Louis Charles Roudanez was born in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, to Louis Roudanez, a French merchant, and Aimee Potens, a free woman of color. Listed as white on his baptismal registry, Roudanez was baptized as Catholic by the president of the College of New Orleans. The registry also lists Roudanez’s birth year as 1823. For reasons unknown, Roudanez and his family always stated that 1826 was the year of his birth, and on the 1870 Federal Census form for New Orleans, Roudanez’s age is listed as forty-four.
As a child, Roudanez was schooled in New Orleans and worked in Hill and Cooley’s notion store. He later made a small fortune in his municipal bond investments then went on to earn a medical degree in 1853 at the University of Paris, which was then considered to be the world’s best medical school.
After the French Revolution of 1789, physicians became one of the most politically progressive professional groups in France. Living in France during the Revolution of 1848 and having French revolutionaries as professors instilled in Roudanez an idealism that he would be both praised and vilified for in later years. Many foreign students of color who studied there often stayed since France was a much friendlier place to people of color, but Roudanez returned to the United States. His friends encouraged him to live in the North first, so he moved to New Hampshire and earned his second medical degree at Dartmouth College in 1857.
Roudanez returned to New Orleans, where he would live for the rest of his life, and began a successful medical practice in which he treated both black and white patients. Roudanez married Celie Saulay on September 15, 1857. They had eight children. Two of his sons became doctors and a third became a dentist. Another one of Roudanez’s sons attended Louis le Grand College and lived in New Orleans his entire life. Three of his daughters lived in Paris; one of them was the head of an all girls’ school.
In April 1862 when south Louisiana came under Union occupation, the rights of the free black population were rolled back. Among other restrictions, the Union army required all blacks, even free people of color, to carry passes when in public. Roudanez and a group that was comprised mostly of black Creoles began L’Union , a bi-weekly French-language publication, aimed at the black Creole population, to campaign against slavery and for their own voting rights. On December 23, 1862, L’Union became a tri-weekly.
The paper was run by a board of directors that was elected by shareholders every six months. Those working on the paper received death threats. Often quoted in the paper was the French revolutionary philosopher, Lamar-tine, whom L’Union called “the Bard of liberty.” L’Union promoted the literary heritage of black Creoles, but the exclusivity of a French-language paper widened the chasm between this small, elite group of Catholics and the much larger English-speaking group of black American Protestants, whose lives were more greatly affected by slavery and racism.
L’Union also called for suffrage for free black men, but stopped short of calling for voting rights for ex-slaves until near the end of the paper’s run. The paper was printed in both French and English starting on July 9, 1863 and a year later, L’Union , realizing that the struggle for voting rights must include ex-slaves, publicly called for their suffrage. Five days afterwards on July 19, 1864, L’Union folded.
After L’Union ceased publication, Roudanez launched the New Orleans Tribune, a newspaper which still serves the African-American community of New Orleans, Louisiana. The newspaper is now published by McKenna Publishing Co., which also publishes The Blackbook, a community directory of African-American businesses, and Welcome, a guide for Black tourists to New Orleans.
Roudanez died in New Orleans on March 11, 1890.
Posted By: Siebra Muhammad
Monday, February 3rd 2014 at 12:28PM
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