Survivance to Submission:

Franco-Americans in New England,

1608-2001

 

 

By Sarah L. Belanger, Colby College, 2001

 

 

I have no ethnicity; I am American.  That’s it.  Odorless, colorless, tasteless.  Cannot be seen or heard.  Just American, like everyone else. 

 

My Grandparents were French Canadian.  Madeline was twenty-five when she married Leo who was five years her junior.  Scandalous.  His family resented her from the beginning because of her money, because she didn’t want to give up her job and her friends and her life after she got married, because she loved were she came from and didn’t want to give up her French.  She gave it up, all of it.

 

They would take me out to lunch at the Dairy Bar, a place full of old people drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and like clockwork every time Mémère and I would get the same thing: a small platter of fried scallops.  It seemed that Pépère knew everyone in the restaurant and they’d come over and smile at me and say, “Bonjour, ça va?” all polyester pantsuits and silvery permed hairdos.  The vielles mémères and vieux bonhommes would talk to Pépère and Mémère forever, speaking words I never understood.  I’d smile and do the word search on the paper placemat, counting the seconds until they left the table. 

 

I can’t decide who failed who.  Madeline and Leo sent my mother and her three sisters to French Catholic schools.  Despite the fact that my mother still speaks her “native” tongue, all I learned growing up were a few phrases that I cannot recognize as written words.

 

Noella and Richard thought that in order for their children to succeed, they needed to be American.  My father went to Irish Catholic school—the kid who walked into first grade not knowing a word of English.  The voice of my father’s childhood has been lost. 

 

For so long just being American was good enough.  I wasn’t French.  My family was French.  Mémères and Pépères were French, but I was not French.  I can’t speak the language and I don’t have that funny accent and I wouldn’t keep my furniture wrapped in plastic and I don’t want to drive a Cadillac.  Ever. 

 

Sometimes I feel like I am letting them down.  Letting down my Mémère because I refused to speak to her in French, because I was embarrassed, because I couldn’t speak it like her.  Do you think she would have cared if my accent was lousy?  Would it have really been so hard for me to do her the justice of speaking to her in her language for once, in the language that should have been mine.  In the language that I lost because this thing called society told everyone to jump into the melting pot and forget where they came from.  Everyone, lose your faith, your culture, your language, yourself and get your piece of the American Dream—some kind of myth that will never be tangible, never attainable, never truly desirable to anyone whose forefathers didn’t come over on the Mayflower. 

 

My people have been here as long as yours.  Who are you to tell me what language to speak?  Who are you to put shame in my life?  Shame in my family, shame in the eyes of my grandmother who was embarrassed to write letters to me because she never learned proper English and was afraid that I’d think she was stupid.  Who do you think you are? Better yet . . . who am I?

 

     

If history does, indeed, move in cycles, then the story of the Franco-Americans is no exception.  Franco culture in the United States has experienced a birth, death, and rebirth over the past one-hundred and fifty years since the earliest migrations.  While the Francos have an immigrant narrative similar to most other peoples who have made the exodus to the United States in the quest for the American Dream, their story diverges somewhat from the well-worn path. 

      The first Franco-Americans did not migrate to the United States to begin their lives anew on this soil.  They were not looking for the American Dream, they simply needed the income to make their dreams back home a reality.  French Canadians came to New England not to stay here and build lives here but to work and save money to better their lives back in Canada.  The first migrants to New England were individuals and families looking to work in the emerging mill towns only as long as it took to save enough money to go home and escape the poverty that blanketed much of Canada in the latter half of the nineteenth century.  They had the intention of going home, and most did, back to their farms and their villages, hoping to start fresh and provide their families with all the necessary, respectable comforts. 

      The first migrants from La Bauce embarked on a journey that continues to affect their thousands, if not millions, of descendants to this day.  The community has had its highs and lows and how you read its current status depends on where you sit.  However, it is impossible to have a discussion about Franco-American culture without discussing the importance of the intertwining aspects of the French language, the Roman Catholic church, the proximity of Quebec (the center of Francophone Canada) to settlements in the United States, and the idea of survivance—the necessity of preserving Franco culture through the Church.  Each of these factors has had profound effects on the timeline of Franco culture in New England and are responsible for the status of the Franco-Americans in New England today.

French speaking peoples have lived on this continent since 1608, a year after Jamestown was founded and twelve years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.  The greatest masses of French immigrants were concentrated throughout Québec, and in the southern regions of New Brunswick, and especially along the fertile banks of the St. John River valley.  After the border dispute of 1842, the modern-day boundary between Maine and Canada was created, using the St. John River as a guide, and divided the French population into two separate nations.[1]   Because the majority of French-speaking Canadians were farmers, migration to the U.S. increased proportionately with land scarcity and other agricultural hardships. 

