Gainey won’t say French is in decline
Fresh from her win in the NDG byelection, Anna Gainey is walking perilously close to Emmanuella Lambropoulos’s footsteps by refusing to state that French is in decline in Quebec.
The fête nationale usually inspires items on language, not least Gilles Proulx’s rant against François Legault for not being enough of a nationalist, and not doing enough to combat the gangrène anglicisante of Montreal. I do enjoy having my first language portrayed as a foul disease. Meantime MBC inflates his lungs for a rendition of Gens du pays that will knock our socks off.
I still can’t quite get it why the English were evil invaders but the French were lovely. I was reminded of this earlier today when mentioning Urbain Tessier dit Lavigne. Here’s what Quebec’s official répertoire du patrimoine says about him:
Tessier dit Lavigne est vraisemblablement recruté en France par Jérôme Le Royer de La Dauversière pour participer à la colonisation de Ville-Marie (Montréal). En 1648, il reçoit sa première concession de terre sur l’île.
So the French were giving away plots of land that didn’t belong to them so the area could be colonized. No surprise there. Settler colonialism was well under way.
Comme la plupart des colons des débuts de Ville-Marie, Tessier dit Lavigne doit prendre les armes plusieurs fois pour repousser les attaques iroquoises.
Nice going, Urbain! Clear those guys off their ancestral lands, that’s what kindly settlers do.
Il est inhumé à Ville-Marie le 21 mars 1689.
Bye-bye, Urbain.
I still don’t see why the colonization was supposedly OK, even admirable, but the English taking over management of an already colonized place was the real wickedness. I suppose I can’t be helped.
DeWolf 20:43 on 2023-06-22 Permalink
By the time American revolutionaries were fighting against British rule, there were several generations of settlers who felt pretty deeply rooted. Same with Canada. Whereas the US gained independence, Canada was colonized by another power that imposed its own rules and culture on the place. That’s the crux of the problem: 150 years may not be that long in the grand sweep of history, but it’s enough time for a sense of identity to develop, and for people to feel quite attached to where they are from.
The way the British colonized Canada was the same as how they colonized many other places around the world, such as India. They co-opted local elites and created a power structure that protected their commercial interests while keeping the colonized people down. In this case, the colonized people were (French) Canadians as well as Indigenous people. Canadians were settlers but they were also colonized. That’s the issue, and that’s the source of the grievances that still exist today.
Kate 20:49 on 2023-06-22 Permalink
The British treated the French-speaking colonizers of Lower Canada a damn sight better than they treated people in Africa and Asia – probably because they were white and Christian. The Quebec Act saw to that.
In fact, you could say that the French Canadians were the best treated minority in the British Empire.
DeWolf 20:57 on 2023-06-22 Permalink
It’s partly because the St. Lawrence river valley was so thorough settled that they didn’t have too much of a choice. Acadia was more thinly populated and so the British deported the Acadians, and 50 percent of them died as a result. It was an outright genocide.
South Africa has some commonalities with Canada. The Dutch colonized the Cape and some adjacent areas, they became Boers over several hundred years, and when they were conquered by the British, they were marginalized even as the various Indigenous groups were marginalized and persecuted even more brutally.
DeWolf 21:00 on 2023-06-22 Permalink
This is not to excuse the colonialism of the French or Dutch or any other European power. It’s just an attempt to explain how people who were colonizers, and whose ancestors were then colonized by another imperial power, can feel a sense of grievance.
Meezly 11:34 on 2023-06-23 Permalink
“I still can’t quite get it why the English were evil invaders but the French were lovely.”
But isn’t that how history works? Those in power can write (or rewrite) their history to suit their own agenda.
IMHO I feel that the sense of grievance from the French was not merely about being subjugated by the English, but having lost the fight to be the imperial power in Canada. Considering how the French colonized Algeria, Indochina, etc. their methods would not have been any more lovely than the English!
That’s why it’s so infuriating when Quebec politicians say that systemic racism can’t happen here because French Canadians were once subjugated by the English. It’s the same argument about how the Irish can’t be racist, but playing the victim card has been used to suppress and deny racism in Ireland.
It’s really about keeping the status quo and holding onto the old power structures.
Ian 18:14 on 2023-06-23 Permalink
While I enjoyed DeWolf’s retelling of QC colonial history, the one thing that has always perplexed me is how the Acadians are looked down on in the ROQ – and even more so with NB Acadians …
Overall though I’m more inclined to agree with Meezly, race pride is always about power.