On May 18, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt of the United States wrote to Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. It was the darkest moment of the Second World War, when Nazi Germany and Japan seemed unstoppable and the world was ablaze. But Roosevelt had another problem on his mind. Three weeks earlier, Canada had conducted a national referendum on conscription. Although a majority of Canadians had said yes, seventy percent of French Canadians refused to be conscripted for overseas service. Riots even broke out in Montreal over the question.
The White House was worried that this controversy would be detrimental to the Canadian war effort. In his letter to the Canadian prime minister, Roosevelt bragged that French Canadians who had migrated to New England were finally converting to “Anglo-Saxon ways” and speaking English in their homes. He proposed that Canada and the U.S. join forces and do “some sort of planning…perhaps unwritten” to assimilate the remaining French speakers in Canada.
It’s surprising to find that Roosevelt was grappling with the issue of French Canadians while there was a war going on. Yet the fact was, two centuries after France’s defeat and withdrawal from the continent, and despite overwhelming odds, French remained an American language. Like Roosevelt, many people wondered why. And like Roosevelt, many people still wanted to see French in North America disappear as a native language.
The story of French in America was very different from that in the rest of the world. Linguistically, it was the first time that any European language had been completely cut off from its origins and evolved separately from the source of their language. Since 1763, French Canadians lived in a kind of linguistic Lost World. Contact between Canada and France was limited to a few priests who emigrated, a few books that made their way over, and a few ships that docked in Quebec—the first French ship to drop anchor in the port of Quebec City, La Capricieuse, arrived in 1855, ninety-two years after the end of the French regime.
In Canada, various attempts to assimilate francophones had not only backfired, they had created two distinct French-speaking peoples: the French Canadians and the Acadians. Over the centuries both groups developed a quasi-tribal sense of identity so powerful they refused to let go of their language—at any price.
When France still had a presence on the American continent, before 1763, its two main colonies were Quebec and Acadia. Today, the native francophones of America all belong to one of these two related but distinct trunks, some of whose branches have become intertwined over the centuries. The French Canadians, based in Quebec, are the largest group. Today six million francophones live in Quebec; they call themselves Québécois, an appellation used only since the 1960s. These French Canadians spawned many groups, including today’s half-million Franco-Ontarians, a hundred thousand French Canadians in the Canadian West, and two hundred thousand Franco-Americans, mostly concentrated in Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island.
The Acadians are an entirely different group. Early French settlers in what is today the province of Nova Scotia, they numbered ten thousand when France lost the colony to Britain in 1713. Forty years later the British deported half of them—to Britain, its own American colonies and elsewhere. The other half slipped through British hands and fled, mostly to present-day New Brunswick, where three hundred thousand Acadians now make up a third of the population. Others went to Louisiana, where they were known as Cadiens—later, Cajuns. Today their descendants number about two hundred thousand. Acadians in New England became American citizens and, over the centuries, mixed with French Canadians who had also migrated to New England, so no one knows their real numbers today. But the violent attempt to wipe the Acadians out forged a strong, distinct identity that has lasted until this day, even among those who no longer speak French, much like most of the world’s Irish or Scots who long ago forgot Gaelic.
The history of the Acadians is full of ironies. In the seventeenth century these industrious French colonists transformed thousands of acres of tidal marshlands in the northern hump of present-day Nova Scotia into some of North America’s richest farmlands. The area they occupied was much disputed between the English and the French, and it changed flags a dozen times before the Treaty of Utrecht ceded Acadia to the British, once and for all, in 1713. For the next forty years the Acadians remained neutral and prospered. But in 1748 the British started to get nervous; they feared the Acadians would side against them in the ongoing colonial struggle with France. The solution, they thought, was to get rid of them and free up the rich farmland for British settlers.
In 1755 the British began the operation Acadians still remember as Le Grand Dérangement (the great upheaval). Soldiers began rounding up the Acadian settlers. Families were broken up, houses were burned, those who resisted were shot and the rest—ten thousand in total—were packed into boats and scattered among the Thirteen Colonies or shipped to Britain, France and even the Falkland Islands. Some boats sank, and those who survived drowning and sickness arrived dirty, dispossessed, malnourished and often separated from their families.
While the move did free land for English settlers, it hardly erased the Acadians from the continent. Thousands of them slipped through British hands and founded a New Acadia in what is now New Brunswick. The Acadians who were deported—whether to other British colonies or abroad—resisted all attempts to assimilate them. Most of the deportees in the thirteen British colonies trekked back to Quebec, or to other safe havens such as New Brunswick and Louisiana.
