Once a month, The duty challenges history buffs to decipher a topical theme based on a comparison with a historical event or figure.
Is Premier François Legault exaggerating when he talks about the Louisianization of Quebec to express his fears about the decline of French? At least that’s what many journalists and historians say, who believe that the situation in Quebec cannot be compared to that in Louisiana, where the French-speaking people have voluntarily become Americanized.
It is true that the colonization of the Louisiana territory by the Americans, who constituted the majority of the population from the middle of the 19e century, cannot be compared to the situation in Quebec, where the proportion of Anglophones does not exceed a quarter. It is also true that French-speaking Louisiana enthusiastically welcomed the economic prosperity and political liberalism brought by the American Republic. It is wrong, however, to believe that Americanization took place without violence and without resistance.
In the light of the recent public debate, it is clear that little is known about the history of the Americanization of Louisiana, a process of identity change that ultimately involves the anglicization of Francophones. When the term “Louisianization” entered the vocabulary of sovereigntists in the 1960s, the fate of French in Louisiana had long been an integral part of the historical consciousness of Quebecers.
Prosperity
Explored from the XVIIe century by men from the St. Lawrence Valley, Louisiana shares a language and customs with Quebec, but is distinguished by its climate and the importance of the slave plantation economy.
At the end of the Seven Years’ War, Louisiana passed into Spanish hands. The use of French persists there, the small Creole population of French and African origins absorbing migrants – including Acadians who find asylum there after their brutal deportation by the British. Through the interplay of empires, Spain ceded Louisiana to France in 1800, which in turn sold it to the United States in 1803. Members of the Louisiana elite sought to create alliances with the new colonizers.
The press in Lower Canada took a close interest in the future of Louisiana in the young republic. In January 1808, a reader of the newspaper The Canadian defends the “inhabitants of Louisiana” who seek to preserve “their customs and their laws” [sic] despite the recriminations of the Americans. These French-speakers “who were sold as the herd is sold with the farm” were not very numerous, but their majority position enabled them to use French in republican institutions. The integration of Louisiana into the vast American market benefited the French-speaking elite, which experienced great prosperity until the Civil War (1861-1865).
Although Americans poured into the state by the thousands each year — willingly, for whites, or by force, for blacks in slavery — the French-speaking population increased tenfold during this period. Indigenous peoples who have escaped forced displacement make French the cement of their recomposed communities. French-speaking Louisianans practice all trades, live in both the city and the countryside and support various political parties. They are mainly Catholics, but also Protestants and Jews.
In the middle of the 19the century, New Orleans thus became the largest French-speaking city in America, far ahead of Montreal and Quebec. It is distinguished from other cities in the South by its open public spaces where all skin colors rub shoulders. Its newspapers make a great deal of news from the French-speaking world. “A revolution is brewing in Canada”, thus reports The Echo in 1836.
A race war
In the wake of the 1837-1838 rebellions, the rhetoric that presented Louisiana as a counter-model crystallized in Canadian political discourse. Patriots dissatisfied with British rule see the experience of these Louisianans integrated into the American Republic as an option. Others, however, warn of the Louisiana mirage. In the summer of 1836, The Canadian reports that “on the shores of the Mississippi as on that of the St. Lawrence, an illiberal war is being waged against an honest and peaceful population, which we want to dominate in order to then crush and annihilate it”.
In his famous report of 1839, Lord Durham disagrees. To solve the problem of a hostile French-speaking population in the British Empire, it is necessary to put in place a slow assimilation as in Louisiana, where “a numerical majority of a loyal and English population” and “perfectly equal and popular institutions can erasing racial distinctions without disorder or oppression”.
The division of New Orleans into three ethnolinguistic municipalities in 1836 by the state legislature “at the request of the English who complained of the inertia of the French” is an example of what Durham calls “perfectly free competition”. All the efforts of French speakers since the beginning of the century to “preserve the equality of the two languages” cannot compete, believes Durham, with the personal interest of the ambitious individual ready to “amalgamate” with the American majority. By emulating Louisiana, the objective is clear: “obliterate French-Canadian nationality”.
By the time Lord Durham wrote his report, “the blurring of distinctions between English and French” was perceptible in Louisiana, but it was far from complete. For the sake of success, families of the French-speaking elite make sure that their children learn English; the boys will thus have good careers and the girls, good marriages. However, the majority of Francophones continue to marry among themselves. Anxious to preserve their French heritage and pass it on to the next generation, they set up schools, refused to speak English, and supported the development of local literature.
In 1844 the United States Mail announces the publication of “two sister works”; the first is a Louisiana History by Mr. Remy, a “young Creole”, the other is a “defence of French nationality in Canada” by Mr. Garneau. Linguistic cohabitation becoming more difficult in Louisiana at the turn of the 1840s, the French-speakers obtained that it be enshrined in the state constitution.
The disappearance of the slave system with the Civil War, combined with the cultural erasure efforts of the Reconstruction government, accelerated the Americanization of French speakers. The 1864 constitution provides for the abolition of slavery and, at the same time, the exclusive use of English in institutions.
The newspaper The Globe of Toronto rejoiced in December 1865 at the “veritable race war” taking place “in New Orleans […]. The American element controls the city and is determined that French will not be taught and that the next generation of Creoles will be completely Americanized”.
almost cousins
Impoverished by the war, the white Creoles first tried to ally themselves with the colored Creoles in the unification movement. Then, like the Cajuns, they joined the armed struggle of Anglo-American white supremacists against the Reconstruction government. They thus obtained in 1879 a partial reintroduction of French in the Constitution and the right to instruct children in their language in segregated schools.
In Our men and Our history, published in Montreal in 1911, Rodolphe Desdunes recounts the role of Francophones in the fight against segregation in the South. Joséphine Decuir, a Creole of color who owned a hundred slaves before the war, challenges in court her exclusion from the cabin reserved for ladies on a steamer. His case, heard before the United States Supreme Court in 1877, preceded by some twenty years that of Homer Plessy, who failed to put an end to railroad segregation. In the foreword to Desdunes’ book, the French-Canadian missionary Louis Martin writes: “I love colored Creole. I especially like him when he speaks my language. He is then a bit like my cousin. »
Increasingly withdrawn into the countryside of southwestern Louisiana, divided by the color of their skin, their origins and their social classes, the French speakers are relegated to the backbenches. “Are we dead? ” title The Meschacebe in 1886, when Franco-Americans still accounted for a quarter of the state’s population. He does not, however, envy the fate of the “French race” in Canada—this “American Siberia” from which thousands are exiled in search of a better life in the United States.
In 1921, when the Franco-Louisiana population had never been so large in absolute numbers, the majority wrote into the constitution that English would henceforth be the only language of instruction in public schools. In less than two generations there has been a dramatic decline in the number of French speakers.
Louisiana’s Americanization story is not one of slow decline. It is a story of forced colonization, stigmatization and cultural erasure. As the newspapers of the 19th century showe century, Quebec as a French-speaking society was built in relation to Louisiana. Historical consciousness, writes Maxime Raymond-Dufour, is a “legitimation tool for action” and serves to “build the future”. Yesterday as today, the fate of French in America is based on collective choices.