The Martyrs of Louisiana 

On the 18th of June 1842, in a doctor’s office on Esplanade Avenue in New Orleans, a French poet and playwright named Auguste Lussan died of a surgical operation meant to relieve yellow fever.  The attending physician was Jean François Beugnot, a prominent doctor who had immigrated from France, and who would soon present and publish his approach to treatment of yellow fever in a regional medical journal, research which would later be recognized by Napoleon III with the award of the Legion of Honour.

The cause of yellow fever was still unknown, but Dr. Beugnot believed that what was needed for treatment was to shock the body out of its affliction by bloodletting to the point of syncope (seizure) followed by administration of a heavy dose of sulphate of quinine. Bloodletting was still a common, if medieval, practice among doctors trained in France in the mid-1800s, though it was increasingly rejected as ineffective by many physicians including some in Paris and New Orleans. While quinine was a godsend against malaria, it was worse than useless for treating yellow fever because quinine is toxic, particularly for a patient with already depleted platelets, and large doses can cause fatal side-effects. Lussan died on the table, likely of this combined treatment, and days later, his hearse proceeded from Esplanade Avenue down the old Bayou Road towards a potter’s field where he would be buried as only an impoverished man would, directly in the ground with a covering of earth. Sadly, he had planned to return to France with his young spouse, twenty-five-year old Antoinette, and their five-year old daughter Marie-Augustine and infant son Eugene later that same year.  The tragedy of Lussan’s death, a fellow artist to the very end,  inspired a milestone in Black History— the first book in the canon of African American literature, Les Cenelles.  

Yellow fever had by then become the scourge of New Orleans and would go on to kill over 40,000 citizens by the end of the century. The epidemics had greatly increased with the post-1803 influx of immigrants from St. Domingue where yellow fever had already decimated Napoleon’s army, killing within a few months over 90% of the 30,000 soldiers sent to quell the slave rebellion. This extreme mortality rate is thought to have resulted from an immune-naïve soldiery, the seasonal maneuvering by rebellion leaders Toussaint L’Overture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and the bloodletting favored by the French doctors. Napoleon had apparently planned to use a reconquered St. Domingue, with an eventual force of 60,000 troops, as a base to launch an attack on the weakly defended United States through New Orleans and the Mississippi Valley.   The yellow fever outbreak of 1802 closed that door and led instead to the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Haiti and New Orleans have remained connected ever since, with a shared history and culture as well as similarly devastating natural disasters.

The outbreak of 1841 caused New Orleans to declare an emergency by late June when, of the 100 people who had already contracted the disease that early summer, 20 had already died. There would be total of 1,641 deaths from yellow fever by year’s end, a pattern of mortality that continued in the years that followed.  The summer of 1853 saw the worst outbreak in the history of the city, which was anticipated by one New Orleans physician, Dr. Edward Hall Barton, who used statistics to document periodicity in the outbreaks (due to the timing of mosquito breeding, a link unverified until the next century. Barton was among the many who eschewed the practice of bloodletting as ineffective.  Decades of repeated outbreaks of deadly yellow fever and other infectious diseases earned New Orleans the sobriquet “City of the Dead.”

 The horse-drawn hearse carrying Lussan’s body—and the small entourage of artists who followed—did not pass without notice.  Armand Lanusse, the noted Black poet and educator and a group of poet colleagues were residing at the time in an old house on the Bayou Road.  For this group, the vision of a fellow poet who died a pauper while his work was celebrated in New Orleans was a contradiction they could not ignore. It also opened a door. As of 1830, publication of political criticism by Black writers was illegal in Louisiana but Lanusse nevertheless began assembling some 84 poems of 17 Black authors, concerning the beauty of the women of New Orleans, for a volume titled Les Cenelles: Choix de poésies indigènes, known in English as Mayhaws: A Selection of Native Poetry (1845).  Mayhaws are hawthorn berries, beautiful and delicious but surrounded by sharp thorns that make picking them hazardous, perhaps an allusion to the risks presented to Black men by their courtship. Now, 180 years later, Les Cenelles is recognized as the first entry in the canon of African American literature. 

Lanusse himself wrote the introduction (here translated from the original French):

    …Three years ago, we found ourselves in a house located on the road to the bayou. From there, we noticed seven or eight artists who were sadly following on foot a hearse of poor appearance. The sight of this convoy excited our curiosity and we took some information on the one who was going so modestly to occupy his place in the field of rest; it was the body of the author of the beautiful drama entitled: The Martyrs of Louisiana, it was the remains of a distinguished poet that we were going to a cemetery where only poverty seeks a burial, that we were going, I say, to cover with the same quantity of mud that the remains of the poorest and most obscure individual in our city require!… .”

    And yet, go and tell one of these beings who is truly born a poet, however unfortunate he may be, go and tell him: Follow me, abandon a career which offers you only a dreadful prospect; come, I will undertake to procure for you a lucrative job by means of which you will be able to aspire to a future a thousand times more flattering. You will then hear him repeat with enthusiasm and with a slight change the very true words of the actor Kean, in the play of that name by the immortal Dumas, you will hear this man exclaim with all his energy as a poet wounded in his dearest belief: “Who would leave poetry, never!”

