French Canadians

"Canadiens" redirects here. For the hockey team, see Montreal Canadiens.

This article is about the ethnic group. For linguistic uses, see Canadian French.

French Canadian
Canadien français, Canadienne française

Émile Nelligan • La Bolduc • Maurice Richard René Lévesque • Avril Lavigne • Garou
Regions with significant populations
Canada, especially Quebec and New Brunswick, smaller populations in Ontario, Nova Scotia, Southern Manitoba, New England, New York and Louisiana.
Languages
French, English
Religion
Primarily Roman Catholic
Related ethnic groups
French, Québécois, Acadians, Cajun, Métis, French-speaking Quebecer, Franco-Ontarian, Franco-Manitoban, French American, Brayon

French Canadian (also Canadien in Canadian English or in French, or Canadien français in French) refers to a nation or ethnic group of French descent that originated in Canada during the period of French colonization beginning in the 17th century. They constitute the main French-speaking population of Canada. The term may also refer to people living in Canada of any ethnic origin who are native speakers of French.

Most French Canadians currently reside in the province of Quebec and call themselves Québécois or Quebecers. During the mid-18th century, settlers born in French Canada colonized other parts of North America, including Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Illinois, the Windsor-Detroit region and the Canadian Prairies (primarily Southern Manitoba).

Between the 1840s and the 1930s, some 900,000 French Canadians emigrated to New England, settling mainly in cities such as Fall River and New Bedford. Those who stayed in the United States (including Acadians) eventually became a large portion of the Franco-American community. During the same period of time, numerous French Canadians also moved to Eastern and Northern Ontario. Their descendants constitute the bulk of today's Franco-Ontarian community.

They are the second largest ethnic group in Canada, after the English Canadians and before the Scottish Canadians (not included is people who identified "Canadian" as their ethnicity on the census).

Population

Place d'Armes in Montreal, historic heart of French Canada.

People who today claim some French-Canadian ancestry or heritage number some 7 million in Canada and 2.4 million people in the United States. (An additional 8.4 million Americans claim French ancestry; they are treated as a separate ethnic group by the U.S. Census Bureau.)

In Canada, 85% of French Canadians reside in Quebec where they constitute the majority of the population in all regions except the far North. Most cities and villages in this province were built and settled by the French or French Canadians during the French colonial rule.

There are various urban and small centres in Canada outside of Quebec that have long-standing populations of French Canadians, going back to the late 19th century. Eastern and Northern Ontario have large populations of francophones in communities such as Ottawa, Cornwall, Hawkesbury, Sudbury, Welland, Timmins and Windsor. Many also pioneered the Canadian Prairies in the late 18th century, founding the towns of Saint Boniface, Manitoba and in Alberta's Peace Country, including the region of Grande Prairie.

In the United States, many cities were founded as colonial outposts of New France by French or French-Canadian explorers. They include New Orleans, Louisiana; Mobile, Alabama; Coeur d'Alene, Idaho; Belleville, Illinois; Dubuque, Iowa; Detroit, Michigan; Biloxi, Mississippi; St. Louis, Missouri; Creve Coeur, Missouri and Provo, Utah.

The majority of the French-Canadian population in the United States is found in the New England area. Quebec and Acadian emigrants settled in industrial cities like Fitchburg, Waltham, Lowell, Lawrence, Chicopee, and New Bedford in Massachusetts; Woonsocket in Rhode Island; Manchester and Nashua in New Hampshire; Bristol in Connecticut; throughout the state of Vermont, particularly in Burlington, St. Albans, and Barre; and Biddeford and Lewiston in Maine. Smaller groups of French Canadians settled in the Midwest, notably in the states of Michigan and Minnesota.

Language

Quebec stop sign.

Canadian French is an umbrella term for the distinct varieties of French spoken by francophone Canadians: Québécois (Quebec French), Acadian French, Brayon French, and Newfoundland French. Unlike Acadian French and Newfoundland French, the French of Ontario, the Canadian West, and New England all originate from what is now Quebec French and do not constitute distinct varieties from it, though there are some regional differences. French Canadians may also speak either Canadian English or American English.

