Québécois and Acadien

Commentary: Quebecois and Acadien MASON WADE It is an old English-Canadian tradition to take it for granted that French Canada is monolithic, and that all French Canadians think alike. The troubles of recent years surely have relieved English Montrealers of these highly erroneous illusions, but in Ontario and the West the troubles seem to have served merely to replace the old stereotype of the priest-ridden peasant with the new one of the long-haired revolutionary, both equally non-Canadian by the lights of regions more devoted to the melting-pot ideal than to the mosaic one. It is curious that Quebec 's English-speaking neighbours to the eastward have also until recently been given to these basic errors, for they should have been aware that the Acadiens, their Frenchspeaking fellow citizens in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, did not see eye to eye with the Quebecois. But as recently as 1961, when the authorities of Mount Allison University were planning a summer seminar on "French Canada Today," inviting only Quebecois speakers, I had some difficulty in persuading them that more valuable insights might result if the program included both a Quebecois and an Acadien speaker on each topic. As I had anticipated, the speakers on that occasion took off in opposite directions from the start, shattering forever for that audience the mistaken notion of a monolithic French Canada. There are many reasons for the different outlooks of the Quebecois and the Acadien. Under the French regime Canada and Acadia were separate colonies, and they were peopled from different regions of France. Afte1· Jean Talon, the great intendant who proposed to link the two colonies, no administrator in New France took much interest in Acadia, except the Bishop of Quebec whose writ ran throughout the Maritimes until 1817. But Acadia clearly took second place to QueJournal of Canadian Studies bee in his concerns. After the main thrust of French exploration, trade, and missionary activity shifted to the St. Lawrence with the foundation of Quebec, Acadia was largely neglected by France, and left to the tender mercies of rival fishing entrepreneurs and fur traders who waged commercial wars against each other, often in alliance with Boston merchants. From the first Acadia was involved in the continuing Anglo-French struggle for the continent, because of the region's strategic geographical position, as important for trade as for warfare. It was the portion of the North American mainland which projected farthest eastward and closest to the Grand Banks, while Cape Breton was a stepping stone to the easternmost outpost of North America, Newfoundland , with its own rich fisheries. Unlike that bleak island, Acadia was heavily wooded with hardwoods as well as conifers, and offered abundant fur and edible game. The extraordinarily high tides of the long, narrow Bay of Fundy created vast marshes, which when dyked provided ready-cleared land of high fertility. Thus for fisherman, fur trader, and colonist alike Acadia had great attractions. Since it was equally accessible from the route from France to the St. Lawrence and that from England to New England and New York, it became the eastern outpost and flank of both rival empires in North America. The rivalry for control of this key area began early and continued to the end of the French empire in North America, though much of Acadia and Newfoundland fell into English hands in 1710. Just eight years after Champlain and DesMonts founded Port Royal, Captain Samuel Argall of Virginia destroyed the French settlements there and at Saint-Sauveur on the Maine coast. In 1621 Acadia became Nova Scotia for Englishmen -or at least Scots-when Sir James Alexander received a grant of the region from his friend King James I. But in 1632 Acadia was returned to France, only to be conquered by Major Robert Sedgwick of Massachusetts in 1654. It was returned to France again in 47 1670. Behind the shield of the warlike Abenakis, encouraged by the governors in Quebec and their own French leaders to keep the expanding New England frontier in bloody turmoil, the peaceful Acadian farmers doubled in numbers between 1671 and 1686, opening up new farmlands in the Minas Basin...