La Survivance and Revolution

La Survivance and Revolution: The Ideological History of a Remnant

Following the Conquest of Canada by the English, ratified by the Treaty of 1763, our ancestors developed an ideology referred to as la survivance – survival. It has been said that in the early years following the English Conquest, les Canadiens, as we were known at the time, expected the French to return. They could not believe nor would they accept that the French king would abandon his vast North American Empire, which had included a sphere of influence over some of the finest real estate on the continent: the Saint Lawrence and Ottawa River areas, the Great Lakes region, the valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, the fertile lands of what is now the American Midwest, and down the continent’s great central river to New Orleans, where the river met the mighty Gulf of Mexico.

Our ancestors reasoned that, inevitably, there would be another war with their rivals, the English, and this future war must bring the triumphant return of the armies and governors of the Kings of France. And when they returned, they must find everything in the colony formerly known as Nouvelle-France just as it had been before. Like the early Christians who expected the imminent return of the Savior, la survivance entailed the fervent preservation of our ancestor’s traditional cultural institutions in expectation of the ultimate return of France triumphant.

This return might have occurred within two decades of the Treaty of 1763. As everyone knows, during the American War of Independence of the 1770s and 1780s, France allied itself with the fledgling American Republic against its common enemy, the British Empire. Historians claim that there was some talk of France recovering Canada in the negotiations that followed the English defeat in the Revolutionary War. However, Gallic diplomacy saw a greater advantage in allowing Canada to remain a part of the British Empire as a permanent menace to the Americans. By allowing the British to retain Canada, reasoned the French Crown, the United States might be made dependent on French military and naval power, maintaining a favorable (for France) balance of power on the North American continent. The Cession of 1763 was the first break separating our ancestors from the mother country. Unbeknownst to them, the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which brought to an end the War of the American Revolution, would represent a second break.

Another Revolution, in France in 1789, would constitute a third and final break between our ancestors and their European mère patrie. The French Revolution, a cultural as well as a political milestone, swept away the ancien régime, ensuring that no future French King would rule over Canada.

The Revolution of 1789 and its aftermath created permanent cultural, ideological and political differences between the two French-speaking peoples on either side of the Atlantic. Staunchly Catholic, the more conservative elements among the canadien elite, viewed the anti-clericalism, modernism and republicanism of the French Revolution with alarm. Whatever the ideology, the France of 1815, when the dust from the Napoleonic Wars began to settle, was not at all the France from which the ancestors of the Canadiens had departed. With the Revolution of 1789 and its aftermath, France crossed a Rubicon separating the mother country from its former colony. It is at this point that the French-speaking people of Canada took on the character of a remnant – a remnant of an older French culture, the France of the Sun King, the Catholic France of seigneurs and the fleur-de-lys.

At this stage, having lost its initial raison d’être, the strategy of la survivance in French North America took on a different task with a new intent – to preserve a pre-Revolutionary French ideal, against the secularizing tendencies of the modern world. This ideal possessed three main characteristics: a society which was French-speaking, Catholic and rural. To these three watchwords we might add a tendency – implicit in Catholicism – toward hierarchical institutions and viewpoints. This culture, said this new version of la survivance, would stand as a bulwark on the continent against what one cleric at the time of the War of the 1750s had called “the detestable errors of Luther and Calvin.” The survival of this pre-Revolutionary French culture would provide an alternative vision of North America, one which was, claimed these ideologues, more spiritual, more ordered, less materialistic, and less addicted to change and mobility than was the Anglo-Saxon, Protestant majority on the continent. To some degree, this vision still exists in modern Canada, which wishes to portray itself as more humane, more pacific, less avaricious and less violent than its Southern neighbor.

However, this conservative version of the ideology of la survivance was but one interpretation. The early 19^th century witnessed the growth of a liberal movement in French-Canada, culminating in the abortive Rebellions of Lower Canada (Québec) in 1837 and 1838. Though these Patriotes took French North American survival as a datum, a self-evident premise, they seem to have been influenced by the republican currents streaming across from the southern frontier, accompanied by the influence of the more moderate, earlier phases of the French Revolution, as well as the nationalist movements of early 19^th Century Europe. Consequently, the Patriote movement borrowed symbols from both the American and the French Revolutions. Somewhat anti-clerical, or at least favoring some form of separation between throne and altar, as well as the abolition of seigniorial privileges, this republican Patriote movement represented a somewhat different flavor of survivance, when compared with the ultra-Catholic, ultramontane alternative.

The failure of the Patriote Rebellions to establish an independent French-speaking nation-state in North America resulted in a strategic retreat for the liberal interpretation of la survivance. Through much of the remainder of the 19^th Century, Québec nationalism came to be identified with the vision of a French, Catholic, and rural future for our people. This seems to have been largely an anachronism by mid-century, since, by this point, over-population and a lack of economic opportunity within the traditional socio-economic framework started to drive a significant percentage of the population across the border into the mills and factories of New England or into the growing Western Provinces of Canada.

In all of the stories about the great migration of Québécois into New England there is at least one common denominator – poverty. It is perhaps an over-reaching generalization, but it comes close to the truth to aver that the Québécois who came to New England in the migrations of 1870-1930 came, not because they wanted to, but because they had to. Most of them came from the growing class called journaliers – landless day-laborers who either found themselves in remote regions of Québec (living among a “foreign” Anglophone population such as in the Eastern Townships), heading to the metropolis of Montréal, or venturing south into the New England mills. Anecdotally, all of my Québécois forbears who came to New England were from this journalier class. None of them seems to have owned a farm in Québec to which they could return. Their economic situation is evident from the descriptions of conditions in the mill-operated tenements which I have described elsewhere (see “The Case of the Cabot Mill”). Who would endure such an existence unless it was a dire necessity?

