Counter-Currents
Image source: New Orleans official website.
1,399 words
Celebrated French explorer Jacques Cartier founded New France in 1534 when he erected a cross on the shores of what is known today as Quebec City. Thus begins the 269-year story of the French colonization of North America. During those years, the French colonized Canada and the American Midwest along the Mississippi River and the Ohio Basin, a territory known as Louisiana, so named by explorer Sieur de La Salle in honor of his King, Louis XIV. French colonists founded the cities of Quebec, Montreal, New Orleans, Saint Louis (named after sainted crusader king Louis IX), and Detroit, all of which went on to become major economic, cultural, and industrial centers in subsequent centuries.
The reasons why the French failed to win this contest for dominance in North America against rival Britain are too numerous to describe for the purposes of this essay, but it is interesting to ponder what would have happened if they had. France took a very different approach to colonization. Instead of encouraging immigration from Europe, they forged a more cooperative relationship with the natives, employing them as sort of independent contractors and sometimes mercenaries. Had France become the dominant power, America today might be a country with majority-white urban commercial centers surrounded by majority-Native American countryside, and everyone would be speaking French.
France lost its North American territories after the Seven Year’s War. Britain got Canada, while Spain got the Mississippi basin. Napoleon forced Spain to give the Louisiana territories back, but in 1803 he sold it to the United States to pay off his debts. Understanding the world-changing historical magnitude of this blunder, Napoleon’s brothers begged him not to do this, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. Thus ends the story of France’s colonization of North America.
From New Orleans to Detroit, there were only about 50,000 French living in the territory at the time of the Louisiana Purchase. Naturally, they didn’t all stop speaking French overnight. How long did the descendants of the French colonists continue speaking French after the Louisiana Purchase? Everyone knows that they did for a time. The French cowboy from Louisiana turns up in Westerns occasionally. But when did they stop speaking French? Did they ever stop?
There were communities throughout the former Louisiana territory, usually out in the boonies, where people continued speaking French well into the twentieth century. There’s an area in the middle of nowhere in Missouri called Old Mines, where as recently as the Second World War there were still several thousand people who spoke French as their first language. Not just any French, though. It became known as Missouri French, or “Paw-Paw French,” a dialect that was distinct from both standard French and Louisiana French. It had its own unique phonetic quirks. Old Mines was cut off from the rest of the world to the extent that it developed what became known as Missouri French. With post-war highway expansion and mass communication, places such as Old Mines are today not as remote as they used to be, and now the dialect is on the verge of extinction. While there are still a handful of native speakers of it, and there are some people working to keep it alive, it will likely go extinct in our lifetimes.
The most famous example of this is the case of Louisiana, where the state maintained a significant French-speaking presence well into the modern era. A study conducted in 1968 estimated that there were still a million Louisiana residents who spoke French as their first language.
When I was a wee baby Trav, that was one snappy bit of trivia for an elementary school kid to know. I knew that in America people speak English, but that the one exception is Louisiana, where there are these people called Cajuns who have been speaking French since the time of Napoleon. I had heard stories about how there were parts of California full of illegal immigrants where Spanish was the main language, and that some cities had areas where Chinese was mostly spoken, but the grandkids of these immigrants likely wouldn’t be able to speak a word of either. Louisiana was a quirky exception to this rule, where you could find native-born Americans whose first language was something other than English. I heard that in the state there were French-language radio stations all across the dial.
Needless to say, the Louisiana French are no longer the exception. There are now pockets all over the United States where something other than English is the dominant language. As a result, the Louisiana French no longer receive the attention they used to. Unless serious measures are taken soon, Louisiana French will likely be a dead language by the end of this century. From there being a million Louisiana Francophone in 1968, a 2023 estimate by the Louisiana newspaper The Advocate estimated that the current population of Francophones stands at only 120,000.
This is a sort of genocide. No one was put into a gas chamber. No one was programmed. Much of this is the result of assimilation. Many in Louisiana saw French as a low-status language, the way we might view Spanish today, and thus learned English instead to avoid the stigma. My own grandparents spoke Louisiana French as their first language, and neither my dad nor any of his siblings can speak a word of it. Their family had moved away from Louisiana, and there was little use for learning French in their new Anglophone home.
