French Canadian (also
Canadien in
Canadian English or in French, or
Canadien
français in French) refers to a
nation or
ethnic group of
French descent that originated in
Canada during the period of
French colonization
beginning in the 17th century.
They constitute the main French-speaking population of Canada
. The
term may also refer to people living in Canada of any ethnic origin
who are native speakers of
French.
During the
mid-18th century, settlers born in French
Canada colonized other parts of North
America, including Alabama
, Louisiana
, Mississippi
, Missouri
, Illinois
, the
Windsor-Detroit region and the
Canadian Prairies (primarily
Southern Manitoba
).
Between
the 1840s and the 1930s, some 900,000 French Canadians emigrated to
New
England
, settling mainly in cities such as Fall
River
and New Bedford
. Those who stayed in the United States
(including Acadians)
eventually became a large portion of the Franco-American community.
During the
same period of time, numerous French Canadians also moved to parts
of Southern Ontario (mostly
Eastern Ontario), and Northern Ontario
.
Their descendants constitute the bulk of today's
Franco-Ontarian community.
The
majority of French Canadians that continue to reside in the
province of Quebec
, however,
call themselves Québécois rather than French
Canadian.
They are the second largest ethnic group in Canada, after the
English Canadians and before the
Scottish Canadians (not included
is people who identified "Canadian" as their ethnicity on the
census).
Etymology
The French Canadians get their name from
Canada, the most developed and
densely populated region of
New France
during the period of
French colonization in
the seventeenth and eighteenth century.
The original use of
the term Canada referred to the land area along the
St. Lawrence
River
, divided in three districts (Québec,
Trois-Rivières, and Montréal), as well as to the Pays d'en
Haut (Upper Countries), a vast and thinly settled territorial
dependence north and west of Montreal which covered the whole of
the Great
Lakes
area.
At the end of the seventeenth century, the French word
Canadien became an
ethnonym
distinguishing the inhabitants of Canada from those of France.
From 1535
to the 1690s, however, it had referred to the Aboriginal people the
French had encountered in the St. Lawrence River valley at Stadacona
and Hochelaga
.
Identities
Canada
Top Four Reported "French" ethnic or cultural identities
in Canada
| Identity |
Population |
| French |
2,838,000 |
| Québécois |
1,026,000 |
| French Canadian |
847,000 |
| Canadien(ne) |
555,000 |
French Canadians living in Canada express their cultural identity
using a number of terms. The
Ethnic Diversity Survey of
the 2001 Canadian census found that French-speaking Canadians
identified their ethnicity most often as
French,
Canadien,
Québécois, or French Canadian.
The latter three were grouped together by Jantzen (2005) as “French
New World” ancestries because they originate in Canada.
Jantzen (2005) distinguishes the English
Canadian, meaning
"someone whose family has been in Canada for multiple generations",
and the French
Canadien, used to refer to descendants of
the original settlers of
New France in
the 17th and 18th centuries.
Those reporting “French new World” ancestries overwhelmingly had
ancestors that went back at least four generations in Canada.
Fourth generation Canadiens and Québécois showed considerable
attachment to their ethno-cultural group, with 70% and 61%,
respectively, reporting a strong sense of belonging.
The generational profile and strength of identity of French New
World ancestries contrast with those of British or Canadian
ancestries, which represent the largest ethnic identities in
Canada. Although deeply rooted Canadians express a deep attachment
to their ethnic identity, most English-speaking Canadians of
British or Canadian ancestry generally cannot trace their ancestry
as far back in Canada as French-speakers. As a result, their
identification with their ethnicity is weaker: for example, only
50% of third generation "Canadians" strongly identify as such,
bringing down the overall average. The survey report notes that 80%
of Canadians whose families had been in Canada for three or more
generations reported "Canadian and provincial or regional ethnic
identities". These identities include French New World ancestries
such as "Québécois" (37% of Quebec population), "Acadian" (6% of
Atlantic provinces).
