From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/French/Richard Jones
Canadian ecclesiastics and colonial administrators expected that thousands of French émigrés would come to Canada in the 1790s. In Lower Canada, they agreed that the colonists should be settled mainly in rural parishes, from ten to forty in each, while about 400 would stay in Quebec City or move on to Montreal. In Upper Canada, Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe met emissaries from Britain to make plans for settling additional French exiles. He agreed to set aside for them a township near Burlington Bay at the west end of Lake Ontario.
Few French émigrés arrived. In Upper Canada, Count de Puisaye’s colonists received sizable tracts of land north of Toronto on Yonge Street. Frontier conditions proved difficult for the tiny group that included several aristocrats quite unused to the activities of pioneers: the men had to clear the land of huge trees that required hundreds of blows with an axe to fell, then learn the art of farming; women were to manage all aspects of domestic life with few of the conveniences that this largely upper-class group had enjoyed in prerevolutionary France. In 1801, three years after the colonists’ arrival, a surveyor reported on that particular section of Yonge Street: “As yet the greater part of the said distance ... is not passable for any carriage whatever, on account of logs which lay in the street; ... the road is very narrow, and difficult to pass at any time.” The colony’s leaders promised that hundreds of new settlers would soon join the group: Breton peasants to farm the land and officers whose only duties would be military. When these colonists failed to arrive, Puisaye returned to England in a vain attempt to seek further aid for the colony. The other settlers sold their lands and returned to France.
Small numbers of French settlers established themselves in Quebec after Confederation. The Compagnie de Colonisation Ffranco-canadienne, founded in Paris in 1872, was to recruit immigrants from Brittany to settle the vast lands it hoped to acquire in Beauce and Dorchester counties south of Quebec City. It was to bring in 200 families each year, over a period of eight years, and build houses for them. Provided that it found immigrants, the company was to receive a large land grant from the provincial government. The immigrants were to supply the manpower necessary to cut wood which the company would then export. By 1878, when the company entered bankruptcy, only 12 French immigrants had come. Historian Majella Quinn suggests that the climate and the lack of access roads discouraged some potential immigrants, but the opposition of the French government seems to have been the principal explanation for the colony’s failure.
In the course of his visit to France in 1885, Father Antoine Labelle convinced a small number of French colonists to immigrate to Quebec where they settled in the Beauce region as well as in the Eastern Townships. Other colonists heeded the advice of propagandists such as Louis Arnould, a professor of literature from Poitiers who had spent several years in Quebec. He enthusiastically recommended newly opened regions of colonization such as Temiscamingue and Lac Saint-Jean where settlers could exploit the forests: there was wood to build houses, wood for heating, and wood to sell to the pulp and paper companies. They could also grow wheat and oats for their dairy cattle.
A steadily rising proportion of French immigrants to Canada between 1880 and 1914 settled in western Canada. By 1911, 52 percent of French immigrants lived in the west and only 34 percent in Quebec.
Missionary priests established several colonies on the prairies. Oblates brought several families from Brittany to various villages in Manitoba. A secular priest, Abbé Jean-Marie Jolys, also from Brittany, founded a new parish at Saint-Pierre, while other Bretons settled at Sainte-Rose du Lac, near Lake Dauphin.
Dom Paul Benoît, from the Jura region of eastern France, set up a colony near Pembina Mountain southwest of Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, at the request of Bishop Taché. In this era of official anticlericalism in France, Dom Benoît viewed Canada as a healthy place for Roman Catholics, especially for religious communities. The Trappists, for example, opened a monastery at Saint-Norbert, near Winnipeg. Many French clergy who had recently arrived in Quebec were then sent on to the Canadian west, particularly as missionaries. Dom Benoît also brought colonists to settle at Saint-Claude, another Manitoba parish named for a village in the Jura. Some of these colonists eventually migrated further west, to places such as Saint-Front, in Saskatchewan, and Vegreville, in Alberta. Still another French priest, Jean Gaire, from Nancy, founded eleven colonies between 1888 and 1902 including Grande-Clairière, Manitoba and Wauchope, Saskatchewan. The tireless Gaire made visits to France and Belgium, hoping to entice thousands of colonists to come to the Canadian prairies. Father Marie-Albert Royer, a priest from Auvergne, reached Saint-Boniface in 1906, then went on to the Gravelbourg area, in Saskatchewan, where he founded the parish of Ponteix. Most of his colonists were also from Auvergne.
