Peace is our portion. Yet a whisper rose,
Foolish and causeless, half in jest, half hate.
Now wake we and remember mighty blows,
And, fearing no man, wait!
—Rudyard Kipling, “The Song of the Cities.”
The French Canadians had gained a new strength the French of France never had had. That is the shadow of the forest. It was inevitable that the shadows of the trees under which they had lived all these hundreds of years should leave their mark. It showed in the cadences of their folk songs and the way they could, on occasion, sink into an Indian quietness that was amazing. It was set off all the more by their old French gaiety.
—Robert P. Tristram Coffin, Kennebec: Cradle of Americans.
« Je me souviens / Que né sous le lys / Je croîs sous la rose »
—Eugène-Étienne Taché, ISO
It is at Christmas time that my French-Canadian heritage most completely dominates me. Not decorating until Christmas Eve, save a Christless Nativity Set (the Child only makes His appearance when I return from Midnight Mass); singing Minuit Chretien and Il est ne, le divin enfant as my father did in my childhood and youth; memories of his blessing us on New Year’s Eve (as my brother does for his children to-day); placing the Three Kings on the Nativity Scene on the Epiphany—these ghosts of Gallic-American Christmases past are always with, year after year.
We are a strange people, we descendants of the 17th and 18th century French pioneers in North America. The accidents of history ensured that the only political independence we would have in the end were the tiny French Islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon—and they fly the revolutionary tricolour, not the lily banner of Ss. Louis and Joan of Arc, under which we were settled. Although the Province of Quebec and the State of Louisiana contain the most of us, substantial islands remain in the Canadian Maritimes and West; the descendants of the great 19th century migration to the New England mills (such as my family) remain, as do ancient settlements here and there in the American Midwest. Well has the French Fact in this Continent been called “an archipelago”—a group of smaller and lesser islands.
Starting in 1608 with the founding of Quebec by the heroic and devout Samuel de Champlain, our identity was forged in struggle with the wilderness, hostile Indians (though thankfully the friendlies outnumbered them and contributed to our gene pool—and vice versa), and the British. Our list of pre-Conquest heroes is long: Dollard des Ormeaux, Maisonneuve, Guillaume Couture, Madeleine de Verchères, the Canadian Martyrs, Roberval, Frontenac, and on and on in a seemingly endless line of explorers, soldiers, saints, and missionaries. Our French is influenced by the fact that a great many of us descend from the Filles du Roi—“Daughters of the King”—orphans raised in Royal Convents in France, and sent to Quebec, New Orleans, and Mobile with dowries and the right to choose their own husbands. Rather than any of the many dialects of French then in use, they were taught the language of the Court, spoken by only a minority in the Mother Country—but this was the language they passed on to their children, and it marks the French of Canada to this day. The result was a proud people, devoted to their Faith, language, and customs. They were and are also quite diverse; in addition to the settlers of the St. Lawrence Valley—later to be called “Quebecois”—there were the Metis—descendants of French and Indians who opened up the rivers of the West—initially for the French, but then for the British and the Americans; the Acadians, who settled in what is now Nova Scotia, were driven out by the British in 1755, and either returned to the Maritimes or ended up under Spanish rule in Louisiana—their descendants are to-day’s “Cajuns”; and the settlers of Louisiana, the Gulf Coast, Arkansas, and Missouri. Called by the elastic name “Creole,” many of these were Slave owners. French law requiring them to acknowledge any offspring they had with Slave women as their own, from these unions arose the Creoles de Couleur. Often educated in France and owning slaves and plantations themselves, they formed a bulwark of the colony alongside their white cousins.
From the Fall of New France in 1763 and the Louisiana Purchase three decades afterwards, we have been faced with a series of political choices, usually unpalatable. The Quebec Act of 1773, although attacked by the southern rebels and one of the causes of the American Revolution, protected our religion, language and laws, and expanded the boundaries of the nascent Province of Quebec to include all French-Speaking settlements in North America under the British Crown. It was for this reason that Quebec’s redoubtable Bishop Briand excommunicated later Baltimore Archbishop John Carroll when that clerical gentleman came with Benjamin Franklin to seduce the locals from their allegiance. Later in 1776, the rebels invaded; although at first greeted with apathy, when their military governor outlawed the Mass guerrillas suddenly appeared. With the help of the French militia the British were able to drive the rebels back whence they had come.
