Remi Francoeur on Mont-Royal Street, in Montreal, on Dec. 23, 2022.Andrej Ivanov/The Globe and Mail
When Rémi Francoeur was growing up in Manchester, N.H., in the 1980s, he mostly spoke French. So did the bank teller, the butcher, his babysitters and many of his friends.
He had no reason to believe this francophone world was about to crumble, and that he would one day have to leave the country to save his French soul.
He and his neighbours were living in one of the few remaining Québécois enclaves in New England – the vestige of a migration that saw about a million francophone Canadians move to the northeastern United States between 1840 and 1930, often to work in textile mills.
A majority of those who stayed assimilated. The region has many Beaulieus (pronounced Boh-leo) and Heberts (pronounced Hee-burt) who don’t speak any French.
But some resisted. Well into Ronald Reagan’s presidency, families such as the Francoeurs kept alive traditions from the old country – in their case, the Mauricie region of Quebec, a roughly five-hour drive north. They ate clouds of dough drenched in maple syrup called grand-pères, played the board game Tock, listened to records by Michel Louvain and Les Classels.
The essence of their culture was the French language. It was “the door” to everything else, said Mr. Francoeur – what allowed them to understand the music on the record player and watch the Radio-Canada broadcasts that were part of their basic cable package.
Over the course of his childhood, he watched that door inch shut. The forces that caused the erosion of “Little Canadas” from Woonsocket, R.I., to Fall River, Mass., were finally coming for his own francophone pocket of America.
Local Catholic schools had stopped offering French half-days about a decade before he was born, and his friends’ parents had stopped addressing their kids in their native tongue, so there was less and less French on the playground. The more anglicized kids rooted for the Boston Bruins, rather than the Montreal Canadiens.
Some families sped up the process, consciously opting out of their Frenchness because of its working-class associations. There was a “stigma around it being the poor culture, and to advance you had to live in English,” Mr. Francoeur said.
His family hung on to their language in part because Rémi’s father had moved to New Hampshire from Quebec at the tail end of the exodus, in the 1960s, when the New England textile industry was all but exhausted and the Quiet Revolution was expanding the horizons of francophones in Canada.
Others in his neighbourhood were fifth- or sixth-generation Americans whose ancestors had been clinging to their French for a century, against long odds. States such as Maine had outlawed public school instruction in languages other than English in the years after the First World War.
In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan aggressively targeted French-Canadians, largely because of their Catholic faith, burning one of the community’s schools in Leominster, Mass., threatening churches, and engaging in street fights, said David Vermette, author of A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans: Industrialization, Immigration, Religious Strife.
The persistence of French-speaking communities in New England was in some ways more remarkable than their eventual decline. The proximity of the homeland helped: Unlike immigrants from Sicily or the Pale of Settlement, Franco-Americans could easily visit Quebec and keep in touch with relatives.
The long-standing French-Canadian commitment to survivance in the face of attempted assimilation also meant that community leaders preached language preservation from the pulpit or in the pages of French-language newspapers such as Le Défenseur and Le Patriote, Mr. Vermette said.
It was hard to resist the Anglo-American tide all the same. The beat novelist and On the Road author Jack Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac to a French-Canadian mother in Lowell, Mass. He often dreamed in French well into adulthood, but lamented the difficulty of maintaining his identity in the U.S. mainstream. “We have to live in English, it’s impossible to live in French,” he once wrote. “This is the secret thought of the Canuck in America.”
Decades later, in 1990s Manchester, Rémi Francoeur could relate. His francophone community was disappearing all around him. The language wasn’t taught in school except as a second language, on par with Spanish or German. Teenagers like him were seeing their French degenerate, not improve.
“It was tough emotionally for so many people to see their ways of living, their references, diminish quickly,” Mr. Francoeur said.
As he moved into the wider world – went to university, began working for political campaigns – he grew farther from his native French. With so little nourishment of his heritage, Mr. Francoeur said, “I felt that part of me was dying.”
He knew he had to take dramatic action. The family had kept in touch with its Québécois relations, and Mr. Francoeur visited the province often as a young man. Now in his early thirties, he decided to move there – the only place in North America he felt he could truly live as a francophone.
Modern-day Quebec required some adjustment. Mr. Francoeur spoke his father’s rural, old-fashioned French, with an r-rolling accent that barely exists any more north of the border and some outdated vocabulary. (To him, a skunk was still a “bête puante” rather than a more contemporary moufette.)
But seven years later, he still lives happily in Montreal, working in public relations, living with a Québécoise girlfriend, and hoping to publish a book about his experience. Title: The Last Franco-American.
He knows he is taking poetic licence. To this day, tens of thousands of people speak French every day in the state of Maine alone, notes Mr. Vermette. There are historic pockets of francophones across the U.S., from the Cajuns of Louisiana to lesser-known speakers of the Paw Paw dialect in Missouri.
Mr. Francoeur shows a songbook he inherited.Andrej Ivanov/The Globe and Mail
Among a younger generation of Franco-Americans there is also a nascent cultural revival. Claire-Marie Brisson, a bilingual native of Metro Detroit who was raised by Franco-Michigander parents, hosts the North American Francophone podcast and teaches a course at Harvard about the history of French-speaking communities across the continent.
“Our voices are coming to the forefront,” said Prof. Brisson. “Twenty- and 30-somethings are really fighting to get that language back.”
For Mr. Francoeur, the best way to fight for his native language was to return to where that language originates. In a way, his journey from Manchester to Montreal feels like a homecoming, he said.
“My branch is sort of getting back to the root.”