The precariousness of the French fact in Canada and North America
The main reason Québec
governments have taken steps to protect the French language in Québec is their
observation that the French language, a minority language in North America and
Canada, is too precarious to develop without state support. Although
francophones are the majority in Québec, their language's power of attraction
is weak. English, the continent's usual and predominant language, the language
of both commerce and culture, vies constantly with French to be the language of
business and communications. The French fact in North America is precarious for
several reasons: (1) the Conquest of 1760, which put an end to French
colonization in North America; (2) the progressive assimilation of francophones
outside Québec and the inadequacy of language rights; and (3) the delicate
balance of the French fact in Québec because of the lower birthrate and the
contribution that immigration continues to make to Québec's demography.
Unforeseen consequences of the Conquest of 1760
It was decisive for the future of
French in North America and probably for the French language in general when
the colony of New France fell into the hands of the English in 1760. The final
ceding of New France to the British crown in 1763 put an end to a century and a
half of French settlement in North America. Sixty thousand French colonists
suddenly found themselves a conquered people, subject to a foreign language,
religion and legal system. After the Seven Years' War, it could have been
expected that New France would suffer the same fate as the former Dutch and
Swedish colonies on the American east coast. As historian Michel Brunet noted:
The evolution of this new British colony, it was felt, would be similar to that of New York, first settled by Dutch colonists, and of New Jersey, which had been founded by Swedes. In less than a century, these two distinctive collectivities had melted away. The British conquerors of the St. Lawrence Valley sincerely believed that a similar fate awaited the Canadiens.
England quickly exercised its
rights as a conqueror. British subjects came by the thousands to settle in the
new colony called the Province of Quebec. In 1791, London divided the colony in
two, reserving one part, Upper Canada, for some 10 000 of its colonists, and
the other, Lower Canada, for the 150 000 Canadiens living in the St. Lawrence
Valley. Although they were granted a legislative assembly with limited powers,
the Canadiens were still in a position of economic and social inferiority. The
predictions of foreign observers on their chances for cultural survival were
not very optimistic. Benjamin Franklin predicted:
In less than a half century, because of the mass of Englishmen who are settling around and among them, they are destined to mix with and become part of our people in both language and mores…
Alexis de Tocqueville, the
acclaimed author of Democracy in America, visited Lower Canada in 1831. He
wrote:
But it is easy to see that the French are a conquered people. The rich classes belong for the most part to the English race. While French is spoken almost universally, most newspapers, signs and even French merchants' signs are in English. Commercial enterprises are nearly all in (English) hands.
In 1837-1838, ideas about
democracy and a republican government stirred Lower Canada. The Patriote party
of Louis-Joseph Papineau headed a protest movement against the hold London had
on its colony's affairs. London's refusal to bring in a truly constitutional
and responsible government gave rise to an insurrection in the colony that was
quickly put down. London concluded from this popular uprising that it should
force the assimilation of Canadiens of French extraction by uniting the two
colonies. In 1840, it decreed this union and imposed equality of representation
for the former Upper Canada and the former Lower Canada in the single
parliament, even though the Canadiens, who numbered 650 000, were the majority,
Upper Canada's population being 450 000. Because of massive immigration by
colonists from the British Isles, the population of British extraction grew
larger than that of the French Canadians. When the Dominion of Canada was
created in 1867, French Canadians comprised only one-third of the population of
the new quasi federation.
By obtaining a legislative
assembly, a province and local autonomy in 1867, French Canadians recovered the
little collective freedom they had had before 1840. A minority condemned to
assimilation, they thought they had acceded to the status of a founding people,
equal as of right to English Canada. With the confederative pact, this minority
people hoped to preserve their language, their culture and their civil
institutions.
Thanks to a birthrate
unparalleled in the West, the population of French extraction managed to
increase in the 19th century. History belied Franklin's and de Tocqueville's
pessimistic predictions. Between 1881 and 1961, the population of French origin
maintained its weight - about 30% - in the country's total population, despite
the creation and addition of new provinces and the colonization of new
territories by immigrants from around the world.
