By Jack Patterson, Intern, European Reading Room, 2016
The French-American press, while it existed on a smaller scale than some other ethnic presses in the U.S. (e.g. German), provided French-speaking populations with a means to orient themselves in the United States at various times during its history. French serials have been printed in the U.S. as early as 1780 (the first being the Gazette française, published for a month on the French fleet docked at Newport led by the Comte de Rochambeau to inform the French troops). Even today, newspapers in French published on a small scale in the U.S. have served various purposes, including the communication of American news to Francophone residents, the recording of events in France and its colonies for French expatriates in the U.S., and the recording of French language, literature and culture with American origin (notably in Louisiana). Examining the history of the French-language press in the U.S. offers a unique view of the history of French immigration patterns in this country. By the middle of the 20th century, the near-complete disappearance of French-American serials reflects the gradual diminution of French monolingualism within the U.S.
The majority of French-language serials that have appeared in the U.S. were published between 1780 and 1925. Examining the history of the French-American press, it is useful to identify three major categories of Francophones who were responsible for these publications, whose communities sprang up in different locations at different times in the U.S. Many publications and individuals of course do not fit neatly into these three categories, but the categories are nonetheless useful in understanding the historical context of the profusions of the French American press. Coming first chronologically, ‘refugees’ from the French Revolution made their way to the U.S. in droves, originating either from France itself or its colonies (most notably Santo Domingo). Many of these wayward souls did not remain in America for very many years after arriving, but were nonetheless responsible for many newspapers up to about 1800. The second group of French-speakers who found themselves in the U.S. after the turn of the 19th century was the Cajuns, or people who had inhabited (Spanish) Louisiana before it passed to the U.S. in 1803. The third and last group can be referred to as Acadians, or simply Québecois immigrants from Canada, who settled primarily in New England looking for stable factory work after the American Civil War. According to scholar of French-American history Robert Perreault, of the nearly 500 French newspapers published in the U.S. from 1780 to 1987, over 330 were published in New England by Québecois immigrants. These three groupings of Francophones in the U.S. were responsible for the majority of French-language newspapers but do not represent the totality of the Franco-American press (other publications have cropped up on the West Coast and in the Midwest, for example, and other immigrant communities, such as Haitian, have published in French).
The first wave of revolutionary refugees left France in the summer of 1789 and consisted of privileged classes who objected to the Revolution. Many of these expatriates did not leave Europe, since some were seeking Germany’s aid in combatting the Revolution. The next wave of emigration, lasting from 1791 through the Thermidorian reaction of 1794, consisted of a wider scope of people, including many former revolutionaries who found themselves enemies of the evolving Revolution and who fled for their lives. Since many of these were politically republican, moving to the U.S. was appealing since they presumably shared similar values.
A second source of refugees during the same time was France’s colonies, where the effects of the Revolution were taking hold. Santo Domingo, the French colony of sugar and coffee plantations, was very prosperous and populous before the Revolution (35,000 ¬- 45,000 slave owners and 450,000 slaves). After the Constituent Assembly in Paris granted citizenship rights to free mulattoes, and a later law extended the same rights to blacks (1791-1792), unrest began to brew in the colony, culminating in a riot in June 1792 which was fomented by the Civil Commissioners who had been sent from France to enforce the new laws (Polverel and Sonthonax). At least 10,000 white refugees piled onto ships and fled straight to the U.S. Given that many of these ships were merchant craft which were trading with the U.S., the majority of colonial refugees ended up in American port cities. These eastern seaboard cities – Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and others– became hosts of French-speaking communities which were large enough to necessitate the formation of their own presses. (By the end of 1793, there were around 3,000 francophone inhabitants of Philadelphia, the largest number of refugees of any American city).
Philadelphia had already been host to an important touchstone of Franco-American press history in 1784: the three-month run of the Courier de l’Amérique. Published by booksellers Boinod & Gaillard -- Swiss nationals who had moved to America to experience the new republic -- it was the second French newspaper published in the U.S. The Courier de l’Amérique was focused mostly on America, with some attention to France. The journal was admired by the small French community in Philadelphia, but folded due to a lack of subscribers, a common fate for newspapers of any language during this time.
It was not incidental that Philadelphia had already seen French-speaking people trying their hand at newspaper publication before the Revolution. As the seat of national government, the city drew many Frenchmen who had a political bent and wanted to be engaged. For the refugees, whether they fled Santo Domingo or France itself, staying in port cities like Philadelphia was also a good place to await news from abroad and potentially return home; the dissemination of newspapers was thus partially oriented toward spreading news about France. Another focus of the newspapers during this period was politics. The papers were sharply divided into two groups, as were the émigrés: republican and aristocratic. One noted character of the Philadelphia press was Claude Corentin Tanguy de la Bossière, a former colonist from Santo Domingo who had published the royalist Journal des révolutions both in the colony and again in Philadelphia, as well as L’Étoile américaine (Feb. – May 1794) and the Niveau de l’Europe et de l’Amérique septentrionale (late 1795) in Philadelphia. Tanguy was closely monitored by the French ambassador, Pierre Adet, because of the anti-revolutionary stance of his journalism, and was forced to publish under a fake name for the latter publication (the Niveau) because some of his articles had been blocked by Adet. A republican counterpart to Tanguy’s newspapers was the Courrier français (1794-8), curiously printed by the same Pierre Parent who printed Tanguy’s aristocratic Étoile américaine for a time. The Courrier was representative of republican attitudes; it supported certain aspects of the Revolution but, as many of its readers came from Santo Domingo, it did not approve of the current state of affairs in the colony. These refugee papers, wherever they fell on the political spectrum, were characterized above all by acerbic wit and vitriol. Samuel Marino, who wrote a dissertation entitled The French-refugee newspapers and periodicals in the United States, 1789-1825, stated that these papers should be considered not as American but as French, since these were Frenchmen temporarily relocated to the U.S., who wrote about events back home, and of whom many wished to return home.
