Although roughly half a million francophones live in Ontario, they make up only 4.5 percent of the population there. By comparison, the 250,000 Acadians living in New Brunswick make up a third of the population of the province. Because of this strong presence, Acadians have always been in a better position than Franco-Ontarians to get provincial authorities to listen to their demands.
Acadians began organizing and exerting their political power closely on the heels of the Quebeckers. They were even powerful enough to get one of their own, Louis Robichaud, elected as premier of the province in 1960. Robichaud ran New Brunswick competently for ten years and did three things that changed the future of French there forever. In 1962 he created an all-French university in Moncton (Franco-Ontarians, in comparison, have only bilingual universities). Robichaud then abolished the county governments that ran schools and created a ministry of education with a mandate to improve teaching everywhere, especially in poor communities (which most francophone communities were). Then, in 1969, he declared his province officially bilingual, partially to show separatists in Quebec that the rest of Canada could compromise and even be progressive when it came to French. New Brunswick became the first Canadian province—and the first jurisdiction in the world—to translate common law into French. Robichaud’s successors went on to create separate administrations to run French and English schools and health care.
But while Lesage’s reforms in Quebec corresponded to the wishes of the vast majority of the population, New Brunswick was split over Robichaud’s policies—a large segment of the population opposed any measures that would benefit the Acadian minority. To obtain public support for his reforms, Robichaud had to hold elections twice, in 1967 and 1969. His education reform program, called Égalité des Chances (Equal Opportunity), was extremely unpopular in conservative circles, where Robichaud was accused of “robbing Peter to give to Pierre,” an oblique slander against Acadians. Robichaud managed to sell the policy by convincing reactionaries that his reforms would benefit all the poor, whether French or English.
Although Robichaud played a strong part in the cultural survival of New Brunswick Acadians, he was followed by a generation of young leaders, trained at the University of Moncton, who picked up where he left off. The main sociological difference between Quebeckers and other French Canadians and Acadians is that, by 1960, the vast majority of Acadians led a rural rather than an urban life. Acadian-born Justice Michel Bastarache, who now sits on the Supreme Court of Canada, is famous for having encouraged Acadians to move to Moncton in the 1970s. He warned—rightly—that unless Acadians urbanized and created their own city life, they would miss the boat on modernity and the fundamental transformations of the twenty-first century.
Urbanization had started long before Bastarache. A dynamic insurance company, L’Assomption Vie, created by Acadians working in Massachusetts in 1903, moved to Moncton in 1913. The city later got a French university, attracted a French consulate and opened a French hospital. In the 1990s the New Brunswick government gambled on Moncton’s bilingualism to promote call centres, and today most Canadian banks have call centres there. Then, much in the way that Montreal’s Expo 67 symbolized Quebec’s entry into the modern era, Moncton welcomed the first World Acadian Conference in 1994 and the Francophonie Summit of 1999, which assembled fifty heads of state in the small city. Both events boosted Acadian pride. In 2003 Moncton became Canada’s first officially bilingual city—a move that even Ottawa, the capital of an officially bilingual country, has not yet dared to make. Everyone knows that bilingualism works in Moncton’s favour: The declaration was made by the English-speaking mayor and city councillors.
Moncton’s downtown is modern and tidy, and the city exudes prosperity in a region of Canada that has otherwise seen economic hard times for many decades. If the suburb of Dieppe is included, Moncton today is half francophone. While Moncton’s French character was not obvious from the street signs we saw as we strolled through the downtown, every second person we heard was speaking either French or chiac, the local slang that mixes French and English. We discovered that Moncton even has a French bookstore outside the university, no small feat compared to Sudbury, which has none.
