There is nothing more interesting and, at the same time, more heartening than a reading of the slim volume that Mr. Chandonnet has published at Desbarats. Our exiled compatriots have been so maligned; it has been so often said that on setting foot on foreign soil, they lose all memory of their God and their homeland, that it brings us pleasure to find a man of good faith, an eminent priest, who nobly avenges all the injuries they have suffered in the past.

– Le Constitutionnel, October 4, 1872

So a Trois-Rivières newspaper greeted the publication of Father Thomas-Aimé Chandonnet’s Notre-Dame-des-Canadiens et les Canadiens aux Etats-Unis one hundred and fifty years ago. This was one of the many Franco-American parish histories that would appear in print. Chandonnet’s work stands out for several reasons. It may have been the first monograph with French Canadians in the United States as its primary subject. Significantly, also, the author set out to uphold the dignity and defend the integrity of those who had left Quebec—by no means the prevalent opinion among cultural elites north of the border.

Chandonnet was born in Saint-Pierre-les-Becquets, some twenty miles from Trois-Rivières, in 1834 to a farming family of modest means. He attended seminary and had the opportunity to study abroad. He graduated from the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Pontifical Institute in Rome with doctorates in philosophy, theology, and canon law. He taught at the Quebec Seminary and served as principal of the Laval Normal School. In Quebec, he left a lasting impression, but neither for his work on the French Canadians of Massachusetts nor for his brief study of the Catholic parish in Malone, New York. Chandonnet engaged directly in the theological controversies of the day and founded a religious periodical in Montreal, further testaments to a life of intense intellectual activity. He would die prematurely, still in his forties.

Notre-Dame-des-Canadiens provides a valuable early glimpse of the French-Canadian community in Worcester, Massachusetts, a city still little acknowledged outside of the different incarnations of Le Travailleur and the Institut français at Assumption University. Chandonnet’s work traced the “prehistory” of the Catholic parish of the same name. The first families from Lower Canada came to the city in the 1820s, many of them originating—as in Woonsocket—from the lower Richelieu and Yamaska rivers. More recently, immigrants had come from the Montreal and Saint-Hyacinthe areas. While their numbers grew, the 1840s and 1850s witnessed efforts to secure distinct institutions for expatriated French Canadians.

Having established the context, Chandonnet launched into his parish history. However, as we will see, far from restricting himself to a dispassionate presentation of the “facts,” he used his authorial voice to forcefully confront misperceptions of budding Franco-American communities.

The Laws of God

By the nineteenth century, parish formation in Lower Canada had become a mundane affair. Expatriates were not so fortunate when seeking to establish distinctly French-Canadian parishes on U.S. soil. A community had to band together, seek and obtain the bishop’s approval, find an appropriate location, collect funds to build (or buy) and furnish a church building, and attract a French-Canadian priest. Hardly ever did all of this occur in the exact same sequence; often, as had happened in Worcester, early efforts ended in failure. Chandonnet pitched his book partly as a memorial to the zeal, hard work, and sacrifices incurred in the establishment of Notre-Dame-des-Canadiens.

In the Worcester area, a tipping point came with a rising population and the arrival of Father Jean Baptiste Primeau. A presentation on the emigration by Zéphirin Druon, a leading figure of the Church in Vermont, had tantalized Primeau. In 1869, he offered his services to Archbishop J. J. Williams of Boston, who sent him to Worcester with explicit orders to organize a French-Canadian national parish.

Primeau’s arrival coincided with the departure of a man Chandonnet deemed to be a false prophet:

A new kind of missionary appeared in the midst of Worcester’s French Canadians. In the name of sacred liberty, he came to preach a crusade for the deliverance of his country and its depressed provinces by the great flourishing republic. This movement would bring all emigrant Canadians under a single flag; this man would march before them and lead them to victory. In three months, it seemed, annexation would be a matter of fact and all would return to their homes.

Chandonnet argued that annexiationist assemblies—their speeches and their resolutions—were the work of “politicians trained in Canada, residing in Canada, having left Canada the day prior, and returning to Canada on the morrow.” He told the Quebec press frankly that ordinary migrants were not driving the cause of annexation, nor were they duped by the likes of this visitor.

