Strangers in the House. Candace Savage
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I say, “that’s exactly it. Conquest. French Canada was conquered. And I get it that being under the boot of an enemy causes damage, even if the boot was, I don’t know, the satin slippers that English gentlemen wore in the eighteenth century.”
“And you’re angry with Clara Blondin because—?”
I pick up my fork and put it down, reach for my glass of wine.
“It’s just that I’ve been reading about what happened after the Conquest, trying to see the big picture. What would make a person refuse to speak, or even be spoken to, in her own language?”
Another nod of agreement. “That’s pretty extreme.”
“I’ve been trying to convince myself that it goes way back, that the despair set in a long time ago. But, you know, lots of people never gave up. Think of the people who started my choir, for example. I want Clara to have been like them.”
The choir in question, my choir, is Le Choeur des plaines, a community choral society dedicated to performing “les plus belles chansons du répertoire francophone,” the most beautiful songs of the French repertoire. Choeur translates as choir, but it happily invites confusion with coeur, or heart, and the ensemble is proud to identify itself as an important element in maintaining Francophone culture in this English-speaking stronghold. Curiously, I first learned about it thanks to a performance of a musical masterpiece that comes to us direct from eighteenth-century Britain, from the very decades when the English military was making mincemeat of the French. On this particular evening, however, an amateur choir was making mincemeat of the Messiah. Seldom had the yoke of Handel’s allegros been less easy, or the footfall of his trills and runs more burthensome. In fact, the whole thing quickly became so unbearable that Keith and I walked out at intermission, something unheard of for us, but not before we’d taken note of the tenor soloist, whose clear, pure voice had provided the evening’s one saving grace. The program identified him as the conductor of Le Choeur des plaines.
Fortunately for me, Le Choeur turned out to take an open-door approach to new admissions. “I’ve never known us to turn anyone away,” a voice on the other end of the line told me when I called to inquire. And so ever since, I’ve spent one happy evening a week in the music room of l’École canadienne-française, a few blocks from my house, practicing les plus belles chansons of the likes of Gabriel Fauré, Claude-Michel Schönberg, and Gilles Vigneault.
“The people who started the choir treasured their language. Napoléon and Clara, their ancestors had spoken French forever. Then pfft, they throw it away as if it doesn’t matter.”
Keith raises an eyebrow and fixes me with a skeptical gaze. “When exactly was the choir founded? Twenty-five years ago, isn’t that what you said? And when did the Blondins live here? The 1920s versus the 1990s: you’re talking about two different worlds.”
He has a point. I shrug in acquiescence.
“You wouldn’t do that for no reason,” he continues, “give up your mother tongue. Maybe your Blondins were just trying to survive. I don’t think you’ve drilled down far enough to find the answers yet.”
Right, then. It’s time to keep opening cupboard doors and see what tumbles out.
THE ENTENTE BETWEEN the government and les Canadiens would turn out to be short-lived. When the Thirteen Colonies declared their independence from Great Britain in 1776, they upended the game board of colonial power, sending pawns and rooks flying in every direction. Among the players displaced by this crisis were thousands of American colonists who were opposed to independence and who fled en masse. Many of these ultra-conservative, ultra-monarchist, ultra-Protestant refugees resettled in the British colony of Nova Scotia, but about six thousand of them ended up near present-day Kingston, then within the boundaries of the Province of Québec. A decade or so later, my own Sherk ancestors (pacifists during the revolutionary war but pro-British nonetheless) would pull up stakes in Pennsylvania and make the trek north, adding to the incursion of English-speaking settlers.
Shaken by what they saw as the dismembering of Empire, the loyalists arrived in Québec with the intention, as one of their leaders put it, of creating “a perfect image and exact copy of the British government and constitution.”6 Imagine their distress when they found themselves instead governed by French civil law, impeded by a feudal system of land tenure, and surrounded by people who submitted to the Pope and spoke “foreign.” Worse yet, they were ruled by an appointed despot, based in distant Montréal, without any sign of government by and for the people. Although a tiny minority of the population, the newcomers were mighty in their influence, and London was quick to respond to their demands. In 1791, the sprawling colony of Québec was divided into two side-by-side jurisdictions: Upper Canada to the west, with British civil law and freehold land tenure, and Lower Canada to the east, still a homeland for the French.
Although the loyalist newcomers were satisfied with this arrangement, the commercial class of Montréal, by now in complete control of the economy, were indignant about what they saw as more weak-kneed pandering to the French. In their view, it was high time for the “old settlers,” the Francophones, to recognize the superiority of British institutions, give up their alien ways, and become ordinary British subjects. Faced with this hostility, the habitants of Québec rallied to defend their distinctive heritage. “There are 120,000 of us,” they dared to remind the king. As a majority of the population, they felt their interests should “carry the balance.”7 Still smarting from the loss of its Thirteen Colonies, rattled by rising sectarian tensions in Ireland, and freshly alarmed by news of the revolution in France, London decided to take the hint. Best to keep on the right side of as many people as you could.
But behind that cloak of smiling benevolence, there now lurked a sneer. The new constitution granted each of the Canadas a democratically elected assembly but was careful to deny those bodies any real power. Authority was vested in officials appointed by the Crown and answerable only to the colonial office in London. This setup left the administration open to cronyism, self-aggrandizement, and backroom shenanigans, tactics that fit neatly within the skill set of the colonial elite. Nepotism and corruption were endemic. Decisions were made in secret and imposed without consideration for the harm they caused. Meanwhile, the people’s elected representatives could do little but mutter, obstruct, and fume. And so the tension continued to mount through the 1810s, the 1820s, the 1830s.
The final insult—the spark that would set off a violent explosion—came midway through that decade. In 1834, the legislature of Lower Canada confronted the British government with ninety-two demands for reform. Top of the list, not surprisingly, was a call for democracy and an end to the excesses of the governing clique. In this, they spoke in unison with their neighbors in Upper Canada, who were advancing similar claims. But the French-speaking colonists also had grievances that were uniquely their own.
Item: The British Parliament had passed a law to reform the seigneurial system in Lower Canada that was so badly worded it threatened to deprive farmers of their land.
Item: The British government had granted vast tracts of the province to London-based colonization companies and other speculators, thereby depriving the French-speaking residents an opportunity to expand. What was to become of the ever-increasing population of sons and daughters?
Item: The colonial administrators systematically discriminated against people of French ancestry. Why else, in a jurisdiction where French speakers still held a considerable majority, would Anglophones hold two-thirds of government jobs, including all those with the greatest responsibility and the highest pay?
Three years would pass without an official response from London. When the answer finally came, in the spring of 1837, it was a slap in the face. Apart from a small concession (an offer to reconsider the land-tenure issues), the British government either ignored the requests entirely or dismissed them with a single haughty word: any such change would be “inadvisable.” As tempers rose in the months that followed—there was an armed clash between English loyalists and Francophone