But many of the French in the Old Northwest—towns such as Kaskaskia and Cahokia in current Illinois and Vincennes in modern Indiana—were brought over to the rebel cause by Fr. Gibault, pastor of the three towns. He would come to regret his decision, and leave American territory for the then-Spanish town of New Madrid in what is now Missouri. In any case, in time American settlers would overrun these territories, although such French customs as eating Muskrat during Lent still prevail around Detroit, the New Year is welcomed with the Guinannee is Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, and Prairie du Rocher, Illinois, and Missouri French, once spoken throughout that State, Illinois, and Indiana, still lingers around the village of Old Mines, Missouri. On both sides of the Mississippi, American rule meant assimilation.
On the British side of the new border, the original French settlers were joined by refugees from the republic. These Loyalists settled in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario, and the Eastern Townships of Quebec; they were the founders of Anglo-Canada. They had only one thing in common with their new neighbours; a loyalty to the Crown reinforced by their determination not to be swallowed up by the Yankees. This was a strong bond in one way: given the experience of Francophones south of the border, had it not been for this, neither French nor Anglo-Canadians could or would exist to-day. Given their mutual antipathies, this is hard saying, even to-day.
The Francophone bastion of Louisiana was hard pressed to retain its identity after 1803—and the American settlers constantly chipped away legally at the position of the Creoles de Couleur. All Louisianans were caught up in the disaster of the Civil War, and after Reconstruction and the onset of Jim Crow, the Francophone community allowed itself to be split along racial lines—which greatly facilitated the assimilation of both sides. By some there was a yearning for something better than the dreary politics on offer—as late as 1905, the great Louisiana French writer Alcee Fortier was listed as the New Orleans representative of L’Action Francaise. But in 1918, French was outlawed in Louisiana public schools, and was soon under siege throughout the State. The rural Cajuns have been somewhat better at holding on to their ancestral language, but relatively few still speak, despite efforts since the 1960s to revive its use.
By way of contrast, Quebec’s political identity continued to develop under the British Crown through the 19th century. Initially a strong liberal republican movement developed, les patriotes, which revolted against the British in 1837, in tandem with English-speaking Liberals in Ontario. But after that, the mainstream of French-Canadian thought would flow along more Conservative lines. Such prelates as Ignace Bourget and Louis LaFlesche and the great publicist Jules-Paul Tardivel brought the Catholic Social Teachings which were emanating from Rome and influencing France to Canada. These intellectual efforts were reinforced by the effort of recruiting and dispatching to the embattled Papal States French-Canadian recruits for the Pontifical Zouaves. The idea was born that the French-Canadian people, an island of Catholic and Latin civilisation in a Protestant Continent, had a distinct vocation to evangelise the lands to which God had led them.
The Dominion of Canada was born in 1867, and about the same time two streams of emigration began leaving the often-impoverished Quebec countryside. One went into the opening Canadian West, establishing a new network of Francophone islands, often attached to existing Metis settlements; the other flowed southward into the mill towns of New England. For those who remained under the Crown, there would be growing friction with the Anglo-Canadians and the government in Ottawa: the schools questions in Manitoba, Ontario, and New Brunswick, and the two Riel rebellions of the Métis, the last of which would end in the execution of the eponymous leader. But it is interesting to note that Riel rebelled against the Canadian government, not their Queen; indeed, between rebellions, he led his Metis against Fenian attackers from the United States in Her Majesty’s name. When the British General, Wolseley, after Gordon’s murder at Khartoum chased the Mahdi up the Nile, he insisted on using French-Canadian boatmen to do so. In his view they made his victories possible.