Far from eradicating the Acadians, Le Grand Dérangement became the founding moment of Acadian identity—and it remains so to this day, even though Acadians are spread all over the North American continent and many have long since been assimilated. We witnessed the power of Acadian identity when we attended the third World Acadian Congress in the summer of 2004. The event was held in Nova Scotia, where sixteen thousand Acadians still live. After touring the francophone villages of Nova Scotia’s French shore, we arrived in Grand Pré, the spiritual heartland of Acadia, where the deportation is said to have started. There we attended the closing ceremony of the conference, the grand messe, an outdoor Mass attended by eight thousand people, including dignitaries such as the prime minister of Canada, the premiers of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and the governor of Louisiana—the latter two, Acadians. Licence plates showed that the revellers had driven from as far away as New York, Pennsylvania and Louisiana to be at the event. Thousands sat in the blazing heat under red-white-and-blue umbrellas (the colours of the Acadian flag) and bowed their heads while Acadian priests and bishops celebrated the Mass in French.
On an earlier trip to Louisiana, we had noticed that the local descendants of Acadians were much more interested in Nova Scotia, where only several thousand speak French, than Quebec, where millions speak French, or even New Brunswick, which is the real heart of Acadia today. At Grand Pré we understood why: Cajun identity is based much more on the historical moment of the deportation than it is on modern affinities with Quebeckers and Acadians living in New Brunswick.
Before the Grand Mass, Acadians had been flocking to Grand Pré all summer to gaze at the statue of a buxom eighteenth-century peasant girl standing in the fields near the town’s church. The girl, Évangeline Bellefeuille, never actually existed—she was a literary creation of the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Longfellow was not Acadian himself, but when he heard the legend of a pair of lovers who had been separated by the deportation, he developed a fascination with Acadian history and decided to turn the story into an epic poem, Evangeline. The story begins when the British tear the heroine’s fiancé from her arms during their engagement party. After Evangeline is shipped away, she spends her entire life seeking Gabriel, finally finding him on his deathbed in Delaware. Published in 1847, the poem was immensely successful. It was translated into French in 1865, and is considered one of the factors that contributed to the Acadian réveil (awakening) of the nineteenth century.
From 1755 until the middle of the next century, Acadians survived by keeping a low profile. As Roman Catholics they were deprived of the right to vote in New Brunswick until 1830. But by the 1850s they had started to open their own colleges and found their own newspapers. In 1881 they even organized a convention nationale (national convention), which assembled five thousand people at St. Joseph College in Memramcook, New Brunswick. As their patron saint they chose the Virgin Mary. By 1884 they had an anthem, “Ave Maris Stella” (“Hail, Star of the Sea”), and had designed the Acadian flag, a French tricolour with a star in papal gold in the upper left corner. The convention sparked the Acadian réveil and was followed by at least a dozen similar events held every decade or so after that. Until the 1960s these symbols were really the only things the Acadians had to unite them as a community, aside from the Church and the French language.
The most famous Acadian deportees are the three thousand who settled in Louisiana in the 1780s (invited by Spain, as we explain in Chapter 4). Among the various groups of francophones who settled in Louisiana in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Acadians were the ones who survived assimilation the best. The explanation for this goes back to the time of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, when the American government bought Greater Louisiana from France for fifteen million dollars. At the time forty-three thousand inhabitants were living in what would become the American state of Louisiana, ninety percent of whom spoke French. They belonged to three groups: the Cadiens; the original French settlers of Louisiana, who had already mixed with the Spanish, Natives and black slaves living there; and finally, ten thousand refugees from Saint-Domingue, mostly Creole planters and free people of colour. The main difference between the groups, aside from background, was that the Acadians did not mix with the others. They had settled far from New Orleans, on the west bank of the Mississippi around the town of Vermilionville (now Lafayette), where they prospered on family farms of their own.
By 1879 eighty percent of the Creole planters had been assimilated to English, but more than half of the state’s population still spoke French. The Cadiens were isolated from the rest of the state by the enormous Atchafalaya Swamp, and they remained untouched by changes—they still called Americans les Anglais. However, the Cadiens did assimilate the Irish, Natives, blacks and Germans who managed to cross the swamp. It was this blend that created the unique Cajun culture with its crawfish and barbecued shrimp dishes, two-step dancing, fiddle music and zydeco (a mispronunciation of the French les haricots, beans; more on this in chapter 14).