Quebec
Since the 1960s, French Canadians in Quebec have generally used
Québécois
(masculine) or
Québécoise (feminine) to express their
cultural and national identity, rather than
Canadien
français and
Canadienne française. Francophones who
self-identify as Québécois and do not have French-Canadian ancestry
may not identify as "French Canadian" (
Canadien or
Canadien français). Those who do have French or
French-Canadian ancestry, but who support
Quebec sovereignty, often find
Canadien français to be archaic or even pejorative. This
is a reflection of the strong social, cultural, and political ties
that most Quebeckers of French-Canadian origin, who constitute a
majority of
francophone Quebecers,
maintain within Quebec. It has given
Québécois an ambiguous meaning
which has often played out in
political issues, as all
public institutions attached to the provincial government refer to
all Quebec citizens, regardless of their language or their cultural
heritage, as Québécois.
Elsewhere in Canada
The emphasis on the French language and Quebec autonomy means that
French-speakers across Canada may now self-identify as
québécoise,
acadienne, or
franco-canadienne, or as provincial linguistic minorities
such as
franco-manitobaine,
franco-ontarienne or
fransaskoise. Education, health and social services are
provided by provincial institutions, so that provincial identities
are often used to identify French-language institutions:
- Franco-Newfoundlanders, province of
Newfoundland
and Labrador
, also known as Terre-Neuvien(ne).
- Franco-Ontarians, province of Ontario, also referred to as Ontarien(ne).
- Franco-Manitobans, province of Manitoba, also referred to as Manitobain(e).
- Fransaskois,
province of Saskatchewan
, also referred to Saskois(e).
- Franco-Albertans, province of Alberta
, also referred to Albertain(e).
- Franco-Columbians, province of British
Columbia
mostly live in the Vancouver
metro area. Also referred to as
Franco-Colombien(ne)
- Franco-Yukonnais, territory of Yukon
, also
referred to as Yukonais(e).
- Franco-Ténois, territory of Northwest
Territories
, also referred to as Ténois(e).
- Franco-Nunavois, territory of Nunavut
, also referred to as Nunavois(e).
Acadians residing in the provinces of New Brunswick
, Prince Edward Island
and Nova
Scotia
represent a distinct francophone culture.
This group's culture and history evolved separately from the French
Canadian culture of Quebec, at a time when the Maritime Provinces
were
not part of what was referred to as Canada, and are
consequently considered a distinct culture from French
Canadians.
Brayons in Madawaska County
, New
Brunswick and Aroostook
County
, Maine
may be
identified with either the Acadians or the Québécois, or considered
a distinct group in their own right, by different
sources.
French Canadians outside Quebec are more likely to self-identify as
"French Canadian". Identification with provincial groupings varies
from province to province, with franco-Ontarians, for example,
using their provincial label far more frequently than
franco-Columbians do. Some identify
only with the
provincial groupings, explicitly rejecting "French Canadian" as an
identity label.
United States
During
the mid-18th century, French explorers and Canadiens born
in French Canada colonized other parts of North America in that are
today Louisiana (called Louisianais), Mississippi, Missouri, Illinois, Vincennes, Indiana
, and around Detroit
. French Canadians emigrated massively from
Quebec to the United
States between the 1840s and the 1930s in search of
economic opportunities in border communities and industrialized
portions of New
England.. French-Canadian communities remain along the
Quebec border in northern Maine, Vermont
and New
Hampshire
as well as
further south in Massachusetts
, Rhode
Island
, and southern New Hampshire. The wealth of Catholic churches named after
St. Louis throughout New England
is indicative of the French immigration to the area. They came to
identify as
Franco-American,
especially those who were born American.
Distinctions between French Canadian, natives of France, and other
New World French identities is more blurred in the U.S. than in
Quebec. In
L'avenir du français aux États-Unis,
Calvin Veltman finds that since the French
language has been so widely abandoned in the United States, the
term "French Canadian" is there understood in ethnic rather than
linguistic terms.
The largest population of French Canadians in the United States
today can be found in
Broward County,
Florida, and a sizeable population resides in Louisiana as well,
particularly in the
Acadiana region of the
state.