No, the Canadian colonies of the United States are not stirring or excited; they are neither hostile to the established order nor enemies of their homeland’s institutions; nor yet do they idolize the American Constitution or American laws. They have not brought hatred, contempt, or vain ambitions, but rather their love of work, their industriousness, the hope of a happy médiocrité, and the indelible memory of the missing homeland.

Chandonnet did not name the person who had brought radical ideas, but we can safely assume that it was Médéric Lanctôt, who, as the text suggests, left Worcester almost as soon as he had come.

As would frequently happen down to the present day, our author projected a single, common focus on the cause of French-Canadian nationality. He highlighted the establishment of the parish and the grand celebration of Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, in 1870, that it facilitated. Among the orators on that occasion was a very young Ferdinand Gagnon, a more reliable—or orthodox—figure than Lanctôt. The Canadian associations in Worcester, Chandonnet insisted, were all fraternal and benevolent. Politics had no place at the Worcester convention of French Canadians over which Gagnon presided in 1871. We know that such prominent attendees as Joseph LeBoeuf and George Batchelor, not to mention Gagnon, were no strangers to hot political issues. They resolved to recommend naturalization to migrants planning to remain in the United States, but the convention did focus its attention on the pillars of survivance.

Traditional French-Canadian institutions would help safeguard the community from the radical schemes of silver-tongued adventurers. Father Primeau had a hand in the construction of ethnic institutions and an ethnic identity among the Canadians of Worcester. He supported the creation of a temperance society and it was under his leadership that Notre-Dame held a successful fundraising bazaar that attracted the interest—and the money—of Irish residents.

That was Primeau. Chandonnet had more to say—and here we find the doctor of canon law. His work includes a lengthy treatise on parish councils. He contrasted the elected parish councils of Quebec and the American system, in which parish property belonged fully to the pastor, who reported to the bishop only. Patriotic though he may have been, Chandonnet firmly disapproved of the administration of parish property (even in part) by laypersons. French Canadians in the United States ought to recognize the authority of their bishops and their pastors and abide by the law of the land. He did concede, though, that it was good practice to have priests inform parishioners of the state of local Church finances. (The issue of parish councils later became a sore sticking point in Maine.)

Compulsory funding of Catholic institutions also elicited a comparison between Canada and the United States. Whereas Quebec had a dîme, tithing and any kind of financial contribution occurred on a voluntary basis in American dioceses. Here Chandonnet clearly expressed support for the former system. He enjoined migrants to give as they would back home. Between these asides on Church affairs, it comes as no surprise that Notre-Dame-des-Canadiens received the imprimatur of the ultramontane bishop of Montreal, Ignace Bourget.

The Laws of the Market

Chandonnet’s outspokenness—or quite simply his conservatism—extended to such earthly affairs as labor conflicts. As many French-Canadian priests would, he condemned strikes. But rather than offer moral reasons, he instead plunged in economic theory. Strikes were doomed from the outset due to the leverage exerted by capital over labor. Strikers could not prevail and, by boycotting the manufactures, they would only thrust their families into poverty.

This may have been a moot point, or yet a way of cautioning against agitators, for, in Chandonnet’s opinion, French Canadians in Worcester and beyond were not suffering unduly in their adoptive country.

The fact is that, in general, French Canadians in the United States live well. Suffice it to say that work is abundant, the wages are fairly high, and the cost of housing, etc., fairly reasonable. In most centers, work is varied enough that the wife and children manage as well as the husband and father to earn more than is needed to cover their expenses.

A rosy picture, no doubt, but perhaps not too far from the truth. This assessment preceded the degradation of work in the textile industry in the 1870s and 1880s through “speed-ups,” recurrent wage cuts and the fine system, and the tenement life imposed by certain large corporations. There was a larger point. Hundreds of thousands of French Canadians crossed the border simply because they enjoyed better economic conditions under the starry flag. Nor were moral failings at issue here, as many observers in Quebec argued in the late nineteenth century.

