A few weeks ago, we were reminded here that the history of the emigration of Quebeckers to the United States is more recent than the major works on the subject suggest. Other articles report on the efforts still devoted to the development of French-Canadian culture south of the border. However, Franco-Americans, “these other yourselves” as Claire Quintal said, are often relegated to the peripheries of the intellectual world of Quebec.
When we dare to include them in our collective thinking, it is to affirm that outside the homeland, outside Quebec, there is no cultural salvation. On July 4, in fact, a journalist from Radio-Canada declared that he was presenting “The last Franco-Americans” to us. The “Francos” I meet were not particularly surprised by this report. Since the 1960s, Quebec journalists have regularly visited the United States to explain to us that Franco-American life is at its last hour.
This is a misunderstanding of the Franco-American journey. Since the Quiet Revolution, the definition of Quebec’s identity has gone through language: secularization has elevated the status of French as a primordial element of Quebec collective life. It is a choice that did not present itself to the Franco-Americans. These people have experienced very different social realities, and their community has changed and reoriented culturally.
Language and culture
Today, there is no paradox in calling oneself Franco-American and Anglophone. People who have lost the language of their ancestors due to conditions beyond their reach still live the Holidays like their ancestors did, gorge themselves on tourtière and poutine, appreciate Quebec artists and groups while supporting their own art scene – and we could go on and on. Language does not by itself make culture. What can be said, in fact, of the Irish identity, which is maintained in English? What about the cultural differences between Quebec and Acadia des Maritimes, which even in their expressions and distinct accents share the French language?
Unfortunately, here it is still very easy to judge the French Canadian diaspora and its descendants from the model of the nation-state. Quebec nationalists have learned to be wary of multinational states – the fruit of their disappointments within a disliked and abused Confederation. The American cultural melting pot and the impression of Anglo-Saxon hegemony helped to strengthen this political thought. However, we must be careful not to judge other peoples on the basis of a Quebec model which would be universal and which would condemn people of French heritage outside Quebec to their inevitable disappearance.
The “Francos” maintain their traditions and, far from becoming folklorized, seek to enrich their culture – a distinct culture, not Quebecois or American, but the fruit of a crossbreeding which has its own legitimacy.
A certain elite has shown in the Little Canadas Gallic fortresses resisting in vain against a cross-border “pansaxonism”; the historical reality is more complicated. The direction given to themselves by the “Francos” cannot be reduced to the national parishes, supposedly insular, that they financed. As my research reveals, we discover in these people a concern to defend their interests in the turbulent political arena of their adopted countries. They advanced their economic interests there. They also brought the leaders of the survival movement, such as Joseph D. Bachand and Josaphat Benoit, into the corridors of civic power.
Even with the challenges that are imposed on any minority group, the Franco-American population has given itself distinct community institutions in order to then integrate the common structures of the adopted country. She thus forged important inter-ethnic alliances, then proved that the French fact in America would help shape the destiny of the United States – in the industrial district of Waterville, in Maine, as in Washington. Where the votes allowed, the “Francos” were able to get involved without hiding their heritage; this involvement has followed the course of their cultural metamorphosis since the 1960s.
In Quebec, the right to self-determination has often been proclaimed; the Franco-American population demands such a right to give itself an identity direction without being constantly evaluated from a model which is not its own. This is what she has been doing for nearly two centuries, a slice of history that we should explore to better appreciate what is happening so close to us, among those whose roots are also ours.