Population
Place d'Armes in Montreal, historic
heart of French Canada.
People who today claim some French-Canadian ancestry or heritage
number some 7 million in Canada and 2.4 million people in the
United States. (An additional 8.4 million Americans claim French
ancestry; they are treated as a separate ethnic group by the
U.S. Census Bureau.)
In
Canada, 85% of French Canadians reside in Quebec where they
constitute the majority of the population in all regions except the
far North. Most cities and villages in this province were
built and settled by the French or French Canadians during the
French colonial rule.
There are various urban and small centres in Canada outside of
Quebec that have long-standing populations of French Canadians,
going back to the late 19th century.
Eastern and Northern Ontario have large populations of francophones in
communities such as Ottawa
, Cornwall
, Hawkesbury
, Sudbury
, Welland
, Timmins
and Windsor
. Many also pioneered the Canadian Prairies in the late 18th
century, founding the towns of Saint Boniface, Manitoba
and in Alberta's Peace
Country, including the region of Grande Prairie
.
In the United States, many cities were founded as colonial outposts
of
New France by French or
French-Canadian explorers.
They include New Orleans, Louisiana
; Mobile,
Alabama
; Coeur d'Alene, Idaho
; Belleville, Illinois
; Dubuque,
Iowa
; Detroit,
Michigan; Biloxi, Mississippi
; St. Louis, Missouri
; Creve Coeur, Missouri
and Provo,
Utah
.
The
majority of the French-Canadian population in the United States is
found in the New England area, although in the Middle Colonies
there is a large French-Canadian presence in Plattsburgh,
New York
, across Lake Champlain
from Burlington, Vermont
. Quebec and Acadian emigrants settled in
industrial cities like Fitchburg
, Worcester
, Waltham
, Lowell
, Lawrence
, Chicopee
, and New Bedford in Massachusetts; Woonsocket
in Rhode Island; Manchester
and Nashua
in New
Hampshire; Bristol
in Connecticut
; throughout the state of Vermont, particularly in Burlington, St. Albans
, and Barre; and
Biddeford
and Lewiston
in Maine.
Smaller
groups of French Canadians settled in the Midwest, notably in the
states of Michigan
and Minnesota
.
Language
Canadian French is an umbrella term
for the distinct
varieties of
French spoken by francophone Canadians:
Québécois (
Quebec French),
Acadian French,
Brayon French, and
Newfoundland French. Unlike Acadian
French and Newfoundland French, the French of Ontario, the Canadian
West, and New England all originate from what is now Quebec French
and do not constitute distinct varieties from it, though there are
some regional differences. French Canadians may also speak either
Canadian English or
American English.
In Quebec, about six million French Canadians are native French
speakers. One million are English-speaking, i.e. Anglophones or
English-speaking
Quebecers, and others are
Allophones (literally "other-speakers",
meaning, in practice, immigrants who speak neither French nor
English at home). In the United States, assimilation to the
English language was more
significant and very few Americans of French-Canadian ancestry or
heritage speak French today.
Six million of Canada's native French speakers, of all origins, are
found in the province of Quebec, where they constitute the majority
language group, and another one million are distributed throughout
the rest of Canada. Roughly 31% of Canadian citizens are
French-speaking and 25% are of French-Canadian descent. Not all
French speakers are of French descent, and not all people of
French-Canadian heritage are exclusively or primarily
French-speaking.
Francophones living in Canadian provinces other than Quebec have
enjoyed
minority language rights
under Canadian law since at least 1969, with the
Official Languages Act, and under the
Canadian Constitution since
1982, protecting them from provincial governments that have
historically been indifferent or downright hostile towards their
presence.
Religion
The
pre-revolutionary kingdom of France
forbade
non-Catholic settlement in New France
from 1629 onward and almost all French settlers of Canada were Roman Catholic. In the United States,
some French Catholics have converted to
Protestantism. Until the 1960s, religion was a
central component of French-Canadian national identity. The Church
parish was the focal point of civic life in French-Canadian
society, and religious orders ran French-Canadian schools,
hospitals and orphanages and were very controlling of every day
life in general. During the
Quiet
Revolution of the 1960s, however, the practice of Catholicism
dropped drastically.