Despite the wisdom of Bastarache’s idea of urbanizing Acadians, we saw the downside when we visited New Brunswick’s remote Acadian Peninsula. There is no missing the sense of pride in Caraquet, the heart of traditional Acadian culture, but there is none of Moncton’s optimism with respect to the future of French. Caraquet is almost a hundred percent francophone. For Sale signs are written à vendre, and the drive-in cinemas present French-language films, mostly from Quebec. The Acadian newspaper, L’Acadie nouvelle, is based there. When we visited, the play L’ode à l’Acadie was running in a theatre there. Yet we could see that high unemployment and the rural exodus had hit local life pretty hard. Caraquet’s French bookstore and cinema had closed recently. Like most of the Canadian Maritime provinces, the area once thrived on the lumber industry and fishing, jobs that mechanization have diminished. The young are fleeing the area to go to work in the city. It is fortunate that these young disenfranchised francophones have a French-speaking city to go to, but it doesn’t bode well for rural New Brunswick. Arguably, Bastarache’s campaign for the urbanization of Acadian life may not have helped rural Acadians, but urbanization is a worldwide trend and there is no reason Acadians would have avoided it; it may be fortunate that they chose to concentrate in one centre rather than dilute themselves over many.
In Caraquet we met the president of the board of L’Acadie nouvelle, Clarence Le Breton, who works at the provincial ministry of fisheries and who deals daily with the other side of the coin of urbanization and modernization. Le Breton, in his fifties, knows that the key to prosperity is no longer boats and land, but diplomas. Yet he also knows that education threatens the very existence of this part of Acadia. “Isolation saved our culture, but it is hurting us now. The young go to the city to find work, and there they co-exist with English. It will open up huge opportunities, but it will call for great vigilance.”
There never was a Jean Lesage, a Pierre Elliott Trudeau or a Louis Robichaud in Louisiana, and it shows. Big Mamou is a sleepy prairie town in western Louisiana. The stores along the town’s main artery, Sixth Street, have curiously bilingual names like Ti-Bob’s (short for “Petit Bob’s”) and the town is famous for its Mardi Gras Run, where people race about looking for the ingredients of gumbo, a famous Cajun dish. We were drawn to Big Mamou by another event: the Sunday morning show at Fred’s Lounge. The show, where live musicians play Cajun folk songs and zydeco and locals of all ages dance two-steps and waltzes, is a fifty-year-old tradition. We were already late when we showed up at 9:30 a.m. People had been downing beers since eight o’clock and were digging into the boudin (a spicy sausage of pork and rice) that was being passed around. The tiny bar was packed. There were even stragglers listening to the show outside on KPVI 92.5 FM. Cajun music and dancing are still alive and kicking in Cajun country, where restaurants and halls host concerts regularly. In fact, Fred’s Lounge was just one stop on a circuit of venues throughout western Louisiana that offer Cajun music on Saturdays—the circuit ends in Eunice, at another live broadcast called “Le rendez-vous des Cajuns.”
Along with food, music is the heart of Cajun culture, which is arguably one of the liveliest and most original in America today. Yet Cajuns are almost completely cut off from the source of their originality. Although French hasn’t disappeared, it is barely discernible in Louisiana. There are still plenty of Ti-Bobs, Ti-Jeans and Ti-Noncs on western Louisiana shop signs, but only fifteen percent of Cajuns still use French, and even fewer among the younger generations. The century after the Civil War was hard on the Cajuns, who faced open policies of assimilation in schools and even in religion (see chapter 10). Many Cajun soldiers learned English fighting in the Second World War; many more went to work in the oil industry, run by Texans who opened wells all over Louisiana in the 1940s. During the same decade the co
nstruction of a highway across the Atchafalaya Swamp also hastened assimilation by ending the Cajuns’ isolation. The result: It is rare to meet someone under fifty who speaks Louisiana French. Of the 250,000 Cajuns living in Louisiana today, those who speak French are old, and since they have never been schooled in French, most don’t know how to read or write it. Basically, though they may still have spoken French, Cajuns educated after about 1930 stopped transmitting French to their children. Some, like the notorious Senator Dud Leblanc, were keenly aware of what was happening and tried everything they could to stop it, but assimilation policies had been so successful by the 1960s that most Cajuns didn’t have a clear idea of their origins. Many even forgot they were Acadians.
