding mothers of the oldest and largest lineages in New Orleans and Louisiana today.

Alas, what would have been an interesting 100-page history was drowned in details. Almost each of the 200+ women who was put on the ship for France's colony got a several paragraph treatment of the circumstances of her arrest. Because the great majority were trumped up charges of prostitution, it felt like reading the same few pages over and over. And half the women were named Marie, so I didn't have a prayer of keeping them straight. A few deeper dives on DeJean's part would have been far more effective than repeating variations on a theme.

The stories of the women once they arrived in the colonies went the same way: name, whom they married, when they married, what their spouse did to earn a living, where they settled, how many kids they had, and when they died. Over and over. I would have given up early on except that my son got this for me as a gift and I wanted to be able to give a report back.

I wish there was an abridged version that left out all of the individual histories and just told the larger one. DeJean discovered a really cool piece of history to share. Then she itemized all the life out of it.

[Jillian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hmmmm.

There's a story here...but DeJean did not write it. She made a list of names and dates and turned them into sentences without illuminating their significance. If somebody someday decides to write the story...they have a great sourcebook.

The text is almost 400 pages. A lot of that is statistics that could have been pushed into the endnotes, or French source material where we are given both the original French and an English translation, or unnecessary bonus information about when somebody was born or what their later descendant did. Was DeJean paid per word? It's not wrong to include any of that, but I read it not knowing why I'm reading it, so that it washes over me meaninglessly and gets forgotten. Finally I got to the end of the book where DeJean says she wanted to write about these women being treated like merchandise. OH, I said, is THAT what this book was about? This was a lesson for me about making a point. I can see, somewhere, the relationship between the women's deportation and the investment boom in France, or maybe I can see that there COULD be a relationship between them...but this book did not convince me that relationship exists, is important, or is interesting. It feels speculative.

I think DeJean got in her own way here. It is obvious that she wanted to pay these women some respect, that it was important to her to give us their names, to rescue them from faceless anonymity. But their names don't mean anything by themselves, and name after name after name blends into a muddy, NAMED anonymity. I have to say too that I found the writing in this book very unpleasant to read on a sentence level. It feels like DeJean is actually seeking out the most unnatural place to insert a new clause, like she is trying to make her sentences more complicated and unsettling. Is she trying to hide something? Or maybe camouflage the fact that she is NOT SAYING ANYTHING?

[Ginny Kaczmarek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating. As a New Orleanian for the past 20 years (and a tourist before that), I knew the general outlines of the founding of the city, but I'd never heard this story. Around 1719, more than 100 Parisian women were rounded up in cafes and pubs, sent to prison on trumped up charges, then shipped to the new colony of Louisiana at great profit to the jailers and arresting officers. The women who survived the journey arrived without food or clothing, yet went on to build homes with their bare hands; worked with indigenous people to hunt, fish, and farm; and married sailors and soldiers to raise families that sometimes became legacies. Many of the women, once chained together in the hull of a ship, spent their lives within blocks of one another, sharing resources and childcare in order to build a community.

Laden with details and organized by location rather than chronology, this is a scholarly work that's very readable, though I'd stop short of calling it novelistic. I'd love to know more about the individual women's day-to-day lives, but it's amazing that the author found as much about them as she did, tracing their lives through scant 300-year-old public records. If anything, this book is a corrective to the dismissive narrative that all women sent to Louisiana (other than the Ursuline nuns) were criminals and prostitutes that contributed nothing but trouble to the nascent city. Au contraire; these women were survivors who depended on one another to build a new society.