When we witness an exodus of 600,000 souls—continuous, growing, longstanding, we might say; when we witness the elderly, fathers and mothers, young people, timid young girls, children embracing mothers they may never see again; crying, sad, beaten down, desperate, while they pull themselves from their cares, to face an unknown horizon, cold and dark despite the lightning that scars it; it seems to us that the most fortunate, the most committed patriots might find the reason not in a capricious desertion of the homeland nor in a monstrous absence of feeling—they might search beyond such vile filth for the secret reasons for this movement that is so contrary to the soul’s natural inclinations.

Chandonnet could not be more blunt: these were not deserters or traitors. The mass migration followed basic principles of political economy. Canadians went into exile due to lack of work or low wages as compared to what the U.S. Northeast offered. At this point, the author dared to delicately wade into Canadian policymaking. He argued that Canadian industry needed greater protection—higher tariffs, presumably—while the government ought to remove barriers to domestic colonization, for instance by building roads and addressing the cost of land.

When French Canadians struggled in the United States, he continued, laziness and extravagance typically were not the cause. Sometimes, the migrants did not save as much as they should. The language barrier hindered their advancement. They left Quebec with debts that consumed a part of their income. Sometimes, the dream of a quick fortune led them from place to place and the hope of quick and easy cash hurt their long-term prospects.

While expressing modest hopes that migrants would repatriate, Chandonnet helped legitimize the experiences of those who had gone to the United States to feed their families and who, in the process, were bringing la patrie with them. In this way, he was a conservative precursor to Honoré Beaugrand who, several years later, penned his own vindication of Franco-American life, but showed no quarter to Canada’s political elites.

A Minority Group—On Its Own Terms

Chandonnet, who highlighted the work of Divine Providence in the formation of Notre-Dame, stopped short of expressing providential expansionism: the idea that unseen forces were bringing French Canadians to foreign soil as agents of a larger, religious drama that would alter the cultural landscape of the United States and broaden the homeland. But he concluded his work by quoting J. A. Mousseau of Montreal’s L’Opinion publique, who said as much: “we proudly admit to being of those who believe in the providential destiny of our race in America.” Mousseau was himself relying on the work of Rameau de Saint-Père, whose legacy included this supreme faith in the expansion of French people and their culture beyond their ancestral homelands.

There was something to it. Chandonnet’s study of Worcester was mirrored by developments across the region:

Behold Sainte-Marie de la Visitation in Putnam, diocese of Providence; behold Saint-Jean-Baptiste in Troy and Champlain, diocese of Albany; behold Marlboro, diocese of Boston; behold Saint-François-Xavier in Winooski Falls, diocese of Burlington; behold Southbridge, Webster, and Ware, diocese of Springfield; behold Nashua and Manchester, diocese of Portland.

Chandonnet, like Primeau and some French-Canadian migrants, could afford to be hopeful at this time. They could spy the potential in Franco-American life—in something that was of Quebec, but always beyond it. Franco-Americans lived it and knew it. In Quebec, however, as I have argued elsewhere, the idea of providential expansion was always a minority position. Political and cultural elites in Quebec City, in Montreal, and across the province viewed depopulation as a disaster for the “race.” Emigrants were relegated to an unenviable part of the public imagination. We can only wonder what might have come had politicians, clergy, editors and journalists, and other opinionmakers followed Chandonnet’s lead—providing support to francophone minorities outside of the province rather than swiftly condemning them to oblivion. This might also have led to an empathetic view of groups migrating to Quebec for some of the same reasons.

Ultimately, Notre-Dame-des-Canadiens et les Canadiens aux Etats-Unis should retain our attention for the author’s cheery outlook—a rare one in a literature filled with warnings about the always-imminent melting of a culture. But there’s more. Chandonnet’s work represented an early moment in literature about Franco-Americans, though the issue of French-Canadian emigration had appeared in the Quebec press since the 1830s. It announced a genre focused on survivance that erased divisions and disagreements among Franco-Americans; it also marked a turn from the boisterous debates of the 1850s and 1860s, often led by liberals, to a gradual consolidation of clerical authority over Franco institutions in the last third of the century. One hundred and fifty years later, it is a moment worth acknowledging and studying.

The full text of Notre-Dame-des-Canadiens et les Canadiens aux Etats-Unis is available on Archive.org.