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Saying that French is dying out mostly due to assimilation is like telling a Native American that much of the “genocide” perpetrated against them was actually intermarriage, however. If a people ceases to exist as a distinct group, it is a tragedy no matter how it occurred. When it comes to immigrants, assimilation is good, but in the case of the Louisiana French, I think there are reasons why they should be considered as an “indigenous people.”
Like Native Americans, the French can rightfully claim that they were in Louisiana first, and should feel no obligation to assimilate to newcomers in their own homeland. Also like the Native Americans, the French did not democratically choose to become part of the United States. Texas at least had a legislature that decided to join the United States, but the inhabitants of the Louisiana Territory were never consulted when Jefferson and Napoleon hashed out their smokey backroom deal.
I think that the United States should feel an obligation to guarantee that the culture they inherited through the Louisiana Purchase does not vanish from existence. The federal government gave the Native American tribes reservations in order to safeguard them against total extinction. The Louisiana Francophones are thus well within their rights to demand their own semi-autonomous microstate where their centuries old-culture — the culture that gave the world gumbo and Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard — does not disappear into history. It could be a joint operation between France and America — and possibly Britain, too, as Cajuns are the product of a British ethnic-cleansing operation that would be considered a war crime today.
It wouldn’t even need to be a very big state, but Louisiana French would be the official language of its government and school would be taught in French. The 120,000 remaining native French speakers would then be highly encouraged to move there and given cushy jobs as “consultants” for whatever linguists have to be brought in for the project. From there, those people’s extended families would be able to gain citizenship. From there, anyone who could trace their ancestry to French territory at the time of the Louisiana Purchase and who wanted to reclaim their French identity could apply for citizenship, as could select diaspora Francophones who might be interested in participating. Priority would be given to married couples who intend to have children who would then be educated in French. Such a state would not only preserve the existence of an indigenous American culture and its unique American dialect, it would probably attract a good amount of tourism — especially if they packed the place with casinos, Cajun restaurants, and jazz bars.
120,000 is a decent number of people to build something upon, and if action is taken now, the torch that has been handed down for generations since the time of Jacque Cartier can remain lit.
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24 comments
Another great Louisiana Frenchman was White Nationalist singer-songwriter Clifford Trahan aka “Johnny Rebel”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Rebel_(singer)
The author brings up an interesting question: How much assimilation is too much assimilation for the Whites of the European Diaspora in North America? How ‘coherent’ do we really need to be as a ‘nation’?
It’s true that ‘speaking English’ is a key to upward (or at least outward) mobility, so non-English languages are going to suffer. For non-European languages, that seems fine. But for European languages – even ‘pidgen’ languages – we should endeavor to protect and preserve them by making sure members of the community of speaker do not have to move away in order to be economically successful.
For example: Their family had moved away from Louisiana, and there was little use for learning French in their new Anglophone home.
Story reported by an Asian woman who feels no connection, no nostalgia no revery for the story. She reports the story in the most assimilated dialect of all, the one designed to have no personality and where you close your eyes and you can hear what no diversity means – nothing at all distinguishable and every trace of even an individual is removed. That dialect is 20th century American Teleprompter PreCanned Sawdust Story English.
May the Creole organize and preserve their language and heritage.
Nice work. It’s Jacques not Jacque btw.
I agree it’s a shame to lose White ethnic subcultures. Not only are they very interesting, mainstream Whites could learn a thing or two from them. However, they seem to voluntarily assimilate, so nobody can really be blamed for not protecting them.
I can understand Paw Paw french, although it seems like some very distant and ancient language From a remote part of the french countryside.
But Louisiana french, I have to dissect every word to understand. A lot of damage (not to be pejorative) but it seems that paw paw french has survived better thanks to its isolation.
I don’t mean to be pessimistic, but it’s hard to see how these languages can be preserved when the mother nation itself is on the brink of extinction.
Very interesting article. I live in St. Francois County, Mo., and Old Mines is just in the neighborhood, along with similar towns like Valles Mines and Cadet, Potosi, etc. Bonne Terre, where I was born, is full of residents with French names.
I didn’t hear or see a lot of “Paw-paw” French, but the French influence is very strong, especially from the older lead mines.
One teacher recalled when he and his wife married, there was a chivarree, where French townsmen put him and his wife in a bed and carried them around. Old French custom.