Quebeckers refer to assimilation as la louisianisation (Louisianization), and much of the activism of French Canadians and Acadians in the 1960s was driven by their fear of ending up like Cajuns. But Cajuns also became politically active during this period—in fact, just when their culture was about to disappear. The 1960s were full of contradictions. Author Shane K. Bernard pointed out in his book The Cajuns: Americanization of a People that one driving force of the Cajun renaissance in the early 1960s was not a Cajun but a British-born Canadian historian, Raymond Spencer Rodgers. Like many intellectuals of his generation, Rodgers embraced the struggle of all ethnic minorities, whether black, Indian, French Canadian, Acadian or Cajun. He moved to Louisiana to teach at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in 1966, and within weeks went public to denounce Cajuns’ lack of concern over the disappearance of their culture. Rodgers shook people up at the Lafayette Chamber of Commerce, particularly one Cajun lawyer and former representative to Congress, James Domengeaux.
Domengeaux spoke French but couldn’t read or write it. He was sixty-one at the time and already planning his retirement when he suddenly took up the cause of French in Louisiana with the fury of the newly converted. He and the chamber of commerce successfully petitioned the state Senate and House of Representatives to pass a series of regulations stipulating that French would be taught for five years in high schools and that universities would train French teachers. In 1968 Louisiana created the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL) to coordinate initiatives to promote and teach French. When non-Cajun (and often anti-French) representatives opposed its creation, Domengeaux argued that French would boost tourism in Louisiana and improve the state’s image—and he was right.
Contrary to what most people believe and what Louisiana’s tourist brochures now suggest, French never became an official language in Louisiana. However, the state did give CODOFIL broad powers to develop a language policy. With his characteristic energy, Domengeaux managed to bring about two hundred foreign teachers to Louisiana from France, Belgium and Canada. He met French president Georges Pompidou in 1969 and reportedly told him, in his Louisiana French, “Monsieur le Président, si tu m’aides pas, le français, il est foutu en Louisiane” (“Mr. President, unless you help me, French has had it in Louisiana”).
CODOFIL did have some serious self-imposed limits, though. The most obvious was political. Being, as a Southerner, attuned to the legacy of the Civil War experience, Domengeaux was allergic to radical Quebec-style nationalism. In fact, he blackballed the most vociferous French-language activists who sprang up in Louisiana in the 1970s, starting with singer Zachary Richard. Richard, who would become one of Louisiana’s best-known musicians, went on to a bilingual international career and was more popular abroad than in Louisiana. Early in his career he travelled to France and Quebec and discovered radical francophone activism. He also discovered that, outside Louisiana, language was a political issue. Back in Louisiana Richard tried to push his compatriots to become politically radical, but Domengeaux suppressed him, essentially pushing him out of Louisiana by refusing to invite him to events and concerts. For Domengeaux language was an issue of culture and education, but no more. He refused to give it a political dimension as Quebeckers and Acadians had.
The Cajun French dialect is very distinct from Parisian French or even Quebec French. The influence of English is strong, not only in vocabulary, but in calques such as laisser les bons temps rouler (let the good times roll). In the same spirit, Cajuns call rednecks cous rouges. But aside from anglicisms, Cajun French has many peculiarities that make it beautiful. Cajuns preserved different archaisms than those found in Canadian French. They say nic for nid (nest), amarrer for attacher (to tie up), avenant for gentil (friendly), and gave their own spin to many other expressions. For oncle (uncle), French Canadians say mononcle (a construction similar to monsieur), but Cajuns trim it to nonc or ti-nonc. They also developed lively expressions of their own, including lâche pas la patate (literally, don’t drop the potato, meaning don’t give up). Cajuns call thier non-Cajun compatriots les Améritchains.
