




































“Nursery of Revolution”:  Armand Lanusse and 

the L’Institution Catholique des Orphelins dans l’Indigence, 1852-1868 

 

Petra Munro Hendry 

Louisiana State University 

   

Abstract 

The icon of the American educated citizen has 

traditionally been rooted in Jeffersonian 

Democracy, eventually taking shape in the 

Northern, Anglo-Protestant, Common school 

movement in which state-supported public 

education has been assumed to be the measure of 

democratic progress.  Alternatively this research 

engages curriculum history from a “transatlantic, 

multiracial, multicultural and multinational 

contact zone” in which Franco-Afro-Creoles of 

Louisiana of the antebellum period were active 

agents in constructing  “public” education.  This 

paper examines one Afro-Creole school, the 

Société Catholic pour l‟Instruction des Orphelins 

dans l‟Indigence, and its principal Armand 

Lanusse, from 1852-1866, to illuminate how its 

curriculum sought to situate Louisiana as part of 

the Atlantic World that constituted enlightenment 

ideologies of the “public” in which the “educated 

citizen” emerged as a “subject” identity.  This 

research draws on archival documents (Archives 

of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, Historic New 

Orleans Collection, Howard-Tilton Memorial 

Library, Tulane University) to not only trace the 

transnational, hybrid nature of these educational 

innovations, but to articulate the unique 

philosophical assumptions which undergirded the 

curriculum.  Ultimately, this line of inquiry 

requires a reconsideration of the national 

narratives of American educational history that 

have been rooted in a Northern, Anglo-Protestant, 

Common School narrative of education.  

April 30, 1858 

Leonard Santos Esq. 

Terrebonne, LA 

 

Dear Friends, 

 I think it a great pleasure of giving 

you an idea of the examinations that 

took place here a few days ago; for they 

were very beautiful…we read, made 

dictation, conjugated verbs, and made 

grammatical exercises. For the pieces of 

poetry, the school was so full of people 

that we could not get a place to sit down.  

The recitation began at three in the 

afternoon and finished at half past nine.  

There was a little girl that had two 

pieces she recited so well, that they 

threw two bouquets at her, and one cake 

to my friend Isidore….. 

     Yours,  

    Leon Dupart
1
 

 

Fourteen-year Leon Dupart, a free person of color 

and student at the L’Institution Catholique des 

Orphelins dans l’Indigence in New Orleans, 

composed this letter for his English composition 

teacher as part of his weekly class assignment. 

His letter reflects not only a deep sense of pride in 

his classmates‟ intellectual prowess, but suggests 

that community performances such as these were 

popular literary events designed to pay tribute to 

the emerging talents of young Afro-Creole poets, 

artists and scholars. For Leon and his 

approximately 240 classmates, the school 



 
 

23 

provided a rich liberal arts education for both 

French and English speakers. Although the school 

was under the auspices of the Catholic Church, 

children of all religions were admitted.
2
 

According to the prospectus, every child, both 

girls and boys, would receive a practical, moral 

and religious education, regardless of economic 

status or future profession.
3
 The curriculum was 

designed to offer “invaluable advantage” to black 

children of the poorest classes who might only be 

able to attend a few months or at most a year.
4
 

And while there were strict state prohibitions 

against teaching slaves, the school‟s Board of 

Directors‟ meeting notes suggests that there was 

heated discussion regarding the possibility of 

educating the enslaved.
5
 According to Mary 

Mitchell “the Catholic Institute was the 

cornerstone of the Afro-Creoles political work. 

One in which they developed a radical agenda 

aimed at attaining civil and political rights for 

people of color in the Americas.”
6
  

Oft maligned for its lack of education and 

democratic vision prior to the Civil War, recent 

scholarship by Caryn Cossé Bell, Emily Clark, 

and Mary Mitchell contests a deficit view of 

democratic education in Louisiana by 

highlighting the role of a distinctive female 

Catholic tradition, an Afro-Creole protest 

tradition, and the republican idealism of French 

and Haitian intellectuals.
7
 While these works 

focus on the political, religious, intellectual and 

social heritage of democratic thought, my interest 

lies in the area of education. Specifically, my 

focus is on the L’Institution Catholique des 

Orphelins dans l’Indigence (also known as the 

Catholic Institute for Indigent Orphans, or 

Institute Catholique, or the Couvent School), 

between the years 1852-1866, when Armand 

Lanusse (1812-1867), a free person of color, was 

the principal.  With a cadre of Afro-Creole men 

and women teachers, Lanusse developed a 

curriculum that challenged emerging theories of 

scientific racism that posited blacks as 

intellectually inferior. Challenging these 

dominant stereotypes, the Catholic Institute 

worked within the severe restrictions placed on 

blacks in antebellum New Orleans to not only 

establish a school that served as a “public” 

institution in order to provide an education to the 

largest number of black girls and boys, but 

established a rigorous curriculum in which 

students were to become activists in imagining 

what freedom and full citizenship in a democratic 

society based on human equality might look like.    

Dubbed “the nursery of revolution” the 

Catholic Institute challenges prevailing narratives 

of curriculum history that privilege the origins of 

“public” education as the exclusive province of 

the Massachusetts common school movement. 

The Catholic Institute also provides a unique 

space in which to examine a Afro-Creole 

curriculum that saw public education as critical to 

liberation and equality, and in which notions of 

“public” education challenged normative 

understandings of the relationship between 

citizenship, nation, and identity.
8
 The teachers 

and students of the Catholic Institute were 

situated as neither free or slave, black or white, 

French or American, but in the in-between and 

hybrid spaces of identity; citizenship and equality 

were continually contested and in flux throughout 

the antebellum period.
9
 Drawing on the student 

letters of the boys written for their English 

Composition class at the Catholic Institute, the 

minutes written by Armand Lanusse at the Board 

of Directors meetings and newspaper articles 

from the Tribune and L’Union written by the 

teachers and students, I examine in what ways a 

“curriculum of imagination” provided a critical 

space to re-imagine the “public” sphere as a site 

of freedom and moral equality.  



