Migration

The great majority of persons of French heritage who immigrated to Canada after 1760 came directly from France, were of French nationality, spoke French, and were Roman Catholics. There were exceptions. The census of 1861 showed that of the 2,389 persons born in France who lived in Ontario, most came from eastern France (Alsace and Lorraine) and were Germanic-speaking. Some French farmers who had departed from the Finistère and Morbihan regions of Brittany in the late nineteenth century undoubtedly spoke Breton as their mother tongue. Among French immigrants to Canada small numbers came from French colonies or overseas departments such as Algeria, Morocco, and the former Indochina. After World War II, immigrants from France included a few Protestants and even some Jews.

Few French could be considered exiles or refugees, with the exception of early arrivals from Great Britain who had fled the terror of the French Revolution. Many of the two thousand religious who came to Quebec in the first years of the twentieth century considered themselves to be victims of religious persecution, yet they had not been physically expelled from France and their lives had not been threatened. A handful of French who immigrated to Canada after World War II had collaborated with the Vichy regime established after the fall of France in June 1940.

No systematic study has been done on the regional origins of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French emigrants bound for Canada. Certainly, Canadian and Quebec officials who sought colonists for the plains of western Canada and for the newly opened regions of Quebec directed their appeal to the inhabitants of Normandy and Brittany who, they thought, would be capable of adjusting to the rigours of Canadian winters. Donatien Frémont’s study of two French colonies in Manitoba, Sainte-Rose du Lac and Grande Clairière, shows that Brittany, particularly the area near Rennes, furnished the largest contingent of immigrants; the others came largely from Lorraine, Normandy and Savoy. The members of women’s religious congregations who emigrated to Canada after 1900 came particularly from communities in western and southeastern France. Of the 221 brothers belonging to the Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes who reached Quebec between 1904 and 1908, fully 154 came from Besançon, on the edge of the Jura.

Immigrants arriving after 1945 seem to have more varied origins. Although many still came from northwestern France, others had lived in Paris, or in the regions near Bordeaux or Marseilles where the Canadian government finally opened immigration offices in 1965. The bureau at Marseilles undoubtedly received many inquiries from persons who had returned to France after living in North Africa.

In the decades following the British conquest of 1760, few French immigrants came to Canada. Until Napoleon’s fall in 1815, Britain and France were frequently at war. France did not encourage emigration and Britain did not want French immigrants to settle in a colony whose largely French population it often viewed as a threat.

One Canadian institution, the Roman Catholic Church, looked to the immigration of priests from France as a solution to its human resources problem. Although Quebec’s population more than doubled to 160,000 in the thirty years following the conquest, the number of priests remained constant, at about 140. Yet London forbade the Canadian clergy to recruit in France. Indeed, only two French ecclesiastics were admitted to Quebec in this period.

The French Revolution offered the Canadian Church new possibilities as nearly 8,000 French priests fled across the Channel to England. London, interested in reducing the number of émigrés on British soil, now agreed that some could come to Canada. Only about fifty did, and these were immediately placed in teaching positions in the colleges at Quebec City, Montreal, and Nicolet as well as in the active ministry. In Canada, colonial administrators feared that the entry of large numbers of French priests would diminish the feeling of dependence of the Canadian clergy on the British government. Moreover, many French clergy in England clearly feared being deported to Canada. One exiled priest wrote: “It was a harsh extremity to go and live in Canada to avoid dying of hunger in England.” Nor did French bishops, hopeful that conditions would eventually improve in France, wish to encourage the departure overseas of their clergy.

The migration to Canada of French religious, women and men, became more important after 1840. Bishop Ignace Bourget of Montreal went to France in 1841 to recruit personnel for parishes, missions, and schools. At a time of religious revival in France, such personnel was available and, over the next decade, five communities of women opened houses in Quebec. Among male communities, the Jesuits and the Oblates responded to Bourget’s appeal. This was not a mass movement: in the course of the forty-year period from 1837 until 1876, a total of only 225 French religious of both sexes immigrated to Quebec.

Larger numbers of French clergy sought to immigrate to Quebec in the wake of the Third Republic’s anticlerical legislation after 1880. First came the Frères de Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, the Marists, and the Frères de l’Instruction Chrétienne. The Franciscans, the Capuchins, the Eudists and others arrived after 1890. Harsh measures taken by the French government in 1903 produced a new exodus to Canada including the Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes. Hundreds of nuns also chose exile, as the French government closed 3,000 religious schools. Historian Guy Laperrière has estimated that at least 2,000 religious immigrated to Quebec in the years 1900– 14. Yet the numbers of arrivals would have been much greater had Roman Catholic bishops not responded negatively to most requests they received. Archbishop L.-N. Bégin of Quebec confided to a colleague: “If I acquiesced to all the requests, our poor little city would have as many monasteries as streets.” The need for additional religious establishments was not there, nor were the financial resources to support them.