The migration began in the 1850s led by individuals forced to deal with land scarcities in Canada.  According to Yves Roby, “Generally speaking, poverty, discouragement, and unemployment are the factors which pushed so many French Canadians, at that time, to leave behind family and friends to crowd themselves into the working –class neighborhoods of New England cities.”[2] Traditionally, French families in Canada were large so that children could contribute to the family farm.  When children reached adulthood and had their own families, the land of their father was subdivided so that each child had his or her own plot.  This practice carried on generation after generation, leaving each child with only a small portion of what his ancestors had.  As a result, it came to the point where families were no longer left with enough land to grow the food needed to support their large families.  This lack of land combined with Canada’s short growing season and the antiquated farming methods that French farmers were using led to poverty among many farmers.[3]   

The majority of migration of Francos into New England occurred in the latter half of the nineteenth century.  According to David B. Walker, “The trickle [of migration] that began before the [Civil] War swelled to a torrent in the 1865-1900 period with three-quarters of the total Franco-American immigration taking place during these three decades.”[4]  Walker attributes migration to New England mostly to the tradition of French Catholic families having many children.  It was not uncommon for families two generations ago to have a dozen children, putting a greater strain on the family’s resources. 

Overpopulation was a serious problem in Quebec during the latter part of the 19^th century and by 1870 new agricultural lands in the province were exhausted.  These along with a governmental policy of neglect and the absence of a good transportation system to the Canadian Northwest made it inevitable that the more ambitious and desperate among the younger generations would seek out the expanding opportunities in the emerging industrial society to the south.[5]

 

In the late nineteenth-century, as the industrial revolution was in full swing in New England and family farms failed in southern Quebec and New Brunswick, thousands of French Canadians left their homes to move to a place that despite being at times only a few hundred miles away seemed entirely foreign.  Families used to their rural lives were transplanted to growing, bustling cities where they could not even speak the language.  However, individuals took these risks in order to secure their families a better life back in Canada.

The migration of Franco-Americans to the United States is similar to that of other ethnic groups in that the motivating factor was economic hardship.  Unlike some refuges to the United States, French-speaking Canadians rarely, if ever, left Canada out of political oppression.  Communities that spoke French were scattered throughout Quebec, New Brunswick and the Maritime Provinces, existing almost as a separate entity from British Canada in terms of language and culture.  Canadians came to New England to amass a small fortune that would allow them to rebuild their family farms.  They were unlike other immigrants in that their homes were only a few hundred miles away and it was completely feasible for them to work in the mills for several months and return to their homelands and families, while immigrants of other ethnicities worked on building their lives on American soil.

Once these French Canadian migrants reached the industrial centers like Lowell, Massachusetts or Manchester, New Hampshire that they would call home for the next few months or even years, every member of the family who was old enough would find work in the mills.  In most of these communities, textile mills were the source of income for French Canadian migrants, while in other areas lumber milling or quarrying were the chief industries. 

During the depression, writers with the Federal Writers’ Project (a Works Progress Administration program) collected life-histories of French speakers in New England, documenting the early years of the migration.  Several of these histories are included in C. Stewart Doty’s book, The First Franco-Americans: New England Life Histories From the Federal Writers’ Project, 1938-1939.  Reporters chose French enclaves in four different areas: Manchester, New Hampshire; Old Town, Maine; Barre, Vermont; and Woonsocket, Rhode Island.  It is interesting to note on the table of contents page how each location is subdivided by person.  At times interviewees are identified by their names, however in other instances only an occupation is listed, while a few individuals are listed by name and occupation.  This points to a couple of things, one showing how inconsistent the interview styles were as a result of being conducted by a number of different people, some of whom were not even writers by trade.  The other thing to think about is the possibility that interviewees were not always viewed as independent individuals but only as bodies supplying labor for struggling industries, one Franco being the same as the next.

Regardless of this possible slight towards the Franco-Americans, the book is a valuable resource for learning about life in the mills of New England and what it was like for those who chose to make their livings there.  Philippe Lemay was one of a number of Francos in Manchester, NH, who were interviewed by the Federal Writers’ Project.  Lemay was born in St. Ephrem d’Upton, Québec, in 1856.  At the age of eight, his parents took their 14 children on a four day train trip to Lowell, Massachusetts.  The Lemay family spent the next eight years in Lowell, a community that had few French Canadian families, but would become a thriving enclave shortly after the Civil War.  Philippe went to work in the Lawrence textile mill as a bagboy.  In 1872 his family relocated to Manchester, NH, where he would spend the rest of his days.  Lemay’s parents, however, returned to Canada for good in 1875.