So ​​why despise feelings that one cannot share? Why not respect the convictions of others whatever they may be?… .

    We are therefore publishing this collection with the aim of making known the productions of some young lovers of poetry who are doubtless not jealous of the great successes obtained on the stage or in the literary world by Louisiana poets who have had the good fortune to draw knowledge from the best sources of Europe, for the latter will always be a subject of emulation for the former, but never an object of envy.

    And if by chance this volume reaches the generation that is to follow ours, the poets of this future era will doubtless regard it with the same interest that one takes in looking at simple monuments that were erected by mortals as simple as these monuments themselves. These poets will see there how those who preceded them thought, and how these charming Louisiana women were sung, whose beauty, graces and amiability will doubtless be preserved in all their marvelous purity in those who succeed them.
                                                                      Armand Lanusse 1845.

The significance of Lanusse’s introduction was noted by, among others, the distinguished author and editor of the French-language Tintamarre Press, Dana Kress,  professor of French at Centenary College of Louisana:

Indeed, Creole writers of color founded a major American literary movement whose importance was analogous to the creation of jazz.  As is noted in the Anthologie de poésie louisianaise du XIXe siècle, Armand Lanusse’s introduction to Les Cenelles stands as a sort of manifesto for this socially engaged literary movement that has been called the School of New-Orleans, and whose vision was shared by a large coterie of authors who worked to bring about social change in American society.

—Dana Kress (2010) Anthologie de poésie louisianaise du XIXe siècle.

Lanusse’s account of the hearse and walking entourage suggests that Auguste Lussan must have been buried close to the Bayou Road, either in the nearby cemetery that later became Holt Cemetery but was used for decades before, or possibly the Bayou St. John Cemetery, which was even closer to Bayou Road though the exact location remains unknown. Both cemeteries held Black citizens buried free of charge under the soil in a potter’s field, as described by Lanusse, unlike St. Louis and other costly New Orleans white cemeteries with above-ground tombs. The Black cemeteries also received victims of yellow fever, likewise  buried in a potter’s field. The existence of sexton’s records for 1841-42 offers a chance that Lussan’s final resting place can be identified one day. It is perhaps a curious arc of history that the yellow fever that caused Lussan’s death and led these Black poets to publish for the first time, had four decades earlier frustrated Napoleon’s plans, and led to the expansion of the growing country to the north.  

Auguste Lussan had achieved early recognition in New Orleans with a patriotic tribute to Andrew Jackson, who led the American army to victory over the British in the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, and his subsequent work built on this success.  Auburn University Professor Juliane Braun’s thesis in her 2019 book, Creole Drama:Theatre and Society in Antebellum New Orleans,  is that Auguste Lussan was surprisingly progressive and the first to provide, through his play La Famille Creole (1837), a sense of Creole identity as inclusive of people of color and of recent immigration. The prevailing Louisiana Nativists counted as Creole only white people born in Louisiana from Gallic or Latin ancestors whom had immigrated from France 25 years or more earlier, yet Lussan cast a young woman of mixed race, Marie, and her France-born spouse Adolphe as the center of the play’s eponymous famille creole. Lussan’s point seems to have been that America needed everyone if we are to make this new country “strong and be able to heal it when sick” (Braun 2019, pp. 116-124).  

Lussan’s most successful play was Les Martyrs de la Louisiane (1839), a patriotic story of the heroism of the French Creole resistance to Spanish rule in early Louisiana.  While clearly appealing to French sensibilities, Braun notes that the play portrays several Spanish authorities in a genial way and marks several deaths of French Louisianan citizens at the hands of the Spanish as inadvertent. Braun suggests that Lussan seems to make the Spanish governor (O’Reilly)—but not the Spanish people–the culpable party in ruling over the French population, a parallel to the then-tense situation with the relatively new Anglo-American rule. In this indirect way, Lussan promotes cooperation as a way forward for the French in Louisiana to remain viable as a population.

Auguste Lussan was a French immigrant, who was born Jean-Joseph Paul Pelletier.  He adopted this new name on his arrival in New Orleans from Algiers where in 1832 he had married a beautiful young woman from Marseille named Marie-Antoinette Dortrouve (15 years old at the time), against her father Andre’s wishes (he had brought her to a convent in Algiers after the French conquest in 1825).  Pelletier had just turned 32. It seems likely that he had already arranged earlier in Paris to come to New Orleans (there are immigration records from Paris to New Orleans for Davis and his entourage that year) and then left Paris for Algiers to marry young Antoinette before departing together. It is not yet known how (or where) the two met.  We do know where Pelletier was from—Le Mans, France.

Jean-Joseph Paul Pelletier attended the College Henri IV in Paris, one of the most prestigious schools in France. His father’s death at the nearby Hotel de Invalides was when Jean-Joseph was only 25, and there are no other details of his life until 1831, when he staged the play Les Fils d’ un-Homme (which was then published under another pseudonym Paul de Lussan) before traveling to Algiers where he would marry and depart for New Orleans.

