Canadiens en Guyane, 1754-1805

Thanks to the work of scholars such as Bernard Cherubini, historians are now aware of the thousand or so Acadians who were transported after the British conquest of New France to French Guiana as part of the disastrous Kourou expedition of 1763–1764 launched by Louis XV's minister Choiseul. As Robert Larin correctly points out, however, the presence of French Canadians —distinguished from Acadians —among the immigrants to Guiana during and after the Seven Years War has been almost totally ignored. Larin, who has been working for some time on a comprehensive assessment of forced or voluntary French-Canadian migration at the time of the Conquest, proposes in his present work to set the record straight. In Canadiens en Guyane the author resolves to write a social history that delineates and explains this displacement of Canadiens —whom he defines as born in, married in, or having had children in the area corresponding to present-day Quebec —to French Guiana as part of the overall exodus of the period. A thorough examination of Canadian archival sources permits Larin to come to his preliminary conclusion that 92 French Canadians probably touched Guianese soil between 1758 and 1765, while nine others followed after 1765. He admits, though, that these figures remain somewhat tentative and require confirmation in his subsequent research, because 20 immigrants cannot be proven to be Canadiens. Nevertheless, Larin argues quite persuasively that a possible narrowing of his sample does not affect his overall findings and the conclusions he draws from them.

These findings continue quite naturally along the lines of his previous research. He argues that commoners, and not members of the elite (nobles, officers, officials), dominated in both the overall exodus of 4,000 Canadiens during the Conquest period, and in the small contingent that ventured to French Guiana. Among the latter, 60 of the 92 were commoners. Larin then proceeds to examine in detail the migratory process that occurred, first out of Canada, and then from France (or St. Pierre and Miquelon) to Guiana. The author delineates the social status of each immigrant, traces their individual itineraries, and provides a genealogical statement for each possible participant, before drawing up a prosopography for the entire group. He concludes that French Canadians, unlike Acadians, pursued individual rather than imposed or group itineraries and had various motivations for their peregrinations. Some Canadiens had been expelled by the British, but others clearly opted to start their lives anew in a French environment rather than remain under British tutelage. After arriving in French ports by way of various routes, some Canadiens were led by differing circumstances to join the Choiseul expedition to Guiana and convinced others to merge into the Acadian contingent; meanwhile, still others travelled directly from St. Pierre and Miquelon to Guiana. Throughout this somewhat repetitive, nearly 400-page volume, Larin successfully traces the individual lives of the French-Canadian migrants at the same time as he analyses their joint ventures. The result is at times a fascinating account of the often tragic wanderings of a handful of eighteenth-century French Canadians. It not only brings to light a hitherto neglected episode of Canadian history, but also helps explain the social dynamic and internal structure of this transatlantic migration.

While there is little doubt about Larin's contribution in this book to the history of the Conquest, his treatment of French Guianese issues is much less thorough and convincing. To be sure, the author forewarns us (p. 89) that his primary focus is on the migratory process, rather than on Canadiens in French Guiana, but this does not prevent him from occasionally making sweeping presumptions about Guianese developments based upon rather limited evidence. One of his concluding points is that the French-Canadian commoners who remained in Guiana after 1770 left their mark upon Guianese history by integrating into the Creole society of the colony, especially in the areas of Sinnamary and Kourou, where the few French-Canadian survivors of the Choiseul expedition took refuge, merging into the larger Acadian community. Here, he argues, the Canadiens became involved in small-scale agriculture and especially cattle-raising—though he gives no concrete examples —and contributed to the development of a Creolized petit blanc agricultural sector ignored by Guianese historians because it remained apart from the dominant slave-based plantation economy. Again, without offering examples, the author claims that some of these Canadiens lived in "une certaine prospérité" (p. 151) and that their survival is evidenced by the persistence of French-Canadian surnames into the nineteenth century. Larin even suggests that Guiana did not prove to be the white man's grave, while conceding nevertheless that nearly half of the 92 French-Canadian immigrants perished shortly after their arrival, and that another third was saved only by rapid repatriation to France. In the end, Larin avows that only four members of the French-Canadian elite remained permanently in Guiana after 1770 and that only eight commoners stayed. Without further evidence as to what impact these eight commoners, morphed into Creolized petits blancs, had on Guianese society, one is tempted to accept the official French accounts of the 1820s to 1840s that depicted the few white settlers remaining at that time in Sinnamary or Kourou as surviving miserably on subsistence farming or wood-cutting.

In sum, one might say that there is really so little information provided on French Canadians once they arrived in Guiana that the title Canadiens en Guyane is a misnomer. Indeed, it would have been more appropriate to have entitled this book Canadiens vers la Guyane, for it is almost entirely a history of a migratory movement. It is in this sense that Larin has made his mark. The Canadian historical world can only hope that Robert Larin will soon conclude his larger study of the exodus of all French Canadians during and after the Conquest, of which this current book appears to be a preview.