[Ken Wells · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a prodigious leap of research, and as a writer, arm-chair Louisiana historian and someone keenly interested in my Louisiana roots, I found this a remarkable addition to my understanding of the founding of the Louisiana Gulf Coast. The segue between the cruelty of life for the poor in 17th Century Paris and the grueling hardships of Colonial Louisiana made me appreciate even more the courage, determination and grit of the early settlers that included my mother's family, Swiss-Germans, who arrived in the Gulf Coast's desolate wilderness in 1721. DeJean's book makes it clear that it was pretty much a horror show in which only the lucky, brave and persistent survived. And of course, the conscription and incorrigible ill-treatment of poor Parisian women at the hands of corrupt police and bureaucrats was a sobering eye-opener. My quibble is mostly with the narrative. I found too much of the book reads like a long genealogical recitation; I might have preferred DeJean pick a representative character through which to tell the bigger story and find a way to tuck many of the collateral genealogical details into the book in way that didn't slow down the narrative. That said, I highly recommend this book (which was gifted to me) and keep it in a prominent position of my bookshelf as an indispensable part of my Louisiana historical collection.

[Kate. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three hundred years ago, 200 women were wrongfully deported from Paris and sent in shackles to the French colonies. Why? Failure to conform, poverty, police corruption, and the economics of colonialism. What happened when they got here? Starvation, pestilence, wrangling the bureaucracies of struggling colonial outposts, "marrying up" -- sometimes repeatedly, burying childresn, hurricanes, and slaughter in conflict with the indians in Natchez.

I had a few big takeaways from this book: the greatest was how much about these women's lives we can know even without their first-hand memoirs, the second greatest was how much I would LOVE to hear the story from their own perspectives. These women were low value (in internet speak) in Paris and were alchemized to very high value in Mobile and New Orleans. All they had to pay for this miraculous upgrade was unspeakable treatment in voyage and never seeing their families or homeland again. Can't help but think a few of them were kindred spirits who -- like myself -- marvelled over and over again at France's ineptitude in colonialism.

My favorite parts of this were the place-based stories -- how some women made their lives in Mobile, Alabama and how others built homes in the French Quarter of New Orleans, all on blocks and corners I know very well.

[Carla Hostetter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A scholarly work, exhaustively researched that explores an untold story of French women deported to the colonies often on trumped up charges, sometimes even turned in by families wanting to take their inheritance. The tale begins with an unusual murder for which a fruit seller is charged, jailed in awful conditions, and eventually exiled. She will leave her mark on the development of French Louisiana long before the casket girls arrive. While it seems over half the 150 or so women deported died on the way or soon after, the stout survivors, starved and in rags soon married, sometimes having multiple husbands and many offspring. After the initial case, however, the book does bog down in French politics and the John Law bubble that contributed to the women's fate. Doesn't help that so many of the women were named Marie, but that is something every genealogist runs into. Half way through the book, the women finally arrive in Louisiana and Mississippi and the interesting details pick up considerably telling what is known of their fates and their families. Those that survived made a significant contribution to settling the south and are now given credit for the first time.

[The Atlantic]

"Also in need of a revolution in their home country, but born several decades too early: The 132 French women, convicted of crimes as small as eating a stash of consecrated hosts in a time of scarcity, who were involuntarily sent to America’s Gulf Coast in 1719. Only 62 survived the journey, finding themselves on arrival in territory that, having been billed as resource-rich and ripe for development, was challenging in the extreme and sparsely dotted with French settlements. Yet the women found in their new surroundings opportunities that would have been impossible in France. They worked, married, and built the foundations of communities such as Mobile and New Orleans, forging bonds with one another along the way. Their lives became early examples of the American dream, and of its violence."

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/arc...

[Heather Puckett · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the first half of this book. It was so interesting reading about these Frenchwomen who were largely accused of crimes they did not commit - or at least crimes for which there was little or no evidence of them committing. I was riveted by the tales of corruption in the government, police force, and prison system. Apparently, not much has changed in the last 300 years...
But once the book moved from France to Louisiana, I started to lose interest. I found it hard to keep track of the names of all the women (almost every single one of them was named Marie!) and their stories lacked detail. I am sure DeJean conducted painstaking research, but I also know that record keeping at that time was inconsistent and unreliable. So I think it was challenging for DeJean to tell the women's stories because she was working with limited information. I guess I was hoping for clearer connections between these women convicts and the Louisiana of today.