Obviously, clergy constituted only a tiny fraction of total French immigration to Canada. Before 1800 the trickle of French immigrants included a handful of doctors and also two printer-editors, Valentin Jautard and Fleury Mesplet. Mesplet founded a bilingual newspaper, the Montreal Gazette, in 1785. At the time of the French Revolution, small groups of French royalists attempted to convince the British government to favour their settlement in Canada. Count Joseph de Puisaye succeeded in enlisting London’s support for a proposal to bring several thousand French émigrés to Canada. Although 500 showed interest, only 44 embarked at Portsmouth in 1798 for the port of Quebec and thence Upper Canada, where they intended to settle.

French immigration to Canada in the nineteenth century was a relatively small-scale phenomenon. Perhaps 50,000 French were admitted to Canada between 1820 and 1910. (In the same period, 470,000 immigrated to the United States.) Yet, by the 1850s, a time of economic, commercial, and colonial expansion, France was rediscovering Canada. In 1855, Joseph-Guillaume Barthe, a young French-Canadian lawyer, published a book in Paris in which he proposed that France reconquer Canada by pacific means through massive emigration. Sociologist Edme Rameau de Saint-Père sought for his part to show that French culture was alive and prospering in Canada; the French could make amends for past errors by showing a renewed interest in emigration to Canada. The French government was, however, more preoccupied with establishing commercial links; for that reason it opened a consulate in Quebec City in 1859.

Historian Pierre Savard has examined the correspondence of the French consuls in Quebec City. Consul Henri-Philippe Gauldrée-Boilleau did inform his government that the French Canadians wanted French immigrants, particularly Catholic peasant farmers from Normandy and Brittany, to help restore a demographic equilibrium with Ontario and replace French-Canadian migrants to the United States. In 1862 Canadian government minister Hector Langevin had the consul write to Paris to request immigrant colonists for a township in the county of Dorchester, south of Quebec City. The consul expressed the hope that part of the flow of emigrants to the United States could be diverted toward Canada. A few families did eventually arrive. One enterprise, the Compagnie de Colonisation et de Crédit des Cantons de l’Est, arranged for the settlement near Lake Mégantic of a dozen families from Brittany, the Vendée, and Savoy. But the consuls in Quebec never believed that large-scale immigration from France was feasible; they noted that Canadians disagreed among themselves on the subject of immigration, with many convinced that all efforts should be directed toward repatriating French Canadians who had settled in New England.

The Quebec and Canadian governments did undertake to bring some French immigrants to Canada. A Canadian government agent, Ambroise Hector Verret, visited Paris in 1861–62, but his efforts were paralysed by a French law which forced all recruiting agents to deposit financial guarantees. In 1871 the government of Quebec appointed two temporary agents who experienced only minimal success in recruiting colonists in France and Belgium. At the same time, the provincial ministry of agriculture made contact with municipal authorities across Quebec asking for information on the advantages for immigrants of settling in each locality. An agent welcomed immigrants at Lévis, in a temporary refuge, or sent them on to Montreal where jobs might be found for them. A few immigrants arrived from Alsace-Lorraine, recently incorporated into Germany; one, Charles-Auguste Pfister, spent a long career at the École Polytechnique in Montreal which he had helped found in 1876.

Immigration from France increased substantially after 1872, thanks in part to the efforts of Gustave Bossange, a steamship agent who also worked as a Canadian immigration agent. Bossange complained that his main obstacle was the cost of passage across the Atlantic for the French who did not enjoy the same possibilities as British immigrants of obtaining low-rate fares. Then, as the economic crisis deepened after 1874, the number of immigrants again declined, many recent arrivals returned home, and the Quebec government decided that its scarce financial resources would be better employed in opening new territories to internal colonization. Indeed, in 1875, provincial governments agreed to abolish their immigration agencies and to cede all responsibility for publicity abroad to the federal government.

Among French immigrants in the early 1870s were an indefinite number of supporters of the Paris Commune, whose insurrection had been crushed by troops. They inspired little confidence in conservative Canadians one of whom, Bishop Taché of Saint-Boniface, dismissed them as “socialistic pleasure-seekers.” These “communards” appear to have been involved in a demonstration in Montreal in 1872 that was dispersed by the police.

