About Le Moniteur de la Louisiane

Le Moniteur de la Louisiane

Le Moniteur de la Louisiane, in English The Louisiana Monitor, was the first newspaper published in Louisiana. It appeared in New Orleans on March 3, 1794, founded by Louis Duclot, a refugee from Saint-Domingue, and it was published in the French language, typically in a four-page format, for about twenty years. For the first decade of its life it was the only newspaper in the colony, and in 1797 it became the official paper of the government.

The Moniteur was born under Spanish rule, in a French-speaking colony whose governors regarded the printing press with suspicion, and it survived the transfer of Louisiana to France and then to the United States in 1803. Its history is the starting point of Louisiana journalism, and its surviving issues, preserved by the Library of Congress, remain a foundation document of the state's press history.

A Refugee Founder and a Governor's Permission

The founder of the Moniteur, Louis Duclot, was a refugee from Saint-Domingue, the French Caribbean colony then convulsed by revolution and slave uprising, which sent French-speaking refugees across the Gulf and Caribbean world. Duclot established his printing office in New Orleans and issued the first number of Le Moniteur de la Louisiane on March 3, 1794.

Printing in Spanish Louisiana required official tolerance. Initial publication required authorization by the Spanish colonial government, which was given by the governor, Francisco Luis Héctor de Carondelet. The paper's early issues carried the statement that they were issued from Duclot's press with the permission and privilege of the governor — a formula that captured the paper's position exactly: a newspaper existing on sufferance, in a colony where Spanish officials were deeply suspicious of the printed word.

The Only Newspaper in the Colony

The Moniteur flourished for twenty years and remained the sole newspaper in Louisiana up to the time the colony passed to the United States in 1803. For a French-speaking population hungry for news of Europe, of the French Revolution and of the Caribbean world from which so many of its refugees came, Duclot's weekly was the only printed source of intelligence the colony possessed.

It was a weekly publication in French, reporting on local and international news with an emphasis on international news. Its four pages carried government notices, commercial intelligence and advertisements alongside the foreign reports its readers craved — a modest format dictated by the small scale of its market and the constraints under which it operated.

A Small and Reluctant Readership

The Moniteur's audience was never large. A contemporary account by Berquin-Duvallon, published in Paris in 1803, reported the editor's own admission that the paper had never attained more than eighty subscribers, most of them European foreigners. The same account attributed the Creole population's distance from the paper to parsimony on one side and a dislike of reading on the other.

The colony's single printing office, established with Governor Carondelet's approval, worked under government control and was used mainly for the weekly gazette and for official printing — government ordinances and administrative regulations, alphabets and catechisms for children, passports and other forms. The Moniteur was thus both a newspaper and the visible tip of the colony's entire print culture, such as it was.

Official Paper of the Government, 1797

In 1797 Le Moniteur became the official state newspaper. In that capacity the colonial government used it to communicate government notices and regulations to the French-speaking population of the region. Those communications included the government's policy on slavery, and for a time the paper carried the official policy on indemnification for runaway slaves arising from the slave revolts of the period.

The Moniteur ran advertisements of various sorts, emphasizing agricultural products and equipment, and also the sale of enslaved people — a reminder that the first newspaper in Louisiana was embedded in the slave economy of the colony it served, and that its official columns administered, among other things, the legal machinery of slavery. Its motto, printed on its masthead, was a string of Latin noise-words: "Bombalio, Clangor, Stridor, Taratantara, Murmur."

Jean Baptiste Le Sueur Fontaine, Editor 1796–1814

In 1796 Jean Baptiste Le Sueur Fontaine became the Moniteur's editor, a position he held until 1814; for a few years he was also the paper's publisher. Like Duclot, Fontaine was from Saint-Domingue, part of the refugee generation that staffed the early cultural institutions of New Orleans. Locally he was popular for his activities as an actor and socialite as well as a journalist.

Fontaine was a sympathizer of the French House of Bourbon, which may have influenced his editorial positions, though influence had narrow scope: the newspaper's settled policy was to avoid controversy, and it seldom expressed editorial opinion. Under Fontaine the Moniteur steered through the most consequential years in Louisiana's history without becoming a partisan organ — a survival strategy under regimes that changed around it.

Through the Louisiana Purchase

The Moniteur lived through three sovereignties. Founded under Spain, it was still publishing when Louisiana was retroceded to France and when, in 1803, the Louisiana Purchase transferred the territory to the United States. Fontaine himself kept an account of the brief French administration of Prefect Laussat, from November to December 20, 1803, which he left in his will as part of his editorial set of the paper; that set was never found, a loss bibliographers were still lamenting more than a century later.

After 1803 the Moniteur no longer stood alone. Louisiana's first newspaper by an English-language publisher, the Union, began in New Orleans on December 13, 1803, and a French competitor, Le Télégraphe, followed immediately after. The monopoly that had defined the Moniteur's first decade ended with the American era, though the paper itself continued publishing into the new regime.

The Final Years and Disputed End Date

Fontaine's editorship ended in 1814, and Louis F. M. Le Faux became editor after him. The newspaper's ownership in its later period is recorded under W. H. Wilson of New Orleans. The paper continued until the publisher's death in July 1814, according to one account of its history, which gives July 2, 1814, as the date publication ceased.

The Library of Congress, however, catalogues the Moniteur as published from March 3, 1794, to 1815, and dates in the paper's bibliographic record run into that year. The difference between a final issue in 1814 and a run extending to 1815 is a small but genuine discrepancy in the record of a paper whose surviving files are fragmentary; either way, the Moniteur's life spanned roughly two decades, from 1794 to the middle of the following decade.

Surviving Issues and Preservation

Survival of the Moniteur's issues is poor, as befits a small colonial weekly. The Library of Congress holds it on microfilm for August 1802 to November 1803 and for parts of 1811 and 1812, and in paper for individual issues of May 28, 1803, and February 18, 1804. A digital edition is available through the Library's Chronicling America program, and the paper's catalogue record carries the control number sn84020177.

The first complete volume in any public collection was reported to run only from issue number 14 of 1802 into November 1803. That even the paper's own editorial set disappeared — Fontaine's bequest was never located, and at least one early printing connected with the paper was destroyed by fire — makes the Moniteur a case study in how fragile the documentary base of early American journalism can be.

Legacy as Louisiana's First Newspaper

The Moniteur's importance outweighs its circulation. Eighty subscribers made it a negligible commercial enterprise; two decades as a colony's only newspaper made it a historic one. It introduced the periodical press to Louisiana, served as the official voice of its government from 1797, and recorded, in French, the passage of the territory from Spain through France to the United States.

Every later Louisiana newspaper tradition — the great bilingual dailies of antebellum New Orleans, the French papers that survived into the twentieth century, the Black press of the Civil War era — began in the space the Moniteur opened in 1794, when a refugee printer persuaded a Spanish governor to let him publish a four-page weekly for a colony that had never had one.