Philippe Lemay worked in the Amoskeag mills for over sixty years.  He spent almost 45 years living in an Amoskeag corporation house.  His days at the mill enabled Lemay to accomplish what he desired—he was able to support himself and his family and to secure his children a promising future.  He also was able to save money for his retirement and made numerous trips throughout the years to his birthplace in Canada.[6]

Lemay did not find his experience working in the mill completely positive, however.  Aside from the long hours and unhealthy working conditions, (many workers developed chronic chest irritations from the cotton dust constantly floating in the air), there was constant tension between the various immigrant groups working in the mills.  He comments extensively on relations between the Irish and the Francos in Manchester:

The days of petty persecution, beatings, rock-throwing, swill-slinging and tragedy from Irish people are not nice to remember.  They were afraid that we had come here to take their jobs away from them in the mills and they tried hard to send us back to Canada by making life impossible for us in America.  They wanted us to speak the English among ourselves when we only knew French, and it made them mad because we didn’t.  They had forgotten—or didn’t know—that French Canadians had taken into their homes many orphaned children of Irish immigrants to Canada and brought them up as their own.  Yes, Irish Americans should have been our best friends over here, not our worst enemies.[7]

 

According to Lemay, the Irish made “life impossible” for the Francos in a number of ways, sometimes using words, and sometimes using violence.  Lemay also recounts an incident where three young Irish men stepped out of a bar late at night and heard French being spoken on the street.  According to Philippe, “They, like many others, hated to hear French spoken and called on the five ‘frogs’ to ‘talk United States.’  They rushed the French Canadians as they passed them.”[8]  Jean-Baptiste Blanchette was one of the French Canadians involved in the fray and was struck on the side of the throat by a broken bottle, which led him to eventually bleed to death.  Blanchette’s death was indeed a blow to the entire French community in Manchester and his funeral procession picked up support from about 1,000 mourners.[9]

      While Jean-Baptiste Blanchette’s story is but one isolated incident it is part of a larger context of animosity toward Franco-Americans during their employment in the mills of New England.  Psychologist and documentary filmmaker Ben Levine describes how this migration and resulting civil unrest affected both Francos and Anglos alike and ultimately led to the shame that buries much of Franco culture to this day:

During the heyday of the mill economy, Anglophones became a minority in many cities.  They came to fear political and economic power latent in this cheap new labor pool.  They feared the communist potential they believed inherent in Catholicism and saw the French language as an impenetrable bond defining a people who fiercely resisted assimilation.

 

Thus began a campaign throughout New England of repressive language laws and social stigmatization against the use of French.  Encouraged by Anglo business interests, the Ku Klux Klan waged a campaign of violence and terror against Franco-Americans.  The largest, most active Klan organization of any state outside of the deep South was in Maine, with 175,000 members.  Franco-Americans felt inferior, pressured to assimilate, and split as a culture.  Ashamed of their language, they still remained faithful to their French heritage.  When the Depression closed the border with Canada in 1938, Quebec slipped away, leaving Franco-Americans in a cultural limbo.[10]

 

During this time of displacement and unrest, until the border closed, French Canadians maintained a very strong connection to their homes and families in Quebec through the use of language and religion.  In larger Franco communities, children attended parochial schools where half of their education was taught in French.  Franco migrants in New England saw themselves separated by Anglo New Englanders by two main issues: language and religion.  These two cultural forces defined them and therefore maintaining them was critical.  By strictly attending French services and sending their children to French Catholic school, language and faith became inextricably linked, and connected the displaced Francos to their home.

There was also a physical link, however, which connected the mill communities of New England with the farmlands of southern Canada—the railroad.  Families who migrated to New England almost always did so by rail, saving up or selling personal items to finance their trip.  Trains carried families down from Canada to the mills, and often times, select family members back up in the summer months to visit with relatives or to check in on the family farms. 

During the intense migration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, lively Franco communities began flourishing all over New England.  A French Catholic infrastructure was created as a result of a number of needs within the community.  First and foremost was the language barrier.  Connected to the issue of language is the notion of survivance, a French term for ethnic survival.  As Claire Quintal describes it, “This mystique of survivance ‘preserved’ French language and French-Canadian religious values and cultural traditions for generations in New England’s Little Canadas.  It did, however, delay the naturalization of the population living in them.”[11] The means by which to preach and implement this message of survivance became the French Catholic Church. 

Pride in and the perpetuation of Franco culture were not, however, the only motivating factors in the formation of collective welfare strategies and parochial educational bodies.  As Mark Paul Richard contends in his article, “Coping before l’État-providence”:

We do know, however, that discrimination sometimes provided the rationale for them to create these institutions.  For example, Pawtucket Memorial, a Protestant and Masonic hospital in Rhode Island, did not grant privileges to Franco-American doctors.  Consequently, Franco-Americans had ‘to forego hospital treatment or choose Protestant doctors with whom rapport was more difficult because of language and background,’ according to Sister Florence Marie Chevalier.  As a result, Franco-Americans in Rhode Island built their own hospital.[12]

 

Here it is apparent that the Franco-American community raised money through the Church and constructed its own health facility because it felt that the existing one, staffed by Anglophone Protestants, was not serving it properly.  Recognizing a lack in services, Franco-American people in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, as in numerous other communities across New England, were forced to create their own separate, but equal, facilities to be staffed by the clergy.  Richard describes this necessary safety net in this way:  “Prior to the establishment of the U.S. welfare state, New England’s Franco-Americans employed collective coping strategies that drew upon models and resources available in Québec and that promoted both their economic and cultural security.”[13] 

