French and Spanish Colonial Louisiana

René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, paddled to the mouth of the Mississippi in April sixteen eighty-two, planted a cross and a column inscribed with the arms of France, and claimed the entire river basin for Louis XIV, naming it Louisiana in the king's honor. It was an audacious claim for a man standing in a cypress swamp at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico with a small party of exhausted explorers. France did almost nothing with it for the next two decades.

Actual colonization began with Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, who established Fort Maurepas on Biloxi Bay in sixteen ninety-nine, and his brother Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, who founded New Orleans in seventeen eighteen on a crescent of slightly higher ground along the Mississippi. Bienville became the dominant figure of early Louisiana, serving as governor four separate times over four decades, mediating between Indigenous nations, enslaved Africans, French soldiers, German immigrants, and the directors of the Company of the Indies, which held Louisiana as a private commercial concession until seventeen thirty-one. Spain acquired Louisiana by treaty in seventeen sixty-two in a secret agreement at the end of the Seven Years War, though it took until seventeen sixty-nine for Spanish governance to actually establish itself, after a French Creole revolt against the first Spanish governor failed and its leaders were executed.

Spanish rule lasted until eighteen hundred, when Napoleon reacquired Louisiana in the Treaty of San Ildefonso, only to sell it to the Americans three years later. In those hundred and thirty-some years of French and Spanish rule, Louisiana developed the legal, architectural, culinary, and cultural foundations that still distinguish it from every other American state.