Here's how it all went down: In 1762 France gave Louisiana to Spain in a secret treaty -- so secret that the people who actually lived here didn't even find out about it till a couple of years after the fact. So when the Spanish governor finally showed up to take charge, apparently nobody was glad to see him. Turns out everybody pretty much wanted to be French even though France didn't want them. So they had this little rebellion, and the governor got scared and got right back on the boat. Then the next governor came and rounded up six ringleaders of the rebellion and had them shot right about the spot where Frenchmen Street now starts at Esplanade (in front of the old Mint). So Frenchmen Street was named in honor of those six -- count them, SIX! -- Frenchmen who died there because they wanted to be French men and not Spanish men.
If the guy who did this street sign had taken my carriage tour, he would have known better. He's probably one of those guys who walk by me every day, and I say, "Would you like to do a carriage tour?", and they say, "No, I'm a local."
Fun history-repeats-itself footnote: Ninety-three years after the death of the Frenchmen... Um, can we just round off to a hundred? Because it sounds better, and I'm a tour guide after all, not a history professor. So anyway, a hundred years later (more or less), the Union troops took New Orleans in the Civil War and raised the American flag from the Mint. And this local guy by the name of William Mumford climbed up on the Mint, tore down the flag, tore it into pieces, and passed them out to his friends. So there on the same spot (more or less) where the six Frenchmen had been executed one hundred years earlier (more or less), William Mumford was hanged for the same crime (more or less) -- refusing to recognize the new political reality!
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