      Women played critical roles in this system, with various orders of nuns staffing the majority of hospitals, orphanages, old-age homes, and parochial schools in Franco communities.  This distribution of work to women echoed the system that had previously been established in Canada and spread rapidly throughout New England during the years of migration.  “As in Québec, women religious provided the social services.  By the early twentieth century, they administered eight hospitals, twelve orphanages, and two hospices throughout New England, serving thousands of orphans, patients, and elderly adults.”[14]  These figures are particularly interesting to keep in mind considering the population of Francos in the region, about half a million around 1900.[15]

How were these church-sanctioned and -operated facilities financed?  Through parishioners who were taught by their faith to be generous with what they had, constantly donating a percentage of what little there was to helping the parish in its entirety.  Health facilities also depended heavily on the clergy who staffed them for little, if any, monetary compensation and on the doctors who volunteered their time.  As Richard writes,

St. Mary’s Hospital could finance medical services for the predominately working-class communities of Lewiston and its twin city, Auburn, for several reasons.  First, the Soeurs Grises [Gray Nuns] working at the hospital received little financial compensation.  Second, from the founding of St. Mary’s in 1888 at least through 1938, its doctors took turns completing rotations for no fee.  Third, the Sisters used revenues from private rooms to finance part or all of the medical bills of those who could not fully pay for hospital services.[16]

 

In addition to church-related facilities for treating the sick, orphaned, elderly and poverty-stricken, there was an emergence of mutual aid societies, also designed to assist people during hard times.  Echoing mutual aid societies that existed in Québec as early as 1789 , Franco aid societies first began appearing in New England and New York around 1848, in their heyday reaching numbers over 400. [17]  Not only did these societies work as providers of insurance for Franco-Americans, they also acted as protectors of French culture. 

Cultural preservation and mutual assistance were the central goals of these societies.  They sought to promote survivance—the preservation of the French language, Roman Catholic faith and French-Canadian traditions.  Consequently, they helped found and support French churches and schools throughout the northeastern United States, [and] they advocated the teaching of French-Canadian history . . .[18]

 

In order to join such mutual aid societies as l’Association Canado-Americaine (which exists to this day), or l’Union Saint-Jean-Baptiste d’Amérique, one had to be French or French-Canadian, and Catholic.  Most organizations also limited membership to males, although entire families usually reaped the benefits in times of need.    Members were provided with varying sums of health insurance, disability benefits, unemployment benefits, old-age benefits, money for funeral costs and in most cases a collection would be taken up by members to support families after losing a loved one.  Through these aid societies, Franco-Americans were able to keep one another afloat during hard times in a country where they were not always totally welcome and which did not have a nationalized safety net of its own.[19]

      Having a huge effect on children who came to the U.S. at an early age and ones who were born and raised here was the parochial school system.  Another integral part of the survivance ideology, elementary schools especially provided a solid foundation of Franco culture in the lives of the youth.  In these schools, children learned the Catholic religion, performed oral and written exercises in French, and studied French-Canadian history, traditions, and culture including art and music.  In his book, The French-Canadian Heritage in New England, Gerard J. Brault contends that:

Franco-American culture today is largely the product of an extensive school system that flourished the period between World War I and World War II.  More than any other institution, the elementary schools, founded and maintained by separate parishes, influenced and shaped individuals and gave them a sense of belonging to the Franco-American group.[20]

 

In French parochial schools, children were socialized into Franco culture.  Parents received the message to send their children to these schools from a variety of sources, including their own parents and other relatives and parish priests who included the importance of religious education in their Sunday sermons.  In the years before World War II, Franco society made it the duty of parents to send their children to their local French Catholic school.  If this was not done, then surely the culture would die, or at least that is what the rationale was.

      In contemporary society, Catholic school is often regarded as a painful and sobering experience.  Order, respect and appropriate behavior were strictly enforced.  Students were separated by sex in all aspects of school from classes to recess time, boys on one side, girls on the other.  Uniforms were also required of all students, as well as proper language when addressing the Sisters who educated them and led them in prayer.  Failure to follow rules was often met with some kind of repetitive writing assignment, or with the fabled boxing of the ears or ruler slap on the hand.

      What was more complicated than the regulations of early Catholic school was the dichotomy of ideals taught.  Schools were commonly taught in French for half the day and English for the other half, although Brault claims that it was more complicated than this:

The morning session was conducted in French, the afternoon in English, or vice versa, often in different classrooms with different teachers.  French was the medium of instruction for catechism, Bible study, French language, Canadian history, art, and music, more or less in that order of importance; the remaining subjects—reading, writing, arithmetic, American history, geography, civics, hygiene—were taught in English.