Why did these Acadians survive? Until the American Civil War, the French-speaking Louisianais deftly used whatever institutions were available to them to preserve their language and resist assimilation. Although the state constitution of 1812 decreed that laws had to be passed in the language of the American Constitution, the legislature was French-dominated. So it continued to vote laws in French anyway, for the next fifty years. State law used the French Civil Code, in French, and a penal code in French was created in 1825; most judicial proceedings took place in French. The word Dixie, an important term for the Old South, is a deformation of the number dix (ten) that appeared on the back of Louisiana banknotes.
Culturally speaking, the French Canadians, who were based in the valley of the St. Lawrence River—today’s province of Quebec—were always better off than either the Acadians or the Louisiana Cajuns. They were never deported, and were five times more numerous than Acadians from the outset. One of their best tools against assimilation was a fantastic birth rate—for nearly a century it enabled them to outpace British immigration to Canada. By 1830 the original fifty thousand Canadiens had multiplied tenfold, to number half a million.
Perhaps because of their numbers, the French Canadians were always more politically assertive than either the Acadians or the Cajuns. Through political manoeuvres they forced the British authorities to keep certain French institutions, and even to grant Quebec its own parliament in 1791, which French Canadians have dominated ever since. By 1867 French Canadians made up only a third of Canada’s total population, but they still constituted a large majority in the province of Quebec. The Canadian constitution, the British North America Act, which was written that year, was the high-water mark of French-Canadian assertiveness. It united the five colonies of British North America and created an independent Canada. French Canadians had made sure that Canada became a federation of former colonies rather than a unitary state, so French speakers would have some clout in Canadian politics. The Act gave formal status to the French language—for the first time in Canada’s history. It made the use of both French and English mandatory in Parliament and before the courts, both at the federal level and in the province of Quebec. This was hailed as a political victory, and it created much hope, especially after the federal government safeguarded the rights of French speakers in the newly created province of Manitoba in 1870. However, French Canadians quickly saw that the federal government and English Canadians had no intention of respecting either the spirit or the letter of the law. French Canadians would spend the next hundred years trying to get English Canada to respect its side of the deal.
Throughout their history French Canadians’ willingness to rock the boat has always distinguished them from Acadians and Cajuns. The most violent episode was the 1837 revolt that cost hundreds of lives and was a major setback for the French-Canadian leadership. Rebelliousness is not exclusive to Quebeckers. In the 1870s a mixed-blood people in Manitoba, descendants of Indians and French Canadians known as the Métis, carried out a particularly violent revolt. At the time some ten thousand Métis were living in western Canada, centred around the French parish of St. Boniface in present-day Winnipeg. They were an industrious lot of farmers and hunters, all French-speaking. The end of the 1860s had brought a massive influx of Irish Protestants who were rabidly anti-Catholic and anti-French, and even went so far as to reject the French system of land allotment in strips along rivers.
Louis Riel, a Métis who had been schooled in Montreal as a priest, led his people in a revolt against the Irish immigrants. His action forced the federal government to promise that the rights of the French-speaking Métis would be guaranteed in the newly formed province of Manitoba—it was a breakthrough for the rights of French speakers west of Quebec. But after a second Métis uprising in 1885, Riel was captured and hanged. Five years later a new provincial act declared English to be Manitoba’s only official language. This flagrantly contradicted the Manitoba Act, and as the federal government did nothing to enforce its own law, it became clear that French speakers living west of the Ottawa River would enjoy no constitutional protection.
Another example of French Canadians’ assertiveness was, of course, their decision to take to the streets over the question of conscription. The anti-conscription riots Roosevelt refers to in his letter to King (there were also riots over conscription in 1917) created anti-French resentment all over Canada. Although French Canadians had many reasons for refusing to fight overseas, the main one was that, in seventy-five years of Canadian history, the Canadian Army had not found time to create a French-speaking chain of command to accommodate soldiers from the other founding nation. The message was: It’s not our war if we can’t fight it in French. The riots were a radical move, but they did attract attention. It was at that moment that radical French Canadians, especially those in Quebec, began to consider the idea of separation from Canada, though they remained a very small minority until the 1960s.
Political wheeling and dealing and protests were two ways in which both Acadians and French Canadians resisted assimilation, but there were others, from the militancy of the Catholic Church to a strong emphasis on la vie associative (community life, but one that extends beyond local communities) to their extraordinary birth rate.