The proportion was maintained,
but at a price. The federal government pursued a policy of massive immigration
at the turn of the century in order to develop the country's economy and settle
its vast territories. Between 1896 and 1914, Canada welcomed more than three
million British, American and Eastern European immigrants. A large number
settled in Western Canada. Many poor and unschooled French Canadians may have
wanted to emigrate there, too. But with little encouragement to locate in the
West, about 450 000 crossed south over the Canadian-American border between
1890 and 1920.
The progressive assimilation of francophones outside Québec and deficiencies in language rights
French seems destined for
marginal status outside Québec. It took a long time for francophone minorities
to get recognition for their situation as imperilled minorities and to get the
rather lukewarm support of governments. Having long been deprived of public
services in French, they had to integrate into milieus where French met with
indifference, even hostility.
Figures on the rapid assimilation
of these minorities speak for themselves. In 1931, 7.2% of the population of
Canada outside Québec had French as a mother-tongue. This proportion dropped to
less than 5.0% in 1991. If you look at language of use rather than
mother-tongue, the proportion of francophones outside Québec declined from 4.4%
to 3.2% between 1971 and 1991. Rapid assimilation seems to be running unabated
in some provinces. The proportion of Ontarians for whom French is the usual
language fell from 4.6% to 3.2% between 1971 and 1991. In Manitoba, it slipped
from 4.0% to 2.4% in the same period, and in Saskatchewan, from 1.7% to 0.7%.
Only the Acadians of New Brunswick seem to be resisting assimilation, their
share in the province's population having stabilized at about 31%.
This assimilation reveals the
inadequacy of the legal and constitutional provisions introduced to protect
francophone minorities since 1867. Manitoba declared itself a unilingual
English province in 1890, even though its constituent law had prescribed
bilingualism for legislation and the courts and guaranteed Franco-Catholic
schools provincial government support. In 1896, the Manitoba government had to
concede to its francophone minority the right to instruction in French; this
was withdrawn in 1916, however, and French disappeared from Manitoba schools.
In 1897, Ontario made English the only language of the justice system. In 1913,
it severely reduced the teaching of French in Catholic confessional schools
(Regulation 17), to the great displeasure of Franco-Ontarians who saw this as
the sign of a deliberate policy of assimilation.
Manitoba and Ontario have since
restored some of their minorities' rights, but only several decades after the
introduction of linguistic unification measures. It may have been too late. As
William Tetley, former Liberal minister in the Bourassa government and McGill
University law professor, observed in 1982, the Constitution of Canada and the
courts have done little to protect the language and culture of francophone
minorities:
It is clear that the Canadian Constitution has done very little to promote or protect Canada's two great languages which should have been - and should be today - a great national asset. The British North America Act, 1867, failed to protect the French language and culture which were violated in such judgements as Ottawa's Separate Schools Trustees v. MacKell or such legislative action as Manitoba's Official Language Act, 1890, and Regulation 17 of Ontario. The Constitution as interpreted by the courts should have provided a high standard of conduct, a spirit of natural justice, and a tradition of fair play. Instead, there was often harshness and no apparent legal recourse. It was only in the 1960's that political action in Quebec, beginning with the Quiet Revolution, brought about change.
The realization that francophone
minorities in Canada are slowly but perhaps inexorably being assimilated has
contributed to making the need to support the French language in Québec more
acute.
How the French language has fared in Québec
Threatened, losing momentum
outside Québec, the French language seems to have had more stability in Québec.
The percentage of Quebecers with French as their mother-tongue remained
constant from 1951 to 1991, decreasing from 82.5% to 80.7% from 1951 to 1971 and
increasing to 82.1% in 1991. In the same period, the percentage of anglophones
decreased from 13.8% to 9.6% and the percentage of allophones - those whose
mother-tongue is neither French nor English - increased from 3.7% to 8.3%.
French as the language of everyday use stayed at the level of 83% of the
population.
