"There is No Forty-Fifth Parallel": Division or Unity for French North America?

I had made a terrible faux pas. I made the mistake of asking a proud Franco-Manitoban what part of Québec he was from.

It should have been a clue that he described himself as French-Canadian rather than Québécois. But in the USA a Québécois might have used the former expression especially when speaking English. However, the author of a blog called French North America should have known better.

After correcting my misapprehension, my new Franco-Manitoban acquaintance made a revealing admission. He first said that he hated being mistaken for Québécois and then said, “There are pockets of French all over Canada. And they don’t like each other.”

Sad. But, in my experience, also true. One of the most hateful, vitriolic anti-Québec rants I have ever read appeared on the blog of an acadienne. The Acadian resentment of Québec is something I’ve noted in both written and verbal communication.

Being three-quarters a grandson of Québec and one-quarter a grandson of Acadie, I once asked a young Québécoise in the Beauce region about the Acadians. She expressed sorrow about the history of Acadie but then said that her sense was that the Acadians were the mouton noir of the Francophones in Canada.

We were not always so divided. There was a time when the French North Americans felt a unity of language, religion, and customs, at least when these were perceived as threatened.

Witness an article that appeared on page 8 of the June 9, 1911 edition of the Boston Evening Transcript. The matter at hand was a convention of Franco-Americans meeting in Biddeford, Maine to discuss the Corporation Sole controversy.

Boston Evening Transcript
June 9, 1911
French North Americans
United Against the Corporation Sole

This dispute concerned a Maine law that had placed all of the temporal property of the Catholic parishes in the state in the hands of the Bishop of Portland and his successors. The law took assets that were purchased and improved at great expense by the impecunious Franco-American Catholics and turned them into the personal property of the Bishop.

French North Americans on both sides of the border were united against the Corporation Sole legislation. The 1911 article reports that Pascal Poirier “the representative in the Canadian Senate of the French Acadian people of New Brunswick” sent the convention this message: 

“I wish to tell you that I am, like everybody else here in New Brunswick, entirely with you in heart, soul and spirit. It is the cause of the religion of our fathers, it is the French language, it is liberty, it is right you are defending…God who has made us French and Catholic – Catholic in the truest sense of the term – expects that we will defend by all means within our power, our nationality and our religion… No representation, no taxation. This motto has made of the English a nation of freemen. Let it be our motto also, especially when certain persons in authority are using our own property to destroy our children, our language, and our faith.”

Note that the “French Acadian” Senator refers to “our nationality,” which he owns as the common possession of Acadians and Franco-Americans, the majority of whom had roots in Québec. For the Senator, the Franco-Americans are a we and not a them.

I imagine that the Senator did not fancy himself any less an Acadian when he refers to “our nationality” in common with New England Franco-Americans. He had not only a local identity as Acadian but he also claims a wider French North American identity.

At the 1911 Biddeford convention a letter from Cyrille F. Delage the President of the Saint Jean Baptiste Society of Québec was also read. Monsieur Delage writes:

“We cannot attend your convention, but we are with you in heart and spirit. Your struggle interests and passionates (sic) us in the highest degree. We are following it in all the details, for it has all our sympathies, and we consider your cause our own. There is no forty-fifth parallel between the descendants of the French race in America…. Justice shall be given you and success will crown your noble efforts for the preservation of our language and our traditions. If we can aid you, either financially or otherwise please command us.”

“There is no forty-fifth parallel between the descendants of the French race in America.” Monsieur Delage seems to means the 49th parallel, the traditional border between Canada and the USA. Despite this geographical miscue, he recognizes that the French North Americans are a nation without a state straddling the border between two federal unions, the USA and the Dominion of Canada.

The word “our” is used a number of times to emphasize what M. Delage states frankly: that the struggle of the Franco-American is also the struggle of the Québécois. The great-grandparents of today’s Québec nationalists considered the Franco-Americans to be of one “race” with them.

The article also notes the enthusiastic response given by the assembly to the address, and indeed the very presence, of Olivar Asselin, a Québécois journalist, “former associate of Henri Bourassa,” “leader of the Nationalist party,” and a “special delegate from the Saint Jean Baptiste Society of Montreal,” the foremost French-Canadian national society of its day.

In addition to the journalist Asselin, the article reports that, “all the French-Canadian papers in Québec and New England, including La Presse, La Patrie, Le Devoir, and La Revue Franco-Americaine of Montreal are represented almost all of them by their editors themselves.”

When was the last time that an organ such as the venerable Le Devoir took an interest in a Franco-American convention? Imagine the editor of a major Montréal or Québec City media outlet today attending such a convention in Maine.

One hundred years ago, in a very different ideological milieu, the “French race in America” formed a coherent bloc, albeit with local distinctions. Elsewhere I have pointed to the example of the Latinos. Although they have their origins in Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico and other places, they have recognized their common interests and christened themselves with a new name. They have become a major socio-political bloc thereby.

The ties of language and religion that once united us across national and provincial borders have loosened considerably. But have we cooperated, unwittingly, in a strategy of divide and conquer advanced by the assimilationists? Rather than nursing grievances based on ancient resentments or parochial differences, the fragile plant I call French North America could choose to reinforce its roots in the soil of a common heritage.

Once the “French race in America” in its various pockets in Canada and the USA had a wide, continental perspective. If we may still speak of la survivance a return to this more inclusive French North American identity may be our last, best hope.