Since 1763 French Canadians and Acadians have multiplied a hundred times, to about 7.5 million. That figure excludes another 4.5 million descendants who have assimilated into English in Canada and the U.S. (most people in North America with the family name White are actually descendants of Leblancs; one of the most famous assimilées is the singer Madonna, whose mother was a third-generation Franco-American from the Fortin family). Until the 1960s, French Canadians held their ground demographically thanks to their birth rate. They even colonized—hundreds of thousands left to settle in Ontario and the western Canadian provinces, and one million settled in the states of New England.
The apparently bottomless human resources of the St. Lawrence River valley spawned a smaller subgroup of French Canadians who pursued exploration of Greater Louisiana and later the American Midwest, and whose influence lasted well into the middle of the nineteenth century. Most of the early legends of the American frontier were in fact created by French-Canadian coureurs des bois, voyageurs (boatmen), merchants, muleteers and missionaries. Without them, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark would have had a considerably harder time making their 1804–5 trek across the continent.
In spite of their accomplishments, French-Canadian frontiersmen remain a mere footnote in American history. Travelling down the Mississippi on our way to Louisiana, we were stunned to see that the museum under the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, hardly mentions them. To be fair, the low profile of the coureurs des bois can be at least partially explained by prejudice towards them as illiterates who had married Indian women or were so-called “half-bloods” themselves. On the other hand, they settled throughout the west, as far south as New Mexico; they also found the passage for a train route across the Rockies, discovered gold in California and befriended other legends of the American West. Their society, centred on present-day Missouri, remained predominantly French until the 1840s, after which English-speaking Americans overwhelmed and assimilated them.
Another reason that French Canadians and Acadians survived was that they discouraged intermarriage, especially with English speakers. Roosevelt himself pointed out this “problem” in his correspondence with King. French Canadians knew that intermarriage would spell the end of French in Canada, as it did in the American West in the nineteenth century and in New England and Louisiana by the Second World War. Interestingly, though, they did practise it selectively. In situations where they felt they could assimilate English speakers, they actually encouraged it. Some important Quebec political families, such as the Johnsons and the Ryans, who were both originally Irish and Catholic, became French-speaking this way. Canadian prime ministers Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Brian Mulroney, Quebec premier Jean Charest and New Brunswick premier Bernard Lord were products of such relations.
Their abundant birth rate and tendency to avoid disadvantageous intermarriage helped create a quasi-tribal identity among French Canadians and Acadians. One of the most striking features of French Canadians and Acadians (and their descendants, even the ones who are assimilated) is their fascination with genealogy. Almost all old-stock French Canadians and Acadians know the first name of their ancestor who first set foot on the continent, which is impressive, since many arrived in the seventeenth century. The explanation is simple: The French companies that brought the settlers kept thorough records of the settlers’ names, and later, Catholic parishes kept their records in good order. During the World Acadian Congress, Acadian visitors drove from all over North America to Moncton, New Brunswick, to consult the exhaustive genealogical files stored at the University of Moncton’s Centre for Acadian Studies. Julie was stunned to discover the existence of a Dictionnaire biographique des ancêtres québécois (Biographical Dictionary of Quebec Ancestry) when we visited the Centre.
As far as the French Canadians’ remarkable birth rate was concerned, there was nothing spontaneous about it. French Canadians’ and Acadians’ sturdiest and most resilient institution, the Catholic Church, held up as models families of ten, fifteen or even eighteen children. The Church was the central pillar of French-Canadian society from 1763 up until the 1960s. The clergy opened schools and ran them either directly or through religious orders. In the second half of the nineteenth century the Church sent missionaries and settlers west to Manitoba and Alberta and established a network of French-language schools, colleges, convents, hospices, hospitals and parishes throughout the country—the first colleges in New Brunswick were started by Quebec and French congregations. The Church also ran hospitals; in fact, there were few aspects of daily life that it did not manage.
In the extensive notes that Alexis de Tocqueville took while he was researching Democracy in America, he described the French-Canadian clergy as better educated and better mannered than the clergy of France. When their parishioners were in conflict with the English authorities, he noted, the clergy defended the parishioners. Tocqueville had touched on an important political difference between Canada and France: The French-Canadian clergy were in favour of democratic representation and institutions, while the French clergy were not only conservative but also predominantly opposed to democratic institutions. Despite their militancy, though, the Canadian clergy never led revolts. When political tensions rose, they tended to side with the authorities and oppose open rebellion.