If these statistics speak to the
vitality of the French language in Québec, they should not let us forget the
immediate reasons for its precariousness. Québec's demographic weight within
Canada has declined progressively since 1931, from 27.7% to 25.8% in 1986 and
to 25% today. Between 1875 and 1965, Québec's fertility rate was higher than
those of other North American regions. Beginning in the 1960s, however, Quebecers,
setting aside the Catholic Church's support for a high birth rate and espousing
more modern mores, began to produce fewer offspring. The outcome was that their
birth rate became one of the lowest in the Western world. From 1956 to 1961,
French-speaking Québec women had a fertility rate of 4.2 (4.2 births per woman
of childbearing age). The rate dropped to 2.3 for 1966-1971 and then to 1.5 for
1981-1986 before rising to 1.6 in 1990, which is barely enough to replace the
population, the rate of 2.1 being required to ensure replacement. Québec
anglophones also experienced a less dramatic decline in their fertility rate
which is now about on a par with that of francophones. The low fertility rate
worries many Quebecers who fear that Québec's demographic weight is continuing
to decline and that the proportion of francophones in Québec is being eroded.
On top of this is the fear that
immigrants who have settled in Québec in large numbers since the turn of the
century prefer English to French as the language of communication and culture.
The proportion of Quebecers of other than French or British extraction was 1.6%
in 1871 and 8.6% in 1961. As long as their exceptional fertility compensated
for the arrival of immigrants, the francophone majority did not feel
threatened. When their fertility began to decline, however, Québec's linguistic
balance became shaky. This realization was heightened in the 1960s, a time when
immigrants were free to choose their schools and laissez-faire was the practise
for commercial signs. Over 85% of immigrants opted for English-language schools
in the late 1960s. Statistics show that more and more ethnic minorities adopted
English at the expense of French. While 48% of these minorities in Québec were
drawn to English in 1931, the proportion had risen to 69.6% by 1961.
The will the majority of Quebecers have affirmed
since the 1960s to take control of their social, economic and cultural life and
to make French the common and usual language of Quebec
The precariousness of French in
North America does not explain everything. The assimilation of francophones in
Canada must cease being a hidden reality and governments must find a remedy for
it. Although Québec had every reason to be concerned about the future of French
culture and language, Québec governments did not choose to legislate between
1867 and 1964. Laissez-faire took the place of policy. What changed in the
early 1960s was the perception Quebecers had of themselves and what they could
achieve through their political institutions. Since the Conquest of 1760,
French-speaking Quebecers had grown accustomed to living under the
authoritative power of the Catholic Church which attended to preserving the
language and the religion of the faithful. Quebecers saw themselves as
belonging to a French-Canadian, minority and agrarian people, with religion and
tradition serving as a bulwark against assimilation. Beginning in the
nineteenth century, however, they experienced the industrialization of the
economy, and in the early twentieth century, they asserted themselves as an
urban people who, after World War Two, discovered the consumer society and
modernism.
From the 1960s on, Québec society
was swept by the winds of change that transformed it profoundly. Many of the ideas
that had been talked about in Québec for decades were translated into political
reforms. Quebecers urged their provincial government to raise the general level
of education and to provide the population with public services worthy of a
modern society. Many also discovered that although francophones were the
majority in Québec and in Montréal, English was the language of prestige,
business and public signs and that many company doors were closed to them. This
was noted by two government commissions of enquiry on the status of French. In
Montréal, immigrants' enthusiasm for English-language schools aroused fears
among francophones and fueled heated debates. Francophones saw this tendency as
a sign that if nothing was done, French would continue to decline in Montréal,
as Marc V. Levine, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee specialist in urban
issues, wrote:
By the 1960s, the Anglicization of the city's school clientele seemed to portend a Montreal in which the children of immigrants would become Anglophones and French-speakers would ultimately become a demographic minority. Thus, for important segments of the Francophone community, the individual right of parents to choose their children's language of schooling, historically respected in Quebec, now clashed with the 'collective right' of Francophones to survive and prosper as Francophones. In the eyes of Montreal's rising Francophone elite, the new middle class of teachers, journalists and policy professionals who had displaced traditional church elites as the leading force in French-Canadian society, Francophone minorisation in Montreal would spell ultimate doom for a living French language and culture throughout Quebec.
The slogan Maîtres chez nous
(masters in our own house) used by the Liberals of Jean Lesage during the 1964
electoral campaign captures the spirit of the times, enamoured of change and
progress. Opening careers in the public service and in companies to
francophones, expanding the means of the Québec State, giving it the stature
and structure of a modern government, separating Church and State more appropriately,
reforming education, nationalizing electricity, providing Québec with a
universal pension plan and more - that was the program and the ambition of the
governments of the time, driven by the people's impatience and expectations.