 
 

24 

Ultimately, this line of inquiry requires a 

reconsideration of the narratives of curriculum 

history that have perpetuated a normalized 

Northern, Anglo-Protestant, Common School 

narrative of education. Louisiana‟s educational 

history during the Antebellum period contests not 

only the hegemony of the “common school” 

movement as the origins of “public” education, 

but also situates Louisiana as part of a larger 

Atlantic World (West Africa, the Caribbean, 

Western Europe and Canada) that constituted 

enlightenment ideologies of the “public” in which 

the “educated citizen” emerged as a “subject” 

identity. These ideologies, according to Paul 

Gilroy, are specifically the result of a “Black 

Atlantic” culture in which people of African 

descent engaged in an intense cultural exchange 

and invention (or creolization) that transformed 

and expanded the meanings of democracy.
10

 

Despite calls for a more “transatlantic” history, an 

African-Franco-Creole ideology as articulated by 

Armand Lanusse and the Catholic Institute 

remains obscured due to the normative framings 

of curriculum history which Bernadette Baker 

maintains are embedded in an “occidentalist 

preoccupation with a certain series of sociological 

transformations and categories that enable the 

social projects of modernity and nationalism to be 

named, to slide easily by as though obvious, 

uncontested and universally understood.”
11

  

Situating the Catholic Institute, its teachers and 

students, as critical agents in articulating the role 

of “public” education in shaping a democratic 

society is essential in contesting dominant 

narratives of curriculum history.  

 

Armand Lanusse and an African-Franco-

Creole Revolutionary Education Tradition 

A need for learning is being felt 

everywhere.  We are beginning to  

understand that no matter what situation fate has 

placed us in, a good education is a shield against 

the spiteful and calumnious arrows shot at us.
12

  

The “shield” to which Armand Lanusse 

(1812-1867), a New Orleans Afro-Creole Free 

Person of Color, refers to is education.  As editor 

of Les Cenelles, the first anthology of African-

American literature published in the United States 

in 1845, he began the volume by declaring that a 

“good education” was the shield that would 

protect young men and women of color from the 

“spiteful” arrows of racial discrimination. While 

Lanusse is perhaps best known for his literary 

work, this research seeks to situate his life and 

work as an educational activist and theorist whose 

work as a writer and poet, teacher and 

administrator, journalist, public intellectual and 

civil rights activist in nineteenth century 

Louisiana embodied an Afro-Creole revolutionary 

education tradition. Situated as neither free or 

slave, black or white, French or American, but in 

the in-between and hybrid spaces of identity, free 

people of color sought to assert, as Edouard 

Glissant maintains, an unique “creolized 

collective presence” in spite of the repressive 

binary (black/white) constructs of race imposed 

on them by Americanization.
13

 As part of a larger 

community of free persons of color whose Afro-

Franco-Creole-Catholic traditions can be traced to 

the beginnings of the French colonial period, 

Lanusse was part of an Afro-Creole protest 

tradition shaped by a multilingual, trans-cultural, 

transatlantic, process of creolization that was 

critical to his unique theorizing of the relationship 

between identity, education, freedom and 

citizenship.
14

  

While Lanusse is well recognized as an 

Afro-Creole poet, his role as a leading 

educational activist in New Orleans has been 

obscured. In fact, Lanusse was part of a larger 

network of transnational intellectuals whose 



 
 

25 

political radicalism was, according to Carolyn 

Bell (1997), based in the egalitarianism of the age 

of democratic revolution, a Catholic universalist 

ethic, and Romantic philosophy that saw 

education as central to liberation. Shaped by the 

ideals of the Haitian and French Revolutions, as 

well as the revolutionary fervor of radical French 

émigrés to New Orleans, Lanusse‟s vision of an 

egalitarian society came to fruition in a unique 

interracial intellectual tradition that saw “public” 

education as critical to humanization and the 

democratic ideals of equality. 

For Lanusse, a “good education” was the 

shield that would protect young men and women 

from the “spiteful” discourses of racial 

discrimination. Although public education had 

been established in New Orleans in 1841, free 

people of color were barred from these schools 

even though their property taxes helped to fund 

them. This blatant exclusion from the public 

sphere fueled the activism of Creoles of color 

who saw  “public” rights as reflecting “an even 

deeper and more radical insistence on the moral 

equality of all human beings” than political or 

civic rights.”
15

 While those who could afford to 

do so continued the long held tradition of sending 

their children to private schools, either religious 

or secular, or to France for an education, concern 

was for those children of color who did not have 

this advantage. Lanusse and other Creole leaders 

(both black and white) undertook a campaign to 

promote education. In fact, the 1840‟s 

(simultaneous with the introduction of publicly 

funded schools for whites only), marked a critical 

period of educational innovation for free children 

of color and enslaved children in New Orleans 

including the St. Claude School, Sister of the 

Holy Family Bayou Road School, Collège de la 

Louisiane and the Catholic Institute, among 

others, that understood education not only as 

public, but as universal.  

Armand Lanusse, born in New Orleans in 

1812, unlike many other free men of color from 

Louisiana, was not sent to Paris to receive his 

education but most likely attended a small private 

school in the French Quarter. Under the tutelage 

of a private tutor, he would have been educated in 

the classics, French and Latin, and introduced to 

the great French romantic writers, such as 

Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo (who set one of 

his novels during the Haitian Revolution), 

Alphonse de Lamartine (an advocate of universal 

suffrage), and Pierre-Jean de Béranger (an 

advocate of social reform). This group of French 

romantic writers had an abiding faith in the ideals 

of the French Revolution. No doubt these writers, 

among others, had a deep impact on Lanusse as 

he imagined a society in which all men would be 

treated as full human beings.  

As a young man, in his early thirties, 

Lanusse saw education as a means to not only 

maintain Afro-Creole French-speaking culture, in 

an era of increasing Americanization, but as a 

means to counter the racial degradation implicit in 

the emerging plantation/slavery system. Free 

people of color were determined to challenge the 

increasingly harsh nature of race relations through 

counter-spaces that signified the goals of 

democratic revolution. Afro-Creoles focused their 

activism on the development of schools. Private 

schools, such as the Sainte-Barbe Academy, 

founded by Michel Séligny, and the G. 

