The Franco-Americans of New-England: Dreams and Realities

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

One of the most interesting but least-known migration stories in
Canadian history is that of the French-Canadian diaspora. In the latter
part of the 19th and early portion of the 20th centuries, high
reproduction rates and the inability of agricultural and extractive
industries in the valleys of the St. Lawrence and Ottawa Rivers to
absorb the surplus generated an out-migration that was impressive in its
demographic and geographic dimensions. Rural French Canadians migrated
to the cities and industrializing towns of Quebec; into the Eastern
Townships, where they replaced anglophone farmers; up into the clay
lands of the Abitibi region; onto the Ontario side of the Ottawa valley;
westward along the Mattawa–Sault Ste. Marie pathway; and then into the
lumbering area of Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the American
mountain states. There were those who migrated and immigrated to the New
England states, finding employment by the tens of thousands in the
region where the American Industrial Revolution began.

Yves Roby published his authoritative and enthralling examination of
this exodus to New England in 2000. It is now available in an English
edition translated by Mary Brennan-Ricard. Here we find an in-depth
analysis of the exodus, its causes, its consequences, and the rancorous
debate over the migrants’ motives and their capacity to maintain their
cultural integrity. Several chapters are devoted to a discussion of New
England’s “Little Canadas,” as well as institutions that either
supported or undermined French culture, including the acts and
objectives of the Irish episcopate. In the end, by the 1970s and 1980s,
the author concludes, almost the entire population of French Canadians
in the United States had become Americans of French-Canadian descent,
most of them unable to speak and uninterested in, speaking the French
language. This is the resource of first resort, in English, on this
topic, and is highly recommended.