Interest in French immigration to Canada remained alive on both sides of the Atlantic. In France, author Frédéric Gerbié, who had spent five years in Canada, emphasized the need for French immigrants to reinforce the position of the Francophone group in Canada. Instead of departing for the insalubrious colonies of Southeast Asia, Gerbié pleaded, colonists should prefer Canada, particularly the Northwest, with its invigorating winters. The Société d’Immigration Française, established in 1887 in Canada and in French-speaking areas of Europe to favour French immigration to Canada, included Canadian representatives such as Father Antoine Labelle, an apostle of colonization in Quebec, as well as French members such as author Edme Rameau de SaintPère. Labelle had already been sent to Europe in 1885 by the Canadian government to help attract French colonists to the Canadian prairies. The weekly newspaper Paris-Canada (1884–?), founded by Canadian commissioner (and Quebec’s representative) Hector Fabre in Paris, became an important mouthpiece in favour of French settlement in Canada.

Success was modest. In 1891, a French religious community, the Canons of the Immaculate Conception, settled several families at Notre Dame de Lourdes, in Manitoba, one of a series of French establishments in the Canadian west. By 1900, some 2,000 French lived in that region. Although these numbers were tiny, French authorities continued to frown on emigration except to French colonies. French consuls in Canada denounced the “fallacious” promises of agents who were paid a bonus for each immigrant they recruited. Indeed, Auguste Bodard, the Canadian government’s agent in Paris, complained that his greatest enemy was the French consul in Montreal who kept writing articles against French immigration to Canada.

In 1903 Ottawa named a new agent in Paris, Paul Wiallard. In order to avoid contravening France’s anti-emigration laws, Wiallard acted with great tact. As hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Britain and other European countries arrived in Canada, Henri Bourassa and other French-Canadian nationalists attacked what they termed the federal government’s indifference to French immigration. Bourassa noted in particular the paltry budget set aside to encourage francophone immigration. Worried about this negative publicity, two Liberal politicians, Senator Raoul Dandurand and Postmaster General Rodolphe Lemieux, urged Wiallard to step up his activities and promised him the necessary funding. Wiallard prepared texts on Canada which were read in hundreds of French schools to pupils and their parents. He had wall maps of Canada distributed. He sent assistants to give speeches on Canada before chambers of commerce. He enlisted the aid of missionary priests who encouraged their compatriots to flee religious persecution.

But Wiallard’s activity also aroused the ire of French authorities. The government sent a circular to officials in departments across the country emphasizing the difficulties of life in Canada and the failures of numerous French immigrants. It also complained to the British ambassador in Paris. A discouraged Wiallard suggested several ways of calming the storm: the bonus system should be ended; moreover, the Canadian government should send no more temporary emigration agents to France, no so-called farmer-delegates who perhaps painted too rosy a picture of agricultural life in Canada, nor priests who risked stirring up left-wing sentiment against Canada. Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier himself assured the French government that Canada would respect French laws. French immigration to Canada again declined.

After World War II, some French Canadians interested in immigration, such as journalists Jean-Marc Léger and André Laurendeau, as well as the Chambre de Commerce de Montréal, demanded that the federal government make an effort to find French-speaking immigrants. In the following fifteen years, however, only a tiny fraction of the immigrants admitted to Canada were from France.

Why did so few French nationals come to Canada? The traditional explanation has been that the French in general did not wish to emigrate and that the French government impeded emigration. This explanation is partly true though it is incomplete. After the war, France suffered from an acute labour shortage as well as from a scarcity of dollars and imposed severe restrictions on the capital that emigrants could take with them. Before 1951 when a more cooperative French government doubled it, the limit was a mere 300 dollars.

Other observers have maintained that few French came to Canada because the government of Quebec showed no interest in immigration. Those few Quebeckers who actively promoted the cause of French immigration, such as René Chaloult, an independent member of the Quebec legislature, constantly denounced the Union Nationale government for its inaction. Political scientist Freda Hawkins, in her important study on Canadian immigration, affirms that the federal government vainly attempted to ensure the Quebec government’s cooperation in an effort to increase the number of immigrants from France. For example, in 1950, it chose Laval Fortier, a French Canadian, as deputy minister of the new Department of Citizenship and Immigration.