I wrote a play, Bonne Terre, about people caught between surviving in a dead mining town and keeping French customs alive.
That’s basically how it’s been for all other White American populations whose forebears came from countries that spoke anything other than English. German-Americans are about 20% of the population and there used to be a thriving ethnic culture. After plenty of “encouragement” during the first half of the 20th century, all that’s left of it is beer and oompah bands.
Three of my grandparents were fully bilingual. I had to learn the languages of my ancestors in college. BTW, I do know French as well!
Anyway, there are some precedents for language revivals that can be studied as practical examples: Gaelic, Welsh, and Catalan, for instance.
Also the number of Italian speakers in America didn’t drop under one million until the 2000s.
There have been other non-English speaking communities in America but the Midwestern French are a special case because they a) existed prior to the arrival of America and b) speak dialects that originated in these lands.
This is why I did not bother to mention New England French in the article. There are a couple hundred thousand people in Maine, Massachusetts, and surrounding areas who speak French but these people a) descend from 19th century Quebecois migrants and b) speak what is basically Canadian French.
One thing “our side” should investigate is something I call ancestral indifference. I think a significant portion of people who are drawn to this movement care about their cultural heritage. However, many whites seem not to care about their ancestors or their past. A part of the reason why Francophones are dying out is because, at one point, many simply did not care enough to keep it alive. The gay trappings of the monoculture swept them away with little resitance.
I think this indifference could be a genetic, maybe partly due to intelligence levels. When you meet a white with the blank look in their eyes, you can tell that person is just a walking stomach.
Also, if there was a religion that supplants your ancestors and heritage for something else, would this cause ancestral indifference?
A genetic cause is likely with Northern European ethnic groups, since they are by nature more individualistic and less clannish than Southerners.
Look at Greek Americans, for example — very attached to their heritage and probably the most clannish Whites.
That’s true to an extent with Italians as well. However, that usually dies out as proceeding generations get caught up in the monoculture. Italian Americans will often develop a faux culture around pop culture such as mafia movies, crooners, pizza places and talking loudly while drunk but lose the unique regional differences that truly define Italian heritage.
When I was in high school (good ol’ Led Zeppelin ‘70’s), there were many girls of Italian descent, who although were born in Canada, were allowed to date ONLY Italians! They don’t seem to assimilate, the Greeks are like that also, and Jews are a different matter! The western Slavics (Polish, Croats, Slovaks) , Hungarians, Balts are not as clannish.
I believe this was mostly due to fear of sacrificing their daughters to a new culture of dysfunctional family, divorce, and alcoholism. This sense of alarm was not just a difference of nationalities, but a change from old world culture in both southern and northern European tradition, to the new world fashion which blossomed quickly in America. (Sung to the tune of “Sex and drugs and rock n roll”)
Only Québec is worth saving nowadays because it’s the only functioning francophone society left in North America. French is pretty much dead in LA et al. I wrote about erasing French in my blog. https://american-in-quebec.blogspot.com/2019/12/erasing-history-case-of-minnesotas.html?m=1
Strangely, anglophones ate the most hateful to us Quebecers. Viva le Québec libre !
The Acadians (Cajuns) were deported by the British to Louisiana, after the French-Indian Wars! There are still many French speakers in New Brunswick, and some pockets in the Canadian Maritimes. “Evangeline” by Longfellow was about that. If only had the French beat back the British, there would have of been NO..America, Canada, but a BIG Quebec, from the Arctic Circle to the Gulf of Mexico! And French is the Lingua Franca. If only….
Lots to unpack here so this is a bit of a ramble.
It is not hard to imagine how French or even English colonies would have ended up without independence from their imperial regimes. The colonies would have been filled by the king or emperor with lots of Black and Brown helots. We’d have a French-speaking Mexico or Brazil ─ from New Orleans to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
There is a fun movie made in 1981 called Southern Comfort with Powers Boothe and Keith Carradine as long-haired (pre-Reagan era) Louisiana National Guardsmen on weekend training who have a kind of Deliverance interaction with some back-bayou Cajuns who hunt them down like prey after one of them jokingly fires some harmless blanks at the weirdos with his M-60 machinegun. (This is a good way to lose your stripes, but blanks are not nearly as impressive as Hollywood here suggests.)
