Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

Although it was already a major power in the fifteenth century, France was not a player in the earliest voyages of exploration. Still, there was plenty of North America left to be claimed in the next few generations. Jacques Cartier, sent by the French king to discover a north-west passage to the East, discovered instead the St Lawrence river and explored it as far as Quebec and Montreal (then Stadacona and Hochelaga) in 1534-6. [144]Later, fur traders and missionaries enlarged the part of the new continent that could be claimed for France: in 1603-15 Samuel de Champlain entered the Great Lakes; in 1673 Père Marquette and Louis Jolliet broke out southward into the Mississippi; and in 1678-82 Robert Cavelier de la Salle charted its whole course down to the Gulf of Mexico. France had thereby outflanked and surrounded the English colonies, which were being strung out along the Atlantic coast.

It was an unstable situation, however, since the English colonists heavily outnumbered the French, perhaps by forty to one in the mid-seventeenth century: they would still be twenty times more numerous a century later, when the French settler population had multiplied by ten. [613]Arguably, the expulsion of French Protestants in the Reformation and afterward was at the root of this imbalance between the two powers. As we have seen, their departure had seeded the spread of French, as the language of culture and high thinking, into central and eastern Europe. But by the same token, France had lost the mass of its population of willing emigrants, the kind of puritans, adventurers and Utopians who formed the backbone of Britain’s Thirteen Colonies. Nouvelle-France boasted a meteoric birth rate among those who came and stayed, but never became a magnet to immigrants equal to New England.

In the same period, largely with Richelieu in charge at home, French settlements were also being planted on the Caribbean islands of Martinique (1625) and Guadeloupe (1635), and at Cayenne on the mainland in Guyana (1637); on the other side of the Atlantic, the French claimed Senegal on the west African coast (1639) and Madagascar in the east (1643). Farthest of all, a French Jesuit missionary, Alexandre de Rhodes, made it in 1624 to southeastern Indo-China, then known as Cochin-China. [145]

However, the only parts of the extensive territories claimed for France which received significant settlement by French-speaking colonists were the St Lawrence river area, known as la Nouvelle-France (New France), and Nova Scotia, then known as l’Acadie (originally la Cadie , derived from some Indian name). [146]Here the original French policy had been to hope that ‘our sons will marry your daughters and we will become one people’. Unfortunately, this did not happen in a way that suited the French, since the early tendency was for arriving male settlers to go native, and bring up their children in their sauvage mothers’ languages. In 1666, after three generations of French colonial presence, Louis XIV’s minister for the colonies, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, complained that Frenchmen who wanted to trade—mostly for furs— still had to communicate in the natives’ language. [614]

Part of the solution to this was to send out well-brought-up French girls, filles à marier , to marry the settlers and create French-speaking homes. Among them were the famous filles du Roy , ‘king’s daughters’, mostly orphans from bourgeois families, whose travel and subsistence costs—and in some cases dowries—were borne by the Treasury. Some nine hundred of them were sent out between 1665 and 1673, to boost the population (3215 according to the census of 1665), and improve the sex ratio (2:1 male to female). Although the intendant of the colony, Jean Talon, told Colbert that he would have preferred village girls, ready to work like men, rather than these delicate young ladies, they seem to have been a good investment. The population of Nouvelle-France reached 20,000 in 1713 and 55,000 in 1755. The fertility rate averaged a whopping 7.8 children per woman. Although only some 40 per cent of the immigrants spoke un bon français , over half of the women did, and the variant dialects of the immigrant families seem to have been levelled out in the seventeenth century, in favour of standard French learnt at Mother’s knee. In 1698 the Controller-General of the navy remarked: ‘People speak here perfectly well without any bad accent. Although there is a mixture from almost all the provinces in France, none of their dialects can be distinguished in the Canadian provinces.’ [615]

And the marquess of Montcalm, the French general who was to lose the city of Quebec to the British in 1759, had previously admitted: ‘The Canadian peasants speak French very well.’ [616]

The Treaty of Paris in 1763 spelt the end of France’s empire in North America. American France yielded to the overpowering numbers in the British colonies, even if the coup de gršce had come from the dominance of the British navy in the Atlantic [147]The French defeat did not, however, put paid to French-speaking in the north-east. Even though Canada soon became the destination for large numbers of English-speaking loyalists from the Thirteen Colonies, unwilling to live in an independent United States of America, [148]the French were still vastly preponderant, approximately by a factor of seven, in the settled areas of what was still a territory with a small European population. It is estimated that in 1791 there were 140,000 francophones and 20,000 anglophones in Canada. [149]The French have since put up a redoubtable defence of their community’s existence, polarised around the Catholic Church, French civil law and the continued use of their language.

They were, however, increasingly joined by immigrants who either spoke or adopted English, and certainly by the midpoint of the next century, when the European population was about 1.5 million, French speakers had ceased to be the majority. And the population movements had not yet peaked. Another 2.3 million were admitted between 1821 and 1910. [617]In 1998 the country’s population had reached 30.5 million, of whom 6.7 million or 22 per cent spoke French natively, as against 60 per cent brought up to speak English.

Despite this disappointing finale, Canada is the main success story of French as transplanted overseas. But it is certainly not the only story. France had also had a major piece of the action in the sugar business, and throughout the seventeenth century the most populous francophone colony had in fact been the French Antilles, Guadeloupe and Martinique: by 1700 they were home to 25,000 French and 70,000 black slaves. [618]Their descendants are still there, with a population now of just over a million, all speaking French, or French creoles. Haiti too, becoming French in 1697 through the action of pirates ( filibusters ), became prosperous in the same business, although the French owners’ term was ended violently by slave revolution in 1804. There too French and French creoles are spoken to this day, by some 7.5 million. The other colonies of the French Crown were either trading posts in highly populated regions (Chandernagore, Yanam, Pondicherry, Kāraikāl and Mahe along the coast of India), way-stations on naval routes to India (Senegal, the islands of Réunion and Mauritius, and (briefly) Madagascar) or the rumps of larger-scale conquests that never worked out (French Guiana). [150]None of them ever attracted major settlement from Europe, though almost all of them host small francophone communities to this day, notably 40,000 still in Pondicherry; and 160,500 can speak French in Réunion, amid half a million (90 per cent of the island’s population) who speak a French creole. [619]

The French Revolution ushered in a new phase of imperial wars, but with the exception of Napoleon’s somewhat romantic foray to Egypt in 1798-9, they were all waged within the continent of Europe; and they all amounted, in less than a generation, to nothing at all. Ironically, the great claims to fame of France in the early modern period, the Revolution and the reign of Napoleon, contributed little if anything to the spread of the French language, even if they sent French-speaking soldiers all over Europe.