Sophie White

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Sophie White | "A baser commerce": Retailing, Class, and Gender in French Colonial New Orleans | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3 | The History Cooperative

"A baser commerce": Retailing, Class, and Gender in French Colonial New Orleans

FOLLOWING the death in 1747 of Marie Catherine Baudreau, Widow Gervais, thirty-seven colonists lined up before the Superior Council of Louisiana to file suit against the estate of this New Orleans shopkeeper. Thirty-five of the petitioners were laying claim to merchandise that these colonists had supplied to Gervais or consigned to her store to sell on commission. Yet of these thirty-five claimants, only eleven can be described as professional members of the mercantile community involved in the sale of dry goods. The other twenty-four claimants consisted of colonists of noble extraction (including military officers), surgeons, and habitants as well as inhabitants from middling to modest backgrounds: artisans, indentured workers, domestic servants, and one military gunner. All were white; collectively, they represented just over 1 percent of Louisiana's population of thirty-two hundred white colonists.¹ Conspicuous among these petitioners were eight women of different marital and, by implication, legal status: one widow, one spinster, one minor, and five married women. Most prominent of all claimants for the extent of her commercial undertakings with Widow Gervais and the elevation of her rank was Madame de Vaudreuil, the governor's wife and a member of the nobility. Her interests in Gervais' estate were substantial, hinting at a long-standing mercantile relationship with the widow that stretched beyond the activities of the shop and that potentially identified Madame de Vaudreuil as a noteworthy member of the mercantile community of New Orleans.

Evidence dating to the period following Gervais' death (and the demise of her shop) suggests that Madame de Vaudreuil had operated her own store in New Orleans in which she sold dry goods. In profiting from trade, Madame de Vaudreuil was merely duplicating the commercial activities of most of the members of the colonial elite, including her husband, the governor. But by keeping her own shop where she was perhaps called on to serve customers rather than consigning her merchandise with other merchants, Madame de Vaudreuil, unlike Widow Gervais, could be publicly slandered for engaging in "a baser commerce" inappropriate to her rank.² For Widow Gervais' death had robbed Madame de Vaudreuil of the veil of respectability that had served to cloak this noblewoman's business activities, exposing the contours of the colony's commercial and cultural structures.

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