After the surviving city boys have their ordeal escaping the weird Cajuns in the dark swamps where they don’t belong, the movie ends when they come upon the fun Cajuns having a weekend folk dance and barbecue.
I am generally against balkanization because it cuts off parts of the whole and tries to antagonize the pieces-parts against each other.
I don’t see how balkanizing is helpful for White people or how it makes us stronger ─ although I can see the appeal of LARPing at the Renaissance Faire or getting a tintype-style photo taken at Pioneer Village or the OK Corral ─ complete with musket and your fair lady in an “ah do declare” dress.
So I am skeptical of appeals such as this, especically if we are putting existential labels onto it. Nobody forces you to use electricity and motorcars.
And most people have no clue what life would really be like in the 19th century or even 1900, and that includes the Amish ─ most of whom would be in deep doo if the electricity at their Walmart day job went out for good, or suddenly there were no more rich tourists wanting to buy expensive handmade wooden furniture.
Specifically, the author uses the “fuzzy math” G-word which causes me some irritation.
Then he applies this also to the Noble Savages who were given Reservations and not actually exterminated. Let’s poke into that rabbit hole.
Nobody requires these people today to live on the Rez, and the only reason they had to before was because they had a tendency to scalp White settlers who tended to kill them back, and with a greater abundance of firearms. So good call.
White people did not bring the poverty to the Natives; that was well-baked literally into their genes from pre-Columbian times. This is why modern agriculture that mitigates “feast and famine” cycles turns them into fat diabetics and sometimes obese alcoholics. Roadside Navajo fry-bread is pretty darn good, but they didn’t invent it.
In fact, your typical Marxist professor will call U.S. government efforts to eradicate hunger by providing milk, flour, and real cheese to the Amerinds as “Genocide” for this very reason.
At one time to deal with poverty, the U.S. Government also established Indian Schools where the boarding Amerind children had to wear shoes and cut their hair, get deloused, learn how to read and write and to fluently speak that awful English. Genocide. Oh dear.
When I was a boy in grade school in Tucson, Arizona circa 1970, it was a custom for Mormon families to bring an Indian child of the same faith into their home to live for a year to help them assimilate. Then they went home to their parents and a local school but with a new cultural experience behind them. My parents thought that was a good idea and did so without even consulting me. Suddenly I had a new brother of the same age.
I can’t speak for whether the diversity experience for one year “helped” him or not. We were in different school years anyway because the Indian kids had been put a grade behind since their first year in school was for learning English, a foreign language. Kids are good at that.
In the United States, I do think more emphasis should be put on learning a foreign language, preferably something besides Spanish or Chinese (all the rage). But otherwise, why should I apologize for learning the proper “Lingua Franca” (i.e., English) as my native language?
My point is that in those days there were still people on the Rez that could not speak English. That is rarely the case today with modern highways, radio, television, and now the Internet. Sure, many of the elders and the tribal locals speak Navajo ─ or whatever it is really called in their native language ─ but almost nobody today does not know English.
This is bad, why?
I don’t really see the atrocity here. I don’t see how Amerindians would be more prosperous and enriched today if they were living a rigidly-insular lifestyle with some kind of Prime Directive against cultural contamination. They have long made a business selling rugs and jewelry and gasoline and lodging to gushing White tourists thanks to the U.S. highway system. A classic road trip was from Chicago, IL to Santa Monica, CA on U.S. Route 66 encountering lots of exotic wildlife and scenery along the way. European visitors have often found these expanses unfathomable, crossing states twice the size of many continental countries.
As a boy, I remember an elderly Aunt who had some impressive and gargantuan Swastika-emblazoned Navajo rugs colored in Black, White, and some kind of deep blood-Red.
I am surprised to learn that the Navajos were preferring the German aniline coal-tar dyes for their rug-making since the time of the Transcontinental Railroad (1869). Yep, the same BASF consortium that has been chemtrailing your skies has been supplying the dyes for those Native American rugs since before Wyatt Earp was lawman in these parts.
On the other hand, there are well-known downsides to Hollywood-style inter-connectedness. Now one never sees Swastikas displayed on Native art. Ever. If you find one on a Navajo rug today, it was probably made a century ago and bought by a Cracker tourist, and it will cost many thousands of dollars (if the owner is willing to sell).