Dorefeuille Academy were interracial schools that 

flourished in the 1820‟s. The emergence of a class 

of educated persons of color, proficient in 

multiple languages, the classics, music, theatre, 

and drama challenged the increasingly insidious 

images of black inferiority perpetuated in the 

emerging constructs of “scientific racism.” By 

1830 legislation was passed that made it a crime 

to write anything that might cause “discontent 

among free people of color or insubordination 



 
 

26 

among the slaves,” the penalty being life 

imprisonment at hard labor or death.
16

 By 1855, 

free persons of color could not move about the 

streets without permission.  Many free people of 

color moved permanently to France, the West 

Indies, Mexico or Haiti rather than endure 

continued persecution.
17

  

Despite these setbacks, Afro-Creoles, like 

Lanusse, redirected their activism to the 

establishment of literary and educational 

institutions through which they could contest 

images of racial inferiority. However, given the 

context of repression, this posed severe 

limitations for Afro-Creoles political activism. 

For Lanusse, his writing did not directly address 

political issues (given that this was a crime). 

However, his own writing and publications 

sought to combat ignorance of racial prejudice by 

highlighting the contributions of Creoles of color 

to the intellectual and cultural life of New 

Orleans. In 1843, Lanusse created an interracial 

literary journal, L’Album Littéraire, which 

published the works of both Creoles and Creoles 

of color. Although only six issues were published, 

it was bold for its time and place. In it, Lanusse 

published  “Un Marriage de conscience” a story 

that criticized the practice of plaçage, a practice 

in which a young Creole woman of color would 

be “placed” with a rich white man in exchange for 

financial security and support. This practice 

demeaned women as property (a parallel to 

slavery) often leaving them destitute. This 

critique of gender relations (as perhaps also 

mirroring race relations) was also a critique of the 

Catholic Church, which Lanusse suggests closed 

their eyes to the practice. In Les Cenelles, he 

published a second poem critiquing plaçage 

entitled “Epigram.” A mother of a young Creole 

woman of color is in the confessional with the 

priest ready to be absolved of all her sins when 

she asks the priest “Before grace sparks my soul, 

tell me I can … Set up my daughter with a rich 

white man!”  With these final lines the poem 

ends, the complicity of the priest a critique not 

only of the Catholic Church, but of 

institutionalized white (sexual) supremacy.
18

  

Lanusse‟s critique of racist and sexist 

social relations clearly propelled him to activism 

in education. It is perhaps no coincidence that this 

literary outpouring of Afro-Creoles coincided 

with the establishment of publicly funded 

education (for whites) in New Orleans in the 

1840‟s given that free people of color were barred 

from these schools even though their property 

taxes helped to fund them. This inequity 

galvanized the Afro-Creole community, 

particularly Armand Lanusse, to support the 

formation of the L’Institution Catholique des 

Orphelins dans l’Indigence (also known as the 

Catholic Institute for Indigent Orphans). In 1837, 

Madame Marie Couvent, a free woman of color in 

New Orleans and devout Catholic, had 

bequeathed to the Catholic Church the money 

necessary to provide a school for free black 

orphans in the Faubourg Marigny.
19

 Public 

officials opposed expanding educational 

opportunities for free people of color and 

discouraged the formation of the school. 

However, after ten years, Father Manehault, 

Couvent‟s spiritual advisor and supervisor of her 

will, approached Mr. Francois La Croix, a black 

philanthropist and slaveholder, as well as other 

prominent French-speaking free men of color for 

the purposes of carrying out the will of Widow 

Couvent.
20

 These men formed the society known 

as the “Catholic Society for the Instruction of 

Indigent Orphans” which was chartered in Baton 

Rouge in 1847. Although the school was under 

the auspices of the Catholic Church, children of 

all religions were admitted.  

The Catholic Institute provides a unique 

space in which to examine Lanusse‟s role as 



 
 

27 

principal in creating what some consider the first 

black “public” school in Louisiana as well as the 

development of a bi-lingual curriculum in which 

students were to be active agents in imagining 

what a democratic society based on equality 

might look like. We are fortunate that student 

letters from the period 1858 to 1865, written as an 

English exercise, have survived. Not only do they 

speak about the school, their classmates, the 

curriculum, and their Principal Armand Lanusse, 

but the exercises in writing reflect the school‟s 

curriculum of imagination in which fictive letters 

provided students an opportunity to construct 

alternative identities and imagine worlds in which 

freedom was a reality.  

 

Re-Imagining Citizenship:  The Trans-

Atlantic, Imaginative Spaces of Freedom 

 

May 8
th

, 1857 

  

Dear Friend, 

I write you this short letter in 

order to let you know that I desire 

tolerance in this country.  Tell me what 

you think of Mexico if I should be well 

there with my family. 

 Your devoted friend 

 Armand Nicolas
21

 

  

Fourteen-year old Armand Nicolas, writing to a 

fictive friend in Pueblo, Mexico, is trying to 

imagine what it might be like to emigrate and live 

in a country that is free of racial discrimination. 

Although barely a teenager, it is obvious that he 

has experienced the increasing restrictions on free 

people of color that preceded the Civil War. 

Despite these racial prejudices, Armand sees 

himself as clearly entitled to the full benefits of 

citizenship. His keen sense of social justice has 

been nurtured by the radical pedagogy of his 

principal and teachers that empowered these 

young men to envision their lives as active agents 

despite the harsh realities of racial oppression. 

The curriculum of imagination of the Catholic 

Institute was infused with a global, transatlantic 

sense of identity in which connections to France, 

Haiti, Cuba, and Mexico, not only allowed them 

to conceptualize freedom, but also underscored a 

sense of global citizenship (as opposed to being a 

citizen of a nation) with those in other countries 

and their struggles for equality. For the students at 

the Catholic Institute, democratic revolution 

would require a radical re-imagining of the public 

sphere in which citizenship was conceptualized 

within the trans-Atlantic, imaginative spaces of 

freedom.
22

   

For Armand and his approximately 240 

classmates, the school provided a rich liberal arts 

education including instruction in French and 

English (eventually they also offered Spanish), 

grammar, composition, mathematics (arithmetic, 

algebra, and geometry), rhetoric, geography, 

catechism, history, logic, basic accounting and 

personal hygiene.
23

 Encouraged to engage their 

imaginations, students were given the space to 

imagine different futures and to envision 

themselves as active agents in shaping a society 

in which the ideals of democratic revolution and 

universal brotherhood would come to fruition.  

