Les Franco-Americains de la Nouvelle-Angleterre: Reves et realites (review)

Most Canadian historians are aware that hundreds of thousands of French Canadians emigrated to New England beginning in the years preceding the American Civil War. It is widely accepted that this mass migration pretty much ended in 1930, with the onset of the Depression. But what became of the thriving Franco-American communities of industrial towns like Lowell, Manchester, Nashua, Pawtucket, and Southbridge? The general history of these communities in the years following 1930 has been dealt with before by François Weil and Armand Chartier. Both historians suggested that in the years following the Second World War, the Franco-Americans had fully blended into the American melting pot, having lost their language, neglected their national parishes, and abandoned their traditional culture. Currently, the consensus is that what came to be known as la franco-américanie exists no more. Yves Roby's latest book, Les Franco-Américains de la Nouvelle-Angleterre: Rêves et réalitiés, seeks to answer the question of how this once vibrant community lost its identity, so to speak. This is of interest to American historians of immigration and ethnicity, since Roby shows how a major immigrant group arrived and set up ethnic institutions that strengthened their sense of identity, but also, over time, proved to be the instruments of their gradual assimilation into the American mainstream. To historians of French Canada, this story of la survivanceFranco-American style (to use an expression once employed by Ramsay Cook) is also relevant, since it can be seen as an important counterpoint to the cultural evolution of Quebec over the same period. If anything, Roby's book shows that the history of French Canada is not complete without an understanding of New England's Franco-America.

Those familiar with Roby's earlier work are no doubt aware that in 1990 he produced a major scholarly achievement in Les Franco-Americains de la Nouvelle Angleterre, 1776-1930. This was a groundbreaking study, because in it Roby combined a social history of the Franco-American communities of New England with the more traditional focus on their struggles to survive as a distinct cultural group. The result was an extraordinarily compelling work that, for the first time, seemed to provide a reliable telling of a story that had been neglected for too long by Canadian historians. Readers may wonder how this newer volume, which has a similar title, differs from Roby's 1990 work. The best way to answer this question is to employ a painterly metaphor. While in his 1990 work, Roby was content to outline the story of Franco-America's rise and eventual decline in the broad strokes of an abstract expressionist, in this book, Roby takes the approach of an impressionist, applying paint in tiny strokes, filling in the spaces with much fine detail and nuance of colour. In this case, the impressionist's pointillism results in a monumental canvas, not unlike one of Monet's later works. And just as the impressionists were not so much interested in portraying the scene at hand as the interplay of light and colour upon it, so in the case of Roby's work, the interest lies not so much in the telling of the total story of the Franco-American experience, but of detailing the construction of their identity. Another way of saying this would be to state that Roby is interested not so much in identity itself, but in the process of construction of identity in the Franco-American communities.

One of the first things that strikes the reader of this book is the author's mastery of his subject. Roby has amassed so much evidence on the battles of the Franco-Americans of New England that in its scholarly research, this 530-page volume is a veritable tour de force. When one realizes that he is attempting to represent the evolving identity of a group that included thousands of people scattered...