Les Réfugiés acadiens en France, 1758–1785: l’impossible réintégration par Jean-François Mouhot (review)

Between 1755 and 1760 the British Empire expelled several thousand French-speaking colonists from the region known today as maritime Canada. These exiles — now collectively known as Acadians — were sent to many places, and a large number of them eventually came to France. In 1785, after protracted, complex negotiations, approximately sixteen hundred Acadians left France for Spanish-ruled Louisiana. Some historians have argued that the 1785 move away was inevitable, because after several generations in the colonies the Acadians were no longer French enough to live comfortably in France. Jean-François Mouhot tells a much more interesting story. The first section of his book is devoted to policy debates over the future of the Acadians. An almost bewildering array of proposals were advanced, some never implemented, some only partially, and some fully but with only mixed results. The Acadians received a financial subsidy, which generated a great deal of paperwork, allowing Mouhot to reconstruct the economic lives of the exiles, the subject of the second section of the book. Part III examines Acadian identity, the reputation of Acadians among administrators, their manner of presenting themselves, and the reactions of their native-born French neighbours. Just as they had done in North America, Acadian communities in France appointed deputies to speak for them in negotiations with government officials. Some figures who had assumed leadership roles among the Acadians before the deportation retained influence afterwards, including the Catholic priests Jean-Louis Le Loutre and Jacques Girard. In France, however, there were important transformations in Acadian politics. Under the British colonial regime the people we call ‘Acadians’ were almost universally known as ‘French neutrals’. In France the Acadians dropped the ‘neutral’ label and insisted that they had always been unqualifiedly devoted to the French crown. (The Acadians in Pennsylvania, by contrast, insisted that neutrality had become a moral imperative for them and a defining cultural trait.) Mouhot warns us not to overgeneralize. He presents a great deal of data in his effort to determine whether it is possible to identify a distinct Acadian ‘identity’ in France prior to 1785. In the years leading up to their departure for Louisiana, the Acadians were increasingly likely to identify themselves as a ‘nation’, but at the same time more of them were entering into marriages with native-born French. Like much recent work on the Acadians, this book corrects older studies that emphasized the exiles’ shared characteristics. In many respects, Mouhot’s work resembles Christopher Hodson’s The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History (Oxford: OUP, 2012), except that Hodson concentrates on the dispersal of Acadians to exotic locales, and adds little to our knowledge of the process that brought the Acadian exiles to the places where we are most likely to find their descendants today: New Brunswick and Louisiana. Mouhot’s book is more relevant to the history of Louisiana’s Cajuns. In the end, however, Acadian history can never be just about Acadians. Mouhot has framed his study as Acadian history, but he also provides a quirky angle for examining the improvisational politics of Ancien Régime France.