Church attendance in Quebec currently
remains low. Rates of religious observance among French
Canadians outside Quebec tend to vary by region, and by age.
In
general, however, those in Quebec are the least observant, while
those in the United States of America
and other places away from Quebec tend to be
the most observant. There are also French Canadians, those
are people who have Canadian citizenship and whose mother tongue is
French whose families arrived in
Canada over the last 75 years and who are not
Christian.
There are many people from France, Lebanon
, Morocco
, Tunisia
, and other countries whose mother tongue is French
and are either Muslim or Jewish.
History
The
French were the first Europeans to permanently colonize
what is now Quebec, parts of
Ontario, Acadia, and select areas of Western Canada, all in Canada
(See French
colonization of the Americas.) Their colonies of New France (also commonly called Canada)
stretched across what today are the Maritime
provinces, southern Quebec and Ontario, as well as the entire Mississippi River Valley.
Voyageurs Passing a Waterfall
The first
permanent European settlements in Canada were at Port
Royal
in 1605 and Quebec City
in 1608 as fur trading posts. The
territories of New France were
Canada,
Acadia,
and
Louisiana. The
inhabitants of Canada called themselves the
Canadiens, and
came mostly from northwestern France. The early inhabitants of
Acadia, or
Acadiens, came mostly but not exclusively from
the Southwestern region of France.
Canadien explorers and
fur traders would come to be known as
coureurs des bois or
voyageurs, while those who settled on farms
in Canada would come to be known as
habitants. Many French Canadians are the
descendants of the
King's Daughters
of this era.
During
the mid-18th century, French explorers and Canadiens born
in French Canada colonized other parts of North America in what are
today the states of Louisiana (called Louisianais), Mississippi, Missouri, Illinois, Vincennes, Indiana, the Windsor-Detroit
region and the Canadian prairies
(primarily Southern Manitoba).
After the 1760 British conquest of New France in the
French and Indian War (known as the
Seven Years' War in Canada), the
French-Canadian population remained important in the life of the
colonies.
The British gained Acadia by the
Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 and in 1755, the
beginning of the French and Indian War, deported 75% of the Acadian
population to other British colonies and France itself. The French
Canadians escaped this fate in part because of the capitulation act
that made them British subjects. It took the 1774
Quebec Act for them to regain the French civil
law system, and in 1791 French Canadians in
Lower Canada were introduced to the British
parliamentary system when an elected
Legislative Assembly was
created.
The Legislative Assembly having no real power, the political
situation degenerated into the
Lower Canada Rebellions of 1837–1838,
after which Lower Canada and
Upper
Canada were unified. Some of the motivations for the union was
to limit French-Canadian political power and at the same time
transferring a large part of the Upper Canadian debt to the
debt-free Lower Canada. After many decades of British immigration,
the
Canadiens became a minority in the
Province of Canada in the 1850s.
French-Canadian contributions were essential in securing
responsible government for
The Canadas and in undertaking
Canadian Confederation.
However, over the
course of the late 19th and 20th centuries, French Canadians'
discontent grew with their place in Canada because of a series of
events, including the execution of Louis
Riel, the elimination of official bilingualism in Manitoba, Canada's participation in the Second Boer War, Regulation 17 which banned French-language
schools in Ontario, the Conscription Crisis of 1917 and
the Conscription Crisis of
1944.
Between
the 1840s and the 1930s, some 900,000 French Canadians emigrated to
the New
England region. About half of them returned home.
The generations born in the United States would eventually come to
see themselves as
Franco-Americans.
During
the same period of time, numerous French Canadians also emigrated
and settled in Eastern and Northern Ontario. The descendants of those Quebec immigrants
constitute the bulk of today's
Franco-Ontarian community.
Since 1968, French has been one of Canada's two official languages.
It is the
sole official language of Quebec and one of the official languages
of New
Brunswick, the
Northwest
Territories and Nunavut. The province of Ontario has no official languages defined in law, although
the provincial government provides French language services in many
parts of the province under the French Language Services
Act.