According to the academics ─ the people who all sign Marxist apologies “acknowledging” their current use of ancestral Native lands at the bottom of their e-mails ─ the Swastika was “imposed” upon Native Art by opportunistic White interlopers to “steal” the mojo from sacred indigenous cultures until it was learned that Swastikas were really bad medicine or something like that after a certain dustup over Danzig. I’m not joking. The Nu-Natives won’t even make those rugs anymore; you could not pay them enough.
At one time both types of Indians used the ancestral Swastika symbol. There is a classic Kolchak: The Night Stalker TV episode with Darren McGavin from 1974 called “Horror in the Heights.” This episode with Phil Silvers is creepy and fun, about a shape-shifting Hindu demon stalking a Jewish neighborhood in Chicago that ironically can only be warded off with Swastikas (and a Polish-American investigative journalist with a nose for the paranormal).
Okay, I have no objections to cultural events or efforts trying to preserve things like folk languages and ancient “sacred” symbols. But this is largely an organic process. Nobody is forcing Anglicization are they? Either you can recruit interest in your heritage with the younger generations or you cannot.
Any Nation-State has to have a national language. Pick one. And because of “Spanish” demographic replacement, I have long favored that a law be passed to make English the national language in the United States. Then you would not find so many “Aqui” signs and ballots having to be printed in every foreign dialect.
There is nothing wrong with other European languages, but like building the Royal Roads, the State has to teach the Real McCoy in the schools ─ not the stuff on the BBC that Native-English speakers like me have to turn on the closed captioning to understand. Oi Guv’?
If the local vernacular is not in the Kaiser’s German, or something that Dr. Goebbels would have happily conversed in, there still needs to be a Lingua Franca of sorts to conduct commerce and whatever outside the realm ─ an overall language that needs to be taught to pupils at least secondarily in the schools.
And sorry Francophones, that global role is no longer French.
Since the adoption of the Internet on a wide scale near the turn of the century, people in a cacaphony of native European languages have conversed intelligbly with each other in ─ English.
Personal example. When two airliners were crashed by Jihadis into two Manhattan skyscrapers on September 11, 2001, I was chatting live with people all over the world ─ in English ─ on a Swedish website called the Third Reich Forum, later renamed the Axis History Forum (which still exists today).
We were discussing what was happening in New York that morning in real time, and I turned on my TV set just before the second airliner crashed and I saw it live, and we were then all wondering how such an “accident” could happen twice. (Doing just that was a longstanding joke in the 20th century version of the Microsoft Flight Sim. Later versions had an invisible force field that prevented any such bad-taste crashes.)
I no longer watch any broadcast TV and almost never go to movies anymore. But I do watch a little foreign TV ─ with the exception of BBC Blackface and Asian ─ because the material is produced by and for White people, and with almost exclusively White casting, and usually in native European languages (with English subtitles). The characters all speak their own national languages and might have the Danish guy interact with a Swede, or a German, or a Frenchman, and yet any time they have a language barrier they will then all just default to English. No muss. No fuss. No Silent Genocide.
I like the Renaissance Fair or Pioneer Village as much as anybody else ─ but I am not sure how a weekend of cosplay seriously restores the old Anglo-Saxon dialect. And I can’t understand it anyway.
White cultural pursuits are wonderful ─ and certainly we need more blatant Whiteness everywhere, from quilting bees to all manners of hobbies and LARP ─ “stuff that White people like.” But I don’t think pining about “Linguistic Genocide” propels White Nationalism very far.
🙂
I think you missed the point of this article. Americanism and its language Globish = globalism. Globish = zero real diversity. Yes, it’s more practical for business that we all converse and think in Globish, but the article is about identity and culture. Mais il est de surface, cet article. Here in Québec, we are always diving deep into this topic and well meaning angloïdes can’t really get it, which is understandable, but shows how hard it is to talk about this. We don’t want to just not be great replaced, we want to thrive, here in North America, where we been since 1534 when Jacques Cartier erected the cross in Gaspé, claiming the land for God and King of France.
I enjoy this rambling!
“With post-war highway expansion and mass communication, places such as Old Mines are today not as remote as they used to be, and now the dialect is on the verge of extinction.”
This is encountered outside of Voyageur’s or French Settlements.