Polls also showed that most French Canadians remained hostile to immigration in general, viewing it as a federal enterprise designed to reduce the importance of the French fact in Canada. A survey in 1952 indicated that only 20 percent of Quebeckers favoured increased immigration while fully 69 percent responded in the negative. (This attitude should be placed in perspective: in neighbouring Ontario, 37 percent of respondents agreed that more immigration was desirable but a majority, 56 percent, disagreed.)

But to what extent did the federal government encourage immigration from France? Ottawa widely publicized a change of policy in September 1948. Henceforth, for immigration purposes, French nationals were to be placed on an equal footing with British subjects and American citizens. Theoretically, French citizens, of good health and character, could be admitted to Canada provided they had sufficient means to live while looking for work. The government admitted however that it did not expect French immigration to increase significantly.

Ottawa’s announcement unleashed a frenzy of activity among civil servants. C.E.S. Smith, acting commissioner of immigration, affirmed that the major problem was one of security because France had “a relatively high number of communists and [Nazi] collaborators.” But how could security controls be maintained now that, in principle, French nationals wishing to enter Canada were exempted from passport and visa requirements? An answer was needed urgently for, within three weeks of the new order-in-council, Canadian consular offices in Paris were besieged by more than 3,000 people interested in immigrating to Canada.

In October 1948 the Canadian government published a notice to the effect that prospective French immigrants would be wise to procure a passport to avoid disappointment even though passports and visas were not necessary. In other words, French immigrants were being warned that they might be turned back if they took the new policy of equality with the British and the Americans at its face value. For their part, steamship services were told to sell tickets only to persons having security clearance; if an immigrant were refused entry, the company would be held liable to pay the return fare. Some time later, the federal cabinet agreed to continue to inquire into the political pasts of candidates and their wartime activities. To avoid unfavourable publicity, those who were denied entry to Canada for reasons of security were not to be told the real reason for their refusal.

In the course of the following weeks, thousands of French nationals wishing to emigrate filed applications at the Canadian Embassy in Paris. In February 1949, Consul A.J. Desjardins complained of his office’s inability to keep up with requests. He spoke of a backlog of 3,000 inquiries for information which he had been unable to answer, some of them dating back four months. The RCMP agents responsible for the security checks were overwhelmed. Moreover, in all of France, a single doctor who had his office in Paris received authorization to perform the medical examinations that were obligatory for each applicant. This situation could only result in serious inconvenience for many potential immigrants. Meanwhile, in Great Britain, 500 so-called roster doctors were authorized to do the required tests.

Available documents do not show clearly how a prospective immigrant might be judged “undesirable.” The strong anti-communism of the era and the large number of references to this subject in immigration files concerning security suggest that political activity in favour of the Communist Party and perhaps even membership in the huge Communist labour central, the Confédération Générale du Travail, were sufficient to destroy the chances of a worker who wished to come to Canada. But was an individual who had occupied a position of municipal councillor in a small town during the Vichy regime ruled undesirable as a collaborator? What information did the police use in filtering the applicants who appeared before them? We do know that the French government was reluctant to provide “background information” on applicants. Canadian authorities attributed this slow response to the French government’s desire to curtail emigration. Such security screening was still performed in 1963.

Applicants could also be refused if, in the examiner’s judgment, they risked becoming public charges. Did the fact that the French government permitted emigrants to depart with only meagre funds signify that the immigrant might indeed become a public charge? Immigration rules also provided that immigrants should be of good character. Canadian Immigration services in Paris told one journalist from Montreal that they were looking for people who were “peaceful, hard-working, productive, uncomplaining, likely to adapt, in their daily lives as well as in their habits and thinking, to the requirements of their adopted country.” Of course the same rules applied to immigrants from Britain but, with regard to the latter area, officials do not appear to have been excessively severe.

Interest in immigrating to Canada appears to have been strong in France in the early 1950s as economic conditions in that country remained difficult. Le Devoir (Montreal, 1910–) reported in 1952 that the Canadian Immigration services in Paris were receiving between 4,000 and 5,000 requests for information each month even though immigration personnel were doing virtually no advertising. Le Monde (Paris) spoke of long lines of people waiting each morning for the embassy doors to open, “jostling to leave for Canada.”

For the federal government, French immigration was not a priority. In 1949, while the Canadian consul in Paris was urgently requesting more personnel and more space, Hugh L. Keenleyside, deputy minister of mines and resources – the department that until 1950 had responsibility for immigration – told the deputy minister of labour: “I am sorry to say that ... there appears to have been a decrease of 44.5 percent over last year in the number of Britishers admitted to this country ... Before attempting a new experience in Paris where our activities are limited by reason of the attitude of the French authorities, I am of the opinion that the London problem must receive our immediate consideration with the object of channelling all efforts in the same direction, that is to say, the encouragement of British immigration to Canada.” More generally, sociologist Anthony Richmond has concluded: “Whenever the proportion of British immigrants showed signs of falling, the Canadian government intensified its promotional campaign in the United Kingdom and re-established the primary position of the British immigrants.”

