French Americans

I

Introduction

French Americans, also called Franco Americans, residents of the United States who trace their ancestry to France or to other countries where the French language is widely spoken. French Americans constitute one of the nation’s largest and most diverse ethnic groups. The 2000 U.S. census counted about 10 million French Americans, trailing only British Americans, German Americans, Irish Americans, African Americans, and Italian Americans in size. Approximately 2.2 million French Americans are descended from French Canadians who migrated to the United States. Large populations of French Canadian descent reside in New England and the Great Lakes states. The remainder are scattered throughout the country. French is the third most commonly spoken language in the United States, after English and Spanish.

II

Huguenot Settlement

The large-scale movement of French speakers into what is now the United States began as an unforeseen consequence of religious wars in France during the late 16th and early 17th centuries. These wars ended with the defeat of Protestant forces in 1628. Thousands of Huguenots, or French Protestants, subsequently fled their native land for England. Although England provided the Huguenots a refuge, it could not provide work for most of the refugees. Consequently, large numbers of Huguenots participated in the British colonization of the North American seaboard. Historians do not know for sure how many Huguenots migrated to the British colonies. Estimates range from 2,000 individuals to 50,000 families. Every major port along the eastern seaboard had a prominent Huguenot community. Huguenots played an especially important role in the colonization of the Carolinas (see North Carolina and South Carolina).

III

French Immigration to Louisiana

The arrival of French Protestants in what became the United States coincided with the attempt by France to establish a huge, Catholic colony in North America. This colony, called Louisiana, extended from the Appalachians to the Rocky Mountains and from Illinois country to the Gulf of Mexico. For two decades following the establishment in 1699 of a French settlement at what is now Biloxi, Mississippi, the French focused most of their colonization activity along the Gulf Coast. Their focus moved to the Mississippi River Valley, however, after the founding of New Orleans in 1718.

The Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) and the French and Indian War (1754-1763) ended French power in North America. These overlapping conflicts between France and Great Britain drew in numerous allies on both sides and sparked military confrontations around the world. To lure Spain into war as an ally, France secretly promised to transfer Louisiana to Spain. In 1755 the British expelled the French-speaking population of Acadia, a former French colony located in the area of the present-day Canadian provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. The British annexed many other North American territories previously claimed by France, including Canada.

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Meanwhile the French government neglected Louisiana, which had only about 10,000 colonists when it was transferred to Spain in 1763. The French community of the Louisiana colony, which by this time was dominated by American-born French speakers known as Creoles, survived the transfer. Louisiana quickly became a magnet for French-speaking refugees. From 1764 to 1788, 2,500 to 3,000 Acadian exiles established a new homeland in Louisiana, where they became known as Cajuns. From 1791 to 1809, more than 10,000 refugees from revolutionary conflicts in Haiti made their way to New Orleans. Between 1815 and 1914, tens of thousands of French people, driven from their homeland by successive political and economic upheavals, entered the United States through New Orleans.

IV

Later French-speaking Immigrants

In the late 1800s, New York City replaced New Orleans as the nation’s leading port of entry for French immigrants. Although many of these immigrants made their way into the nation’s interior, many others remained in New York. In 1855, 18,000 French immigrants resided in New York City. Thousands more sought their fortune in California during the 1849 Gold Rush.

Not all French-speaking immigrants to the United States were natives of France. During the 19th century, large-scale immigration of French Canadians from Québec to the northeastern United States provided labor for New England’s rapidly expanding industries. Historians estimate that 20 percent of the population of Québec migrated to New England’s factory towns during the labor shortages of the American Civil War (1861-1865).

Smaller numbers of Québécois migrated to the Midwest throughout the first half of the 19th century. These French-speaking immigrants established farming settlements in Michigan, Illinois, Kansas, and Minnesota. During the second half of the 19th century, the focus of Québécois immigration to the Midwest shifted to that region’s rapidly developing urban centers, particularly Chicago and Detroit. Two later waves of French Canadian immigrants, composed of Québécois and Acadians from Canada’s Maritime Provinces, moved to northeastern industrial states in search of jobs. The first wave arrived between 1880 and 1900. The second came during World War I (1914-1918) and the American economic boom of the 1920s.

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