Notable New Orleanians: A Tricentennial Tribute

Charles Etienne Gayarré.
LOUISIANA IMAGE COLLECTION, LOUISIANA RESEARCH
COLLECTION, TULANE UNIVERSITY.
Senate from Louisiana, but illness forced him to decline the seat. Fortunately for Louisiana history, he
spent his next seven years of “retirement” in France and Spain where he devoted himself to tracking
down and laboriously copying documents amplifying Louisiana’s barely understood colonial history.
During the 1840s Gayarré reentered politics, winning a seat in the Louisiana House of
Representatives. This led to his appointment as Louisiana Secretary of State where he served for eight
years, using his office to acquire historical documents from Spain. His Jacksonian politics put him in
the [John] Slidell wing of the Democratic Party, a wing that opposed compromise before and during
the Civil War. The troubled 1850s saw him join the Know Nothing nativist party, but his Catholicism
kept him inactive. In 1856, he entered into what was to be a happy but childless marriage. The Civil
War culminated this decade and led to the loss of his fortune and political influence. 2
History proved to be Gayarré’s salvation. In 1860, the Louisiana Historical Society elected him
its president, although the Civil War and Reconstruction hindered its development. Gayarré served
when it was reorganized in 1877, and remained its president until 1888. The post Civil War years
saw his major works published, including Philip II of Spain (1866); and the well-written A History
of Louisiana (4 vols., 1866). The Louisiana history still has considerable value and represents the
accumulated research of Gayarré’s pre-war efforts.
1 Grace King, Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1932), 31. Another summary
of his life is at http://www.neworleanspast.com/todayinneworleanshistory/january_9.html.
2 Faye Phillips, “Writing Louisiana Colonial History in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Charles Gayarré, Benjamin Franklin
French, and the Louisiana Historical Society” in Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, vol.
49 (Spring, 2008), 172-3.
E TIENNE C ORDEVIOLLE (1806-1868) AND
F RANCOIS L ACROIX (1795-1876)
Merchant tailors Etienne Cordeviolle and François Lacroix were a partnership of ante-bellum free
people of color who dominated the fine clothing business of New Orleans. They promoted both the
latest styles of Paris and their own tailoring for gentlemen. Chartres was the street of fashion, featuring
“Cordeviolle and Lacroix, tailors,” at No. 123 and “Colvis & Dumas,” merchant tailors nearby at
No. 124. Two other fine tailors, August Jansemme, fils, and Erasme Legoaster worked from the same
shop, and would go on to found their own stores.
Cordeviolle & Lacroix’s customers knew their shop as “The Fashionable Store.” Its inventory
offered garments of cashmere fabric and eleven colors of cloth for gentlemen’s fine suits. The partner’s
ten lines of frockcoats included velvet, cashmere, silk, and satin. The partners imported from
Paris the dress coats of the latest fashion, frock coats, and Paletots [double-breasted French topcoats]
in six styles. 1 According to The Daily Picayune “Cordieviolle [the son of an Italian and a local
free woman of color] was a very flashy, elegant looking fellow, a duelist and a ‘blood’ of the first
water.” Cuban-born Lacroix, more staid, was an artist, “a maker of coats that passed muster before
the severest tribunals of Europe, of trousers that made the dandies of rotten Row, or the Champs
Elysees groan with envy. They were the models of style, the expression of the esthetics of dress.” 2
As their profits grew both partners plowed them into real estate. They ended up owning property
all over the city, in one case 23 St. Charles, a storehouse that Cordeviole used as a business
and residence. The partnership prospered until 1849 when Cordeviolle sold his interest to Lacroix,
and moved to Paris, where he carried on his stylish designs before moving to Italy. In 1865, King
Victor Emmanuel of Italy honored him with la Croix de Chevalier de l’Ordre de St-Maurice et
Lazare. 3 Since the sixteenth century this papal honorific has been awarded to individuals noted for
their charity to the poor and lepers.
NOTABLE NEW ORLEANIANS: A Tricentennial Tribute
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