 Auguste Lussan was employed first as an actor and then became a manager and playwright at the Theatre D’Orleans on Orleans Street in the Vieux Carré from his arrival in 1832 until his demise in 1842. The theatre owner, impresario John Davis, was himself transplanted from St. Domingue, with the intention of establishing a French Opera community in his newly adopted city of New Orleans.

The Theatre d’Orleans and ballroom presented French Opera and plays and hosted the so-called Quadroon Balls (named for women of color with one parent of mixed race).

 He succeeded beyond his dreams. In the first five years, Davis presented 140 French Operas of which 52 were premieres, and the Theatre D’Orleans became the most distinguished theatre in the new United States. Beginning in the summer of 1827 Davis began touring his company throughout the northeastern United States with notable stays in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore that brought a national reputation to his theatre and to French Opera. Auguste Lussan staged his plays at the Theatre D’Orleans, first La Famille Creole in 1837, and then the very popular Martyrs of Louisiana, for which he won acclaim and the right to benefit directly from presentations following the 1839 debut.

 La Famille Creole was one of several of Lussan’s works with a message of social inclusiveness. His 1838 play, Sara La Juive, ou La Nuit de Noël, was concerned with the persecution of a Jewish woman in Ireland (and so distanced from a press focused on Louisiana, perhaps to deflect local criticism), and the Martyrs itself seems to bridge the French and Spanish people there. Dr. Braun (pers.comm) notes that the appeal of Auguste Lussan to the Black community reached beyond his work’s mention in Les Cenelles, as Sara la Juive was staged by a Black theater in New Orleans in 1866, nearly 25 years after his death.

 According to Tinker (1932), Lussan intended to earn enough from his plays to return with his family to France in 1842 when he met his untimely death on the surgeon’s table.  His 1841 book of poetry, Les Imperiales, largely a tribute to Napoleon, was available by subscription. An opening note (Un Mot) with the date February 27, 1841, addressed his Creole subscribers expressing the hope that the poems would show his gratitude for their hospitality, and at the same time share with his compatriots his inspirations from their homeland France. By 1840, French opinion towards Napoleon had become generally positive, in recognition of his reforms and the unification and stabilization of France, as well as the prominence of France on the world stage. However, these were balanced against his increasingly dictatorial rule and losses of territory after Waterloo.

 Despite success with the Martyrs two years earlier, August Lussan was clearly struggling by February 1841. He would be gone only sixteen months later, leaving behind his 25-year-old spouse Antoinette with their 5-year-old daughter Marie-Augustine and infant son Eugene. Notes from his family indicate that he left only a few pieces of silver and a handsome plate which were sold in New Orleans, and the young family moved to Donaldsonville in 1843 where they long had connections through the local theatre.

 Fortunately, sometime before or just after her husband’s death, Antoinette Lussan became a milliner and vendor of Paris gowns and first had a shop in the theater building managed by Auguste and which hosted the so-called quadroon balls. Advertisements for her wares (as Madame Lussan) and the addresses of her various shops in New Orleans are found in the Daily Picayune in the mid-1800s (1847,1848, 1854). Antoinette sold and fitted the very gowns worn by Black women for the balls that were central to—but written of so obliquely by—the poets of Les Cenelles.  

  We are now left with several curious facts and ironies concerning the link of Auguste Lussan and Les Cenelles. First is that he was apparently white and a passionate supporter of the quickly expanding United States as well as of the memory of Napoleon.  While complications from yellow fever ended the life of Auguste Lussan and so many other New Orleanians, the “saffron scourge” may have preserved the fragile republic they were part of. At the same time, Auguste Lussan had written plays united by the theme of a society inclusive of Black, immigrant and Jewish people, and presented in the Theatre D’Orleans,  and his spouse Antoinette Lussan provided gowns to the well-to-do women of color—who were the inspiration for Les Cenelles—(and for different reasons,  likely Marie of La Famille Creole) for their engagements in the ballroom next door. Her shop was in the very same building in 1848.  It does seem likely that, as theatre people, the couple were known to the poets in the creative community of New Orleans.

Marie-Augustine Lussan, 1911. Daughter of Antoinette and Auguste Lussan

 Armande Lanusse was perspicacious in opening Les Cenelles with the image of the meager funeral of a fellow artist, the author of a play, Les Martyrs de Louisiane, that had appealed to the patriotism of all Louisianans. At the same time, the writings of the fallen poet were evidently sympathetic to the cause of social justice. Lanusse’s visionary introduction was a brilliant overture to what would become a subversive body of poetry introducing the canon of African American literature. The choice of funereal imagery, in addition to highlighting the importance of art, also granted a kind of immortality to what otherwise would have been forgotten as a provincial, if popular, play. While Lanusse could have identified Lussan through his other plays, La Famille Creole and even Sara la Juive, which would have been more closely suited to the purposes of the poems that follow, they would not have served as well as Les Martyrs to bring this great body of poems to the widest audience of Louisianans, and so ensure their publication and acceptance in antebellum New Orleans.