Nowhere was this more apparent than in the 

imaginary letters students wrote.
24

  

Several months earlier in November of 

1856, Armand had written to his imaginary friend 

in Grand Lake, LA 

My mother is very well now, she is going 

off for Marseilles, and then to Paris to see 

her brother who lives in the city, and she 

will go and see your wife.  I think in the 

course of the next month I will write you 

more than I do now because I have not 



 
 

28 

this month left my plantation.  Present my 

best to your wife, and all your family. 

  Your faithful friend, 

A. Nicholas
25

 

 

The young men (ironically the young girls 

do not participate in this letter writing, and are in 

fact educated separately from the boys) write 

convincingly about their travels throughout the 

world, including visits to Spain, France, Mexico, 

Haiti, as well as various cities throughout the 

United States including Boston, St. Louis, and 

Cincinnati. They envision family members spread 

throughout the globe engaging in business 

ventures, leisure, travel and commerce. These 

assignments allowed the boys to imagine 

positions of wealth and authority that were denied 

them given the political situation in the south, 

including that of being a plantation owner. While 

these young men were encouraged to visualize the 

prospects of full citizenship with equal political 

rights, this also included the economic potential 

to participate in the slave economy.   

 A few days later, on November 28, 

Armand‟s classmate, William Green wrote to his 

brother in Monterez, Mexico; 

 

You inform me that after you have 

settled in Mexico (where you are making 

a good business) that you have the 

intention to leave for Nicaragua where 

you expect to succeed.
26

 

 

In the 1850‟s, under the increasing racial 

repressions that preceded the war, the teachers of 

the Catholic Institute encouraged the students to 

forecast lives for themselves in places outside the 

United States, countries that might offer them 

freedom and equality.
27

 It is clear in the letters 

that these migrations, and success in a foreign 

country, were dependent on being well educated 

and engaging in a profession. The curriculum of 

the Catholic Institute (which went from first to 

eighth grade) stressed the importance of trade as 

well as networking. Most of the children were 

expected to enter an apprenticeship with an 

artisan or tradesman; most likely as a tailor, cigar 

maker, grocer or shoemaker, professions that had 

long been a monopoly of free people of color.  

William Greene wrote in February of 1857 to his 

friend in Grand Lake, LA. 

 

Oh! What a prize it is to me who has a 

good hand, and more especially to one 

who is about to enter the commercial 

line.  My intention is not to inhabit this 

country forever, a country that offers so 

little advantage as this.  And I am about 

to prepare seriously to leave by 

studying, to bid an eternal adieu to my 

native home … 
28

 

 

 The boys made connections between 

Marseilles, Paris, Mexico, and Nicaragua, 

intertwining commerce with transatlantic 

relationships. Mitchell has highlighted that the 

focus on emigration in the letter writing of the 

students did two very important things, “first, it 

strengthened the ideological and historical ties 

that existed between free blacks in the U.S. and 

other settlements of free blacks in the Diaspora. 

Second, the prospect of emigration created an 

ideological and geographic space in which free 

blacks could envision and articulate the kind of 

freedom they hoped to achieve in a society 

without slavery.”
29

 What is remarkable about 

these letters is that given the focus on “freedom” 

little is said in regard to slavery. Clearly, the legal 

prohibitions against seditious writings prompted 

the teachers to caution students to craft their 

letters carefully.
30

 And given the fact that some 

free people of color were slave owners, it clearly 



 
 

29 

must have been a challenge for the young men to 

negotiate these tensions between “freedom” and 

“slavery,” as well as their own space in between.  

Given these contradictory spaces, a 

curriculum of imagination becomes not only a 

powerful antidote to the increasing racial 

discrimination and injustices that these young 

men are experiencing, but situates the students as 

active agents in negotiating the complex terrain of 

race, identity, and power relations in which they 

are simultaneously privileged and oppressed. In 

these early letters, the boy‟s understanding of 

freedom is located within countries in which 

slavery has already been declared illegal (France, 

Mexico and Haiti). According to Mary Mitchell 

“the students at the Catholic Institution 

constructed their own moral geography; that is, 

they mapped their prospects about freedom, 

testing ideas about a future in other nations 

outside of their own.”
31

   

While we might read this migration as a 

form of “escape” from oppression, these letters 

envision a black Atlantic community that 

transcended the boundaries of individual nations 

and, in the minds of the students, perhaps 

transcended racial oppression as well. This 

curriculum of imagination was one that the 

teachers of the institute hoped would ignite a 

revolutionary zeal among the students in which 

they would construct freedom for all people of 

color, uniting them in a transatlantic citizenship 

that extended beyond national boundaries. This 

transgression of the dominant discourses of 

“citizenship” as transnational was intimately 

related to the ways in which rights discourse was 

emerging in relation to conceptions of public and 

private. Nowhere was this discussion more 

relevant than in relation to the Catholic Institute. 

 

Re-imagining public education 

 

May 27, 1858 

 

To S. Armstrong, Esq. 

Attakapas, La. 

 

Dear Brother, 

The Catholic Institution, to which I 

belong has increased its prices two 

weeks ago and I will tell you the causes 

thereof.  You know yourself, dear 

brother, that the prejudice against the 

colored population is very strong in this 

part of the country.  The Legislation 

used to give every year, for this 

establishment, fifteen hundred dollars; 

but this year, when they went to get it, 

they did not want to give anything at all, 

and they treated them very bad. Then the 

Direction (director) of this establishment 

had a session so as to see what could be 

done.  They saw that they could not go 

any further.  Then they increased the 

contribution of every scholar, by a few 

cents.  The pupils who have a father and 

mother, have to pay fifty cents a month, 

instead of twenty, those who have their 

mother only, have to pay half price.  But 

the ones who are deprived of both, their 

father and mother needn’t to pay nothing 

at all. Is this not too bad, my dear 

brother?  The white people have an 

Institution in every district, and they are 

all protected very well.  But we, who 

have, but a single one, cannot be 

protected at all. 

