AHTG's Tripartite Alliance Earth massive timeline has an interesting path for Louisiana, part of its overall effort to make all Francophoney. Selected excerpt:
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From the Peace of Paris in 1763 until the Treaty of Ildefonso in 1802, the Spanish monarchy controlled the vast territory of Louisiana, stretching from the scattering of colonists in the far south of the territory north to the uncharted prairies and woodlands stretching to the Canadian border. In 1802, though, the Spanish were induced to sell the Louisiana territory to France by the threat of force. Napoléon once hoped to transform Louisiana into the centrepiece of the French colonial empire, but he was soon forced to recognize that France simply could not defend Louisiana adequately against the United States of Britain. In 1803, Napoléon offered to sell the entire Louisiana territory north of the 40th parallel and free access to the port facilities in New Orleans/Nouvelle-Orléans to the young American federation. This stratagem worked remarkably well, laying the foundation for the Franco-American alliance against Britain in the Napoleonic Wars. Though Britain made several raids against Louisiana in the course of the American phase of the Napoleonic Wars, French imperial forces and the United States army were always able to repel the British from Louisianan soil.
As the French Empire's position weakened in Europe, however, France faced the real possibility of losing Louisiana to the British. Reluctantly, in the fall of 1813, the French Empire entered negotiations with the United States on the sale of Louisiana. Just before the final collapse of the French Empire in 1814, the United States purchased South Louisiana from France for two million United States dollars. Under the terms of the purchase, the large Francophone community of Louisiana was to retain the full of the French language in government and education. The conclusion of the Anglo-American War in 1815 brought an end to British attempts at conquest, and Louisiana was confirmed as an American state.
Louisiana's population was quite diverse, but it was still Francophone. The Cadiens -- survivors of the British deportation of the Acadiens from eastern Canada in the Seven Years War -- constituted the single largest group of Louisiana Francophones, rapidly expanding in number throughout the bayous and prairies of western Louisiana. In the east of Louisiana, the Creoles descended from the pre-Seven Years War settlers vied with the tens of thousands of settlers Napoleonophile settlers who fled France after 1814 for control of state politics. There was also a large group of Black Creoles, descended from Caribbean immigrants and slaves. By the eve of the First Civil War, these Francophone groups constituted almost three-quarters of the Louisianan population. In addition to the Francophones, there was a large Anglo-American community took shape in New Orleans to profit from the Mississippi trade, and forty-five thousand immigrants -- nearly all Catholic, mainly French, Irish, Spanish, or Italian, most settlers in the New Orleans area.
Even though Louisiana was a Southern state, the passage of the Graduated Emancipation Law in 1853 also made it a free state. The rapid growth of the Cadien, Creole, and foreign Catholic agricultural settlements led to the formation of a free agricultural peasantry, unique in the South. This, and the ideological opposition to slavery on the part of the Catholic Church, led to Louisiana opting to remain outside the secessionist Confederacy, and to remain loyal to the Union, consequently making Louisiana the first target of the Confederacy. Despite a ferocious defense of the state by the state militia, Louisiana would have been doomed to fall to the Confederates had it not been for the surprising intervention of the Second French Empire against the Confederacy. Though the French intervention may have shortened the Civil War by years, it also created a quasi-permanent xenophobia on the part of Anglo-Americans, upset that the seemingly friendly intervention of France was actually intended to mask a bid for Mexican empire. Louisianan Francophones, as colinguals of France, were naturally suspect.
Over the next generation, Francophone Louisiana became increasingly isolated from the rest of the United States. Though it remained a prosperous territory, its role as an entrepôt for the United States' foreign trade gradually decreased as better railways and the development of New York City and Baltimore made New Orleans obsolete. Louisiana was also distinguished from the rest of the United States by its language, religion, and by its relatively high rate of population growth and the relative importance of immigration. Not surprisingly, Louisiana began to grow apart from the United States.
Beginning in the 1940's, and continuing in the next decades, nationalism began to grow among the Louisianan Francophone community. In the century after the Civil War, the four distinct Francophone groups had begun to intermarry into each other and to develop a growing consciousness of a wider Francophone nation in Louisiana and of an increasingly important Francophone community worldwide. The Parti louisianais was formed by a group of New Orleans intellectuals in 1951. Its platform was a clear statement of the fundamental unity of the Louisianan Francophone population, explicitly identified Louisianan Francophones as a nation and Louisiana as their putative nation-state, and called on the state government to formally establish the predominance of the French language throughout Louisiana. The 1962 language laws passed by the Parti louisianais government, requiring all signage in the state to have French letting, making the French-language school system the default system for all immigrants coming from outside the United States, and requiring the Louisianan government and local corporations to work in a Francophone environment and offer French-language services, were widely criticized. Many Americans saw these laws, and the similar legislation passed by the New Mexican and Navajo territorial governments, as symbolizing the imminent collapse of Anglo-American culture.
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