Le Grand Dérangement: The Great Upheaval

Picture a village on the Minas Basin in Nova Scotia. The year is seventeen fifty-five. A church sits at the edge of the settlement of Grand-Pré, and into it the British colonial governor has summoned every man and boy in the community, ostensibly to read them a proclamation. When the doors shut, soldiers surrounded the building. The document read aloud was a deportation order. The village of Grand-Pré, and every other Acadian settlement in Nova Scotia, was to be emptied.

Governor Charles Lawrence and the Nova Scotia Council had voted on July twenty-eighth, seventeen fifty-five, to expel the Acadian population. Their crime was refusing to swear an unconditional oath of allegiance to the British Crown, a refusal rooted less in treachery than in the wish to remain neutral in a war that was not theirs. Lawrence viewed them as a military liability. The deportation campaigns began August eleventh, seventeen fifty-five.

Of approximately fourteen thousand one hundred Acadians living in the region, roughly eleven thousand five hundred were deported between seventeen fifty-five and seventeen sixty-four. About five thousand died from disease, starvation, or shipwrecks during the crossing. Families were separated deliberately, men onto one ship, women onto another, to prevent reunion and organized resistance.

The first Acadians reached Louisiana in seventeen sixty-four. On February twenty-seventh, seventeen sixty-five, Joseph Broussard, known as Beausoleil, the Beautiful Sun, who had led guerrilla resistance against the British for years before being imprisoned and released, came ashore in New Orleans aboard the Santo Domingo with nearly two hundred refugees. On April eighth, seventeen sixty-five, he was appointed militia captain of the Acadians of the Attakapas region, the territory that would become Lafayette Parish. He died about five months later, at roughly sixty-three years old, near what is now St. Martinville.

The people who became the Cajuns did not arrive in Louisiana with ease. They arrived with very little, after losing almost everything.