 

   Your invariable friend, 

A. Frilot
32

 

 

The sense of despair that A. Frilot conveys in his 

letter reflects the increasing racial discrimination 



 
 

30 

being experienced by students at the Institute. The 

tuition increase was just one more example of the 

worsening injustices against free people of color. 

Several letters written during the week of May 

27th, 1858 convey concerns about the impact of 

the increased tuition, including whether students 

will be forced to leave the school and the outrage 

of parents at rising costs. What made this 

financial burden all the more painful was that it 

brought home the favoritism shown to white 

children at black children‟s expense. A. Frilot was 

quite cognizant of the fact that whites had schools 

that were paid for through public funding 

whereas, while free people of color paid taxes and 

received no educational assurances in return.   

The teachers had obviously not shielded 

the students from the racial discrimination 

inherent in the educational system. In fact, they 

were quite direct in relaying to the students the 

strategies and actions they engaged to protest this 

injustice.  As young Frilot conveys, the director, 

Armand Lanusse, confronted this injustice, and 

while unsuccessful, Lanusse and his staff, 

provided the students with not only a specific 

incident of, and critique of social injustice, but 

conveyed a form of pedagogical activism in 

which they engaged directly in not only 

contesting injustice, but in re-defining and 

crafting meanings of the public sphere.
33

 

The status of the Catholic Institute, as 

either a “public” or “private” space has long been 

contested. While some have characterized it as 

“the most famous Negro private school,” 

evidence suggests that the directors and the free 

colored community considered the school a 

“public” one.
34

 Donations and such sent to the 

Catholic Institution were often addressed to the 

“Public School for Indigent Orphans of the Third 

District” (l‟Ecole Publique des Orphelins 

indigents du Troiseme district). The school had 

received funds from the state legislature for 

several years. The directors justified their requests 

given that black property owners had to pay taxes 

for public schools without having access to them. 

Directors of the school had managed to convince 

the state legislature and the New Orleans city 

council to appropriate money to the school for the 

care of its indigent and orphaned pupils.
35

 These 

grants may well have constituted the first 

governmental subsidy for black education in the 

South.
36

 The school‟s board of directors also 

agreed to follow the disciplinary rules of the 

public schools. While the school remained under 

the auspices of the Catholic Church (which 

functioned as a form of protection), the institution 

admitted children of any religious denomination, 

French and English speaking students, rich and 

poor children, as well as boys and girls. At 

various times, there were heated discussions 

among the Board of Directors as to whether to 

give consideration to educating enslaved children, 

however, given the severe penalties for this, the 

Directors of the School decided it would be best 

to let the slave owners be in charge of the 

education of their slaves. 
37

  While this was 

clearly a community without consensus, the 

directors, teachers and students were actively 

engaged in contesting dominant notions of what 

constituted the “public” by re-inscribing the term 

with their own understandings. First and foremost 

was their absolute right to complete participation 

in the “public” sphere as equals, especially as it 

pertained to education.   

Expectations that the students would 

participate in constituting the public sphere were 

also clearly conveyed to students. Student 

activism was not limited to the practices of a 

curriculum of imagination by writing letters 

within the confines of the schoolhouse. Teachers 

at the Catholic Institute (including Lannuse and 

Paul Trevigne), as well as the students, engaged 

in real world activism by writing editorials and 



 
 

31 

poems to the L’Union, (after two years it became 

the Tribune) the French-language bi-weekly 

newspaper founded in 1862 by Afro-Creole 

leaders.
38

 Cofounded with Dr. Louis Charles 

Roudanez , and his brother Jean-Baptiste 

Roudanez,, and edited by Jean-Charles Houzeau, 

a Belgian activist, who passed for colored, The 

Tribune published editorials, essays and literary 

works that set the Civil War within the context of 

an ongoing age of revolution.
39

 Armand Lanusse 

and other Afro-Creole writers drew once again on 

their radical literary traditions to address the 

possibilities and circumstances of the Civil War 

and Reconstruction, using the medium of the 

newspaper, to imagine with readers a nation of 

composite citizenry, an unprecedented United 

States.
40

  

On December 6, 1862, an article signed 

“A student of the Catholic Institute” (no doubt it 

would have been potentially dangerous to sign 

their name), criticizes an article in the L’Abeille 

(The Bee, another New Orleans Newspaper), for 

misrepresenting the actions of the school‟s 

director, Armand Lanusse, in regards to an 

incident in which the U.S. flag was supposedly 

torn apart at the school house.
41

 The student‟s 

scathing critique of L’Abeille suggests that the 

paper purposely misrepresented the incident in 

order to cast suspicion on the school. The student 

suggests that readers of newspapers must have a 

critical eye in order to “leave aside everything 

that is only there to tease partisan hatred.” In 

regards to the majority of readers, the students 

describes them as “those old geezers stuck in the 

groove of a routine and who for all their life have 

not missed reading the digest after sipping on a 

half cup of coffee, still believe blindly the news 

found in the papers; or maybe the pure-bred 

secessionist, the kind that does not exist in 

Europe, that was engendered by the Southern 

States‟ rebellion.” The curriculum of the school 

clearly resulted not only in critical readers of the 

news, but in students who were empowered to 

write in real world spaces to expose the social 

injustices they experienced. Throughout the Civil 

War, the teachers and students contributed poems, 

editorials and articles to New Orleans newspapers 

in which they sought to articulate a vision of the 

“public” that was not merely rights based, but was 

revolutionary in imagining a transatlantic 

brotherhood in which citizenship transcended the 

nation by conceiving of an international 

brotherhood united by political and economic 

freedom. 

For Armand Lanusse and the students at 

the Catholic Institute, when the Civil War broke 

out in 1861, they believed this would be the 

democratic revolution they had been waiting for.  

