The Future of the Franco-American Past

Abstract

It may be hard to believe, but when I started teaching about French North Americans twenty years ago we knew scarcely anything about the Franco-Americans of the Quebec diaspora. The only general history was Robert Rumilly's Histoire des Franco-Americains (Montreal: Edite par l'auteur, 1958). It was such old-fashioned political history and so biased in favor of the policies of the Woonsocket, R.I.-based Union Saint-Jean-Baptiste d'Amerique that one could neither steal lectures from it nor assign it to students. For students, I assigned Mason Wade's article, Franco-Americans, in the New Catholic Encyclopedia, still a good place to start. I stole lectures from Madeleine Giguere's A Franco-American Overview: New England (Cambridge: National Materials Development Center, 1981). In addition, Professor Giguere gave me copies of the articles and parts of books that had not made it into her book. I also fell back on a handful of dissertations and scholarly articles. Today, it is a different world. This article will review what we have learned in the twenty years since that time about the history and literature of Franco-Americans. Then, it will set forth an agenda for future research on Quebec diaspora studies and discuss the scholarly resources for performing that research. This research agenda will deal with both ordinary and elite Franco-Americans. It will also examine the work of Franco-American writers in French and English. In short, if I were twenty years younger, here are some projects my students and I might take on. By the 1980s new general histories of the Quebec diaspora were made possible by numerous studies of Franco-American communities, such as Ralph Vicero's analysis of the U.S. censuses; Pierre Anctil, Richard Sorrell, and Gary Gerstle on Woonsocket; Tamara Haraven on Manchester; John Cumbler and Philip Silvia on Fall River; Frances Early, Mary Blewitt, and Brigitte Lane on Lowell; Daniel Walkowitz on Cohoes; Michael Guignard on Biddeford; Peter Habler on Holyoke; and Yves Frenette on Lewiston.(1) The general histories of the 1980s and 1990s, made possible by these specialized studies, began with Raymond Breton and Pierre Savard, eds., The Quebec and Acadian Diaspora in North America (Toronto: Multicultural Society of Ontario, 1982); Dean Louder and Eric Waddell, eds., Du continent perdu a l'archipel retrouve (St. Foy; PUL, 1983); Claude Savary, ed., Les Rapports culturels entre le Quebec et les Etats-Unis (Quebec: Institut quebecois de recherche sur la culture, 1984). I drew on these works for my essay in The First Franco-Americans (Orono: University of Maine Press, 1985). Then came Gerard J. Brault's The French Canadian Heritage in New England (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986), with its particularly sensitive account of the author's family and ancestors. His work was followed by Maurice Poteet, ed., Textes de l'exode: recueil de textes sur l'emigration des Quebecois aux Etats-Unis (XI e et Xe siecles) (Montreal: Guerin, 1987). Perhaps the best was Frenchman Francois Weil's Les Franco-Americains, 1860-1980 (Paris: Belin, 1989). Then came Yves Roby's Les Franco-Americains de la Nouvelle-Angleterre, 1776-1930 (Sillery Septentrion, 1990) with its brilliant account of the Sentinellist affair drawn from Vatican archives. Finally came Armand Chartier's Histoire des Franco-Americains de la Nouvelle-Angleterre, 1775-1990 (Sillery: Septentrion, 1991), recently translated into English and especially rich on Franco-American literature and on Franco-American advances during the ethnic revival of the 1960s and 1970s. All of these works framed the conference held in Quebec in 1990. The conference's papers were published as Dean Louder, ed., Le Quebec et les francophones de la Nouvelle-Angleterre (Quebec: Presses de l'Universite Laval, 1991). For any potential scholar of the Quebec diaspora Louder's book is the place to start. The contribution by Yves Frenette and Yves Roby provides any new scholar with the most thorough and up-to-date bibliography of recent work on Franco-Americans and a guide to the archival resources for the next step. …