French Canada

As the threat of another Quebec referendum on independence looms, this book becomes important for every Canadian — especially as language remains both a barrier and a bridge in our divided country Canada’s language policy is the only connection between two largely unilingual societies — English-speaking Canada and French-speaking Quebec. The country’s success in staying together depends on making it work. How well is it working? Graham Fraser, an English-speaking Canadian who became bilingual, decided to take a clear-eyed look at the situation. The results are startling — a blend of good news and bad. The Official Languages Act was passed with the support of every party in the House way back in 1969 — yet Canada’s language policy is still a controversial, red-hot topic; jobs, ideals, and ultimately the country are at stake. And the myth that the whole thing was always a plot to get francophones top jobs continues to live. Graham Fraser looks at the intentions, the hopes, the fears, the record, the myths, and the unexpected reality of a country that is still grappling with the language challenge that has shaped its history. He finds a paradox: after letting Quebec lawyers run the country for three decades, Canadians keep hoping the next generation will be bilingual — but forty years after learning that the country faced a language crisis, Canada’s universities still treat French as a foreign language. He describes the impact of language on politics and government (not to mention social life in Montreal and Ottawa) in a hard-hitting book that will be discussed everywhere, including the headlines in both languages.

On one level, Peter Moogk's latest book, La Nouvelle France: The Making of French Canada—A Cultural History, is a candid exploration of the troubled historical relationship that exists between the inhabitants of French- and English- speaking Canada. At the same time, it is a long- overdue study of the colonial social institutions, values, and experiences that shaped modern French Canada. Moogk draws on a rich body of evidence—literature; statistical studies; government, legal, and private documents in France, Britain, and North America— and traces the roots of the Anglo-French cultural struggle to the seventeenth century. In so doing, he discovered a New France vastly different from the one portrayed in popular mythology. French relations with Native Peoples, for instance, were strained. The colony of New France was really no single entity, but rather a chain of loosely aligned outposts stretching from Newfoundland in the east to the Illinois Country in the west. Moogk also found that many early immigrants to New France were reluctant exiles from their homeland and that a high percentage returned to Europe. Those who stayed, the Acadians and Canadians, were politically conservative and retained Old Régime values: feudal social hierarchies remained strong; one's individualism tended to be familial, not personal; Roman Catholicism molded attitudes and was as important as language in defining Acadian and Canadian identities. It was, Moogk concludes, the pre-French Revolution Bourbon monarchy and its institutions that shaped modern French Canada, in particular the Province of Quebec, and set its people apart from the rest of the nation.

French-Canadian explorers, traders, and soldiers feature prominently in this country's storytelling, but little has been written about their female counterparts. In Along a River, award-winning historian Jan Noel shines a light on the lives of remarkable French-Canadian women — immigrant brides, nuns, tradeswomen, farmers, governors' wives, and even smugglers — during the period between the settlement of the St. Lawrence Lowlands and the Victorian era. Along a River builds the case that inside the cabins that stretched for miles along the shoreline, most early French-Canadian women retained old fashioned forms of economic production and customary rights over land ownership. Noel demonstrates how this continued even as the world changed around them by comparing their lives to those of their contemporaries in France, England, and New England.Exploring how the daughters and granddaughters of the filles du roi adapted to their terrain, turned their hands to trade, and even acquired surprising influence at the French court, Along a River is an innovative and engagingly written history.

At Confederation, most French Canadians felt their homeland was Quebec; they supported the new arrangement because it separated Quebec from Ontario, creating an autonomous French-Canadian province loosely associated with the others. Unaware of other French-Canadian groups in British North America, Quebeckers were not concerned with minority rights, but only with the French character and autonomy of their own province. However, political and economic circumstances necessitated the granting of wide linguistic and educational rights to Quebec's Anglo-Protestant minority. Growing bitterness over the prominence of this minority in what was expected to be a French province was amplified by the discovery that French-Catholic minorities were losing their rights in other parts of Canada. Resentment at the fact that Quebec had to grant minority rights, while other provinces did not, intensified French-Quebec nationalism. At the same time, French Quebeckers felt sympathy for their co-religionists and co-nationalists in other provinces and tried to defend them against assimilating pressures. Fighting for the rights of Acadians, Franco-Ontarians, or western Métis eventually led Quebeckers to a new concern for the French fact in other provinces. Professor Silver concludes that by 1900 Quebeckers had become thoroughly committed to French-Canadian rights not just in Quebec but throughout Canada, and had become convinced that the very existence of Confederation was based on such rights. Originally published in 1982, this new edition includes a new preface and conclusion that reflect upon Quebec's continuing struggle to define its place within Canada and the world.

Although French-speaking Canadians have largely been Roman Catholic, there has been a small, but significant Protestant minority among them. This collection of essays brings together the work of leading scholars in the field to bring historical perspective on this often misunderstood or forgotten religious minority.

Learn Canadian French and speak with a beautiful aged accent of colonial France that has stood the test of time, exceeding 400 years in North America. This book provides countless expressions, idioms, and typical French Canadian words, explaining the differences between Parisian French and Canadian French, with many grammar tables. This book also contains one chapter featuring French-Canadian medium to high impact coarse language. This second edition also includes downloadable audio files, provided in the link inside the book. Once downloaded, you may listen to various chapters and practice your Canadian French oral spoken skills by repeating the sentences and pronunciations. You will also find that the words include English transliteral pronunciations of the French words, which helps the reader tremendously in understanding the French-Canadian accent.