LETTERS READ INCUBATOR VI: Michel Musson, 1849

LETTERS READ

A prelude to the March 25, 2021 reading, The Letters of Edgar Degas, hosted by Pitot House and co-promoted by Alliance Française de La Nouvelle-Orléans. Michel is Edgar Degas’s maternal uncle. Pitot House was once owned by Degas's maternal grandmother.

In this reading, Michel writes of his son, Eugene Henri, 9 years of age, whose illness and death are documented.

The letters, September 8th, and 9th are from the Degas and Musson family's papers, Manuscripts Collection 226, Louisiana Research Collection, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Michel’s father, to whom these letters are addressed, was Germain Musson. A native of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti. It had been a French colony until the Haitian Revolution toppled French and white supremacy, freed enslaved peoples, and empowered people of color. Germain, identifying as white, fled. Germain migrated to New Orleans in about 1810, married a prominent member of the Creole community here, and made a fortune in Louisiana cotton and Mexican silver.

After his wife died ca 1819, he moved his children to France. There, they lived next door to a young French/Neapolitan banker, Auguste De Gas. Auguste and Michel’s sister fell in love. They married, prospered, and had several children. Hillaire Germain Edgar De Gas was the firstborn. Today, we know him as Edgar Degas.

Eventually, Michel returned to New Orleans and created a new world fortune in cotton and insurance. This reading finds Michel at the top of his game, well before the Civil War when everything changed.

Ultimately, Michel’s business failed. As did the fortunes of the Musson clan and many privileged New Orleanians who had thrived before the war. During Reconstruction, the loss of privilege built into resentment which lead to organized insurrection and violence. Michel and several other males in the family became founding, and active members of the White League. “…a paramilitary cousin of the Ku Klux Klan called the White League. They had organized quickly into a dangerous and powerful force for white supremacy that forwent masks and hoods. Their 1874 rebellion was the culmination of years of racial and political terror in Louisiana and surrounding states, a resistance to Reconstruction that northern newspapers like the Cincinnati Gazette saw as ‘the old war in a new shape.” —The Saturday Evening Post, January 21, 2021. Accessed 03/18/21

For further information about The White League and The Battle of Liberty Place.