Louisiana

From the Peace of Paris in 1763 until the Treaty of Ildefonso in 1802, the Spanish monarchy controlled the vast territory of Louisiana, stretching from the scattering of colonists in the far south of the territory north to the uncharted prairies and woodlands stretching to the Canadian border. In 1802, though, the Spanish were induced to sell the Louisiana territory to France by the threat of force. Napoléon once hoped to transform Louisiana into the centrepiece of the French colonial empire, but he was soon forced to recognize that France simply could not defend Louisiana adequately against the United States of Britain. In 1803, Napoléon offered to sell the entire Louisiana territory north of the 40th parallel and free access to the port facilities in New Orleans/Nouvelle-Orléans to the young American federation. This stratagem worked remarkably well, laying the foundation for the Franco-American alliance against Britain in the Napoleonic Wars. Though Britain made several raids against Louisiana in the course of the American phase of the Napoleonic Wars, French imperial forces and the United States army were always able to repel the British from Louisianan soil.

As the French Empire's position weakened in Europe, however, France faced the real possibility of losing Louisiana to the British. Reluctantly, in the fall of 1813, the French Empire entered negotiations with the United States on the sale of Louisiana. Just before the final collapse of the French Empire in 1814, the United States purchased South Louisiana from France for two million United States dollars. Under the terms of the purchase, the large Francophone community of Louisiana was to retain the full of the French language in government and education. The conclusion of the Anglo-American War in 1815 brought an end to British attempts at conquest, and Louisiana was confirmed as an American state.

Louisiana's population was quite diverse, but it was still Francophone. The Cadiens -- survivors of the British deportation of the Acadiens from eastern Canada in the Seven Years War -- constituted the single largest group of Louisiana Francophones, rapidly expanding in number throughout the bayous and prairies of western Louisiana. In the east of Louisiana, the Creoles descended from the pre-Seven Years War settlers vied with the tens of thousands of settlers Napoleonophile settlers who fled France after 1814 for control of state politics. There was also a large group of Black Creoles, descended from Caribbean immigrants and slaves. By the eve of the First Civil War, these Francophone groups constituted almost three-quarters of the Louisianan population. In addition to the Francophones, there was a large Anglo-American community took shape in New Orleans to profit from the Mississippi trade, and forty-five thousand immigrants -- nearly all Catholic, mainly French, Irish, Spanish, or Italian, most settlers in the New Orleans area.

Even though Louisiana was a Southern state, the passage of the Graduated Emancipation Law in 1853 also made it a free state. The rapid growth of the Cadien, Creole, and foreign Catholic agricultural settlements led to the formation of a free agricultural peasantry, unique in the South. This, and the ideological opposition to slavery on the part of the Catholic Church, led to Louisiana opting to remain outside the secessionist Confederacy, and to remain loyal to the Union, consequently making Louisiana the first target of the Confederacy. Despite a ferocious defense of the state by the state militia, Louisiana would have been doomed to fall to the Confederates had it not been for the surprising intervention of the Second French Empire against the Confederacy. Though the French intervention may have shortened the Civil War by years, it also created a quasi-permanent xenophobia on the part of Anglo-Americans, upset that the seemingly friendly intervention of France was actually intended to mask a bid for Mexican empire. Louisianan Francophones, as colinguals of France, were naturally suspect.

Over the next generation, Francophone Louisiana became increasingly isolated from the rest of the United States. Though it remained a prosperous territory, its role as an entrepôt for the United States' foreign trade gradually decreased as better railways and the development of New York City and Baltimore made New Orleans obsolete. Louisiana was also distinguished from the rest of the United States by its language, religion, and by its relatively high rate of population growth and the relative importance of immigration. Not surprisingly, Louisiana began to grow apart from the United States.

Beginning in the 1940's, and continuing in the next decades, nationalism began to grow among the Louisianan Francophone community. In the century after the Civil War, the four distinct Francophone groups had begun to intermarry into each other and to develop a growing consciousness of a wider Francophone nation in Louisiana and of an increasingly important Francophone community worldwide. The Parti louisianais was formed by a group of New Orleans intellectuals in 1951. Its platform was a clear statement of the fundamental unity of the Louisianan Francophone population, explicitly identified Louisianan Francophones as a nation and Louisiana as their putative nation-state, and called on the state government to formally establish the predominance of the French language throughout Louisiana. The 1962 language laws passed by the Parti louisianais government, requiring all signage in the state to have French letting, making the French-language school system the default system for all immigrants coming from outside the United States, and requiring the Louisianan government and local corporations to work in a Francophone environment and offer French-language services, were widely criticized. Many Americans saw these laws, and the similar legislation passed by the New Mexican and Navajo territorial governments, as symbolizing the imminent collapse of Anglo-American culture. Indirectly, then, the language laws that ensured a Francophone environment in Louisiana would play a major role in the rise of nativist political movements inside the United States that would eventually lay the foundations of Changism.

