The Story of French (29 page)

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.