 

This division of time is misleading because French was also used throughout the day for all prayers and public announcements . . . Although the situation varied according to the degree of ethnicity in the area, by the 1930s Franco-American children generally spoke English among themselves at recess.[21]

 

With some disciplines consistently taught in French (religion, art, etc.) and others in English (arithmetic, geography), each culture was to be appreciated for distinct reasons.  English became associated with subjects that were practical and necessary for everyday life, as was learning the language, and French with subjects contemporarily considered above and beyond basic education, except for religion—the foundation of Franco culture.  Canadian history was often emphasized over American history and attempted to convince children to identify more with their Canadian roots, associating being French with a pseudo divinity.  “Canadian history was taught with an eye to showing how God had watched over his chosen people.  Much emphasis was given to describing the religious devotion and extraordinary heroism of the early colonists.”[22]  In a society that was so heavily centered on the Catholic Church, an allegiance to Canada emphasized in the classroom at an early age was intended to create a loyalty to the church later in life.

At the core of these outposts of the Catholic church were the nuns.  It was in the United States, as it had been in Canada, a great honor for a family to have a daughter who entered religious life.  Many female children were encouraged to enter convents—in a sense making the ultimate commitment to both their faith and French-Canadian culture.  Sisters often came down from Canada to work in locations across New England, however in some circumstances orders of nuns were created in the U.S. when there was a need.  One such order was Les Petites Franciscaines de Marie, (the Little Franciscans of Mary), officially formed in 1893.  The creation of the order, however, began five years earlier in Worcester, MA.  By 1888, the Franco population in Worcester numbered about 7,000 and up until this point there existed no organization to care for the orphans.[23]  Concerned about this, Father Joseph Brouillet decided to make an attempt to create an order of nuns in Worcester to care for and educate the orphans.  He created the organization from scratch, recruiting young girls not yet confirmed as sisters in Canada who were excited by the chance for such a great challenge.  Brouillet also looked inside the community and to families who had daughters in convents elsewhere and sought to bring them back to Worcester.  In a few years, Brouillet gathered eleven young women who became the Little Franciscans of Mary and who, as it turned out, assumed care of the poor and elderly in the Worcester area.

At the high point of Franco-American culture in the U.S. with its own churches, hospitals, schools, insurance companies, social clubs, theater groups, sports teams and stores, a Franco could go about his or her daily life without having to utter a word of English.  Because of this, a great many people who came directly from Canada as children or young adults and settled in overwhelmingly French communities were able to lead “normal,” productive lives here in the United States without ever learning more than a few words of English. 

It was not until the Depression hit, followed by World War II, that Francos  stopped the border crossing that some families had done a half-dozen times   It is ironic that the emerging prosperity of post-WWII America and lively Franco culture throughout parts of New England convinced many families to settle here permanently, considering that post-WWII American ideals led directly to the loss of many aspects of French Canadian culture.  The economic boom of the 1950s and the United States’ successful role in WWII led to extreme feelings of patriotism and the true birth of the American Dream—the idea that through hard work anyone was capable of living a comfortable life in the new consumer culture.  To reach for the American Dream, one had, of course, to be American which meant, first and foremost, speaking English.

In the 1950s there was a shift in many Franco-American households from trying to preserve and instill Franco culture and values in the youth to a near-obsession with assimilation.  Parents wanted their children to succeed in American society and the first step was to learn English.  Even in communities with French Catholic schools, more and more children were enrolled in public schools, or sent to Irish Catholic schools where they would be forced to learn English.  Children who spent the first few years of their lives only speaking French lost that language, and many to this day have not been able to reconnect with it.  

A certain amount of prejudice had always existed in New England against Francos, as demonstrated earlier in the violent death of Jean-Baptiste Blanchette in 1880.  Franco-Americans have been referred to as “frogs,” a term equivalent to any of the other racial slurs that have surfaced in the American racist lexicon.  During the 1950s and 1960s, years of this abuse began to catch up with the youth.  Franco children who grew up in the fifties and sixties represent a turning point in the progression of Franco culture in the United States.  It was during their lifetime that the belief in survivance began to dissolve.  The French language and French Canadian culture became something that the youth tried to leave behind, with many making concerted efforts to speak without the accent of their parents and to pronounce their names in an Anglicized way. 

As a result of this post-WWII, large scale assimilation, much of the thriving Franco culture of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries is only a memory, held on to by the select few who are still alive to tell about it.  The people who are often times second or third generation Franco-Americans, (whose parents or grandparents came directly from Canada), and who grew up during the late forties, fifties and early sixties, have been affected most by this change.  Many of these individuals spent their early childhood years speaking only French but were forced to speak English upon entering the public school system.  These were the children who were the first in their families to learn English in a classroom.  While French was still spoken at home, the children began speaking less and less until they reached a point where they understood their parents’ French but replied in English.  The parents of these individuals are, all in all, the last completely bilingual generation of Franco-Americans, people whose conversation will flow freely between French and English. 

This last bilingual generation, born somewhere around 1910 to 1935, is the last living link between life in French Canada and life in New England.  Many of these individuals were either born in Canada and raised there, or were part of a family that crossed the border numerous times.  These Francos saw the heyday of Franco-American culture in the U.S. and also remember what life was like in Quebec.  While some never entered the school systems in New England and, therefore, were never formally taught English, most became completely bilingual, at least partly due to their children. 