If you go ever spoke with the older people who were part of the original settlement populations in Virginia and particularly Kentucky – BEFORE there were television signals to broadcast in programming from the outside world, or radio conglomerates broadcasting syndicated programming – what I found was that it was very difficult to understand my own relatives from this older age range..
These people who had not been impacted by outside vocalizations during their younger years well prior to mass media, spoke with a very unique merging of a lilt – a Scottish and an Irish accent, that had been conjoined with the Cumberland North English cadence.
It is difficult to understand – for an American – a Scots accent alone, for instance, but when you combine all three of these syntax / accent idiosyncrasies into one, you have to ask people to repeat themselves multiple times in a lot of cases to process what they are saying. These people all get the same ”dancing with the stars” programming today, so this is almost entirely absent now, but those were the people who really knew the history of the region and could tell you stories that had some real insight that most books do not convey.
The manner in which the Quebecois maintained a francophone society in my own personal observation was to import of lot of migrants from Haiti and former African colonies that speak the French language or a creole of it, however my experience in QC was that it was a slum, so the maintenance of Francais in the face of in-migration of English speakers did not really maintain much of value.
Everyone eventually becomes part of a common community, or no true society can exist. In the region I previously spoke of, my own ‘Runyon”s are ‘De Runignon’ if you go back to coastal Huguenot-era La Rochelle, but the final generations to speak regular French at home (or Dutch in the case of the maternal line) no longer spell their grandparents names correctly in the mother tongue anymore, still being handed down phonetically to their children, by the mid-19th century.
As with the former regional Ulster blend of Irish/Scots/Cumberland English lilts, the French and Dutch fluency gave way once the airwaves were discovered and interstate roads built, but the people did not.
“The manner in which the Quebecois maintained a francophone society in my own personal observation was to import of lot of migrants from Haiti and former African colonies that speak the French language or a creole of it, however my experience in QC was that it was a slum, so the maintenance of Francais in the face of in-migration of English speakers did not really maintain much of value.”
That’s not true, French was preserved with no importation of foreigners for centuries. That’s a very recent development. It sounds like you went to Montreal and decided that’s what the whole province is like, I thought someone here would know better. There are even parts in rural eastern and northern Ontario full of French-Canadians. Isn’t there inherent value in preserving our native culture that exists nowhere else in the world?
There’s no reason why a whole continent should be a monoculture, even if it is the globohomo one.
“If you go ever spoke with the older people who were part of the original settlement populations in Virginia and particularly Kentucky – BEFORE there were television signals to broadcast in programming from the outside world, or radio conglomerates broadcasting syndicated programming – what I found was that it was very difficult to understand my own relatives from this older age range..”
This is very true! My parents are both from a remote area in eastern Kentucky, and I can recall their pronunciation of certain words — notably “the” spoken as “thee” — and how both of them strived to lose that distinct marker of being a “Hillbilly”.
Another commenter above, Cornelius Burroughs Tavington, touched upon something very true, as well; the term he refers to as “ancestral indifference”. Admittedly, I was a sufferer of that form of self-erasure until I stumbled upon White Nationalism back in 2015. As I’ve told more than one person, I was headed over a cliff into nihilism and White Nationalism saved my life. Now, I will voluntarily and gladly carry on the maintenance of my father’s extensive genealogical research to pass on to the next generations.
In the 80% french-speaking canadian province of Quebec, « louisianisation » has become an expression that reflects the anxiety of being anglicised and culturally replaced. It often framed around linguistic concerns to mask the refusal of ethnic replacement.
The actual Premier of Quebec, François Legault, used this word to justify the fight against mass migration.
https://www.ledevoir.com/politique/quebec/717414/les-oppositions-denoncent-les-propos-de-legault-sur-l-immigration?utm_source=recirculation&utm_medium=hyperlien&utm_campaign=corps_texte
Exact. Louisiana (and I do love southern LA) and even more Missouri are what we do not want to become. However, if the argument is to exclude Québec and its diaspora in this texte, it doesn’t work. All French presence in the USA comes from Québec. New Orleans was founded by someone born here (Bienville). The Cajuns are really Acadians. The Voyageurs (coureurs de bois) were from here. Etc. Etc. This is why Québec is le foyer lumineux de l’Amérique française.
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