In other colonies, French aristocrats, searching for adventure in the new world or wishing to rebuild family fortunes, played significant roles. They appear to have enjoyed little success. Two young nobles, the Duke of Blacas and the Count of Simencourt, established themselves at Saint-Laurent, on Lake Manitoba, and began to produce milk, cheese, and meat. Both later returned to France, as did many of their colonists. Others moved on to the United States. Several aristocrats settled at least temporarily at Sainte-Rose du Lac after 1891. One, Viscount Jacques d’Aubigny, established a large ranch with a cheese factory and a buttery – before becoming a Trappist monk. Further west, at Saint-Hubert, along the Pipestone creek in Saskatchewan, Count Jean de Jumilhac raised hundreds of sheep for which there proved to be no market. Some tried growing chicory, but consumers seem not to have appreciated this coffee substitute; others manufactured gruyère cheese whose taste proved disagreeable. Still other aristocrats and gentlemen-farmers established ranches in Alberta, in the area between Calgary and Red Deer.
Business entrepreneurs also participated in the settlement of French immigrants in the west. After a guided tour of the prairies, thanks to the cooperation of the federal Department of Lands, A. de La Londe, a French agronomist, returned to write an enthusiastic report on the region he had visited. In response, a group of French capitalists bought 200,000 acres of land in the Qu’Appelle valley of Saskatchewan from the Canadian Pacific Railway. One member of the consortium came to Saint-Boniface where he helped set up a new enterprise, the Société Canadienne de Colonisation. The promoters hoped to establish from 150 to 200 colonists on their lands each year but, for financial reasons, the enterprise failed. Indeed, colonists did not need to work through the intermediaries when they could obtain land without cost from the government. Pierre Foursin, a soldier from Normandy and private secretary to Hector Fabre, Canadian commissioner in Paris, bought land southeast of Regina, Saskatchewan, which he intended to offer without cost to selected French and Belgian colonists. Eleven families arrived the first year, in 1893. Conditions during that first winter were extremely painful. Installations were rudimentary, there was no water except for melted snow, and clothing was unsuited to the cold. The second year, an early frost destroyed the grain harvest. Many settlers moved away, and indeed the entire colony was later uprooted and placed close to the new railway.
Still other colonies had wealthy French patrons. In one case, a French noblewoman, Countess Marthe d’Albuféra, decided to found a French Roman Catholic community on the Canadian prairies. With the assistance of the mayor of Saint-Boniface and others, a site was chosen in 1887 – the future Fannystelle, south of Winnipeg – lands were acquired, settlers established, and a chapel and a school were built.
The outbreak of war in 1914 brought a halt to the growth of French colonies in the west. Some settlers, including virtually all of the aristocrats who remained in the region, crossed the Atlantic to bear arms, and few ever set foot again in Canada.
French immigrants who came to Canada after 1945 entered an urban-industrial society. Statistics show that slightly more men than women arrived; in the case of married couples, women were almost always classed as dependents. A majority of these immigrants settled in Quebec: of 55,16o persons born in France who resided in Canada in 1991, fully 38,000 lived in Quebec. Ontario, with 9,660 French-born, placed a distant second.British Columbia and Alberta occupied the third and fourth ranks with 3,535 and 1,690 French-born respectively.
Among those immigrants who came to Quebec, most chose to live in Montreal although, contrary to the experience of other groups of immigrants, a large number settled in Quebec City and elsewhere in the province. Some temporary residents worked for French industrial or financial enterprises with branches in Canada; others, particularly in the 1960s, served as “coopérants,” teaching in colleges and universities in Quebec for specific terms as a replacement for military duty. Still others were engaged in cultural activities which, after 1960, became increasingly numerous as France and Quebec sought to strengthen their ties.
