New Orleans Carnival Krewes: The History, Spirit & Secrets of Mardi Gras

Chapter 1

Birth of the Carnival Krewes

REVELRY IN ANTEBELLUM NEW ORLEANS

Have you ever wondered how New Orleans evolved into the Mardi Gras capital of America—how it became the party city par excellence where jazz bands salute balls and parades and where people cry at weddings and laugh at funerals?

The purpose of carnival is to forget problems. New Orleans is called the Big Easy, and its motto is the French phrase Laissez les bons temps rouler (let the good times roll). In the hot and steamy river city, locals look for ways to distract themselves from crime, heat and hurricanes. A carnival mentality lifts the spirits.

In this chapter, we’ll see how this passion for parties and pageantry began in the river city, how its illustrious and not-so-illustrious founders created a climate ripe for revelry and how carnival krewes crystallized the locals’ absorption in festivities and glamour. Just as clothes make the man, history makes New Orleans carnival.

ORIGIN OF CARNIVAL IN EUROPE

For centuries, Roman Catholic countries have celebrated carnival (Latin for farewell to flesh) before Lent (the period of fasting before Easter) with boisterous éclat. Carnival was the season for aristocratic banquets, ballets, court spectacles, parades and masked balls.

Putting the finishing touches on carnival floats, circa 1970s. New Orleans Tourist and Convention Commission.

France introduced carnival to North America. As early as 1512, the French Court celebrated with a parade in which a fat ox, followed by a triumphal car carrying a child called King of the Butchers, led an elaborate procession. This parade on the day before Ash Wednesday, which initiates Lent, stimulated that day’s designation as Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday).

French aristocrats also sponsored carnival parades of huge, grotesque papier-mâché animals and monsters. Masked carnival balls were added as a private medium for the display of elegance. During the early 1700s, these masked balls were given three times weekly in Paris from November until the end of carnival.

The nobility’s spectacular, extravagant carnival balls and street processions helped to kindle the fires of the French Revolution. As monarchical rule declined and carnival festivities lost favor (only a few parades are still active in the great cities of Europe), revels mushroomed in New Orleans, now the most renowned city for Mardi Gras.

Carnival has been celebrated since the city’s founding as a French colony. During the rule of the Marquis de Vaudreuil (1741–51), all classes imitated his magnificent masquerade balls. Merriment in this port city ripened it for the flowering of carnival.

ENCHANTING HISTORY

New Orleans attracted the rich and the dreamers. From 1718 to 1860, aristocrats and would-be aristocrats had birthed and fanned the need for elegance and romance there. Surrounded by waterways, not the least of which are the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River, New Orleans is the natural stop for the glamorous adventurer.

Few cities claim the devotion of their natives like New Orleans. The city is lush and beautiful (not much of the historic part having been destroyed by hurricanes or wars). The same stunning sights that greeted your ancestors will greet you today: tropical foliage and luxurious balconies, floor-to-ceiling windows, banana trees and palms, large verandas and houses of pale pastels (pink, yellow and green) to reflect the sun.

Creole cottages, Greek Revival mansions and shotgun and camelback houses have survived the storms, and people delight in the beauty of this city built below sea level and out of the swamps. From the outset, New Orleanians have had a joie de vivre and a cause to celebrate. At Mardi Gras, people can be kings or queens and act out their dreams. Fantasy dominates the culture.

Inclement weather and beauty fuel allusions to the past—to mystery and secrecy. Natives pride themselves on the works of their ancestors (real and fabricated), especially their French, Spanish and American forebears who built the French Quarter, the Garden District, Faubourg Marigny, Esplanade Avenue, St. Charles Avenue, Exposition Boulevard, Audubon Park, City Park and plantations upriver.

The Women’s Guild of the New Orleans Opera Association, 25004 Prytania Street, Garden District, New Orleans. Photo by Marit and Toomas Hinnosaar.

Although New Orleans, like the rest of American cities, did not have a native aristocracy, since olden times, New Orleanians have fantasized it so. They have cherished an image of family dynasties and of plantations along the Mississippi River as feudal estates where the planter was once king. Many claim descent from aristocrats, although the majority of the city’s first settlers were refugees, commoners and ex-convicts. The city did have some aristocratic founders. And although these adventurers and exiles were few, they disseminated in New Orleanians a pride and a love of festivity that would swell over time.

