The Acadian Exile: How Le Grand Dérangement Created Louisiana’s Cajuns

In the summer of 1755, British soldiers called the Acadian men of Grand-Pré into their own church, then locked the doors. More than four hundred farmers became prisoners in the place where they had been baptized and married, and within weeks their families were being loaded onto ships with no say in where they would land. Some of their grandchildren would end up thousands of miles away, on a slow brown bayou called the Teche, and become the people we now call Cajuns.

This is the story of Le Grand Dérangement, the Great Upheaval: the expulsion that scattered the Acadians across the Atlantic world, the long, deadly road to Louisiana, and how a few thousand refugees turned into the culture behind the gumbo, the fiddle and the French you still hear in Acadiana. It’s also a story with a twist ending: the British Crown finally acknowledged what happened, 248 years later, because a Cajun lawyer refused to let it go.

Before the exile: a quiet French colony in the North

Acadia was France’s farming colony on the Atlantic coast of what is now Canada. According to 64 Parishes, the Louisiana encyclopedia, its first families came from west-central France in the early to mid-1600s. Over the next century they built a close-knit, Catholic, French-speaking society of farmers, diking the salt marshes of the Bay of Fundy to grow wheat and raise cattle.

The trouble was the map. Acadia sat on the line between two empires. Britain took control of the region in 1713, and the Acadians tried to stay neutral through the wars that followed. By the 1750s, with another war with France coming, the British authorities in Nova Scotia decided the Acadians had to go.

1755: the church doors close at Grand-Pré

The expulsion was planned by Charles Lawrence, who was running Nova Scotia for the British, with help from William Shirley, the governor of Massachusetts, who supplied troops and ships. 64 Parishes describes how Acadian men were summoned on pretexts and arrested. At Grand-Pré, British troops lured more than four hundred men into the church, which became their prison.

Families were separated, farms were burned and people were shipped off to the British colonies along the Atlantic coast, to England and, later, to France. The deportations continued until 1763. Historians writing for 64 Parishes say that as many as half of the roughly 15,000 Acadians may have died, and they describe the expulsion as ethnic cleansing.

In St. Martinville today, a replica of the Grand-Pré Deportation Cross stands at the Acadian Memorial. The original marks the spot where more than 2,000 Acadian farmers and tradesmen and their families were put aboard ships in 1755.

The road to Louisiana

Louisiana was not the first stop for anybody. Exiles spent years in the British colonies, in France and in the Caribbean. Historian Carl A. Brasseaux, writing for the Acadian Memorial, traces the arrivals one group at a time:

• April 1764: the first Acadians to reach Louisiana were a small group of 20 who came from New York by way of Mobile. They were settled on the Mississippi River above New Orleans, near today’s St. John–St. James parish line.
• February 1765: 193 refugees from Halifax arrived in New Orleans, led by Joseph Broussard, known as Beausoleil. They were guided to the Attakapas District along Bayou Teche and given land, six months of seed grain, a gun and tools for clearing land. They called their new home “New Acadia.”
• Summer and fall 1765: disaster. Malaria or yellow fever decimated the newcomers, and some survivors fled to Cabannocé on the Mississippi.
• 1766–1768: at least 689 of the roughly 1,050 known Acadian survivors in Maryland and Pennsylvania sailed for Louisiana. They were placed along the Mississippi in what are now St. James, Ascension and Iberville parishes, and at a post across from Natchez.
• 1785: the biggest single wave. Between May and October, 1,596 Acadians who had spent decades in France crossed on seven merchant ships chartered by the Spanish government, which now ruled Louisiana. Four of the seven groups settled along Bayou Lafourche, between present-day Labadieville and Raceland.
• 1788: the last recorded group, 19 refugees from the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon.

Altogether, about 3,000 Acadian exiles made it to Louisiana, according to 64 Parishes. The Acadian Memorial in St. Martinville has engraved roughly 3,000 names of Acadian refugees from early Louisiana records on twelve bronze plaques.

Why Louisiana wanted them

Spain took over Louisiana after the French and Indian War, and both the French caretaker government and the Spanish saw the newcomers as useful. 64 Parishes notes that the Acadians were welcomed partly as a buffer against British settlers. They were also tough, experienced farmers who arrived as families.

They were not always easy subjects. In October 1768, Acadians joined the uprising in which armed settlers marched into New Orleans and forced out Louisiana’s first Spanish governor, Antonio de Ulloa. Brasseaux estimates that as many as 200 to 300 Acadian men took part.