As the United States' situation deteriorated, Louisiana remained a model democratic state akin to those of New England. Disappearances of prominent Louisianais began in 1979; the Louisianan gendarmerie naturally investigated, and found to that the FBI was perpetuating these murders. When the news of this was publicized in the Courrier néo-orleanais, public opinion in Louisiana was horrified. Quickly, Louisiana -- along with Virginia, the Deep South, and New England -- became one of the main linchpins of the Congressional movement under John Hosperger. Throughout the early months of the Third World War, Louisiana continued to resist the imposition of martial law by Chang, and became a haven for political dissidents from across the United States. In August of 1982, Governor Louise Delorneaux announced the Delorneaux Doctrine, whereby her administration would aid democratic forces operating across the United States.

In the final global nuclear exchange of the Third World War, Louisiana itself was spared any attack with weapons of mass destruction. Still, Texas and the South were attacked and suffered tremendous damage. As large numbers of refugees fled into Louisiana, the Presidentialist Third Army tried to occupy Louisiana. Outside the Louisiana city of Natchitoches, the Third Army was met by the Louisiana National Guard and the Congressional Fifth Army. The Battle of Natchitoches -- a Congressional victory -- is now commonly considered the first major battle of the Second American Civil War.

Up until 1985, Louisiana remained part of the United States. Louisianan wealth and links with the rest of the francophonie played an important role in arming Congressional forces to the levels of the Changist elite forces still operating west of the Mississippi and south of the Appalachians. The Louisiana National Guard played an important role in the liberation of Alabama and Mississppi from Changist occupying forces, at a cost of thirty thousand Louisianan dead. Latent Louisianan nationalism led to the 1986 introduction of a referendum calling for the separation of Louisiana from the United States. In the 1986 referendum, 63% of all voting Louisianans voted in favour of Louisiana's independence. Even though Louisiana continued to play an important role in funding the Congressional forces and Louisianan volunteers were present throughout the theatres of war, Louisiana's official involvement in the Second Civil War effectively stopped for three years.

In July of 1988, though, following a series of artillery exchanges across the Mississippi the Presidentialist Second Army launched an unexpected assault against New Orleans, with the aim of occupying all of Louisiana, complete with its oil wells and refineries and the port of New Orleans. The flower of the Garde national was smashed on the shores of Lake Pontchartain, but much to the surprise of the Presidentialists the Congressionals intervened on Louisiana's behalf, sending the First Motorized Army down the Interstate. The Congressional First Army was outnumbered by the Presidentialists, but it had the advantage of a lighter and faster army, not to mention air support using the Congressionals' new A-7 Sledgehammer ground-attack aircraft. On the 15th of July, though, the First Army and the surviving elements of the Garde national were forced to withdraw to the west of the city, and allow the Presidentialists to take the city. (A 1990 League of Nations commission of inquiry later established that thirteen hundred civilians were murdered by the Presidentialists in the course of their occupation.) On the 2nd of August, the Congressionals and the Garde national launched a counteroffensive against the Presidentialist garrison, and together with the help of the outraged Néo-Orléanais population they drove the Presidentialists out of Louisiana.

The Battle of New Orleans was a turning point in the Civil War. Even though the Presidentialists did manage to take the city, the elite Third Army lost so many tanks and so many men that they was never able to launch another attack west of the Mississippi. They also brought Louisiana and Yucatán directly into the war, with extensive material and financial support from the European DGSE and the South American black-operations agencies. The Garde national spearheaded the 1989-90 offensives into the heartland of what would later become the New African Confederacy, and even after Louisiana mostly retired from active fighting in 1992 following the final expulsion of the Presidentialists from Mississippi, western Tennessee, and Kentucky, the Force expéditionaire remained active until the final days of the war.

In the decade after the Battle of New Orleans, Louisiana continued its recovery. Savvy promoters capitalized on Louisiana's ties with the United States and the francophonie to become the fourth-largest concentration of financial and industrial concerns in North America after Mexico, Canada, and Cuba. More than 700 thousand immigrants -- mainly from the United States, but also from Yucatán and Mexico -- took advantage of Louisianais prosperity, and the city of Nouvelle-Orléans emerged as one of the most liberal and cosmopolitan cities in North America. Louisiana soon gained a reputation as a tolerant multiracial -- if Francophone -- cauldron. Even 1992's Hurricane Stephen, which breached Nouvelle-Orléans main dike and flooded the French Quarter at tremendous cost and loss of human life, had comparatively little effect apart from favouring the cities of southwestern Louisiana.

With the end of the Second American Civil War in 1998, Louisiana was changed almost beyond recognition. Even though Louisiana didn't participate in the general exodus to Rattus Prime that followed the final defeat of the Presidentialist forces, almost 10% of the Louisianais population did choose to emigrate to the North American Community. With the final collapse of the United States, Louisiana emerged as one of the most powerful of the United States' successors. To its credit, the broad spectrum of Louisianais political factions chose to make use of this power to favour the establishment of an integrated Confederation of North America, on the models of the European Confederation and the South American Community. With the general recovery of world trade and captivating new off-world markets, Louisiana's future as a prosperous, independent, North American state appears to be assured.