However, the power of the French norme is such that Domengeaux, though far from being a brilliant literary figure, still looked down on the Cajun dialect and everything associated with it, including Cajun music. That’s why he imported teachers from France, Quebec and Belgium instead of trying to hire locally. The foreign teachers, who often had little teaching experience and even less knowledge of the local culture, openly criticized the Cajun dialect. This obviously sparked resentment among the grassroots Cajuns. After a century of oppression they needed support from other francophones, not criticism, and the situation actually increased their feeling of alienation.
According to the thesis developed by Shane K. Bernard, which our own interviews with CODOFIL support, things began to change in the early 1980s. After a number of studies showed that CODOFIL had achieved little in improving the situation of French, Domengeaux had an epiphany and realized that Cajun French was legitimate French. CODOFIL began hiring more local teachers. At about the same time, Domengeaux and other representatives of CODOFIL visited French immersion schools in Montreal, where they saw how children could be taught all subjects in French. Within a couple of months CODOFIL started testing immersion programs in Louisiana, and today there are roughly three thousand children in the program. The heading on CODOFIL’s press documents now reads “Quoi c’est le Codofil?” (“What’s Codofil?” in Cajun French; in standard French it would be “Qu’est-ce que le Codofil?”). It’s a strong statement of how Cajuns are cultivating their local variety of French.
Yet the results of CODOFIL’s work are still controversial. CODOFIL made French teaching a government priority. It played an active role in defending Cajun rights and promoting the region as a tourist destination. It also developed strong ties with France, Belgium and Quebec—CODOFIL was given the right to sign agreements with foreign governments on its own initiative. But through its early efforts to push standard French, CODOFIL actually built an identity crisis back into Cajun culture. When we met the poet David Cheramie, now the acting director of CODOFIL, he gave us a perfect illustration of this conflict. Cheramie’s parents were Cajuns, but Cheramie was raised in English and learned French as a second language, thanks to CODOFIL. He is now married to a Frenchwoman. “My neighbour has a boat and spends every minute of his spare time in the swamps hunting deer, squirrels and ducks and catching barbues [catfish]. He dances, and he knows everything about Cajun food. But he doesn’t speak a word of French. And then there’s me, who does none of this, who never hunts or fishes, but who speaks French. Who’s the real Cajun?”
Thanks to CODOFIL’s turnaround in the 1980s, most francophones of Louisiana are now convinced that music, grassroots and language are all linked. But linguistic identity remains an issue among them. They now draw a distinction between Cajuns who speak French, whom they call Cadiens, and those who don’t, called Cajun. Yet many Cajuns believe it’s too late to inject French back into the Cajun identity. Between 1990 and 2000 the number of Cajuns who declared themselves French-speaking fell from 250,000 to 200,000. Still, according to recent data, these numbers have stopped falling. So the future of French in Louisiana may be complicated, but it may not be as bleak as people believe. A
s the famous Cajun folklorist, poet and teacher Barry Ancelet put it, “Every time we’ve tried to close the coffin on the Cajuns, the body’s sprung up and called for a beer!”
Chapter 16 ~
The Francophonie
Jean-Benoît visited Monaco in April 1999, to attend a conference of the finance ministers of French-speaking countries. Between interviews he decided to slip in a visit to the Museum of Oceanography, so he hailed a cab. The driver, as it turned out, was one of the rare true-blue Monegasques. Monaco, a tiny principality of 1.5 square kilometres on the Mediterranean coast, has only five thousand natives. The other twenty-four thousand residents are foreigners who live comfortably off one Monaco’s three main industries: casinos, money laundering and tax shelters. As he chatted with the driver, Jean-Benoît failed to notice that his notepad had slipped out of his pocket, so when he returned to his hotel, he was surprised to see the concierge produce it. “Vous êtes Québécois?” asked the concierge. The taxi driver had brought the pad back to the hotel and simply told the concierge it belonged to a Quebecker. Jean-Benoît realized that with an accent like his, he hardly needed a passport.
The Story of French Page 32