FRENCH CULTURE

In particular, New Orleanians like to connect themselves to the French. Mardi Gras is the celebratory day preceding the Catholic Lent. Many streets in the French Quarter or Vieux Carré are named for famous French ancestors like La Salle, Bienville and Iberville. The first of these wealthy aristocrats, René-Robert Cavalier, Sieur de la Salle, took possession of the vast territory in 1682 and christened it La Louisiane in honor of Louis XIV. In 1699, Canadian nobleman Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville founded the first Louisiana colony at Biloxi and then left his twenty-two-year-old brother, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, in command. Bienville moved the seat of government from inaccessible Biloxi to the banks of the Mississippi and named the town for the Duc d’Orléans.

John Law, a Scotsman who controlled projects for the French, lured nobles with tales of New Orleans’s streets of gold. Some stayed, determined to re-create the lifestyle of France in New Orleans. Other aristocrats, exiles out of favor with the Regency, fled to New Orleans to avoid incarceration. These embittered Frenchmen tried to establish a culture that would outshine Paris. Their wives did their utmost to give social life the flavor of Versailles.

The casket girls, so named because the government furnished each with a cassette (casket) containing clothing and useful articles, were from fairly good French stock. The correction girls, however, came from La Salpêtrière, a Paris house of correction. These girls escaped their past by marrying into the best circles of the new society, for the scarcity of women enhanced their value. As time passed, New Orleans’s French families, overlooking the correction girls, traced their ancestry to the aristocracy or the casket girls. A mathematically minded New Orleanian once estimated that if all such claims were correct, each casket girl bore 162 children.

Most French immigrants were peasants, soldiers, criminals and indentured servants sold into short-term slavery. Some became wigmakers or billiard-keepers, while others transformed themselves into prosperous local Creole aristocrats. Non-French immigrants adopted local French traditions. The largest group—sturdy, unspectacular Germans—settled on farms. Many changed their surnames when registering in the city (Zweig became La Branch, Reinhardt became Reynaud) and married into Creole families. Gradually, the number of Germans dwindled, and the number of Creoles grew.

African Americans arrived in 1719, when the Compagnie de l’Occident sold to colonists a large shipment of slaves on three years’ credit. At first, slaves were imported at three hundred to five hundred annually, but that number quickly grew into the thousands. Absorbing much French culture, slaves spoke a soft patois called Gombo French, adopted the names of their Creole owners and prided themselves on being Creole Africans. By assimilating all, French New Orleans developed a unique lifestyle.

From 1718 to 1762, New Orleans was the center of all French commercial and cultural activity in the Americas. It burgeoned into the largest southern port, rivaled only by New York in productivity and wealth. Catholicism furthered the homogeneity of New Orleans society. Jesuit missionaries came with Bienville, and the Capuchins followed in 1722. In 1724, Bienville published the first Black Code, expelling Jews from Louisiana and prohibiting all religions other than Catholicism. The Catholic Church spiritually dominated the city until the Louisiana Purchase.

By 1743, Marquis de Vaudreuil took Bienville’s post as governor of 2,500 New Orleanians and transformed the city into a miniature French court. He furnished locals with titles and insisted on polished manners and refined speech. He held court as a king rather than a governor, and his wife, fifteen years his senior, set fashions for the colony’s ladies. Imitating the style of Louis XV, both were devoted to pomp, pleasure, magnificent balls and dinners on gold plates. At certain festivities, fountains of wine flowed in the Place d’Armes so that all soldiers and citizens could join in the celebration. By 1764, an haute society thrived in New Orleans and nearby plantations. Balls and soirees, promenades, card parties and magnificent banquets in the French mode had become the rule.

For one hundred years, the Creoles lauded extravagance. Wealthy families strove to imitate French splendor. Plantations were called Versailles and Fontainebleau. Modest Creole houses were decorated with costly imported furnishings. Sons went to France for education, and wives ordered gowns and jewels from Paris. African slaves provided for all bodily comforts and did the actual work.

SPANISH-FRENCH CULTURE

New Orleanians’ pride in their heritage took a temporary reversal when the Spaniards took over. In 1764, at the end of the Seven Years’ War, distraught inhabitants learned that Louis XV had abandoned the Louisiana territory to his cousin Charles. Initial reaction to Spanish rule was hurt and indignation. During the rebellion of 1768, the Creoles slashed the moorings of the Spanish governor Antonio de Ulloa’s ship, which carried him away to Cuba.

