A rchive Date
[ 31-05-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[The vanishing francophone
By MICHEL C. AUGER
Toronto Sun
February 4, 2000
MANCHESTER, N.H. - Every Quebecer still has "un oncle des Etats" - an uncle from the States, part of the close to one million French Canadians who emigrated at the beginning of the last century to work in the river-powered textile mills of New England.
In fact, it is only because his grandmother insisted her daughter go back to Canada to give birth that Jean Chretien was not born in Manchester. The prime minister readily admits that he was conceived in this New Hampshire mill town where his father was working at the time.
The textile mills have long closed, but their red brick buildings were built to last a millennium and they have been recycled as office space in a prime strip of real estate along the Merrimac River in Manchester, providing the backdrop familiar to anyone who watched any of the televised news specials about the presidential primaries held here this week.
For a while, a century ago, in cities like Manchester and Nashua in New Hampshire or Lowell, in Massachusetts, the majority of the population spoke French. French Canadians brought with them their Catholic churches, their community centres and even their caisses populaires (credit unions). Nowadays, French is seen but rarely heard on the streets of Manchester or Nashua.
There is Potvin Photo and Marcel's Restaurant and Lepine and Sons Tailors, but don't even try to ask for directions in French in one of those establishments unless the person you are speaking to is more than 60 years old. You will, perchance, sometimes meet someone who will understand French and will answer you with a few words, but more often than not the conversation will end in English.
In the local media, French is limited to one radio program for a couple of hours every Sunday morning. There is French television on cable - Radio-Canada, from Sherbrooke, Que. - but it is mainly watched for Montreal Canadiens hockey games. It used to be one of the last ties to Canada: no matter what, a Franco would not become a Boston Bruins fan and would stick with the Canadiens. But even that is fading. And given the way the Canadiens play, it's not all that surprising.
A REVIVAL OF SORTS
Still, the teaching of French - as a second language - is enjoying a revival of sorts these days. There is a brand new Franco-American cultural centre in Manchester, but there are literally generations of young Americans who have little or no knowledge of the language of their Quebec ancestors.
A lot of the ties with Quebec quietly faded away as the influence of the Catholic church also waned on both sides of the border in the 1960s.
Politically, Franco-Americans have slowly but surely left the ranks of the great coalition of minorities that was the Democratic party's greatest strength. In the primaries this week, French names were as often as not associated with the organizations of various Republican candidates.
There was a time when Franco-Americans could be counted on to vote as a group, as in the 1972 election - when the now-famous letter describing Franco-Americans as "Canucks" was falsely attributed to Democratic front-runner Edmund Muskie by Richard Nixon's operatives as part of the dirty tricks that led to the Watergate scandals. Those days are long gone.
That shows Franco-Americans now are so integrated into the fabric of U.S. society that they have lost their identity in the great American Melting Pot.
For a Quebecer, this is both somewhat sad and a warning. A clear signal that preservation of one's language and culture is nothing automatic and that francophones are indeed a tiny minority on the North American continent.
Assimilation is the norm everywhere except where French has been given official status in all aspects of life, something you will find only in Quebec and New Brunswick, these days.
It only happened a bit faster in New England than in the rest of Canada.
Michael Auger, political columnist for Le Journal de Montreal and Le Journal de Quebec, appears Fridays.
His e-mail address is: mcauger@journalmtl.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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