While the clergy promoted the rights of French Canadians, Church policies were not always beneficial to them. A century of religious nationalism produced countless mottos such as “la langue, gardienne de la foi” (“language, keeper of the faith”) or “Qui perd sa langue perd sa foi” (“He who loses his language loses his faith”). But when the interests of faith and language collided, faith always came out on top. Where everything besides language was considered, the Catholic Church was conservative to the point of being reactionary, and it did all it could to shelter French-Canadian souls from what it considered the deleterious influences of modern life. The result was that the Catholic clergy in Quebec actually forbade the reading and viewing of France’s most cutting-edge writers and cinema, and preached against city life, industry and even money in general, which were considered Protestant and therefore immoral. In the long run this policy had the effect of isolating French Canadians from the French mainstream even more, and it kept them shockingly out of touch with modern realities and progress (more on the consequences of this in chapter 15).
To resist assimilation, French Canadians and Acadians developed diverse, sometimes wacky forms of la vie associative, from language conferences and cultural associations to secret societies. The first association was created at a banquet held in Montreal on June 24, 1834, St. John the Baptist Day (and because the banquets continued to be organized on that day, John the Baptist went on to become the patron saint of French Canadians), and led to the founding of the Société St-Jean Baptiste (St. John the Baptist Society), whose central mandate was to defend the rights of French Canadians. Dozens of other associations were formed in French-Canadian communities in Quebec and elsewhere in the decades that followed. The movement spawned a wide array of symbols, some of which, such as the maple leaf and the beaver, went on to become Canadian emblems. The Société St-Jean Baptiste even devised the anthem, “O Canada,” that eventually replaced “God Save the Queen” as Canada’s national anthem in 1980. Their flag—blue with a white cross and four fleurs-de-lys—became the flag of the province of Quebec in 1944 and the official symbol of all French Canadians. It hung in schools in Ontario, Manitoba and even Manchester, New Hampshire, and Woonsocket, Rhode Island, until it became exclusively the symbol of the Quebec independence movement in the 1960s.
Some of the most flamboyant instances of French-Canadian activism were the conventions nationales (national conferences), a custom started in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1865. In 1874 Montrealers followed up on the idea by organizing the first congress open to all French Canadians; it was attended by eighteen thousand Franco-Americans, who arrived in 250 train cars. Delegates came from across North America, and even as far as France and Haiti. The main event was a three-hour défilé (parade) featuring thirty-one brass bands, twelve floats, a regiment of French-Canadian Zouaves (papal soldiers), and representatives of professional and trade associations and the clergy. Even the premier of Quebec paraded. This first convention nationale impressed the Acadians so much that they organized one of their own in 1881.
In the twentieth century the high points of French-language activism came during three French-language conventions in Quebec City in 1912, 1937 and 1952, organized by the Société du parler français au Canada. These events, at once religious, patriotic, tourist and academic, attracted delegates from the United States and Europe, including a representative of the French Academy. They always culminated in some kind of declaration to save French in North America. The 1912 congrès ended with members taking an oath to the French language. In 1937 the Quebec deacon and arch-activist Lionel Groulx called for the creation of a French state within Canada. It was the first time in Canada that the word nation was used to refer not just to a language group but also to an organized political body; Quebec nationalists would begin to aspire to political separation twenty-five years later.
One of the craziest schemes to resist assimilation took place in Louisiana, where Cajun Senator Dudley Leblanc tried to reverse the trend of Cajuns intermarrying with Americans by importing his own version of the filles du roy, the group of nubile orphans the King of France had sent to Quebec in 1660 to boost the population of the colony. Dud Leblanc—known among Cajuns as Coozan Dud (Cajun for cousin)—was a colourful businessman who had made his fortune in the 1940s selling Hadacol, a tonic that was supposed to be beneficial for people suffering from diabetes, cancer, heart problems, epilepsy and tuberculosis (and even more). Leblanc saw that intermarriage had resulted in few children being raised in French in Louisiana. So he came up with a scheme to import Acadian women from Canada to be brides for Cajun men, giving the old filles-du-roy scheme a modern twist by portraying it as a kind of cultural exchange.
We had heard the filles d’Acadie anecdote when we were in Louisiana, but had brushed it aside as myth until we came face to face with one of the former “filles” (now a grown woman) at the World Acadian Congress. A professor at the University of Moncton (who preferred not to be named), she told us it had been easy to sucker her into this “exchange” because, like every educated girl in the 1960s, she was looking for a way out of New Brunswick. Twenty-two girls went on the trip. She backed out shortly after she got to Louisiana when she sensed something shady about the whole operation, and went to study in France instead. The scheme never worked.
