Franco-American literature is a body of work, in English and French, by French-Canadian American authors "who were born in New England...born in Canada, [and] spent most of their lives in New England...[, or] those who only traveled through New England and wrote of their experiences." "Franco-American literature" however, as a term, has also been characterized by novels written by the Great Lakes Region diaspora as well. In a broader sense the term is also used as a handle for those writers of Cajun or French descent, outside of the Quebec émigré literary tradition.
Written in English as well as examples of Quebec and New England French, Franco-American literature and its associated literary and cultural movement represent an extension of La Survivance and Quebec literature among the French-Canadian diaspora in the New England region of the United States. In this literature, folklore, societal values and expressions of otherism are prominent motifs. While some literary figures, especially those of the Late 20th century Revival, sought to capture their own way of life within Yankee society, many earlier novels placed emphasis on the responsibilities of industry and craft, as well as fictionalized figures within Franco-American society.
History Exiles and the Great Migration
The earliest forms of Franco-American literature began with its journalists. In 1839 Ludger Duvernay published Le Patriote Canadien, as a political exile in Burlington, Vermont, to support the Patriote movement in neighboring Canada. However, it would not be until the height of the Great Migration that one such journalist, Honoré Beaugrand would publish what is widely considered the first Franco-American novel, Jeanne la Fileuse ("Jeanne the Spinner"). After stints as a journalist in St. Louis and New Orleans, Beaugrand founded La République in Fall River in 1875, by that time already a prominent figure in the French-Canadian cultural societies of that city. Sometime around 1877 he published Jeanne la Fileuse ("Jeanne the Spinner") as a serial novel (or feuilleton) in his weekly paper. Even among many other accomplishments, including writing down the French-Canadian folk legend of La Chasse-galerie, and his Montréal mayoralty, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography has described Beaugrand's novel as "his most important work". A social novel, it documented, in a secular tone, the "Grand Migration" from Quebec and living conditions of those who lived in the industrial cities of New England, depicting assimilation through its protagonist family attaining a certain affluence in the States. In many ways the novel was also a censure of the economics of Canada, whose government Beaugrand regarded as apathetic to the causes of agriculture and industry, unnecessarily creating conditions which led to the migration to New England. The novel enjoyed success on both sides of the border and was republished as a book by Beaugrand in 1878 before being reprinted serially in Montreal's La Patrie in 1880, seeing another reprint as a book by their own press in 1888.
Another of the earliest examples of Franco-American writing that meets the definition as American in subject, but Canadian in origins, was Un revenant, épisode de la Guerre de Sécession aux États-Unis ("A Ghost, Episode of the War of Secession in the United States"). Although unremarkable in its writing style, Rémi Tremblay's autobiographical novel represents a unique account of the American Civil War as seen through the eyes of a Québécois foreign national, enlisted in the Union Army.
Feuilleton era
By the end of the 19th century, French-language newspapers abounded in New England, and in their pages works of fiction were published in installments as serial novels. The term feuilleton, though more broadly used to describe a woman's section or supplementary column in French-language newspapers with non-political news, became synonymous with this type of fiction in the context Franco-American newspapers.
What began with the first publishing of Jeanne de Fileuse soon became a trend as other novels (romans) would be published as feuilletons, in installments over weeks or months, with the most popular reprinted as books, oftentimes by the same press. One of the first woman to publish a feuilleton in the genre was Anna-Marie Duval-Thibault, whose novel Les Deux Testaments was structured as a French soap opera, but sought to capture the customs of the New World. Duval-Thibault would publish the feuilleton in her husband's Fall River newspaper L'Independente in 1888, noting in the paper's preface that the novel was inspired by a desire to contrast "the pens of French writers [which] offer us a picture of different customs unknown to most of our readers. When we are told about the great Parisian world, the life of the nobles or the tricksters of European capitals, we can barely grasp all the nuances and understand all the motives of these artificial beings. In Les Deux Testaments, on the contrary, we only see scenes from Canadian life; it is with us, with all that this work contains meaning and memories". While this passage mentions "Canadian life" this, in part, refers to the diaspora in the United States, as Duvay-Thibault herself had lived outside Canada since the age of 3.