Central to this revolution would be a society in 

which the human dignity of all persons would be 

signified in the public sphere through free, 

integrated schools. For Lanusse, this goal was 

most clearly articulated in his writings in The 

Tribune where he wrote on February 17, 1865 

 

[Segregated Schools] perpetuate from 

childhood the infatuation of the white, 

and prompt the black to retaliate by 

enmity or envy, [and] … draws a line 

between the two elements of one and the 

same people, from the cradle itself up to 

the time of manhood and throughout life 

… 
42

 

Once again, a curriculum of imagination played a 

powerful role in envisioning a new America.  

Poems, printed on the front pages of the Tribune 

worked to create a vision of the nation based on 

the newly declared rights of all humans, against 

which actual events could be judged.  

For Afro-Creole activists, the Civil War 

was far more than a struggle to preserve the 



 
 

32 

Union, it was a necessary step toward the 

fulfillment of republican ideals. The editors 

wasted no time in setting out the goals of radical 

creoles: “We inaugurate today a new era in the 

South. We proclaim the Declaration of 

Independence as the basis of our platform … You 

who desire to establish true republicanism, 

democracy without shackles, gather around us.”
43

 

A few weeks later they wrote “a new sun, similar 

to that of 1789 … is on our horizon.”
44

 The paper 

also carefully noted that when France had 

emancipated all remaining slaves in her 

possession in 1848 that they had also been 

granted universal male suffrage. The objective 

was clear- achieving the full rights of citizenship 

for all African-Americans in the United States. 

How this would be achieved was the task that lay 

before them. 

Student letters to the newspaper reflect 

how the outbreak of the Civil War challenged 

students in new ways to negotiate the meanings of 

freedom and citizenship. At the start of the war, 

their principal, Armand Lanusse and many other 

free people of color chose to support the 

confederacy. A student letter from April 1861 

describes the large assembly held in the 

schoolyard at which Lanusse, “a brave Creole of 

our glorious Louisiana,” roused creoles of color 

to enlist in the Confederacy. Lanusse was quoted 

as saying:  

 

So my dear friends, it is not for liberty 

that we are about to spill our blood in 

struggling; but our right and “our right 

we shall have or die on the fields of 

battle.”
45

 

 

Invoking the language of rights to participate in 

the military, a “public” institution, Lanusse‟s 

decision to initially join the confederacy suggests 

the complex, contextual and situated meanings of 

public rights. Later Lanusse joined the Union, and 

in an 1866 editorial, wrote:  

 

Our future is indissolubly bound up with 

that of the negro, and we have resolved 

…to rise or fall with them.  We have no 

rights which we can reckon safe while 

the same are denied to the fieldhands on 

the sugar plantations.
46

   

 

The strategic political use of race distinguished 

the Tribune writers as radical thinkers of the time.  

Given that the prevailing theories of race were 

biological, to construct race as political or as the 

result of historical circumstances was radical. 

 Throughout the Civil War, the teachers 

and students contributed poems, editorials and 

articles to New Orleans newspapers in which they 

sought to articulate a vision of the “public” that 

was not merely rights based, but was 

revolutionary in imagining a transatlantic 

brotherhood in which citizenship transcended the 

nation. Imagination, not just the rational discourse 

of rights, was seen as essential to creating a 

“public” in which the equality of all human 

beings would be honored. 

 

In Conclusion 

Shortly before his death in 1867, Lanusse, 

while still principal, published a poem in 

L’Union, 

 

And since among us the ills of slavery 

will cease, let us forget our suffering of 

yesterday; Let us honor our martyrs and 

forgive the outrage.  This is how a proud 

and free people avenges itself!!
47

 

 

While the ideal of complete freedom had yet to be 

reached, the activism of both the teachers and 

students of the Catholic Institute cannot be 



 
 

33 

underestimated. After the Civil War, the former 

students and teachers were among the leaders in 

creating an integrated, public school system open 

to every child in New Orleans.
48

 The Louisiana 

constitution of 1868 not only mandated the 

establishment of a state-funded system of public 

education, but it forbade segregation.  According 

to Caryn Cossé Bell, it was by far the most radical 

blueprint for change in the Reconstruction 

South.
49

 Although, Lanusse died in the year 

preceding the writing of the constitution, it 

embodied his vision of a truly “public” sphere 

that honored the dignity of all humans. For 

Lanusse, civil or political rights could never 

bestow equality if unequal social relations in the 

public sphere, (like segregation) were sanctioned 

by the law. It was in the public sphere, not in 

individual civic or political rights, that the roots 

of true “brotherhood” took shape.  For Afro-

Creoles, the Constitution of 1868 fulfilled this 

radical revolutionary vision. “Public” integrated 

schools (the first in the nation) in New Orleans 

lasted only through Radical Reconstruction giving 

way to the segregation that increasingly marked 

the “Jim Crow” south.  However, the ideology of 

“public rights” as central to equality continued to 

inform a Franco-Afro-Creole protest tradition that 

would become the impetus for “Plessy vs. 

Ferguson” and the modern Civil Rights era.   

While the national narratives of history 

have situated the origins of “public” education in 

a Northern, Anglo-Protestant, Common School 

narrative, the Afro-Franco-Creole protest tradition 

of Armand Lanusse, and the Catholic Institute, 

disrupts that story by situating Louisiana as part 

of a complex trans-national, Atlantic World that 

developed “vernacular concepts of equality” 

which shaped understandings of  “public 

education.”
50

 Armand Lanusse theorized an Afro-

Franco-Creole protest tradition in which 

subjectivity was a process of creolization 

understood as an active, affirmative principle of 

cultural heterogeneity and innovation;
51

 in which 

public practice as embedded in public education 

was critical to understanding what it means to be 

human; and in which social action was enacted 

through imagining a transnational citizenship that 

disrupted the nation state as the locus of identity.   

The contribution of Armand Lanusse and 

the Catholic Institute have remained unintelligible 

given the normative tropes of curriculum history 

that continue to be wedded to an Anglo-

Protestant-Northern Common School narrative. 

