C&233line Remembering Louisiana, 1850-1871 [Paperback]

Céline Frémaux Garcia (Author)
CÉLINE FRÉMAUX GARCIA (1850-1935) spent her life within the ordered, traditional world of nineteenth-century French Louisiana. She belonged to a close-knit web of relations that included the Montilly, Frémaux, and Garcia families.

Patrick J. Geary (Editor)
PATRICK GEARY is a professor of history at the University of Florida.

In the middle years of her life, Céline Frémaux Garcia recollected in this memoir her Louisiana childhood and growth into maturity—a tumultuous personal period that was transformed by violence as it was dominated by fear. The result is a detailed and sensitive portrait of a child's world of awe and wonder, color, and strife, in which the Civil War and its aftermath form the backdrop for conflict and rivalry within her French middle-class immigrant family.

This vivid memoir . . . is remarkable less for its account of battles than for its revealing portrait of a family under stress. . . . Her story is a rich account of a nineteenth-century immigrant family's struggle to survive on its own terms, in conflict not only with much of American culture but with itself.

Perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the transformation of Louisiana's French community . . . Céline [is] a significant work, one that is of interest to American social historians, feminists, southern and Louisiana historians.

A fascinating and intimate account of both the struggle of an older immigrant generation to hold on to tradition and of the psychological conflicts between mothers and daughter.

Geary is a first-rate editor. His introduction provides a critical, unobtrusive appraisal of the memoir. He has corrected confusions, made identifications, and allowed Céline to tell her own story.

A worthy addilã'