Franco culture began dying out in New England as younger generations lost the language.  Times changed and fewer children attended French Catholic parochial schools, their parents sending them to public schools instead.  This, along with the decreasing numbers of men and women entering religious service, led to the closing of schools, convents, Catholic-run hospitals, and churches.  With no new blood entering their readership, French newspapers closed and radio shows stopped airing.  Following the general trend of membership decline in fraternal societies, many Franco men’s and women’s clubs closed.  French was heard less frequently in restaurants and on street corners until it reached the level of today when it is only heard in select communities and spoken by the elderly, a population now in its seventies and eighties and, literally, dying out.

However, thanks to a renewed interest in Franco-American culture by members of the community who were conditioned by societal pressure to let it go 40 years ago, there is a rebirth simmering around New England.  Taking inspiration from the “Quiet Revolution” in Quebec in the 1960s (a renaissance in French language and culture, a proliferation of French Canadian art and literature, and organized efforts to turn Quebec into an independent nation), more and more Francos are trying to reconnect with their roots.[24]

One aspect of this rebirth is the emerging Franco-American cannon of literature.  Easily the two most widely read Franco authors are Grace Metalious and Jack Kerouac.  Metalious wrote Peyton Place, a best-selling novel of the fifties about the scandals that rocked a small, coastal Maine town.  The novel was followed up with several, less successful, sequels, and was the basis for two films and two television series.  Metalious became a celebrity overnight and the small community of Gilmanton, New Hampshire, where she lived (and upon which the novel is rumored to be about) flooded with media.  Metalious became a controversial figure in popular culture both for the racy nature of her novel and the unconventional lifestyle she led.  She was known as a hard-drinking woman who had a number of lovers over her short life.  Metalious died just short of her fortieth birthday in 1964 as a result of cirrhosis of the liver.  She is to this day, however, recognized as the most prominent Franco-American female author.[25]

Jack Kerouac was born and raised in Lowell, Massachusetts, a community with one of the larger Franco populations in New England.  Growing up Kerouac worked periodically in the textile mills while honing his writing skills.  As he grew older, Kerouac wrote a number of stories based on his youth in Lowell, and while most of these are not his best known pieces, they are crucially important to fledgling Franco authors today.

Denis Ledoux, a resident of Lisbon Falls, Maine, who grew up a mile away in Lewiston, started his own press, Soleil Press, which currently has a library of about a dozen books.  His first book, What Became of Them is a collection of stories chronicling the effects on the family of migration from Quebec and the changes within the next few generations.  Later, Ledoux edited an anthology, Lives in Translation: An Anthology of Contemporary Frano-American Writings, combing the works of several Franco authors and poets. 

Some Francos, like Rhea Coté Robbins, are trying to preserve the culture by recording their personal histories.  Robbins spent five years working on Wednesday’s Child, a book that she decided to write as a young girl.  Growing up in Waterville, Maine, in a part of town referred to as “the plain,” (closest to the Kennebec river and the textile mill), Robbins felt discriminated against as a child because of the fact that she was French.  Written almost in flashback form, Wednesday’s Child reflects on crucial points in Robbins’ life, which she continually tries to make sense of.  The chapters deal with her strict Catholic upbringing, the pain her father felt over not being able to farm like his family did in Quebec, and later, the deaths of her parents and her bout with breast cancer.  Her writing is intensely emotional, conveying to the reader the shame of her youth and the animosity she felt from others, the pain over the loss of her heritage and the determination she feels as a mature adult to reconnect to her culture and to develop her identity.

Robbins is working to affirm her place in Franco-American culture and is intent on keeping it alive through her writing and other efforts.  Robbins created the Franco-American Women’s Institute (FAWI) to fill a void she felt existed within the Franco-American female community.  By asking herself questions to address the problem, she was able to determine exactly what it was that she wanted to create.  She began by asking herself this:

What do you do about a group of diverse Franco-American women? 

How do we pool the diverse group of women--community, academic, professional, Québécois, Acadian, Métis, and Mixed Blood, varied geographies, and more?  The Women of the Franco-American Women's Institute, FAWI, are of the same spirit, but of different gifts, to borrow a famous quote.  Where could a net be found with the strength to catch such a catch?  How could we all come under the rubric Franco-American Woman and still be ourselves? Where is the net that doesn't let the Franco-American woman's soul fall through? I wrote and wrote and wrote in my journal until I reached the definition of the Franco-American Women's Institute. A NET designed to capture, catch, and free the diversity of expression of the women, their maman's and their maman's mamans. Daughters, too. Because daughters are the best insurance for the future. [26]

Robbins’ organization maintains a website and is in the early stages of creating an archive by collecting the stories of Franco-American women of all walks of life.  She is intent on preserving the culture and on honoring individuals who have for so long been invisible in American society.  Robbins’ efforts can ensure that these women will not be forgotten and will serve as role models for generations to come.