After 1960, many changes occurred. First, the Quebec government began to see immigration, particularly francophone immigration, as a necessity to combat the decline in the birth rate and the tendency of non-francophone immigrants to integrate into the anglophone minority within the province. In 1961 the Liberal government of Jean Lesage set up an immigration service at the new Maison du Québec in Paris. In 1965, it organized an immigration branch within the provincial administration. But the Union Nationale government which came to power in 1966 was ready to go further. In a speech in May 1967, Marcel Masse, minister of state for education, underlined the gravity of the situation for Quebec. Only 12 percent of immigrants to the province were French-speaking, the French-Canadian community could boast virtually no assimilative capacity and still showed indifference and even hostility concerning immigration. Nor was Quebec making any special effort to teach French to new arrivals. To emphasize the importance that it wished to attach to immigration, the government of Jean-Jacques Bertrand created in 1968 a provincial ministry of immigration. Various agreements reached with the federal government in the 1970s enabled Quebec to play a much more active role in the selection of immigrants who wished to come to the province.

By ethnic origin (French), 1900–61

By country of last permanent residence (France), 1962–89

Source: Immigration Statistics, 1896–89

In the late 1950s, France seemed to relax its restrictive attitude toward emigration. Canadian authorities accordingly stepped up their promotional activities but still felt that the French government would oppose the opening of immigration offices outside Paris. In 1963, by which time France was undergoing substantial population growth as nearly one million French nationals immigrated from Algeria and helped saturate the French labour market, the Canadian government received permission to open immigration offices in Marseilles and Bordeaux, and it did so in 1965.

All these changes came too late. There would never be large numbers of French who would seek to emigrate to Canada. As the European economies improved, traditional sources of immigration for Canada declined and Canada began to look elsewhere for immigrants.

Early figures on French immigration are incomplete and only approximate. Between 1871–72 and 1900–01, 9,516 immigrants of “French nationality” arrived at the port of Quebec and were placed within the province; nearly 3,000 of these entered in a two-year period, in 1872–73 and 1873–74. A smaller number of French immigrants registered with the provincial immigration bureau in Montreal. Though most of these persons supposedly arrived from the United States, the figure appears to include many who were also counted in the statistics for Quebec City but who had moved to Montreal from other areas of the province. We do not know how many French immigrants arrived at other ports of entry in Canada.

Canadian census figures indicate the number of Canadian residents born in France (see accompanying table). The size of this group reflects trends in immigration, but it is also influenced by such factors as mortality rates, returns to France, and emigration from Canada to the United States. In 1914, for example, the French consul in Montreal estimated that the number of French in Canada had reached 25,000; within months nearly 5,000 of these returned to France for military service. Many lost their lives on the battlefield while others chose to remain in France after the war and brought their families back from Canada. By 1921, the number of French-born persons in Canada scarcely exceeded 19,000. It thereafter declined until the late 1940s.

After 1900 Canadian immigration authorities compiled detailed statistics on the ethnic origin of immigrants. Figures concerning immigrants of French ethnic origin included arrivals from France and France’s colonies, but not from Belgium, Switzerland or the United States, since these countries were listed separately. Although for certain years after 1960 immigration statistics have been compiled for country of birth and country of citizenship, the main variable now used for calculations is the country of last permanent residence. Since 1962, at which time an immigrant’s ethnic origin was no longer asked, the number of “French” immigrants for each year, as shown in the accompanying table, is the number of those who indicated France as their country of last permanent residence.

After World War II, Canada again opened its doors to large numbers of immigrants; again the French were only a minor part of this movement. In the years 1946– 72, Canada received a total of 3,658,763 immigrants. Only 106,728 (2.9 percent) listed France as their country of former residence; more than 26 percent named Britain. 79,881 immigrants indicated that they had been born in France, and 86,086 gave France as their country of citizenship. In the 1981 census, 56,180 Canadian residents said that they had been born in France; the corresponding figure for 1991 (55,160) indicated a slight decrease. Since between two-thirds and three-quarters of French immigrants choose to settle in Quebec, their importance in the movement of immigrants to that province is significantly greater than in Canada as a whole.