The
dialects of French spoken in Canada are
quite distinct from those of France. See
French language in Canada.
Modern usage
In English usage, the terms for provincial subgroups, if used at
all, are usually defined solely by province of residence, with all
of the terms being strictly interchangeable with French Canadian.
Although this remains the more common usage in English, it is
considered outdated to many Canadians of French descent, especially
in Quebec. Most francophone Canadians who use the provincial labels
identify with their province of
origin, even if it is not
the province in which they currently reside; for example, a
Québécois who moved to Manitoba would
not change his own
self-identification to Franco-Manitoban.
Increasingly, provincial labels are used to stress the linguistic
and cultural as opposed to ethnic and religious nature of
French-speaking institutions and organizations. The term "French
Canadian" is still used in historical and cultural contexts, or
when it is necessary to refer to Canadians of French-Canadian
collectively, such as in the name and mandate of a national
organizations which serve minority francophone communities across
Canada. Francophone Canadians of non-French-Canadian origin such as
immigrants from francophone countries are not usually designated by
the term "French Canadian" ; the more general term "francophones"
is used for French-speaking Canadians across all ethnic
origins.
Organizations
National
French-Canadian flags
Image:Flag of Quebec.svg|QuebecImage:Flag of Acadia.svg|AcadieImage:Flag of the
Franco-Colombiens.svg|Franco-ColumbiansImage:Flag of the Franco
Albertains.svg|Franco-AlbertansImage:Bandera dels
Fransaskois.svg|FransaskoisImage:Flag of
the Franco-Manitobains.svg|Franco-ManitobansImage:Franco-Ontarian
flag.svg|Franco-OntarianImage:Franco-Terreneuviens.svg|Franco-NewfoundlandersImage:Flag
of the Franco-Yukonnais.svg|Franco-YukonnaisImage:Flag of the
FrancoTenois.svg|Franco-TénoisImage:Flag of the
Franco-Nunavois.png|Franco-Nunavois
See also
Notes
- Gervais Carpin, Histoire d'un mot.
- Jantzen (2005) Footnote 9: "These will be called “French
New World” ancestries since the majority of respondents in these
ethnic categories are Francophones."
- Jantzen (2005) Footnote 5: "Note that Canadian and Canadien
have been separated since the two terms mean different things. In
English, it usually means someone whose family has been in Canada
for multiple generations. In French it is referring to "Les
Habitants", settlers of New France during the 17th and 18th
centuries who earned their living primarily from agricultural
labour."
- Jantzen (2005): "The reporting of French New World
ancestries (Canadien, Québécois, and French-Canadian) is
concentrated in the 4th+ generations; 79% of French- Canadian, 88%
of Canadien and 90% of Québécois are in the 4th+generations
category."
- Jantzen (2005): "According to Table 3, the 4th+ generations
are highest because of a strong sense of belonging to their ethnic
or cultural group among those respondents reporting the New World
ancestries of Canadien and Québécois."
- Jantzen (2005): For respondents of French and New World
ancestries the pattern is different. Where generational data is
available, it is possible to see that not all respondents reporting
these ancestries report a high sense of belonging to their ethnic
or cultural group. The high proportions are focused among those
respondents that are in the 4th+ generations, and unlike with the
British Isles example, the difference between the 2nd and 3rd
generations to the 4th+ generation is more pronounced. Since these
ancestries are concentrated in the 4th+ generations, their high
proportions of sense of belonging to ethnic or cultural group push
up the 4th+ generational results."
- Jantzen (2005): "As shown on Graph 3, over 30% of
respondents reporting Canadian, British Isles or French ancestries
are distributed across all four generational categories."
- Jantzen (2005): Table 3: Percentage of Selected Ancestries
Reporting that Respondents have a Strong* Sense of Belonging to the
Ethnic and Cultural Groups, by Generational Status, 2002
EDS".
- See p. 14 of the report.
- G. E. Marquis, Louis Allen, The French Canadians in
the Province of Quebec
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