The land itself shaped who they became. The Acadians on the Mississippi were squeezed onto narrow strips between the river and the swamp. Out west, around Opelousas and the Attakapas, families could spread out onto open prairie and raise cattle. That split is still visible today in the difference between the river parishes, the bayou country and the Cajun prairie. To see the wild heart of that country, read our guide to the Atchafalaya Basin, the great swamp that sits between them.

The hard truths in the story

The Acadian story is one of survival, but it is not a simple one. Brasseaux writes that by 1810 a majority of Louisiana’s Acadians owned enslaved people. The reproduction Acadian farmstead at the Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site includes slave quarters alongside the family home, the outdoor kitchen and the barn. An honest visit to Acadiana’s history includes both the exiles and the people their descendants enslaved.

From Acadians to Cajuns

The people who arrived were Acadians. The people who came out the other side were something new. 64 Parishes explains that, especially after the Civil War, Acadians married into the families around them: Creole descendants of French, Spanish and German settlers, along with Anglo-Americans and Scots-Irish. Together they became a new ethnic group, called Cajun. Traditional Cajun food, music and culture came together between the end of the Civil War and the early 1900s.

You can hear that history in Cajun last names. 64 Parishes lists Boudreaux, Guidry, LeBlanc and Trahan as Acadian; Fontenot, Soileau and Fuselier as French; Abshire, Hymel, Schexnider and Stelly as German; and Dartez, Miguez, Romero and Segura as Spanish.

The word itself comes from Acadien, the French for Acadian. In everyday Louisiana French it was shortened to Cadien, and in English that became “Cajun.” Learn to say it the old way on our Speak Cajun page.

Pushed to the edge, then pushed back

Being Cajun was not always something people said proudly. Louisiana’s 1921 constitution ordered that classes be taught in English, and 64 Parishes says children were punished for speaking French at school until about 1960. Many parents stopped teaching French to their children so they would not suffer the same way.

The tide turned. In the early 1980s, a Cajun engineer named Calvin J. Roach sued his employer over an ethnic slur. 64 Parishes says that case, Roach v. Dresser Industrial Valve and Instrument Division, led to federal recognition of Cajuns as a true ethnic group. Since then, the Cajun French revival has worked to keep the language alive, and Cajun music and food have gone worldwide.

Evangeline: the poem that made a legend

No account of Acadian history escapes Evangeline. In 1847, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published Evangeline, a long poem about a young Acadian woman separated from her fiancé during the expulsion, who searches for him for years, including in Louisiana. She is fictional. But the poem made the Acadian exile famous, and St. Martinville embraced her.

The Evangeline statue on the church square was donated by Dolores del Río, the Mexican film star who played Evangeline in the 1929 movie, and was unveiled in 1931, according to the Acadian Memorial. Nearby, an ancient live oak on the bank of Bayou Teche is known as the Evangeline Oak. The story goes that it’s where the Acadians landed; treat that as the legend it is, and enjoy the tree anyway.

The apology that took 248 years

In 1763, Acadian exiles in Philadelphia petitioned King George III about their treatment. The king never answered. In the 1990s, Warren A. Perrin, a Cajun attorney from Erath who also served as president of CODOFIL, Louisiana’s French-language agency, picked the petition back up. He threatened to sue the Crown, asking for no money, only an acknowledgment of what happened.

After years of talks, Governor General Adrienne Clarkson signed a Royal Proclamation on behalf of Queen Elizabeth II in December 2003. It acknowledged the “tragic consequences” of the deportation, including “the deaths of many thousands of Acadians,” and designated July 28 of every year, starting in 2005, as a Day of Commemoration of the Great Upheaval. The proclamation says plainly that it does not create any legal or financial responsibility for the Crown. July 28 was chosen because the deportation order was dated July 28, 1755.

Is your family Acadian, Creole, or a little of everything? Tell us your family name and where your people settled, the Teche, Lafourche, the prairie or the river, in the comments. If you’ve got old family photos, share them in our Family Album, and if a dish came down through your family, post it on Share Your Recipe. Planning a trip to St. Martinville? Tell us how it went.

Sources & further reading

• 64 Parishes, Shane K. Bernard, “Cajuns” and “Acadians in Colonial Louisiana”
• Carl A. Brasseaux, “Acadian Immigration into South Louisiana, 1764–1785,” Acadian Memorial
• Acadian Memorial (Wall of Names, Deportation Cross, mural, hours) and its area attractions page
• Louisiana State Parks: Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site
• Acadian Museum of Erath
• Royal Proclamation of 2003, Canada Gazette Part II, Vol. 137, No. 27 (text via Wikipedia)
• Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information photographs by Russell Lee, St. Martinville, 1938

Checked Nov. 8, 2026.