Historically, North Americans have tended to see the assimilation of French speakers as inevitable, if not natural, given their numeric weakness in the ocean of English speakers that has flooded most of the continent. But there was nothing natural or inevitable about it. The deportation of the Acadians and the anti-Métis repression in the Canadian West were only the most violent attempts to erase native French speakers from the continent. In Canada as well as the United States, francophones faced a barrage of semi-official and official assimilation policies, both tacit and overt.
In Louisiana the Northern occupation government adopted starkly anti-French measures. Louisiana’s constitution of 1864 removed any clauses that favoured French, whether in the legislature, in law or in education. In 1927 Louisiana outright prohibited education in French. The state even hired teachers from out of state to make sure they couldn’t understand French, so they wouldn’t respond to it. Any Cajun schooled before the war recalls stories of children wetting their pants because they didn’t know how to ask to be excused to go to the toilet in English—and they weren’t allowed to do so in French. Intermarriage was one problem, but historians agree that the removal in 1864 of the institutional framework protecting French spelled the disappearance of French in Louisiana.
Louisiana was not an isolated case. Nova Scotia forbade teaching in French as early as 1864. New Brunswick did the same in 1871, followed by Manitoba and Saskatchewan in 1890 and Ontario in 1912. Many French Canadians and Acadians have a retired teacher in their family who remembers desks with false bottoms where students could hide their French books from the school inspectors. Teachers were not even allowed to teach French in French: The famed Acadian writer Antonine Maillet, who won the Prix Goncourt in 1979 for her novel Pélagie-la-Charrette, learned French from a French grammar book written in English.
In Canada, the British North America Act of 1867 safeguarded the rights of French speakers in Quebec and in federal institutions, but English was clearly more equal than French. Until the 1960s the federal government did absolutely nothing to defend the rights of francophones outside Quebec (although, ironically, Quebec had a constitutional obligation to protect the rights of its own anglophone minority). The federal government simply did not apply its own laws or the country’s constitution; for example, when Manitoba denied constitutional guarantees to its French community in 1890, Ottawa did nothing. It was only because French Canadians lobbied to have French words on Canadian stamps commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Act in 1927 that the federal government eventually agreed to do so. French didn’t appear on Canada’s currency until 1936, and the lack of French in the Canadian military was still a problem in the Second World War.
On the whole, the federal government’s stance only reinforced the already strong link between French and the Catholic Church. The constitution guarantees confessional schools, which means that provinces can prohibit French schools, but not Catholic ones. By running their schools in French, the Catholic clergy became the saviours of the language. However, in New England and Louisiana the clergy decided it was more important to convert Protestants than to shelter the French-speaking community. They appointed English-speaking bishops and Irish priests, some of whom were starkly anti-French. This strategy was also used in every Canadian province west of Quebec. In Ontario, in the first quarter of the twentieth century, Irish Catholics were adamant about keeping French Canadians “in their place,” and Bishop Michael Fallon, who led them, did all he could to bar bilingual Catholic schools. Franco-Ontarians, who form the largest group outside of Quebec, protested so vehemently that the clergy reversed their strategy. Wherever these practices were accepted without protest, French communities lost their parish and, with it, their most solid institution. In Louisiana the last Mass in French was sung in 1940.
Other powerful groups also worked against French. In the Canadian West, for instance, the Ku Klux Klan was openly anti-French and anti-Catholic and allied itself repeatedly with conservative parties to push for bans on teaching French. The Klan was also active against francophones in Maine.
Throughout the nineteenth century, French was still the dominant international language and the language of elites everywhere—even Roosevelt spoke French. But while this prestige helped bolster the place of French in Europe and even the teaching of French as a second language in America, it did nothing to help local francophone populations who were under siege by English-speaking elites. McGill University linguist Chantal Bouchard described this process in detail: English Canadians and Americans developed a clear distinction between Parisian French and French Canadian “patois.” The latter was totally discredited, barely considered a real language. Job offers for French teaching positions in American universities often stated, “French Canadians need not apply.”
One of the first reports of this linguistic prejudice dates back to the 1850s and comes from a Frenchman, Emmanuel Blain de Saint-Aubin. He had been hired to teach the children of a rich English-speaking Montreal family, the Monks. The mother had specifically hired a Frenchman to teach her kids so they would never speak “awful French-Canadian patois,” as she put it. Blain himself did not share her prejudice, but he did notice that the notion of a French-Canadian patois was firmly rooted among the Anglo-American elite.
