The Montagnards

One of the truly enormous things with alternate history is that if you change it far enough back, you start getting ethnicities that don't exist IRL. Have Catholicism be slightly less successful in the Balkans, and suddenly there's no Croatia, only a Greater Serbia. Change the political careers of guys you've never heard of in Central Asia, and you wind up with a lasting Moghulistan. Change colonial histories, and you get a Japonicized Taiwan*... or a Lusophone Philippines* instead of a Hispanicized one... or Yevanic surviving in Greece because there was no Sephardic expulsion. (I have all of these.)

It also means that some ethnicities wouldn't exist. Even if there's a similar blend of peoples meeting up, there's no reason to think that they'd become Melungeon. On the same note, it's reasonably certain that "hillbillies," prevailingly Scotch-Irish, don't exist. (I'm not sure the Scotch-Irish, or their parent stock the Ulster Scots, exist either; the Plantations aren't set in stone here.) Some of the territory is originally French; even if there's the same external circumstances, the change in the parent stock would lead people to, at best, convergently evolve.

Fortunately for me, somebody has. They're called the Montagnards.

"Montagnard" as ethnoreligious identity

Martyrdom is glorious when you're in contention for the soul of the world. The Farrellites weren't: they'd lost the war fair and square, the Unitas Fidelium was a shambles, the Most Christian Kingdom was a horrible place to be Farrellite, and they all knew it. Some of them were martyred anyways, and their names have been lost to history. Some of them gave up and quietly consigned themselves to damnation, returning to the harlot of Rome.

A lot of the Farrellites packed up and left, for anywhere that would take them. Some of them [who?] fled to Castille (and later Seville); some of them fled to Romandy, where they fought in the War of the Savoyard Succession or assimilated into the broader Waldensian fold. And some of them, mostly the ones on the coasts, left for the new world, becoming some of the first enthusiastic settlers of France-Outremer.

Being the first settlers in France-Outremer posed all the usual problems, but the worst was a political problem: they weren't the last, either. France-Outremer wasn't the cash cow that Guaquaquite was - but more importantly, there was space for actual settlement, rather than a pure plantation economy. Which meant that there was a second wave of (much more Catholic) French settlers, and then a third - who brought the clergy with them. And the clergy brought the hated Inquisition.

So the Farrellites pulled up their roots and migrated north and west, to places that were technically within the bounds of France-Outremer but remote enough that it wasn't worth the trouble to look for them. (IRL, a fair number of crypto-Jews settled in Albuquerque, simply because it was three months' travel by mule from Mexico City and the Inquisition never went there.) They settled in the Ozarks, and beyond the Ozarks. They reached the Appalachians. (Both of these settlements were the ones that established them as Montagnards: the mountain people.)

By the time France-Outremer was ceded to Seville in 1746, the Farrellites had become culturally different from the other French colonists. That distinction (and the stereotypes associated with it) have remained up to the present time.

Montagnard names

France under the Guises required its Christians to be named after saints by law, and even being Farrellites didn't exempt the Montagnards from this law. They did chafe under it quite a bit, and made a point of naming their children after Biblical figures instead of Romish saints. For the first few generations, the most common was Jean-Baptiste, in honor of the martyred founder of the Unitas Fidelium. [who?]

• Even to the present day, the pejorative Moorish shorthand for the ethnicity commemorates this: they're os Yahias ("the Jean-Baptistes.") Confusingly, in Cabralia the same term refers to Christian converts to Islam.
• Simon, Pierre, and (especially) Simon-Pierre never occur amongst the Montagnards. A fair number of them still have horror stories about what the Apostate did to their ancestors.

After 1746, and particularly after the rise of the UCNA, the Montagnards are able to get away with their Farrellitism, and embrace it wholeheartedly. Jean-Baptiste gives way to Olivier as a stereotypical Montagnard name, and there's an explosion of religiously significant toponyms: Farrellvilles, Toussaints-Veclangues (All the Saints With Their Tongues) and Toussaints-sans-Langues (All the Saints Without Tongues), and so forth.

Montagnard religion

Living on the edge of the French world gave the Montagnards more leeway than their cousins in the Old World, but they were still crypto-Farrellites: officially Catholic until there weren't officials. This makes them the bottom of the barrel in churchmanship: dynastic Farrellitism. Freeform liturgy, a correspondingly greater emphasis on individual faith experience, and lots of charismatic sectarian leaders mesh with general Farrellite attitude to produce a distinct but recognizable flavor of what we'd consider "hillbilly Christianity."

It does, however, make them distinct from their Old World cousins in a few ways:

• Les agapes: In French-controlled Outremer, the Montagnards celebrated the Fraction in the only place they could: their homes. As a pretext for people to get together, this evolved a potluck culture; that same potluck culture turned la fraction into the agape feast. Not all Montagnards celebrate les agapes, but outsiders certainly assume that they do.
• Montagnards are utterly indifferent to paedo- vs. credo-baptism; various communities have different standards, even within the same dynasty. Some of them [details?] are not above having their child baptized in a Catholic church, simply because that's the way it's always been done.
• Montagnard corporate worship isn't very ritualistic, but it's very sacramental. Unlike the archetypal hillbilly church, the sermon doesn't take pride of place, the Fraction does.

That, at least, is the case when the Montagnards have churches. A fair number of them don't.

Montagnard foodways

The New World transplant meant that the Farrellites lost a big part of their original cuisine: Montagnard fish dishes are alien to the Old World, because they don't eat seafood.

• Some of the original Poitevin pilgrims bring goats with them; they're less demanding than cattle and able to subsist in more places, including the Ozarks and Appalachians that make them Montagnards. Goat meat (and goat cheese) are stereotypically Montagnard foods.
• French wine cultures do not transplant to the Old World, but Norman apple culture does. This is transmitted into French colonial society, which is why the UCNA evolves into a cider culture; the Montagnards, however, are acknowledged as the first and foremost ciderers, and take it to much further extents (and higher proofs) than the rest of the French Andalusians.

The Montagnards in the world

For various reasons, the Montagnards have risen from obscurity to become a very visible part of the Moorish mosaic.

• The Montagnard Companies: When France-Outremer passed to Sevillan control, the dhimma was negotiated (as was traditionally done) with the Catholic bishops. The Farrellites, who refused to recognize the Catholic Church as representative of themselves, argued that they weren't covered by the dhimma; the arguments about it outlasted the Moorish Empire. In the UCNA, Yusuf I used this as a convenient legal loophole to fill his armies with more warm bodies; linguistic concerns established the Montagnard Companies, which have remained in existence to this day.

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