French Canadians

I

Introduction

French Canadians, residents of Canada who speak the French language, especially the descendants of settlers from France who immigrated to the colonies of New France and Acadia between 1604 and 1760. In 1991 French-speaking Canadians numbered 6.5 million, constituting 24.1 percent of the nation’s 27 million citizens.

A large majority of French Canadians live in the province of Québec. The more than 5.6 million Québécois, or French-speaking residents of Québec, make up 82 percent of that province’s 6.8 million citizens. More than 80 percent of all Québec residents live in urban areas, the vast majority residing in the metropolitan region of Montréal. Barely 3 percent actively engage in agriculture. Québécois control the province’s political, economic, and social institutions. The legal system of Québec is based on French civil law, while the rest of Canada uses a system based on English common law. Canadian law requires that three of the eight members of the Canadian Supreme Court be trained in the French legal tradition to represent Québécois interests.

Another 1 million French Canadians are scattered throughout Canada’s nine other provinces and two territories. The 485,000 French-speaking residents of Ontario, or Franco-Ontarians, form the largest Francophone community outside of Québec. Acadians, numbering 242,000, constitute one-third of the population of New Brunswick. French-speaking communities in Ontario and the western provinces of Canada have far less political and economic power than the Québécois or the Acadians. Yet they too have managed to retain their language and modernize their cultures despite tremendous pressure to adopt the language and manners of the English-speaking majorities in those provinces.

II

History

Although only about 10,000 Frenchmen immigrated to France’s Canadian colonies, for many decades French Canadians had one of the highest birthrates in the world. By 1901 French Canadians accounted for 30 percent of Canada’s population. French Canadian communities traditionally perceived themselves as highly distinct societies within Canada. Their Catholic religion, their French culture and language, and their sense of being a predominantly rural and agricultural minority set them apart from other Canadians.

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The French Canadian Roman Catholic Church, headquartered in Québec City, served as the dominant institution in the lives of all French Canadians from the 1840s to the 1960s. The Catholic Church recruited large numbers of men and women to administer and staff its health, social welfare, and educational institutions. The Québec provincial government was controlled by church-educated, French Canadian professionals and a small but powerful group of Anglo-Canadian businessmen based in Montréal.

Following the end of World War II in 1945, leading Québécois intellectuals and political activists began to redefine their society. The French Canadian majority in Québec increasingly thought of itself as secular, predominantly urban, and middle-class. During the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, politicians and bureaucrats helped redesign the political, social, and educational institutions of Québec to reflect this new self-image.

Spurred on by their new identity, many Québécois abandoned the Catholic Church as their guiding institution in the 1960s. In its place, the emerging French-speaking middle class of state bureaucrats and state-supported businessmen created a dynamic civil society dedicated to government support for the economy and culture of Québec. Other Francophone communities across Canada also lessened their reliance on the Catholic Church. These communities turned to the federal and provincial governments for financial support to build modern educational and social institutions.

Beginning in the 1960s many Québécois became convinced that they constituted a separate people whose nation-state of Quebec was no longer part of Canada. The Parti Québécois, a political party endorsing independence for the province, became the champion of Québécois nationalism in the 1970s. Led by René Lévesque, the Parti Québécois was elected to govern Québec in 1976.

French Canadian communities throughout Canada began to stress the central importance of the French language in the preservation and expansion of their communities. In 1977 the Parti Québécois government instituted the Charter of the French Language, known as Bill 101, declaring French as the province’s only official language. Bill 101 required all children of immigrant families to attend French-language schools. It also created the Office de la langue française (Office of the French Language) to oversee the expansion of French as the language of the workplace in the private sector. This highly intrusive and controversial language legislation effectively achieved its main objectives. However, the laws alienated many English-speakers and immigrant communities. As the impact of the language laws became apparent and the economy faltered, many English-speakers chose to leave the province. In 1980 the Parti Québécois held a public referendum on independence for the province. Although Québec voters chose to remain with the Canadian federation, feelings continued to run high on both sides of the debate.

Responding to the plight of linguistic minorities—English-speakers in Québec and French-speakers elsewhere in Canada—the federal government implemented a bilingual policy for all of its departments and government-controlled corporations. The Constitution Act of 1982, which included a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, gave both the French and English languages official status. It also established the right of primary and secondary school students from both official linguistic minorities to be educated in their own language. All English-speaking provinces now offer a variety of French-language educational systems controlled by French-speaking parents.

Proposed constitutional amendments in the Meech Lake Accord of 1987 and the Charlottetown Accord of 1992—that would have recognized Québec as a distinct society—were defeated by Canadian voters. The failure of these amendments led to a revival of the separatist movement among French Canadians. In 1995 another referendum on Québec sovereignty failed by an extremely close margin, 50.6 percent opposed and 49.4 percent voted in favor.