Quebecers then discovered a springboard for their economic and social progress
in their democratic institutions, as Premier René Lévesque wrote in 1979:
The central fact of language makes Quebec the one Canadian province out of ten which is radically (in the root sense of the word) different from the rest of Canada. It makes Québec the home base, the homeland, of a compact, very deeply rooted, and rapidly evolving cultural group - there should be no mistake - which sees itself as a national group. Democratic control of provincial institutions in Quebec supplies the Quebec people with a powerful springboard for self-affirmation and self-determination.
This was also a time when
francophones, having long defined themselves by their religious affiliation and
their French origin, began to identify themselves in terms of language and the
Québec territory. Quebecers stopped seeing themselves as a linguistic minority
and learned to think of themselves as a political majority. They also began to
demand protective measures for the French language from Québec and federal
legislators.
Two commissions of enquiry blazed
the trail for the language legislation we now have. In 1963, the federal
government of Lester B. Pearson created a royal commission of enquiry - the
Laurendeau-Dunton Commission - whose mandate was to review the existing "state of bilingualism and biculturalism in Canada"
and to "recommend what steps should be taken to
develop the Canadian Confederation on the basis of an equal partnership between
the two founding races." After holding hearings across the country,
the commissioners concluded in their preliminary report in 1965 that Canada
"without being full conscious of the fact, is
passing through the greatest crisis in its history." The Commission
noted how deeply dissatisfied francophones were, convinced they were victims of
unacceptable inequalities. The Commission's work demonstrated that francophones
were not playing a role in the economy that was proportional to their real
weight. It was shown that Anglo-Canadians of British origin dominated the
economy; they held the most influential and best paid positions. In Québec, the
French Canadian had an income 35% lower than the Anglo-Quebecer. And even
bilingual Quebecers earned less than unilingual Anglo-Quebecers. The commission
consequently recommended that "in the private sector
in Québec, governments and industry adopt the objective that French become the
principal language of work at all levels."
Seeing Québec as a model of an
officially bilingual society, the Commission recommended that French and
English become the official languages of Canada and that New Brunswick and
Ontario make them so at the provincial level. Finally, it proposed the creation
of "bilingual districts" where French
and English would be used currently in educational and municipal institutions
when the minority reached ten percent of the population. In the opinion of
Jean-Claude Corbeil, former linguist at the Office de la langue française:
...you can say that the Commission made it obvious to Quebecers that the rules of the game on the use of French and English in Québec, especially in the work world, had to change and gave rise to the idea of setting by law the conditions for using one or the other language in order to guarantee a better status for the French language in all areas and more favourable conditions for its development, its growth and its advancement.
The provincial Gendron Commission
was created in December 1968 to "enquire into and
report on the status of French as a language of use in Québec." Its
report was tabled in 1972. Like the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission, the Gendron
Commission noted the domination of the English language in Québec's work world.
Numerous inequalities separated francophones from anglophones: francophones
earned less in general, held less important positions, benefited little from
their bilingualism and often worked in English, in a proportion that did not
reflect the high number of francophone workers. The Commission recommended that
a series of measures be adopted to make French the common language of
Quebecers. The commissioners summarized the reasons as follows:
In America, French is a fringe language. As such, its use is restricted even in areas where it is spoken by a majority of the population. This situation requires a clear policy: French can survive and flourish on the North American continent only with a maximum of opportunity and protection throughout Québec; and this can be accomplished only by making it a useful communication instrument for all the people of this area.(...) In the vast economic areas made up of Canada and the United States, French is defenceless in the struggle to impose its utility. This situation is not about to change. Thus in Québec, the vigour and dynamism of French can be ensured only through government support. Failing this, the odds in the match between French and English will remain too one-sided. This government action should aim at establishing French as the common language of Quebecers by making it useful and necessary for everyone in work communication.
The Commission recommended that
the National Assembly declare French the official language of Québec, and
English and French the national languages; that the government take steps to
make French the language of internal communications in Québec in the work place
and the language of communications in the government, professional corporations
and parastatal institutions; that the right of the francophone consumer to be
served in his language be recognized and that commercial signs be regulated in
order to make the use of French mandatory.
Excerpt from Laws and Language in Québec: The Principles and Means of Québec's Language Policy by Marc Chevrier, 1997