Repatriation Revisited

You are tired of life in the mills. You have told me so. Many among you have written me to that effect and I have seen it with my own eyes. Your financial status is not what it should be. For a long time you have served masters without hearts. For too long you have built fortunes for rich Americans. It is time to think about yourself and your children. Your fifteen to twenty-year experience in the United States shows you that there is nothing but the life of a mercenary here. Do you want to be truly free?…Do you want your independence? 

These words were spoken in 1910. Were they the exhortations of a Union organizer?  A Communist agitator? A demagogue running for office? No. They are the words of a Roman Catholic curé and repatriation agent Albert Bérubé speaking to Franco-Americans in my maternal grandfather’s hometown of Biddeford, Maine.

Michael Guignard, in his well-researched article “The Franco-Americans of Biddeford Maine”,*  quotes Father Bérubé in his discussion of the partial successes enjoyed by the movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to encourage Franco-Americans to return to Québec to colonize frontier regions.

In a previous post I discussed an article from a 1900 edition of the Brunswick (Maine) Record attempting to discredit the work of repatriation agent René Dupont. Guignard’s essay reveals that Dupont was a native of Biddeford. Dupont himself was a retourné, a repatriated Franco-American, and therefore well suited to advocate repatriation.

Are They Leaving or Staying?

That 1900 article from the Record bore the headline “French to Stay.”  Nine days prior to this article’s publication, the New York Times had published an article regarding Dupont’s efforts, based on the very same information, under the diametrically opposed headline “French-Canadians To Leave.”  The Times piece, however, adds a detail which the Record omits – the reason why Dupont expected many Franco-Americans to heed the call to return to Québec.

One of the reasons why the French-Canadians desire to leave Maine is that the Roman Catholic Churches in several places in the State have denied them the privilege of having priests of their own race. The dispute has caused bitter feeling, and the matter has finally been referred to Rome for adjustment.
[New York Times, December 22, 1900] 

The New York Times had been covering the repatriation movement since at least 1883 when the following item appeared.

WOOING BACK THE FRENCH CANADIANS

OTTAWA, May 1. – In moving for a statement in Parliament last night showing all the sums of money expended since 1875 to secure the repatriation of French Canadians who have emigrated to the United States, Mr. Tasse stated that it was done with a view to regaining to Canada thousands of French Canadians who have sought in less favorable times employment in the neighboring Republic. There are at present, it is estimated, 300,000 French Canadians in the United States, and the subject of repatriation has on more than one occasion engaged the attention of Parliament…In 1881 10,000 Canadians returned from the United States and in 1882 20,000. 

[New York Times, May 2, 1883]

These figures might have been a cause for optimism on the part of repatriation advocates. However, they do not take into account the number of Canadiens who departed Québec in 1881 and 1882. The rising tide of returnees may be a lagging indicator of the growing number of emigrants leaving the Province.

A more detailed article regarding a specific case of repatriation appeared in the same newspaper three years later.

RETURNING TO QUEBEC

FRENCH CANDIANS LONGING FOR THEIR NATIVE PROVINCE

MONTREAL, Quebec, Sept. 12. – Negotiations have just been concluded here with the Government of this Province and the Montreal Colonization Society, at the head of which is Archbishop Fabre, by Dr. Johnson La Paline of Lawrence, and Camille Roussin, a merchant, of Lowell, Mass., who were duly appointed delegates of 105 heads of French Canadian families in those towns and the neighboring country to make arrangements for their return to this Province. These French Canadians wish to return to Canada and settle on land in their native Province, as many others have already done. A contract has been entered into by the delegates by which 50,000 acres of land in the La Lievre and La Rouge Valleys, in the Ottawa district, have been secured for the settlement of families whose intention it is to come when the clearing of the land and the building of houses is completed, a special fund having been subscribed for these purposes. They will come in an organized body and take possession, provided with implements to till the land. Many have already returned through the exertions of Father La Belle, who has been a pioneer in colonizing the district in question, which is of great extent. Those who have come have been very successful, being more progressive than before they left their own Province. The present movement is expected to be the beginning of an extensive repatriation of the French element.
[New York Times, September 13, 1886]

The region to which the Lawrence and Lowell families were to be repatriated, described as “the Ottawa district,” is in Western Québec. La Lievre River is directly north of Ottawa, while the river La Rouge is to its east, situated northwest of Montréal.

The terms of the contract were quite favorable. The land would be cleared and houses built prior to the arrival of the repatriated families. Agricultural tools would be provided as well. It is most likely that these 105 families came, as did my forebears, from the class of landless journaliers or day-laborers. If they had owned lands in Québec it stands to reason that they would have returned to those.

The article also claims that, “many others have already” returned to Québec, confirmed by the earlier piece from 1883, and that these prior returnees had been “very successful.” They are characterized as “more progressive than before they left their own Province” and high hopes are expressed for “an extensive repatriation” of Franco-Americans.

All of these assertions contradict the spirit of the 1900 article from the Brunswick Record, which seeks to debunk the entire repatriation enterprise as unnecessary and based on unsubstantiated facts.

The above research suggests that there was some legislative corpus under both the Ottawa and the Québec governments regarding the repatriation of Franco-Americans. Are these laws and policies still on the books? Could freshly cleared land await us in Western Québec or the Lac Saint-Jean regions?  Does any Franco-American lawyer wish to press a claim for repatriation?

I am only half joking.

*Michael Guignard's essay appears in Steeples and Smokestacks: A Collection of Essays on the Franco-American Experience in New England, ed. Claire Quintal, Worcester: Assumption College, 1996, pp 122-144. The passage from Fr. Bérubé cited above appears on page 133.