The Spanish epoch ended with absorption of Spanish into French culture and a compromise. The word Creole, which had referred to French natives of New Orleans, came to mean those of French and Spanish descent. The Spanish and French were congruent cultures. The French admired the next governor, General O’Reilly, who governed understandingly, publishing laws in both French and Spanish and totally reconstructing and beautifying the city.

The Spanish took up residences next to the French in the Vieux Carré, and Creolizing the Spanish through marriage quickened. O’Reilly’s successor, Don Luis de Unzaga, married a French-Creole woman. Throughout Spanish rule (1769–1803), marriages between members of all levels of Spanish and French society continued.

In 1788, a fire destroyed most of the old French Quarter structures. O’Reilly and later Spanish governors replaced them with lovely solid buildings with the arches, hidden patios and overhanging balconies with iron lacework that compose the Vieux Carré today.

New Orleans remained the capital of Louisiana and Catholicism the sole religion. By 1800, a French-Spanish or Creole lifestyle flourished among the seven thousand inhabitants.

AMERICAN CULTURE

The Creoles’ pride was again punctured, only to be reinflated by the Americans. The Creoles were French-Spanish; they felt European and paid homage to their ancestors and traditions of revelry and grace. But the European heritage that would be heralded by the carnival krewes was disrupted. In 1803, Charles IV, in mortal terror of Napoleon Bonaparte, returned New Orleans to France. Bonaparte in turn sold Louisiana to the United States, giving control of the city and her neighboring plantations to the Americans.

At first horrified, the invaders ultimately impressed the Creoles. The Americans were even more extravagant than the Creoles. They built their own town across the city moat and opposite the French Quarter. Canal Street became the dividing line between two styles of architecture and cultures.

By 1836, the Americans had split the city and its 85,000 inhabitants into a Creole district, an American district and a third loosely populated faubourg downriver. The American district emerged as New Orleans’s pivotal commercial and residential section. Streets were paved, wharves built and churches, banks, hotels and theaters, daring in size and magnificence, thrown up in the great quagmire (the Creoles’ contemptuous term for the American section). By 1850, a glamorous American residential area, the Garden District, lorded over the city, which now swarmed with 116,375 people.

A 1964 photograph showing the first-floor double parlors of the Albert Hamilton Brevard House, 1239 First Street, New Orleans. Photograph by Dan Leyrer, Library of Congress.

Built on rich silt deposited during flood periods, the district became a paradise of magnolias, live oaks, palm trees and flowering vines. Houses, half concealed among lush foliage, dominated large lots of a city block or more and were planted with jasmines, camellias, mimosa, crepe myrtle, irises and roses.

Wealthy Americans built Greek Revival mansions that boasted twenty or more rooms with eighteen-foot ceilings, tall French windows and double doors. Furnishings were purchased abroad or from the local shops selling the remnants of Creole grandeur.

In 1850, state officials claimed that New Orleans was a bad influence on legislators and moved the capital to Baton Rouge. Creoles and Americans who remained insisted that the city did not need to be a capital. Was New Orleans not the fourth-largest American city and the wealthiest port, surpassed only by London, Liverpool and New York?

By 1860, the Americans had developed a fierce, insular pride that matched that of the Creoles. Being Protestant was revered as much as being Catholic. Initially, the Creoles abhorred religious toleration. But as the heavily Protestant Americans grew prosperous, so, too, did their religion.

The Americans’ city hall became the seat of power. Eventually, only a few Creole mansions remained—among them the building that today houses the Boston Club. Many Creole plantations also passed into American hands. Americans began to feel that the city’s social structure rested more on heritage and good breeding than on material possessions. By the 1850s, the balls and receptions of the Garden District had surpassed the Creoles’ festivities in grandeur. Americans proclaimed their uniqueness as New Orleanians of a tripartite heritage: Spanish-French-American.

The Civil War cemented New Orleanians together. They revered their city as a citadel that, had it not been for the Yankees, would have equaled New York. The city itself wasn’t destroyed, but Federal forces occupied it. After the war, citizens indulged in a swelling feeling of superiority—not because they were French, Spanish or American but because they were New Orleanians.

PENCHANT FOR ELEGANCE

The New Orleanian from 1699 to 1800 was basically unlearned. He lived for sensation rather than reflection, enjoying balls and dances and busying himself with the social demands of his family. In 1832, the city had only three libraries—bookstores containing the worst description of French literature—whereas New Orleans had ample means for eating, playing, dancing, and making love.

Educational facilities for men were severely neglected, especially before 1803, and most boys did little studying anywhere. The few young men sent to France often spent more time in the brilliant society of Paris than in university