The Story of French

by Jean-Benoit Nadeau

  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 an
d 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).