The Hustle and Bustle of City Life

Abstract

This chapter investigates how the ancien régime culture, with which officials and settlers came to French Louisiana and which made them highly sensitive to the issue of maintaining their rank in public, intersected with the process of racialization. As the urban milieu facilitated cross-racial encounters and exchanges of all kinds in public civic and religious ceremonies, drinking houses, and street encounters, most whites quickly became aware of the need to maintain some appearance of social superiority and to display and instill the socio-racial hierarchy by their exclusive and violent behaviour in the public space. Still, people of African descent never ceased to fight against their domination, invisibility, and segregation.