The Occidental French

It's been awhile since my most recent ethnicity, and [as of 11/29] I've been struck with a few days of something that's never happened before: writer's block. I honestly have no ideas to run with, at least for anything particularly new or interesting...

...but I do see some big, glaring things that need filling in. Like the UCNA's population, for instance. Where the hell do they all come from? Some are Arabs, many other are Moors, some are Mozarabs... but they have to come from somewhere. Who are they? How do they interact with each other?

Of all the ethnic groups of the UCNA, though, none has vexed me quite so much as the elephant in the room: the Catholic French Andalusians. Until tonight, I haven't written anything significant about them. Until tonight, anyways, when I named them the Occidentales. This is their story.

Occidentale as administrative category

Around the same time that France became a Catholic dystopia, it also acquired its first serious New World continental holdings (especially big after the loss of Cubana in 1591.) The problem, then, was putting bodies on the ground to hold it better than lost Cubana.

The first generation of emigrants to France-Outremer were from the war-torn north: Normandy, Picardy, and Wallonia. Many of them were Farrellites, or at least crypto-Farrellites; after this turned out to be as big an issue in the New World as the Old, they began their further migration into the north, where they established dynasties and evolved into the Montagnards. That caused a lot of headaches for the colonial administration; Port-Royal, in particular, was plagued with... well, plagues; keeping it staffed was a constant concern, especially once it was clear that fairly large numbers of the locals were theologically too suspect to do the work themselves. (Especially after it was clear that they weren't going to return to the Catholic fold, and Inquisitors sent to do the deed had a worrying tendency to disappear.)

The French solution? Import more colonists. And since the north had been rather tapped out, the colonists would have to come from somewhere else.

And so they did. The second wave of French immigrants came from the more populated provinces of the French coast - Guyenne and Gascony; Poitou (bringing a smaller number of Farrellites with them [details?]), La Rochelle... the second wave of French immigration to the New World was still coastal, but where the first was northern, the second was southern, and much more Catholic too.

As the French Wars of Religion receded into memory, and the first and later second generations were born never remembering a France before the House of Guise, the initial Catholic-Farrellite divide only widened (coinciding with their push ever northward, away from the population centers of France-Outremer.) At the same time, the regional distinctions of the first generation collapsed, as they intermarried and assimilated new immigrants. By the time 1746 rolled around, and France-Outremer passed to Moorish control, the French colonists had established an identity of their own, as les français occidentals, "the western French" - a term that lasts to the present day.

Occidental French language

France-Outremer spoke a bewildering mess of Gallo-Romance tongues, but inside of a century they'd congealed into a standard parlance. Because the original Occidentals were heavily southern, that parlance has features of both French and Occitan, rather like Poitevin (itself a major influence on Occidental French.)

• Occidental French features a decidedly non-guttural /r/. This is a carryover from the southern dialects of most settler families. While the northern guttural /r/ is proper and educated, on the street it's still a Montagnard thing.

Occidental Catholicism

Very much unlike the Montagnards, the Occidentals are as Catholic as France, and always have been.

• Also very much unlike the Montagnards, As of 1930, the Occidentals are more Catholic than France; after the Sodalite Revolt, some Guisard orders simply uprooted and moved to the New World. From these émigrés came the basis of the Sodality in the UCNA.
• The UCNA (a successor to Umayyad Seville) continues the standard Moorish policy of making Mozarabs the official arbiters of Catholicism inside their borders. Because they don't share a common liturgy, Occidentals don't commingle with Mozarabs much at all. Where they have the space, they build separate churches; where they must share buildings, the Occidentals usually hold their services earlier in the day (Isidoran Mass can run very long.)

Occidentals in the world

The Occidental French are the root of the UCNA's bourgeoisie, the old stock of its cities. Arabs, Moors, Cubans, Basques, Montagnards - all of these and many more have moved into the cities, and some have made fortunes there; but the Occidental French were there from the very beginning.

• As of 1930, Occidentals are no less involved in the UCNA's military than the Montagnards are, but they're much less visible about it. This is because, unlike the Montagnards, their dhimmi status was never in question, which both exempted and excluded them from military service. This didn't change until the mid-19th-century dhimma reforms. [details?] Thus, where Montagnard military figures have been remembered as Montagnards, the Occidentals have been remembered as New Andalusians.

This is a work in progress. It will be expanded upon.