Like the recent work of Daniel Tröhler, the 

deployment of curriculum history must 

interrogate the methodological roots that are at 

the base of Anglo-American historical studies of 

the modern school; disrupt the borders and 

boundaries that constitute national studies of 

curriculum history; and historicize the 

“languages” of education that have naturalized a 

science of education that is devoid of history.
52

 

Unleashing curriculum history from the tropes of 

monumental narratives, the nation-state, and the 

dominant languages of education will require a 

re-envisioning of curriculum history that takes 

seriously the contributions of an Afro-Creole 

educational protest tradition. 

                                                        
1
 Catholic Indigent Orphan Asylum  [Couvent 

School]:  Student Composition Books, 1856-

1863  AR/00635. Archdiocese Archives in 

New Orleans, from now on AANO. 
2
 Higher studies for advanced pupils were also 

made available.  Clearly there was a 

differentiated curriculum in which students 

were grouped according to perceived ability 

with what was understood at the time as the 

appropriate curriculum. 
3
 Classes operated on the basis of the pupil‟s 

aptitude and progress, and only at the turn of 

the century was the regular grade system 

adopted. In 1852 there were 165 students 

enrolled, the number of boys and girls being 



 
 

34 

                                                                                             
equal. 1853 there were 240 students, 25% of 

the free children of color attending school in 

New Orleans. 
4
 Mary Niall Mitchell (2008). Raising Freedom’s 

Child. New York:  New York University 

Press, 19. 
5
 Donald Devore and Joseph Logsdon suggest that 

a few of the teachers “dared to teach slaves to 

read and even to advocate racial equality” (pg 

42).  As the conditions became increasingly 

hostile for Free People of Color prior to the 

Civil War, it became more and more difficult 

to challenge the unjust racial system. Given 

that it was a crime to teach any slave to read, 

any efforts to teach the enslaved would have 

been covert.   In D. Devore & J. Logsdon 

(1991).  Crescent City Schools:  Public 

Education in New Orleans 1841-1991.  

University of Southwestern Louisiana:  The 

Center for Louisiana Studies. “The Story of 

St. Louis School of Holy Redeemer Parish 

New Orleans, La. Formerly St. Louis or the 

Colored.” By Roger Baudier, November 

1956, AANO. 
6
 Mary Niall Mitchell (2008). Raising Freedom’s 

Child. New York:  New York University 

Press, 18. 
7
 Caryn Cossé Bell (1997).  Revolution, 

Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest 

Tradition in Louisiana 1718-1868.  Baton 

Rouge:  Louisiana State University; Emily 

Clark (2007).  Masterless Mistresses.  Chapel 

Hill:  The University of North Carolina Press; 

Mary Niall Mitchell (2008). Raising 

Freedom’s Child. New York:  New York 

University Press. 
8
 D. Devore & J. Logsdon (1991).  Crescent City 

Schools:  Public Education in New Orleans 

1841-1991.  University of Southwestern 

Louisiana:  The Center for Louisiana Studies, 

42. 
9
 The concept of the “public,” and specifically 

“public rights,” in defining citizenship, has 

recently been illuminated by Rebecca Scott in 

relation to an Atlantic and Caribbean 

worldview.  Specifically she highlights how 

                                                                                             
“vernacular concepts of equality” in Louisiana 

were the result of social networks that 

spanned place (Africa, Europe and the 

Caribbean), historical events including the 

Haitian and French Revolution, as well as the 

constant flow of peoples throughout the 

Atlantic who brought a “strong tradition of 

claiming equal rights for themselves.” See 

Scott, R. J. (2007).  The Atlantic World and 

the Road to Plessy v. Ferguson.  The Journal 

of American History, 727. 
10

 Paul Gilory (1988). The Black Atlantic. 

Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press. 
11

 Bernadette Baker (2009).  New Curriculum 

Histories.  Rotterdam:  Sense Publishers, pg. 

xi. 
12

 Armand Lanusse (Ed.) (1845) Les Cenelles: A 

Collection of Poems by Creole Writers of the 

Early Nineteenth Century. Translated and 

with a Preface by Règine Latortue and 

Gleason R. W. Adams. Boston, 

Massachusetts:  G.K. Hall & Co. xxxvii. 
13

 Glissant, E. (1989).  Caribbean Discourse:  

Selected essays. Trans. J.M. Dash. 

Charlottesville, VA:  University Press of 

Virginia (Original work published in 1981).  
14

 Author, Curriculum & Pedagogy 
15

 Rebecca Scott (2005).  Degrees of Freedom.  

Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 45. 
16

 Ibid, pg xi. 
17

 Charles Roussève (1937). The Negro in 

Louisiana.  New Orleans:  The Xavier 

University Press, 48.  
18

 (Fabre, 1998). 
19

 Marie Couvent was originally from West 

Africa where she was enslaved as a child and 

sent to Saint Domingue.  She escaped to New 

Orleans during the Haitian Revolution and 

eventually married Bernard Couvent, a free 

black carpenter in the city. 
20

 This included, Barthelemy Rey, Nelson 

Fouche, Emile Brule, Adolphe Duhart, and 

Armand Lanusse. “A History of Saint Louis 

School of Holy Redeemer Parish formerly 

known as Catholic Institute for Indigent 

Orphans founded April 20, 1847.  Sister Mary 



 
 

35 

                                                                                             
Eugenius Gallaher, Sisters of the Holy Ghost 

(S.H.G.).  (April 11, 1976), AANO. 
21

 Catholic Indigent Orphan Asylum  [Couvent 

School]:  Student Composition Books, 1856-

1863 AR/00635. Archdiocese Archives in 

New Orleans, from now on AANO. 
22

 The concept of the “public,” and specifically 

“public rights,” in defining citizenship, has 

recently been illuminated by Rebecca Scott in 

relation to an Atlantic and Caribbean 

worldview.  Specifically she highlights how 

“vernacular concepts of equality” in Louisiana 

were the result of social networks that 

spanned place (Africa, Europe and the 

Caribbean), historical events including the 

Haitian and French Revolution, as well as the 

constant flow of peoples throughout the 

Atlantic who brought a “strong tradition of 

claiming equal rights for themselves.” See 

Scott, R. J. (2007).  The Atlantic World and 

the Road to Plessy v. Ferguson.  The Journal 

of American History, 727. 
23

 “History of the Catholic Indigent Orphan 

Institute” (Dauphine and Touro Streets)  