Little known or remembered among contemporary Québécois is that our ancestors who came to the States did not become Anglo-Saxonized overnight. On the contrary, this demographic revolution ushered in a new, Franco-American phase of la survivance. The French language, the Québec Catholic parish, and the traditional folkways of our people survived the border crossing in tact, and, in many cases, for several generations. A very strong current of la survivance ran through the New England petit Canada. It has been suggested that part of the motivation behind this Franco-American survivance was a continuation of the Catholic messianism in certain strains of 19^th Century Québec nationalism. Another explanation is that the New England Franco-Americans were trying to prove to the elite back in Québec that they weren’t the scoundrels or sell-outs that conservative Québécois propaganda had portrayed.

Whatever its motivation, most Québécois would be surprised to discover the extent of la survivance in New England. Even to the present day, families where French is no longer spoken will, in many cases, maintain the foods, the musicality, the folkways and the traditional outlook and concerns of an earlier Québec; this is in a family, such as mine, whose ancestors left Québec as long ago as the 1870s-1890s.

The reason that survivance in New England goes largely unnoticed in Québec is because of another Revolution: la Révolution Tranquille, Québec’s Quiet Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. This great cultural revolution undermined the older sort of nationalism that emphasized the Catholic and rural character of the country. In some sense, it represents the triumph in modern times of the old Patriote strain of Québec ideology. The Quiet Revolution burned away two of the chemical elements from the older formulas of la survivance – Catholic and rural – and what remained was the precipitate: the French language. The preservation of the French language, protected and established by the famous Law 101, became the chief characteristic of a new phase of la survivance in Québec in the period during and after the Quiet Revolution. The French language became the sine qua non of Québec nationalism.

During this period, the older designations by which we had been known, Canadien or Canadien-français, were replaced with a new ethno-national label: Québécois. This label, intended to affirm a modern, forward-looking identity for the people of Québec, had the unintended consequence of tearing at the bonds of kinship between the New England Franco-Americans and their cousins to the North. Whereas the earlier term “French-Canadian” was more inclusive, and could include a Franco-Ontarian or a Franco-American from Woonsocket or Wisconsin, the term “Québécois” excludes them definitively. A Québécois, after the Quiet Revolution, describes a French descendant, born and raised in Québec, in the French language – and no one else.

This explains why, while one commonly hears the terms “Italian-American,” “Irish-American,” or “African-American,” I’ve never heard anyone referred to as a “Québécois-American.” The older term “Franco-American,” on the pattern of the former designation “French-Canadian,” is still used, revealing that the Franco-American in New England is now a remnant – a remnant of the pre-Quiet Revolution Québec, stranded, as it were, on the southern side of the border.

With the Quiet Revolution history repeats itself. Just as the French Revolution of 1789 guaranteed that the Canadiens would remain for many years a remnant of pre-Revolutionary France, the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s ensured that the Franco-Americans in New England became a remnant of pre-Quiet Revolutionary Québec. Separated from a Québec that has become very different from the homeland of our grandparents and great-grandparents, we have become the remnant of the remnant. Just as someone from France visiting certain older villages in Québec seems to enter the domain of a much earlier vision of France, a Québécois visiting one of the older Franco-American Catholic parishes steps into the pre-Quiet Revolution Québec of his or her parents or grandparents.

For example, Saint Joseph’s Church in Biddeford, Maine, my maternal grandfather’s home parish, still celebrates French Mass on Saturday evenings. When I visited this church a year ago, I expected French Mass to be attended by a half-dozen old ladies. To my surprise, I found the church packed to the rafters, with, I would estimate, 200-300 people in attendance. From age 4 to age 84, all of them knew their prayers and the entire Mass in French, and understood a lengthy French sermon, delivered with old-fashioned spirit by the curé. Are there any churches in Québec, in a town of comparable size to Biddeford, with 300 regular attendees – for a single Mass on the weekend schedule?

Not only in religious attitudes, but also in politics Franco-American New England preserves the traditional conservatism of certain elements of the pre-Quiet Revolution Québec. Whereas modern Québec tends to lean to the left – and is far to the left by the standards of the United States post-September 11, 2001 – most of the older generation of Franco-Americans appears to lean to the right, and, I would surmise, in greater percentages than the older generation of other ethnic persuasions. The strong Catholic faith preserved by the Franco-Americans seems to have influenced their political views, as compared with their Québécois cousins.

Successive revolutions – the Cession of 1763, the American Revolution of 1776, the French Revolution of 1789, the failed revolution of 1837, the Industrial Revolution of post-Civil War New England, the demographic revolution which displaced a large portion of the poorer classes of Québec, and, finally, Québec’s Quiet Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s – each contributed to creating a remnant of the past, a remnant which holds to its history with tenacity. At each phase, the ideology of la survivance was adapted to respond to a new situation, as there appeared a new reason in the present to affirm the past. At each step la survivance…survived.

April 22, 2006

Select Sources:

1) Claude Bélanger (Department of History, Marianopolis College), Readings In Quebec History, “The Three Pillars of Survival,” 2000

2) Gilles Havard and Cécile Vidal, Histoire de L’Amérique Française, Éditions Flammarion, 2003

3) Yvan Lamonde, Histoire Sociale des Idées au Québec, Québec: Éditions Fides, 2000.