The revival of Franco culture in New England is not only happening on an individual basis but also with groups of people looking to rediscover their pasts together.  In Waterville, Maine, a Franco-American film festival led to the formation of a group of local Francos wanting to reconnect with their roots.  Railroad Square Cinema hosted the first festival in 1999, sponsored in part by Ben Levine, a documentary filmmaker and the Penobscot Language School, both of Rockland, Maine.  In 1980, Levine produced a documentary titled, Si, Je Comprend Bien, looking at the issues of the referendum for independence of the province of Quebec, and the status of Franco culture in New England.  Levine showed his film and a number of others either made in Francophone Canada or about life in Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and found a good-sized and lively audience.  After the screenings, people lingered in the theaters to discuss the movies, and inevitably, their own experiences.  This also gave men and women whose French has lain dormant for years a chance to speak the language that many of them first spoke as children.

Another film festival was held at Railroad Square in the fall of 2000, with larger crowds and producing further discussion.  Upon the conclusion of the festival, Julia Schultz, director of the Penobscot School, inquired if anyone would be interested in gathering together in the future to continue the dialogues that had begun.  Linda Gerard DerSimonian, a Waterville resident, was the first to respond and together with Julia put an ad in the local paper to advertise the first meeting of the group.  That first ad received twenty replies and since January the group has continued to grow and has been receiving increasing publicity.  The Boston Globe did a story on the group in late February of 2001 and at the March meeting a television crew from the Canadian Broadcasting Company shot footage for a part of a documentary it was producing on Franco-Americans in Maine.  National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” program also did a piece on the Waterville group.

Giving themselves titles varying from the “language reacquisition group” to the “French group” or most commonly, “le group,” they meet once a month to share photographs and stories from their youth, sing songs, and sharpen their French.  “Le group” does not want to stop there, however, and plans are underway to create a Franco-American cultural center and museum.

This rediscovery of the Franco-American culture is also happening on an individual basis.  Sylvanne Pontin is on a quest of sorts to uncover the history of her family in Waterville, Maine.  When Sylvanne’s 90-year-old father was relocated to a nursing home, he no longer had room for all of the books, photographs and other mementos he had accumulated over his lifetime.  When he suggested simply throwing them away, Sylvanne was horrified and carried several boxes to her home and began sifting through them.  Having these objects of her father’s past in her home has set her off on a journey to piece together her family’s history and to begin working on her own legacy.

Pontin’s maternal grandfather founded Le Club Calumet in 1920.  He was an active businessman in the Augusta community and married a concert pianist, Sylvanne’s grandmother.  Pontin’s father was also a prominent member of the Waterville community.  After attending seminary school in Montreal, which he dropped out of, he worked for a Franco newspaper in Waterville, had a French radio show and participated in numerous theater and musical groups.  Pontin’s mother was equally visible in the Franco community and Sylvanne has childhood memories of impromptu concerts and plays going on in her living room.  Sylvanne, unlike Rhea Coté Robbins, felt that her French heritage was celebrated as she grew up and has always been something that she and her parents were not ashamed of.  The pride her parents felt in their Franco heritage is what Sylvanne believes led them to sending her to Mount Merici School, a French-Catholic girls’ school in Waterville.  And the pride that she feels today is what is driving her toward her ultimate goal of establishing a Franco-American cultural center and museum in the community.

Perhaps the predecessor of this movement centered in Waterville was the establishment of a Franco-American Studies Program at the University of Maine at Orono.  The Franco Studies Program runs a cultural center and library on campus and is the facility through which the Franco-American Resource Opportunity Group is run.  Known as FAROG, (a play on the derogatory term for Francos, “frog”), the organization began as a support group but has emerged as an active entity on the UMO campus.

The group publishes a monthly bilingual tabloid, FAROG Forum, a sassy irreverent, let-it-all-hang-out newspaper with a circulation of forty-five hundred.  In addition to covering the Franco-American scene . . . students and guest feature writers contribute articles, often in the so-called [St. John] Valley French, about their frustrations, gripes, and personal experiences of discrimination.[27] 

 

Francos from all over New England and Canada are encouraged to submit articles to the Forum as a means of opening up dialogue about the Franco-American experience.

The Franco-American culture lives on not only in the literature of its people but in organizations like Le Club Calumet in Augusta, Maine.  Calumet has a long history, being first founded in 1920 by a gentleman named Pierre Perrault and several other men.  The group is formally a Franco-American men’s club and in its early years only admitted men of a higher social status.  Over the years this has changed, however, and membership is now available to any man of Franco-American descent, and currently stands at about 750 members.

The organization describes itself as a bastion of Franco-American culture and as a facility where Francos can meet and socialize, feeling comfortable that they are with people of similar backgrounds.  Calumet hosts a variety of special events for its members including a maple sugar party in the springtime, father/daughter dinners, and periodically brings in guest lecturers to speak on topics relevant to the lives of its members, (many of whom are middle-aged and older), such as social security.  In addition, the club owns a large library of geneaology books and has a bar/game room, open daily for its members.  To raise extra funds for the organization, Le Club Calumet rents its grand hall out for functions such as wedding and retirement parties and caters the events with the help of its members.