Published by the Board of Directors (1916), 

AANO. Roussève, Charles (1937).  The 

Negro in Louisiana.  New Orleans: Xavier 

Press, 43. 
24

 Classes operated on the basis of the pupil‟s 

aptitude and progress, and only at the turn of 

the century was the regular grade system 

adopted. In 1852 there were 165 students 

enrolled, the number of boys and girls being 

equal.  1853 there were 240 students, 25% of 

the free children of color attending school in 

New Orleans. 
25

 Catholic Indigent Orphan Asylum  [Couvent 

School]:  Student Composition Books, 1856-

1863  AR/00635. AANO.  
26

 Ibid. 
27

 Throughout the 1850‟s, the state legislature and 

city of New Orleans increasingly erased the 

legal distinctions between slaves and free 

people of color. This included laws that 

forbade free people of color to own 

coffeeshops, billard halls where liquor was 

                                                                                             
sold, and a city ordinance that outlawed the 

assembly of people of color, free or slave. See 

Mitchell, 20.  
28

 Catholic Indigent Orphan Asylum  [Couvent 

School]:  Student Composition Books, 1856-

1863  AR/00635. AANO. 
29

 Mary Niall Mitchell (2008). Raising Freedom’s 

Child. New York:  New York University 

Press, 26.  
30

 An 1830 law prohibited anyone form teaching 

slaves to read or write under penalty of 

imprisonment. See Caryn Cossé Bell (1997).  

Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole 

Protest Tradition in Louisiana 1718-1868.  

Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University, 

131. 
31

 Mary Niall Mitchell (2008). Raising Freedom’s 

Child. New York:  New York University 

Press, 16.  
32

 Catholic Indigent Orphan Asylum  [Couvent 

School]:  Student Composition Books, 1856-

1863 AR/00635. AANO. 
33

  The directors continued to press for funding, 

in 1862 Representatives from the Institute 

petitioned for financial aid from the Bureau of 

Education. The petition reminded the Bureau 

“the colored population contribute also to the 

Public School fund of this Department, where 

from they derive no benefit whatsoever…” 

The school did receive $3000.00 to be 

expended under the supervision of the Bureau 

of Education and the Superintendent of Public 

Schools. . “A History of Saint Louis School of 

Holy Redeemer Parish formerly known as 

Catholic Institute for Indigent Orphans 

founded April 20, 1847.  Sister Mary 

Eugenius Gallaher, Sisters of the Holy Ghost 

(S.H.G.).  (April 11, 1976), AANO 
34

 The school is described as “private” by John 

Blassingame (1973) Black New Orleans 

1860-1880. Chicago:  The University of 

Chicago Press, 108. See Mitchell, 18, for a 

discussion of the “public” nature of the 

Catholic Institute.  
35

 This was also a vehicle that had been used by 

the Ursulines to secure monies from colonial 



 
 

36 

                                                                                             
officials.  See Emily Clark (2007).  Masterless 

Mistresses.  Chapel Hill:  The University of 

North Carolina Press. 
36

 Devore & Logsdon, 42. 
37

 “The Story of St. Louis School of Holy 

Redeemer Parish New Orleans, La. Formerly 

St. Louis or the Colored.” By Roger Baudier, 

November 1956, AANO. 
38

 Dr. Louis Charles Roudanez and his brother 

Jean-Baptiste Roudanez were the other co-

founders.  
39

 See K. Richard and Author (In Press). „We now 

think for ourselves, and we shall act for 

ourselves‟:  The New Orleans Tribune as 

Advocate for Public, Integrated Education 

1864-1870, History of Education. Also Caryn 

Cosse Bell, 2. 
40

 Caroline Senter (2000).  Creole Poets on the 

Verge of Nation. In S. Kein (Ed.), 

Creole. Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University 

Press. 
41

 The incident referred to by the student was the 

refusal of Lanusse, after the surrender of New 

Orleans, to fly the Union flag as ordered by 

General Butler. Lanusse had served during the 

Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. 

Later he confessed to being misguided in this 

matter and publicly apologized. See Armand 

Lanusse (Ed.) (1845) Les Cenelles: A 

Collection of Poems by Creole Writers of the 

Early Nineteenth Century. Translated and 

with a Preface by Règine Latortue and 

Gleason R. W. Adams. Boston, 

Massachusetts:  G.K. Hall & Co, xxv. 

Eventually the Catholic Institute became an 

arsenal for the weapons of free black men 

fighting to defend the Union and defeat the 

slaveholding South, see Mitchell, 47.  
42

 New Orleans Tribune, February 17, 1865.   

Quoted from James M. McPherson (1965).  

The Negro’s Civil War.  New York:  Vintage 

Books, 289. 
43

 L‟Union, September 27, 1862 as translated in 

James McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War 

(New York, 1969), 276.  
44

 L‟Union, October 18, 1862, ibid 

                                                                                             
45

 Catholic Indigent Orphan Asylum  [Couvent 

School]:  Student Composition Books, 1856-

1863 AR/00635. AANO. 
46

 Caroline Senter (2000).  Creole Poets on the 

Verge of Nation. In S. Kein (Ed.), Creole. 

Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University 

Press, 283. 
47

 L‟Union, December, 2 1866 
48

 Devore & Langsdon, 42.  
49

 Bell, 1. 
50

 See Rebecca Scott (2007). Public rights and 

private commerce: A nineteenth century 

Atlantic Creole itinerary.  Current 

Anthropology, 48 (2). 237-256, for a further 

discussion of “vernacular concepts of 

equality.” 
51

 E. Glissant (1989). Carribbean Discourse: 

Selected Essays. Trans. J.M. Dash. 

Charlottesville, VA: University Press of 

Virginia.  
52

 Daniel Tröhler (2011). Languages of 

Education. New York: Routledge. 

 

 
 

 


