One word in a barely legible phrase written in faded ink caught the eye of Penn Professor Joan DeJean when she came upon the file for a woman imprisoned in Paris more than 300 years ago. As she paged through archives at the Arsenal Library in France looking for someone arrested in 1719, she paused when she saw “et autres prisonnières de la Salpêtrière pour la Louisiane” underneath the name “Fontaine (M.-A.).”
The translation: “and other female prisoners in the Salpêtrière (prison) for Louisiana.”DeJean, a Trustee Professor who taught French and Francophone studies in the School of Arts & Sciences for 33 years, was born and raised in Louisiana, the last in her family’s lineage to speak both French and English. She had spent decades reading through files at the long wooden table in that archive in Paris, looking for a clue just like this one.
“Louisiana, that’s where it started. If I hadn’t been from Louisiana, I wouldn’t have opened that file, and I wouldn’t have seen the list of the women,” she says, women who became the focus of her research for the next 10 years, starting with Manon Fontaine, and culminating in DeJean’s latest book, “Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast.”
The book has received quite a bit of attention, including reviews in the The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, and the New York Times, and on WWNO in New Orleans, as well as an interview with the Fédération des Alliances Françaises USA.
“These are truly remarkable figures, and I want their descendants to be proud of them,” DeJean says. “My biggest hope is that the descendants, as many descendants as possible, will find the book and that they will understand that they have wonderful ancestors.”
In December 1719 a ship, named La Mutine, or the Mutinous Woman, departed France carrying a cargo of convicts, the only all-female roster of deportees to what would become the United States, Fontaine among them. Most of the 132 women were illiterate peasants, most wrongly accused with no evidence of a crime, most labeled as prostitutes.
Abandoned by their nation, they arrived at a nascent European settlement with newfound freedom and seemingly impossible challenges, becoming pioneers who built New Orleans and French trading outposts and settlements along the Mississippi River.
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