The initial result of the French-Canadian emigration to New England was the establishment in the region’s industrial areas of a new network of “Little Canadas.” These neighbourhoods would centre on a Catholic national parish complete with French-language school, fraternal societies, restaurants, and innumerable their French-language services. The expansion of these institutions were in tandem with similar ones of a Nationalist variety in Quebec, and all were dedicated to La Survivance—“the Survival”—of la foi, la langue, et les moeurs—“the Faith, the language, and the customs.” After World War I, both Quebec and French New England were again much affected by Conservative ideas emanating from France. Among leading spokesmen for such in Quebec were Esdras Minville and Msgr. Lionel Groulx—the latter of whom founded L’Action Francaise Canadienne, inspired partly by Maurras. Msgr. Groulx’s work in turn inspired Wilfrid Beaulieu’s Le Travailleur in Worcester, Massachusetts, and La Sentinelle in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. But where these ideas could be tolerated in Canada, the latter publication came into conflict with the Irish-American diocesan authorities in its state. Although an outright schism loomed, that danger was evaded through the intermediary efforts of Little Rose Ferron, a stigmatic whose holiness was respected by all sides.
The Two World Wars presented the French on both sides of the border with a great many questions: what is owed by us to the greater Anglo polities—the British Empire/Dominion of Canada and/or the United States—of which we are a part, and from which we have derived many benefits, yet to which notwithstanding we mean little in terms of surviving as a people? Should or could Quebec separate from the rest of Canada, in order to establish a secure base for our nationality? If it does, what is to become of those of us outside of Quebec?
To these dilemmas were added others after the end of World War II. Quebec was then governed by one of the greatest political figures we have ever produced: Maurice Duplessis. To-day universally excoriated in the manner of Franco and Salazar, he was nevertheless extremely skilful, principled, and pious. A Monarchist, he went so far as to oppose abolition of appeals to the Privy Council in 1949; deeply anti-Communist, he did his best to keep provincial education in the hands of the Catholic Church. Realistic, he dealt with major industrial firms, and brought jobs to the Province. But in the meantime, a sort of secular nationalism was beginning to develop among certain intellectuals—especially those clustered around a journal called la Cite. Within the Church, the pressures were building that would erupt after Vatican II. In the New England diaspora, these changes were mirrored in the life and career of one Jean-Louis de Kerouac—Jack Kerouac.
The result was the so-called Revolution tranquille, the “Quiet Revolution.” Within a decade, deeply Catholic Quebec became completely secular; the high French-Canadian birth rate imploded. The first of the three legs of national survival was knocked out—and, as far as traditional French-Canadian Nationalism was concerned the major reason for our existence denied by the very people—men like Pierre Trudeau on the one hand, and Rene Levesque on the other—who claimed to be Nationalists. The assimilation of the New England French-Canadians gathered steam as Latin Masses with French sermons in “French” churches were replaced with English Masses with English sermons. Nor might this blow to our identity be seen as a victory for the Anglo-Canadians; as the philosopher George Grant showed in his Lament for a Nation (1965), it damaged them in their own way.
There are a few signs of hope here and there—even Kerouac came home to the Faith and sanity before he died. A decade ago the Quebecois neo-Trad band Mes Aïeux made a huge hit with their satire on the Quiet Revolution, Degeneration. Quebec Nationalism as it has been since the 1970s has been self-defeating, because it wanted to root out the very soul of the Province as well as its people. A new group has emerged that—from my point of view—has some very positive elements: the Nouvelle Alliance (NA). But as with the Identitarians in Europe, they are a mixed bag.
What the history of the French in North America has shown is that while the two Anglophone entities under which they have lived have been assimilationist, it is the American that has been by far the most successful at it, by design or otherwise. Had it not been for the Crown, it is hard to believe that the French Canadians would still exist as a people, for all that a great many Anglo-Canadians might wish they did not. Of course, if the latter had achieved their aims, it is doubtful there could be an Anglo-Canada separate from the United States. It is ironic, but for all that this writer agrees with so much of what the NA declares, it seems to him that in the immediate the best hope for survival of Canada and so Quebec as a separate cultural and political reality lies in CANZUK. Yet, it may well be that the young gentlemen of the NA are not unaware of the dilemma. In their website’s section on “American Imperialism,” they write:
If, throughout our history, British colonialism was for every generation the declared enemy of the French fact in North America, there exists another imperialism claiming its sovereignty over all aspects of our daily lives, much more insidious and threatening than the residues of old Albion.
They go on to give a rip-roaring denunciation of their Southern neighbour with which it would be hard to argue. Who knows? Perhaps they shall come up with a definitive solution to the problem. I can only wish them well.
