In several weeks, I will have the privilege and pleasure of sharing my work on Franco-Americans at a colloquium on Quebec Studies at my dear alma mater, Bishop’s University. Below is a sneak peak, which may touch on themes familiar to friends and frequenters of this blog. Though Franco-Americans in the hinterland were typically not […]
Continue readingCategory: Quebec Emigration
A 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 […]
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