Don't know if any of you recall this article from last year ...
Quebeckers' bond with France wasn't such a fine romance
SUSAN SACHS
From Monday's Globe and Mail
March 10, 2008 at 5:03 AM EDT
PARIS — In honour of the 400th anniversary of Quebec this year, politicians met here over the weekend to commemorate the role of France in the development of Canada.
What they heard from historians came as a revelation: The French were happy to be rid of their vast colony in North America in 1763, regarded it as marginal and never seriously considered wresting it back from the British.
"I was a bit surprised to hear that France did not play a vital role in Quebec," said Pierre Claude Nolin, one of the Quebec senators attending the two-day conference.
The history lesson was one in a series of events, most of which are to take place in Canada, marking the founding of Quebec in 1608 by French explorer Samuel Champlain.
While historians on both sides of the Atlantic have been studying French-Canadian relations for some time, much of their scholarship has not penetrated the public and political consciousness. And it is unlikely that new interpretations of long-ago events will change how the two countries see each other.
But their work can help both countries get beyond the myths that underpin how Canadians, and particularly Québécois, define themselves, said Serge Joyal, another Quebec senator and one of the organizers of the gathering.
"There has been a lack of critical reassessment of the relationship between France and Canada," he said. "Sometimes we've had a romantic vision of France."
Part of that vision has been the idea that early French settlers created a new identity as they built a new francophone homeland in what is now Quebec, and that it was distinct from their connection to the mother country.
Not so, said John A. Dickinson, a University of Montreal historian who specializes in 17th- and 18th-century Canada. The French settlers, and their descendants, considered themselves merely temporary inhabitants of a far-flung outpost of Paris, he said.
They were far outnumbered by the roving French fishermen who shuttled back and forth from the ports of Normandy and Brittany, he added. And France valued its island colonies, like Guadalupe and Haiti, far more than it valued the relatively unprofitable New France.
"Although it's sometimes hard for the Québécois to understand, France was not particularly preoccupied with New France," Mr. Dickinson told the gathering. "It was the periphery."
It was not until France ceded its colony to Britain in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, he said, that the French-speaking settlers identified themselves as Canadian.
Several of the historians said that documents from the period gave no support for the notion that France would commit troops to regain its lost colony.
"You often hear the myth that France intended to re-conquer Canada," said Françoise Le Jeune, a professor of Canadian studies at the University of Nantes, in France. "It's not true. The Treaty of Paris was really abandonment."
According to documents and diaries in French archives, the French kings of the 18th and 19th centuries had no interest in regaining their lost North American colonies and preferred to use Canada as a pawn in their endless intrigues against the British.
"We heard that we weren't conquered, that the British just waited for the French to give us away," Mr. Joyal said. "That's shocking to many people. The French didn't want us."
The assumption of a "British conquest" led to the corollary that "Anglos" must be resisted, he said.
"And resistance has been the lifeblood of nationalism. It gave rise to the separatist party."