Among the best known of these early writers was one Louis Tesson, himself a newspaper publisher, who would go on to write three novels Le Sang Noir ("The Black Blood"), Une idylle acadienne ("An Acadian Idyll"), and Un Roman Sans Amour ("A Novel Without Love") in the 1890s, published in Lewiston, Maine's Le Messager. More famously Tesson would develop methods to broaden his audience by educating the community's illiterate using, le methode Tesson, a phonetic approach.
Interwar period
The era between the two World Wars was notable not solely for its literature but also in its criticism thereof. With the support of the Université Laval, in 1946 Sister Mary-Carmel Therriault wrote the first comprehensive history of Franco-American literature, as well as related pieces including the history of New England French, its institutions, journals, publishers, poetry, biographies and folklore. Therriault's account however was not one of praise, and her history regarded the genre as a nascent literary movement by that time— an offshoot of Quebec literature lacking any solitary masterpiece.
By this time, there was increasing support for this diaspora community from those in Quebec. Although some had returned by then, there was an increasing representation both of Franco-American leaders of the church, and the press, in the bodies of Canadian Francophone institutions. One of the most prominent early examples was the Second Congress on the French Language in Canada, which included a committee for measures that could be taken to preserve La Survivance and the bilingual institutions of New England French.
At the end of the Second Congress, there was a proposal to create 12 regional committees in New England, to coordinate the best way to keep the culture alive, and maintain exchange with Quebec to maintain the French language and La Survivance as Franco-Americans. This effort was documented in a large tome called La Croisade Franco-Américaine ("The Franco-American Crusade") published at the end of the Congress with numerous proposals, poetry, and histories of the French-Canadians who had long embraced the identity of New Englanders.
One of the best known novels of the period would Canuck by Camille Lessard-Bissonette. Written in feuilleton form in 1936 for the French newspaper Le Messager of Lewiston, Maine and set in Lowell, Massachusetts, at the time of its publication, its author managed the paper's women's section "Chez-Nous". The feuilleton was subsequently published as a single volume and was so successful that a newspaper in Lawrence, Massachusetts, reprinted it the following year. The novel has been described as having a fundamental historical, sociological, and literary value.
Another example of the period that merited mention was Sanitorium by Dr. Paul Dufault. A fictionalized account of his own experiences, the novel, set in Rutland State Sanatorium in Rutland, Massachusetts, was described in Montreal's Le Jour as a "roman médical" (medical novel), the first of its kind to come out of the Franco-American diaspora, which would later find echos in this theme in novels like Robert Cormier's I Am the Cheese. However, in contrast to psychological institutions, Sanatorium finds protagonists in patients in a tuberculosis ward, a subject that its author knew well as a medical doctor, advocate, and former patient of the disease himself. Working at the first state sanatorium established solely for the purpose of treating the disease, and as the only Québécois member of its medical staff, he would write in English for the New England Journal of Medicine, and published the French-language novel at his own expense as a way to draw attention to the scourge both in the States and the Provinces. Besides its subject matter and setting, the novel is also unique in that its protagonist, Dr. Lanoie, in his dialogue, reflects on the issues of social questions in both Quebec and the United States, describing the work of medicine as literally and metaphorically "l'œuvre de reconstruction".
In the years after Canuck, a shift began to take place toward printing novels in English, and indeed even with greater institutional support of French, a period of about 50 years commenced where subsequent novels were written entirely in English. Some exceptions to this, like Sanatorium in 1938, and Les Enfances de Fanny by Louis Dantin, do exist, but both volumes represented a departure from émigré literature. Both works were printed in Quebec and intended for audiences in the provinces and in the states. Dantin himself, though identified with collections of Franco-American poetry, famously regarded himself as a Quebec literary figure, and rejected the idea of Franco-American literature as a genre. This novel, posthumously published in 1951, was thoroughly American in subject, reflecting his own social and cultural integration living in Boston even as he continued to publish out of Canadian printing houses. His audience too was originally American in scope, as he had initially planned to publish the novel as a feuilleton in a Boston Haitian-American newspaper, following the establishment of a committee of Francophones between Canada and the island nation. Dantin however saw the novel as too controversial for the time, as its subject matter concerned a black woman from the South who settles in Roxbury and falls in love with a young Frenchman who she works for as a housekeeper. Dantin would also include a number of references to specific black nationalist movements which existed at the time, however felt the interracial romance was too controversial for either Haitian or a Franco-American audiences at that time. The book fits in a uniquely American novel written thematically, written in the French language by an author who considered himself an outsider to America's Yankee society.