At this point there were dialectal differences between the French spoken in Quebec and that spoken in France, but they weren’t as huge as the Anglo-American and Anglo-Canadian elites pretended. In 1830 Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured Quebec for two weeks during his research for Democracy in America, had few comments to make about the language spoken there. One amusing anecdote he recounted described a time when he was travelling in the interior of Illinois guided by a Native man; he was surprised to hear the man speaking French with a Norman accent.
The term patois is far from neutral—and it’s an exaggeration. In contrast to the Caribbean colonies, where slaves developed a French-based Creole, the French spoken in North America never definitively broke away from the mainstream. Today French Canadians and Acadians speak the most distinctive variety of French in the French-speaking world, not just because of its accent, but also because of its great variety of idiosyncratic expressions. But the difference between Parisian and Canadian French is no greater than that between British English and the English spoken in Texas. There are dialectal differences, but never so extreme as to make them mutually unintelligible.
The “French-Canadian patois” label was in fact a political tool used to hasten the assimilation of francophones. It stripped French Canadians of the status and prestige they might have been able to take advantage of as speakers of the main international language of the time, and gutted francophones’ confidence in front of their English bosses (with no small thanks to the Catholic Church, urban francophones had become a proletariat, while the English-speaking elite owned most of the economy).
The same prejudice against Quebec French persists to this day. When we give lectures to teachers of French, Julie draws more praise for her French than Jean-Benoît does (she has a lighter Quebec accent and picked up an international style of French during our three years in France, which she uses on formal occasions and for public speaking). Sometimes the praise she receives is meant as encouragement, or admiration for the fact that she mastered French only as an adult. In almost every case her French is compared to that of Jean-Benoît, whom many teachers claim not to understand. Strangely, their inability to understand Jean-Benoît is never considered a handicap on their part—it just seems to go without saying that there is something wrong with Quebec French. The comment is absurd, not to mention puzzling, since Jean-Benoît has considerably better mastery of the language than does Julie. The reality is that, although they mean well, these teachers have absorbed a centuries-old prejudice that was designed to put an end to French Canadians.
Although there is no (legitimate) reason to consider Canadian French inferior, the patois label is rooted in real linguistic differences. Throughout the nineteenth century, dialectal differences between North American and European French increased. At the start of the twentieth century these were more marked than ever, to the point that even the French-Canadian elite became alarmed. The situation was, again, the result of French Canadians’ isolation. During the French regime in Canada, French Canadians were reputed to speak better French than most people from France (we explain this in chapter 4).
Dialectal differences had begun to develop as soon as the British took over. But at first it was not the Canadiens’ French that changed, it was the French spoken in France. Alexis de Tocqueville remarked repeatedly that New France was in fact an Old France—both in speech and in mores. Canadiens maintained the old aristocratic pronunciation of vowels in oi—for example, moi (me), toi (you), poil (hair)—as mwé, twé and pwèl. To this day some old-stock francophones in North America use pronunciations and vocabulary that derive from pre-Revolutionary France. The Canadiens retained the long vowel, which has all but disappeared in Paris. For words like bête (beast), être (to be) and arrêter (to stop), Quebeckers draw out the first vowel, whereas the French keep it short. Quebeckers have also maintained diphthongs, which evolved on their own; a verb such as faire (to do, to make) is pronounced fair in France, while Quebeckers introduce an extra vowel (almost an extra syllable) and pronounce it as fah-air. Quebeckers pronounce pâte (dough) as pawt rather than pat, and fort (strong) as fawr rather than fore.
North American French has also maintained old consonantal sounds such as dj, tch, dz and ts, which have disappeared in standard French. A phrase like tu dis (you say) often comes out as tsu dzis, with a strong sibilance after the consonants. We noticed this feature in the French spoken in Guadeloupe as well, though Acadians have very little of it. Some of Jean-Benoît’s uncles, construction workers raised in the rural Beauce area of Quebec, speak a version of Quebec French that has held on to the tch and the dj. A verb like tiens (take) is pronounced tchien or even quiens, and a verb like marier (to wed) is pronounced mardjer. This type of pronunciation is still common in some parts of France, including central Auvergne. Quebeckers also roll the R as it used to be rolled in the ancien regime.
Some features of French-Canadian word composition, grammar and syntax are also typically seventeenth century. Jean-Benoît’s grandfather used to say formage despite the French Academy’s decision that fromage was the proper term. In Acadia, French speakers often conjugate verbs in an archaic style, saying je chantons rather than je chante. French Canadians also commonly use expressions like mais que instead of quand (when), or être après instead of être en train de (to be in the process of doing something).