III

Culture

French Canadian writers and performing artists have used their language to create a uniquely modern and diverse artistic culture. A profound transformation occurred in 1945 with the publication of Bonheur d’occasion (The Tin Flute, 1947), a novel by Gabrielle Roy. Portraying the harsh reality of an urban, working-class family during wartime, this novel broke with the tradition of French Canadian romantic novels that focused on a vanishing Catholic and rural way of life. Many French Canadian writers turned to themes and critical approaches reflecting the complex social, cultural, and class structure of modern French-speaking communities in Québec and elsewhere. Tit-Coq (Little Rooster), a 1948 play by Gratien Gélinas, deals with the clash between the old and the emerging societies. The novels and plays of Michel Tremblay, set in Montréal’s working-class neighborhoods and dealing with such themes as the politics of language and homosexuality, explored the transformation of Québec society in the 1960s and 1970s. Denise Boucher’s 1978 play Les Fées Ont Soif (The Fairies are Thirsty) provocatively examined the relationship between women and the Catholic Church in contemporary Québec.

French-speaking literature also blossomed in other French Canadian communities. Acadian playwright and novelist Antonine Maillet’s popular novel Pélagie-la-Charette (1979; Pélagie, 1982) and plays, La Sagouine (1971, translated 1979) and Evangeline deusse (1975; Evangeline the Second, 1987) explore Acadian folklore and history. Franco-Ontarian writers Gabrielle Poulin and Paul Savoie and Francophone writers in western Canada have also contributed to fashioning a Francophone culture that spans the entire country.

French Canadians have also made distinctive contributions to Canadian art and architecture. A group of Montréal-based Francophone painters, known as the Automatistes, led the cultural transformation in the years immediately after World War II. Painters such as Paul-Émile Borduas, Alfred Pellan, Jean Paul Riopelle, and Fernand Leduc brought various avant-garde styles to their canvases. In 1948 Borduas authored a manifesto, Refus Global (Global Refusal), attacking the Catholic Church and other conservative elements in Québec society. When the other Automatistes signed the manifesto, they provoked a backlash from the traditional political and religious elites. This backlash forced many Automatistes to earn their living abroad, mainly in Paris.

The hard-edged, abstract style of painters such as Guido Molinari, Rita Letendre, and Claude Tousignant became the most influential art movement in Québec in the 1960s. Ever since, many Francophone visual artists, including sculptors and multimedia specialists, have helped push Canadian art in innovative directions. Montréal remains one of Canada’s leading artistic and cultural centers, attracting world-class art exhibitions.

Until the 1950s, French Canadian music was dominated by rural folk traditions, epitomized by the songs of Félix Leclerc. A new generation of urban Québécois and Acadian singers, such as Gilles Vigneault, Pauline Julien, Edith Butler, Angèle Arsenault, and Claude Léveillée, emerged in the early 1960s to give voice to the nationalist and cultural aspirations of their generation. This movement was soon followed by the more commercial rock music of Robert Charlebois, Ginette Reno, Beau Dommage and Daniel Lavoie, and the love ballads of Céline Dion and Roch Voisine.

With financial support from various government agencies, Québécois filmmakers made documentaries and commercial feature-length motion pictures. Among the most important French Canadian films are Gilles Carles’s La vraie nature de Bernadette (The True Nature of Bernadette, 1972), Claude Jutra’s Kamouraska (1973) and Mon Oncle Antoine (My Uncle Antoine, 1971), and Denys Arcand’s Réjeanne Podavani (1973), Gina (1974), Le déclin de l'empire américain (1986, also released as The Decline of the American Empire), and Jésus de Montréal (Jesus of Montréal, 1989). During the 1970s and early 1980s, many French Canadian films championed Québécois nationalism and helped feed the growing separatist movement in Québec. Later filmmakers, abandoning this crusade, focused on the more personal themes of guilt, retribution, and relationships.

Other French Canadian producers and directors focused their talents on creating television programs. They created a wide variety of children’s shows, situation comedies, popular drama series, documentaries, public affairs shows, and sports programs. Since the 1950s television has helped draw together Québécois from all regions and social classes to forge a new sense of linguistic and ethnic solidarity.

IV

Current Trends

In contrast to the conservative, rural, and Catholic values of the past, the contemporary lifestyles and values of French Canadians are quite similar to those of the majority of English-speaking Canadians. Today the transformation of Québécois society is most clearly seen in the changing role of women. The overwhelming urge to modernize produced a Québécois women’s movement that has been the most militant in Canada. The birthrate in Québec declined sharply from an annual rate of 30 births per 1,000 people in 1951 to 13 per 1,000 in 1991. By the end of this period, over 90 percent of Québécois women of childbearing age practiced some form of birth control. By 1990 abortions became slightly more common in Québec than in the country as a whole.

During the early and mid-1990s, almost 44 percent of all Québec infants were born to nonmarried couples or single mothers. The divorce rate grew from less than 10 percent in the late-1960s to over 40 percent in 1995. Québécois women have achieved post-secondary education rates equal to, and in some fields exceeding, those of male Québécois. From 1961 to 1990 the portion of Québécois women working outside the home increased from 27 percent to 44 percent. Through their advocacy organizations and labor unions, women have led struggles for equal pay and child support and against sexual harassment and violence.

Like all Western societies, Québec is now experiencing the rapid aging of its population. Québec, which receives less than 20 percent of annual immigration into Canada, consistently fails to attract younger foreign immigrants. Many young Québécois migrate to other regions of Canada and to the United States in search of employment.

Although Québec voters have twice rejected independence, the issue refuses to die. A substantial proportion of Québécois continue to demand either special constitutional status for Québec as a distinct society within the federation, or the secession of the province from Canada. Other French Canadian communities express concern about the gradual erosion of French-speaking culture in provinces dominated by English-speakers.

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