The future is uncertain, however, for Le Club Calumet and other organizations like it.  Membership has decreased over recent years and will only continue to slide as the membership gets farther and farther into old age.  Some believe that as Calumet dies, so will the Franco culture, a fate that many think is the fault of the youth.  More than once I heard from Gerard Bouchard, club president, that the Franco culture is dying because “the youth don’t care.”  Membership is down because “the youth don’t care,” less and less people speak French because “the youth don’t care.”  Whether or not this is true is undoubtedly up for discussion and only time will tell what the true fate of Le Club Calumet will be.

It is true that history moves in cycles and this is particularly relevant in the story of the Franco-Americans.  From humble beginnings in scattered mill towns, Francos created their own infrastructure of social services and their own microcosms of culture where their French was celebrated and perpetuated.  However, as migration almost ground to a halt and post-WWII patriotism fed everyone the notion of the need to “be American” the baby boom generation found shame in its Franco-American heritage and followed a rapid path to assimilation.  Forty years later with these individuals reaching mid-life, their parents dying and their children ignorant of the language and culture that was their world as children, the baby boomers are dealing with feelings of loss and confusion.  Where do they fit in?  How do they fit in?  This soul searching is leading many Francos to try to reconnect with their youth and their culture by working together with others whom have had similar experiences.  Telling stories, singing songs, watching movies, writing memoirs and joining together are ways that today’s Francos in New England are refusing to let their past, and their identities, get lost in the melting pot of dominant American society.

 

 

Everyone blames everyone else.  The old blame the young for not caring.  The young blame the old for not teaching them the language, the songs and the traditions.  “You never taught me.” “You never cared.”  But behind the accusations there is guilt.  Guilt for letting go and giving in and breaking away from the culture that had once been held so dear.  Noella regrets sending her children to Irish Catholic Schools and is haunted by the slaps on the wrists her children got when they spoke their native tongue.  My father feels guilt because he let his language slip away and could not pass it to his children.  My mother feels implicated because she neglected to teach me the language when I was small.  Sometimes I feel like I let them all down because when I was younger I didn’t care.  Old Blackie at Club Calumet was right about me, to a point.  I didn’t care and I didn’t want to be French.

 

I reach a point when I want to scream.  I want to scream for the voices that have stayed silent for generations as they hid who they were to avoid shame and ridicule.  I want to scream and tell them that it’s not their fault.  It’s not your fault.  Or mine.  Or anyone else’s.  There was no evil villain lurking in the Franco community making a deliberate choice to destroy the culture from within.  My grandparents thought that they were doing the right thing.  They wanted the best for their children.  It is the same with anyone and to keep blaming and festering in the guilt of choices made years ago does nothing to keep the culture alive, only the pain.

 

 I went home for Mother’s Day to show Noella the documentary I made about us.  She saw her photograph and the dedication at the end and she cried.  In what I had created she saw the faces of her father, mother, sisters, aunts, and children and she saw that I had taken the time to tell their story and that touched her. And with that interest from me, in her, the healing began.

 

It’s a choice you make.  You can choose to ignore it, to deny it, or to embrace it.  It comes down to whether or not you care and once people accept individual responsibility not for what happened in the past but what can happen in the future, then, and only then, will the once invisible have the strength to be seen.

 

 

 

Works Cited

 

 

Brault, Gerard J.  The French-Canadian Heritage in New England.  Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986.

 

Doty, C. Stewart.  The First Franco-Americans: New England Life Histories from the Federal Writers’ Project  1938-1939.  Orono: University of Maine at Orono Press, 1985.

 

Filosa, Gwen. “NH 100: Metalious’s Peyton Place was controversial, popular.” Concord Montior Online, www.cmontior.com/stories/top100/grace_metalious.shtml.

 

Franco-American Women’s Institute, www.fawi.net.

 

Gerstle, Gary.  Working-class Americanism.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

 

Kerouac, Jack and Marion, Paul, ed.  Atop and Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings.  New York: Viking, 1999.

 

Ledoux, Denis, ed.  Lives in Transition:  An Anthology of Contemporary Franco-American Writings.  Lisbon Falls: Soleil Press, 1991.

 

Ledoux, Dennis.  What Became of Them and other stories from Franco America.  Lisbon Falls: Soleil Press, 1988.

 

Levine, Ben. Grant proposal for Narrative Animating Democracy Lab project.  5/9/01.

 

Levine, Ben.  Interview, 3/2001.

 

Quintal, Claire.  The Little Canadas of New England.  Worcester: Assumption College, 1983.

 

Quintal, Claire.  Steeples and Smokestacks: A collection of essays on The Franco American Experience in New England.  Worcester: Assumption College, 1996.

 

Robbins, Rhea Cote.  Wednesday’s Child.  Brunswick: Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, 1997.

 

Walker, David B.  Politics and Ethnocentricism: The Case of the Franco-Americans.  Brunswick: Bowdoin College Bureau for Research in Municipal Government, 1961.