Over the centuries Acadians and French Canadians also developed their own regional vocabularies. Acadians tend to say éparer (to lay out, as laundry to dry) instead of étendre, while Quebeckers say garrocher (to throw) instead of lancer. Each also developed special terms to suit their circumstances, like the Quebec term poudrerie (powdered snow). Having missed the French Revolution, and being sheltered from France’s most extreme post-revolutionary anti-clericalism, French speakers in America maintained a lively tradition of religious profanity that originated in sometimes obscure religious tools or practices. This is one of the most original features of their language, and is instantly recognizable.
The characteristics described above are rarely all found in a single speaker, and the general manner of speaking in urban Quebec today is a lot more polished than it was fifty years ago. The norm being the norm, most educated French Canadians and Acadians can easily drop dialectal differences from their speech, which they tend to do in public speaking and in writing. (Though different in some ways, French writing in Canada is as normative as it is in France, and it conforms to the same norms.) How pronounced these features are in speaking often depends on class, education and whether the person has an urban or rural background. There is no real formula to describe how much or how little Quebecker speaks with the traditional Quebec accent—or accents, since there are many regional variations. Jean-Benoît is educated, urban and bourgeois, but speaks with a strong Quebec accent, no matter to whom he’s talking. But even if some versions of modern Quebec French are more polished, major dialectal variations still remain. They are particularly noticeable in the speech of children, who are not yet conscious of “correctness.”
Anglicisms are another feature of French in America. Historically, the French and Quebeckers have had very different relationships with English. While the French have to deal with the relatively recent influence of English as a global language, French Canadians and Acadians have been dealing with the imposing local presence of English for centuries. This has resulted in many borrowings, such as poutine, the name of a Quebec dish of French fries and cheddar cheese curds with brown gravy. An English listener is always surprised to learn that poutine is a corruption of the English pudding, itself a deformation of the French word boudin (a type of blood sausage).
But anglicisms play completely different roles in European and Quebec French. In France they convey a certain chic. In Quebec, anglicisms are a clear marker of class and education, and are usually considered a sign of ignorance. But even if French Canadians have borrowed many words from English, these have hardly affected the phonetics of the French they speak. Borrowings, in fact, rarely affect phonetics or grammar, the skeleton of any language.
However, borrowings became so intense at the start of the nineteenth century, particularly in the cities, that they affected the structure of the French spoken in America. In Louisiana, in New England and in some communities of the Canadian West, many native francophones lost their capacity to conjugate verbs. For example, an anglicism such as “Il faut watcher son français,” (you need to watch your French), inelegant as it is, is still structurally French. But “Il faut watch son français” (which we heard in Acadia) shows that the speaker hasn’t mastered the basic system of verb conjugation in French. Today, if you have to go through a Canadian call centre (outside of Quebec), you will regularly hear recorded messages saying they will “répondre votre appel” (a calque of “answer your call”) and “accéder votre dossier” (from the English “access your file”)—proper French calls for the preposition à after the verbs in this context.
Those kinds of anglicisms, which are extremely rare in Europe among native speakers of French, are heard much more frequently in North America, and even more so outside of Quebec. They are often a clear indicator of imminent assimilation. Even as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, French-Canadian newspapers were blowing the whistle on anglicisms and bad French, trying to stop the process of anglicization. Their efforts had varying degrees of success. In the twentieth century, Quebeckers would come to realize that these anglicisms were the result of a power relationship—English bosses often forced them to speak in English even among themselves (more on this in chapters 15 and 18).
But power relations do not explain everything: Other anglicisms show how technology plays a role in disseminating language. At the start of the nineteenth century, Canadian turbines and locomotives came not from France or Belgium but from England and the United States. The result: The vocabulary of construction workers and mechanics in Quebec is a study in anglicisms. Many Quebec mechanics speak of le muffleur, le bumpeur or le wipeur, whereas his French colleague says silencieux, pare-chocs and essuie-glace. The difference, of course, is that the instruction manual for a Ford, Chrysler or GM car used to come in English only, unlike those for Peugeots, Citroëns and Renaults. Technology-based anglicisms are one of the main forms of variances in North American French, and they show that technology is a vehicle of culture.
Of course, these technology-based anglicisms also highlight how much French Canadians and Acadians had been missing out on the important technical and intellectual developments that were taking place in France in the nineteenth century. Even while France was being outpaced by competing nations, Paris was still at the cutting edge of modernity. French culture, scientific and technological advances attracted millions of tourists, earned the admiration of the world and made the whole world hungry for French.