Category: Quebec Emigration

Roads, Rails, and Canals: Quebec and the Transportation Revolution

For generations, the field of migration history has evolved around a basic framework of push and pull factors. We can explain people’s decision to relocate by looking at their existing circumstances and the suspected advantages (real or perceived) offered by their destination. But the how—the process of relocating—is too often lost in this framework, which […]

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Histoire des Franco-Américains : Un survol

Les résidentes et les résidents des États-Unis qui déclarent des origines françaises se comptent par millions. Pensons à la population huguenote installée en Amérique du Nord à l’époque coloniale et dont l’empreinte culturelle s’est largement effacée. Plusieurs grandes villes du pays reçoivent plus tard des gens venus directement de l’Hexagone. La Louisiane, le seul état […]

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Debating Emigration in Ottawa: 5 Takeaways

Quebec’s nineteenth-century legislative debates on emigration are available virtually in two searchable volumes (1867-1880 and 1881-1900). These compilations reveal policymakers’ ambivalence about industrialization as a viable means of curbing outmigration and the rise of domestic colonization as a projet national drawing bipartisan support. Excerpts are available here. Emigration to the United States was not confined […]

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The Many Trials of Lower Canada

In the last blog post, we considered how Lower Canadian agriculture may or may not have traversed a period of crisis in the first half of the nineteenth century. Historians still debate whether the colony experienced a sustained production crisis. The challenges were unquestionably many, however: soil exhaustion; fluke climatic events; fluctuating demand in Britain […]

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Finding Franco-Americans in Agricultural Reports

As we’ve previously seen on this blog, nineteenth-century government reports contain abundant information about French-Canadian emigration. Legislative committees studied the issue in 1849 and again eight years later. Emigration was also a matter of debate in the halls of Quebec’s provincial legislature after 1867. Studies and commentaries commissioned (or received) by the contemporary Canadian press […]

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A French-Canadian Journey: Saint-Césaire to St. Albans

See Part I here. The development of Saint-Césaire, on the Yamaska River, announced the expansion of French-Canadian settlement into areas either previously unoccupied by white settlers or hegemonically English-speaking. It lay on the doorstep of the Eastern Townships, colonized successively by Loyalists, other Americans inching New England’s northern frontier onto Canadian soil, and British immigrants. […]

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A French-Canadian Journey: Bellechasse to Sweetsburg

Like thousands of other families, economic and demographic pressures carried them away from the ancestral heart of French Canada and into the breadbasket of the Richelieu and Yamaska rivers, into the “foreign” Eastern Townships, and into the fields and factories of the Great Republic. The descendants of Jean Lacroix and Marie Anne Fradet—both of them […]

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Quebec’s Emigration Debates: 7 Takeaways

As some of you know, in the last few months, I have compiled all debates of the Quebec legislature that addressed (or mentioned) emigration and repatriation between 1867 and 1900. In making these debates more accessible, I hope they will draw the attention and interest of other researchers, thus bringing more voices into the historical […]

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Showdown in Chicago: The Summer of ’93

In the summer of 1893, all roads led to Chicago. The Great Republic was celebrating itself—or at least its white, colonialist incarnation—and the whole world was invited. The Columbian Exposition was to recognize four centuries of European settlement and achievement in the Americas and the United States’ own social and technological progress. All was not […]

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The Day Repatriation Died

It was half past three on July 5, 1888—well, shortly after half past three, some members of Quebec’s lower house being perennially slow to take their seats. Speaker Marchand turned to the honorable member for the riding of Bellechasse, on his left. Faucher de Saint-Maurice had the floor. So did, vicariously, the Franco-American community. Faucher […]

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