In Quebec, about six million French Canadians are native French speakers. One million are English-speaking, i.e. Anglophones or English-speaking Quebecers, and others are Allophones (literally "other-speakers", meaning, in practice, immigrants who speak neither French nor English at home). In the United States, assimilation to the English language was more significant and very few Americans of French-Canadian ancestry or heritage speak French today.

Six million of Canada's native French speakers, of all origins, are found in the province of Quebec, where they constitute the majority language group, and another one million are distributed throughout the rest of Canada. Roughly 31% of Canadian citizens are French-speaking and 25% are of French-Canadian descent. Not all French speakers are of French descent, and not all people of French-Canadian heritage are exclusively or primarily French-speaking.

Francophones living in Canadian provinces other than Quebec have enjoyed minority language rights under Canadian law since at least 1969, with the Official Languages Act, and under the Canadian Constitution since 1982, protecting them from provincial governments that have historically been indifferent or downright hostile towards their presence.

Religion

Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, Quebec

The pre-revolutionary kingdom of France forbade non-Catholic settlement in New France from 1629 onward and almost all French settlers of Canada were Roman Catholic. In the United States, some French Catholics have converted to Protestantism. Until the 1960s, religion was a central component of French-Canadian national identity. The Church parish was the focal point of civic life in French-Canadian society, and religious orders ran French-Canadian schools, hospitals and orphanages and were very controlling of every day life in general. During the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, however, the practice of Catholicism dropped drastically. Church attendance in Quebec currently remains low. Rates of religious observance among French Canadians outside Quebec tend to vary by region, and by age. In general, however, those in Quebec are the least observant, while those in the United States of America and other places away from Quebec tend to be the most observant. There are also French Canadians, those are people who have Canadian citizenship and whose mother tongue is French whose families arrived in Canada over the last 75 years and who are not Christian. There are many people from France, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, and other countries whose mother tongue is French and are either Muslim or Jewish.

History

The French were the first Europeans to permanently colonize what is now Quebec, parts of Ontario, Acadia, and select areas of Western Canada, all in Canada (See French colonization of the Americas.) Their colonies of New France (also commonly called Canada) stretched across what today are the Maritime provinces, southern Quebec and Ontario, as well as the entire Mississippi River Valley.

Voyageurs Passing a Waterfall

The first permanent European settlements in Canada were at Port Royal in 1605 and Quebec City in 1608 as fur trading posts. The territories of New France were Canada, Acadia, and Louisiana. The inhabitants of Canada called themselves the Canadiens, and came mostly from northwestern France. The early inhabitants of Acadia, or Acadiens, came mostly but not exclusively from the Southwestern region of France. Canadien explorers and fur traders would come to be known as coureurs des bois or voyageurs, while those who settled on farms in Canada would come to be known as habitants. Many French Canadians are the descendants of the King's Daughters of this era.

During the mid-18th century, French explorers and Canadiens born in French Canada colonized other parts of North America in what are today the states of Louisiana (called Louisianais), Mississippi, Missouri, Illinois, Vincennes, Indiana, the Windsor-Detroit region and the Canadian prairies (primarily Southern Manitoba).

File:Habitants-Cornelius Krieghoff.jpg

Habitants by Cornelius Krieghoff (1852)

After the 1760 British conquest of New France in the French and Indian War(known as the Seven Years War in Europe), the French-Canadian population remained important in the life of the colonies.

The British gained Acadia by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 and in 1755, the beginning of the French and Indian War, deported 75% of the Acadian population to other British colonies and France itself. The French Canadians escaped this fate in part because of the capitulation act that made them British subjects. It took the 1774 Quebec Act for them to regain the French civil law system, and in 1791 French Canadians in Lower Canada were introduced to the British parliamentary system when an elected Legislative Assembly was created.

The Legislative Assembly having no real power, the political situation degenerated into the Lower Canada Rebellion of 1837–1838, after which Lower Canada and Upper Canada were unified. Some of the motivations for the union was to limit French-Canadian political power and at the same time transfert a large part of the Upper Canada debt to the debt free Lower Canada. After many decades of British immigration, the Canadiens became a minority in the Province of Canada in the 1850s.

French-Canadian contributions were essential in securing responsible government for The Canadas and in undertaking Canadian Confederation. However, over the course of the late 19th and 20th centuries, French Canadians' discontent grew with their place in Canada because of many events (Louis Riel execution and elimination of Manitoba official bilinguism status, the second Boer war and Canada participation, regulation 17 in Ontario against french schools, first & second world war conscription crisis.

