Last spring, on this website, I wrote of Clément Gosselin and other French Canadians who participated in the American War of Independence. After three years, a lengthy labor of love now comes to fruition with the publication of my “Promises to Keep: French Canadians as Revolutionaries and Refugees, 1775-1800,” which will appear in the next […]
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La Journée de la Francophonie in Exeter, N.H.
Yesterday, in celebration of Francophonie Day at Phillips Exeter Academy, I was invited to deliver the event’s keynote address. I gladly share my prepared remarks here. Thank you, all, for your presence here. I salute your interest in this language that bring us together—not merely today, I hope, but throughout the year. Thank you especially […]
Continue readingA Franco-American Rebuttal: The View from 1924
Charles Edmond Rouleau attributed a litany of moral failings to expatriated French Canadians—they were lazy but also greedy, improvident and very often intemperate, they betrayed their homeland and their faith. As the nineteenth century wore on, this type of rhetoric, tending to leave Franco-American communities to their own devices, became dominant among Quebec elites. I […]
Continue readingReporting Failure: The National Project That Wasn’t
Let us leave those American factories where our health wilts like a flower kept from the sun’s invigorating light, and seize the land, such as to be a strong, great, happy, and prosperous people. Charles Edmond Rouleau’s words, published in 1896, were very much in the spirit of the times, at least among Quebec’s elites. […]
Continue readingStories of a Sick Country? Emigration from Canada, 1849-1857, Part II
This is the second part of an essay on nineteenth-century emigration reports. Please find the first half here. In retrospect, the great demographic hemorrhage that weakened Canada in the 1840s might come as little surprise. There was a clear disparity between available labor, at a time of tremendous population growth in the St. Lawrence River […]
Continue readingStories of a Sick Country? Emigration from Canada, 1849-1857, Part I
In the United States and much of Europe, immigration and nativism have provided ample fodder for the front page in recent years. So it has often been. When it comes to geographic mobility, politicians and policymakers worry far more about those who cross into their country than about those who leave. In Canada’s case, such […]
Continue readingFrench Canada, Emigration, and Providence, 1880-1898
The fate of francophones outside of Quebec has recently attracted renewed public scrutiny. In September, New Brunswick’s People’s Alliance, a party hostile to official bilingualism, made a political breakthrough and secured a position of influence by supporting the Progressive Conservative government. The following month, columnist Denise Bombardier argued that the French language had largely disappeared […]
Continue readingProsper Bender from Quebec City to Boston
Several months ago I provided a brief glimpse of the life and times of Prosper Bender (1844-1917), a Quebec-born physician, littérateur, and intercultural broker. Bender spent much of his life championing unpopular causes. Though he may have delighted in being a contrarian, there is little to suggest that he was a girouette, a weather vane. […]
Continue readingFinding a Larger Canvas: Franco-Americans’ Enduring Significance
An earlier version of this essay appeared in Le Forum, vol. 39, no. 3 (fall 2017), 3-5. See the full original version here. How knowledgeable are you of Franco-American history? What about your fellow Americans, or your fellow Canadians—how conversant are they? Unfortunately, many Americans of French descent know little about their heritage; it is […]
Continue readingProsper Bender’s American Dream
I am not without hopes, however, that later some one may assume this task, and cause the social and literary activities of those days, and the participants therein, to live over again. – Prosper Bender, Quebec Daily Telegraph, June 29, 1907 As the son of a prominent attorney in Quebec City, young Prosper Bender could […]
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