New Orleans was founded in 1718 by the French Mississippi Company, named after Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, and never entirely stopped being French. The street names are French. The legal system is French. The cooking is French — or rather, it is what French cooking becomes when it travels to the edge of a swamp and absorbs three hundred years of African, Creole, and Caribbean influence.
The French Quarter runs a Bastille Day celebration that spans several days around July 14. The festival centres on the neighbourhood's French colonial architecture — the ironwork galleries, the Creole townhouses, the streets laid out in a grid by French engineers in the eighteenth century. It is one of the few places in the United States where Bastille Day feels native rather than adopted.
The celebration includes pétanque in the squares, French food markets, and live music at venues throughout the Quarter. The Alliance Française de la Nouvelle-Orléans organises cultural events for members and the general public — film screenings, conversation groups, and an annual Bastille Day dinner that draws the city's French community together.
The French influence on New Orleans runs deeper than architecture and food. The Creole language — a French-derived creole spoken in Louisiana for three centuries — is still heard in parts of the state. The Cajun communities of southern Louisiana trace their ancestry to the Acadians, French settlers expelled from Nova Scotia by the British in 1755, who walked south and west until they reached the bayous.
The Garden District and the Tremé, the Marigny and the Bywater — the city's neighbourhoods each carry a French colonial layer beneath whatever has been built on top. The beignets at Café Du Monde are made from a French recipe. The word for the neutral ground in the centre of New Orleans's wide boulevards — a French urban planning feature — is still neutral ground, not median. Even the way New Orleanians say they live on a street, not in a street, is a French construction.
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