Between the 1840s and the 1930s, some 900 000 French Canadians emigrated to the New England region. About half of them returned home. The generations born in the United States would eventually come to see themselves as Franco-Americans. During the same period of time, numerous French Canadians also emigrated and settled in Eastern and Northern Ontario. The descendants of those Quebec immigrants constitute the bulk of today's Franco-Ontarian community.

Since 1968, French has been one of Canada's two official languages. It is the sole official language of Quebec and one of the official languages of New Brunswick, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. The province of Ontario has no official languages defined in law, although the provincial government provides French language services in many parts of the province under the French Language Services Act.

The dialects of French spoken in Canada are quite distinct from those of France. See French language in Canada.

Modern usage

In English usage, the terms for provincial subgroups, if used at all, are usually defined solely by province of residence, with all of the terms being strictly interchangeable with French Canadian. Although this remains the more common usage in English, it is considered outdated to many Canadians of French descent, especially in Quebec. Most francophone Canadians who use the provincial labels identify with their province of origin, even if it isn't the province in which they currently reside; for example, a Québécois who moved to Manitoba would not change their own self-identification to franco-Manitoban.

Increasingly, provincial labels are used to stress the linguistic and cultural as opposed to ethnic and religious nature of French-speaking institutions and organizations. The term "French Canadian" is still used in historical and cultural contexts, or when it is necessary to refer to Canadians of French-Canadian collectively, such as in the name and mandate of a national organizations which serve minority francophone communities across Canada. Francophone Canadians of non-French-Canadian origin such as immigrants from francophone countries are not usually designed by the term "French Canadian"; the more general term "francophones" is used for French-speaking Canadians across all ethnic origins.

Organizations

National

• Fédération culturelle canadienne-française (French Canadian Cultural Federation)
• Association canadienne-française pour l'avancement des sciences (French Canadian Association for the Advancement of Sciences)
• Fédération de la jeunesse canadienne-française (French Canadian Youth Federation)

French-Canadian flags

• 
  Québec
• 
  Acadie
• 
  Franco-Columbian
• 
  Franco-Albertan
• 
  Fransaskois
• 
  Franco-Manitoban
• 
  Franco-Ontarian
• 
  Franco-Terreneuviens
• 
  Franco-Yukonnais
• 
  Franco-Ténois
• 
  Franco-Nunavois

See also

• Quebecer
• Canuck
• Speak White
• French (ethnicity)
• French in the United States
• French American
• French Argentine
• Pur laine
• Quebec diaspora
• Cajun

References

• Map displaying the percentage of the US population claiming French Canadian ancestry by county, United States Census Bureau, Census 2000

• Allan, Greer (1997). The People of New France. (Themes in Canadian History Series). University of Toronto Press. pp. 137 pages. ISBN 0-8020-7816-8. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |coauthors= and |month= (help)

• Marquis, G. E. (1923). "The French Canadians in the Province of Quebec". Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 107 (Social and Economic Conditions in The Dominion of Canada): 7–12. doi:10.1177/000271622310700103. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

• Brault, Gerard J. (March 15, 1986). The French-Canadian Heritage in New England. University Press of New England. pp. 312 pages. ISBN 0874513596. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |coauthors= and |month= (help)

• Doty, C. Stewart (1985). The First Franco-Americans: New England Life Histories from the Federal Writers' Project, 1938-1939. University of Maine at Orono Press. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |coauthors= and |month= (help)

• Parker, James Hill (1983). Ethnic Identity: The Case of the French Americans. University Press of America. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |coauthors= and |month= (help)

• Louder, Dean R. (1993). French America: Mobility, Identity, and Minority Experience across the Continent. Louisiana State University Press. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |month= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

External links

• Template:Fr icon Online edition of the Dictionnaire généalogique des familles canadiennes, 1871 genealogy dictionary concerning New France by abbot Cyprien Tanguay
• Template:Fr icon Online edition of the Dictionnaire des auteurs de langue française en Amérique du Nord, 1989 dictionary of North America's French language authors by Réginald Hamel, John Hare et Paul Wyczynski