The Story of French (43 page)

A paradigm shift may be needed in the future to overcome this resistance, but there is no denying that the present situation is a quantum leap from the situation in the past. More Canadians speak French than ever, even if the proportion of native francophones has eroded to twenty-four percent due to a lower birth rate. Bilingualism laws have pushed most Canadian provinces to create policies favouring francophones—like Nova Scotia, which recently declared French mandatory for provincial services. French teaching is obligatory in most of Canada’s provincial education programs, and though standard French classes come nowhere near making Canadian children bilingual, two thousand Canadian schools offer French immersion programs to some three hundred thousand children every year—who account for a whopping ten percent of overall enrolment.

In 2005 our twelve-year-old niece, Ceilidh, who has been in French immersion in Ontario since she started school, came to visit us in Paris for ten days. Although she is still a long way from speaking like a francophone, her French is infinitely better than Julie’s was after nine years of basic school French, and she was able to understand and participate in conversations within days of arriving in France. The immersion programs are extremely popular among upper-middle-class parents in Canada, who want to make sure their children will be able to get jobs in the federal government (the schools also have good reputations). Today more Canadians speak French as a second language with convincing fluency than there are French Canadians living outside of Quebec. In Ontario alone, 1.3 million people, or about twelve percent of the population, claim to speak French. Only about half a million of those are native French speakers, among whom only seventy-five percent still speak French at home.

Since official bilingualism was put in place, the Canadian government has also invested hundreds of millions of dollars in French-Canadian communities outside of Quebec. Without this legal and financial support, these communities could not have resisted assimilation. In comparison, Quebec has done little if anything for them since the 1970s. To this day Quebeckers tend to ignore other French Canadians, or dismiss them as either nearly assimilated or on their deathbed. In the early 1990s the famous Quebec writer Yves Beauchemin called French Canadians outside of Quebec “
des cadavres encore chauds
” (“still-warm corpses”). Other French Canadians also resent the way that Quebeckers tend to dominate communications among French Canadians, especially in radio and television. On the whole they see Quebeckers as condescending and distant—which is the way Quebeckers often speak of the French. In spite of all the problems with the Canadian Official Languages Act, the commitment of the federal institutions has been remarkable and essential. Our travels have shown us that the presence of Radio-Canada in every province is often the backbone of French cultural life, especially in remote parts of the country. The lack of such an institutional presence is often the main factor that explains the complete erosion of French in the traditonal enclaves of New England and Louisiana.

On the other hand, it was the example of Quebec that inspired French Canadians to exert their own identity and rights so stubbornly. The year we lived in Toronto (2001), the Ontario government raised the Franco-Ontarian flag for the first time, on St. John the Baptist Day (Quebec’s national holiday, June 24)—the result of even more lobbying by francophones. This flag has a curious history. Around 1973 a group of young professors and students from Laurentian University in Sudbury designed the green-and-white flag with a trillium, the floral emblem of Ontario, and a fleur-de-lys. The group’s leader, history professor Gaétan Gervais, then trademarked the name
drapeau franco-ontarien
(Franco-Ontarian flag). Anxious to get on with business and avoid navel-gazing debates in the community over the flag, he told the Association canadienne-française de l’Ontario (ACFO) that they could take it or leave it. They took the flag, then spent three decades lobbying the provincial government to get it accepted as an official emblem of the province.

In Sudbury the Franco-Ontarian flag is still a hot topic. When we visited the city in the fall of 2004, the Franco-Ontarian lobby was trying to get the municipal government to raise it over city hall, but the administration refused—allegedly out of fear of offending other minorities (Franco-Ontarians make up thirty percent of Sudbury’s population). The mayor dismissed French-speaking militancy as “separatist talk.” Along with Ottawa and Toronto, Sudbury is an important cultural centre of French Ontario. It has not only a bilingual university, but also an all-French vocational college, Collège Boréal. Plans are also in the works to open a French-language university in Ontario, and it will probably be located in Sudbury.

As the local representative of the ACFO told us, the main problem in Ontario right now is not schooling, but support services in French. Sudbury has French schools and French immersion programs, but no French bookstores or movie theatres. Newspapers from Quebec arrive by bus a day after publication. Although medical services are available in French, they are insufficient. There is a French school of medicine at the University of Ottawa, but that’s far from enough to guarantee service in French. Doctors are often second-language French speakers, so a patient who asks about her
grande opération
(a Canadianism for
hysterectomy
) is likely to be met with a puzzled stare from her physician. Speech therapists who speak French are rare. Paradoxically, though, while their associations remain militant, francophones themselves, especially in Sudbury, are rather self-effacing. This struck us as strange, since anglophones today are more open to French than they ever have been. On the other hand, the period when customers boycotted businesses and vandalized stores that displayed signs in French is not that far in the past. And merchants in Sudbury still hesitate to put simple signs saying “
Bonjour
” on their doors.

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 construction 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.