Jean-Francois Mouhot - Les réfugiés acadiens en France (1758-1785): L'impossible réintégration?

Jean-Francois Mouhot

Les réfugiés acadiens en France (1758-1785): L'impossible réintégration?

Québec: Les Éditions Septentrion, 2009

448 + vii pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-2-89448-513-2.

A book examining approximately three thousand Acadians who reached France in 1758, three years after their deportation from the Maritimes, through to 1785, when about 1,600 of them moved on to Louisiana, might seem a footnote to Canadian Studies. In fact, Jean-Francois Mouhot has produced a carefully researched and closely argued monograph which has an importance that transcends its focus and time period. Central to his analysis is the contested issue of Acadian identity – when did it emerge and of what did it consist? Was there a sense of group solidarity among the refugees dumped on French shores? What did they call themselves? Mouhot insists that previous historians have assumed a specific identity prior to 1755 and labelled it "Acadian", and have attributed their failure to take root back in France to this. The problem, as he sees it, is that there are many documents about the Acadians (to use the term for convenience), but most of the few by them were petitions shaped to win concessions from the strong rather than to reveal the perceptions of the weak. On the face of it, the Acadians ought to have fitted in: they defined themselves as people who spoke French and were deeply Catholic. French officials came to call them "Acadians" but the people themselves were more often used the hardly tactful label "neutral French". As Mouhot sensibly observes, concepts such "assimilation" and "integration" reflect modern thinking largely absent in the eighteenth century. However, ancien régime French government comes out of these pages as moderately efficient, even if it did not consistently concern itself with a small-scale refugee issue. Mouhot even identifies some pre-Revolutionary sense of French cultural nationality, although in practice any policy of local assimilation would have aimed at making the Acadians into Bretons or Poitévins. Reintegration failed, he argues, because the French government never intended that it should succeed, or even be attempted. The Acadians offered a handy answer to an awkward contradiction in Mercantilist thinking: nations needed overseas colonies for strength, yet allowing their own people to emigrate meant demographic weakness. (Hence the British use of the "Foreign Protestants" to populate Nova Scotia.) The refugees were a wild card that could be played in the imperial board-game. Plans to send them to Guiana or to the Caribbean came to nothing, and even projects for block settlement within France seemed to have been aimed at keeping them warm for globalisation. But the Acadians, however they styled themselves, played their part too. They married among themselves and repeatedly sought to be sent either back home or to St Pierre and Miquelon. Eventually, and fortuitously, most were herded off to Louisiana. In 1785 it was a Spanish province, but the emigrants reinforced its francophone identity and – as the Bourbon bureaucracy duly noted – they were subjects of the king of England anyway. Appropriately, Mouhot's book was awarded the Pierre Savard Prize for 2010.