Newspapers during this time were beset by many difficulties. Financial troubles were ubiquitous to early papers; it was common to find even in English newspapers pleas to subscribers to send in their subscription fees so that the paper may continue publication. For the French newspapers, to have such a smaller reading audience made things even more difficult, and publishers had to continue their work often by way of much personal sacrifice. Another complication common to all newspapers, but especially the French newspapers, was the difficulty of procuring foreign news, which was still often unreliable and came by word of mouth from transatlantic sailors, or with newspapers they may have brought across the ocean. This was especially a problem for French newspapers that relied on interest in affairs abroad to fuel their subscriptions. Lastly, a common difficulty for French newspapers was the necessity to translate American news into French. A particularly vocal complainer about all these contemporary setbacks to the press, Joseph de Nacrède of the Courier de Boston, wrote in the third issue of his paper that there were so many things written about Congress that as soon as he translated them, they were already out of date. It is important to remember that even though many French-American newspapers were popping up in port cities during these years, they sustained many difficulties and often fell out of publication after only a few months.
As the eighteenth century drew to a close, certain decisive events pushed many French people out of the U.S. for good, ending this phase of the French “refugee press” of the 1790s. Toward the end of the decade, tensions between France and America began to come into sharp relief. Due in part to Jacobin excesses, Americans were beginning to view the French with less brotherhood than they formerly had. It was not until the XYZ Affair that U.S.-French relations became outright hostile, leading to the Quasi-War and later the Alien and Sedition Acts that made it difficult for immigrants to naturalize. This situation resulted in many French émigrés returning to France or Santo Domingo, and the majority of their papers fell out of publication.
But the Franco-American press did not end so quickly. The next flowering of French newspapers in America was to come in Louisiana, after the territory was annexed to America in 1803. This instantaneously brought a large increase of French speakers to American soil. At the time of its entry into the Union, Louisiana was the only state with a majority language other than English. Even the legislature of Louisiana was conducted partly in French up until the Civil War . Due to this profusion of French speakers, many Francophones who had come to America after the Revolution found their way to Louisiana rather than returning home. And, in later years, two more waves of Frenchmen from France moved to Louisiana: political exiles of the July Revolution of 1830, and republicans exiled by Napoleon III from 1848 to 1851. With a majority French population, the press during the early years of the nineteenth century reflected this distribution, and French-language papers were the norm for the Louisiana community.
These papers, rather than treating American news, were directed more toward French news from the motherland and the colonies, as was the case with some Philadelphia papers above. This news from abroad, early on in the 19th century, was scant. Much was acquired from hearsay by way of sailors passing through port cities, and was thus dubious or inaccurate. But its centrality in the papers reflected that many French expatriates were still living in the U.S. with an eye toward home. For some of the Acadians who had owned plantations in Louisiana for generations (and who could afford to send their children to boarding school to keep their mother tongue) the attention to France in these early newspapers was cultural, for the Francophone population of Louisiana was attuned to the arts and saw France as part of their cultural heritage. This attention to French culture, no doubt strengthened by the influx of revolutionary refugees into the state, contributed to the development of the burgeoning Francophone literary community of Louisiana, whose work was reflected in the press.
Around the 1840s some of these New Orleans papers pioneered a new form of periodical. American writer and philanthropist Edward Larocque Tinker summarized it as follows: “It took the form of a small weekly or monthly review, generally labeled ‘Littéraire et artistique,’ containing long serials, musical and dramatic critiques, and accounts of society happenings.” It was in these publications (one example is Les Comptes rendus de l’athénée louisianais) that noted Francophone Louisianan authors such as Alfred Mercier first published their poetry and prose. When French-language newspapers in Louisiana began to evolve as the years progressed (with more accurate news, more journalism and less advertisement), a trend that endured was the literary bent of the Louisiana press.
It is important to remember, however, that French was so widely spoken in Louisiana that it was not only native French speakers who were publishing newspapers in French. For most of the nineteenth century the operating format for the majority of newspapers in Louisiana was to be bilingual. Often the editors’ native language was English, but French editions were usually published concurrently, with slightly different content. In earlier years, the papers for the most part consisted of advertisements (e.g. for runaway slaves) and legal notices. Their focus tended to be away from local affairs, since these were not considered newsworthy. As the years progressed, papers tended to diversify due in no small part to the literary nature of Francophone Louisianians.
French newspapers’ heyday in New Orleans and other Louisiana parishes lasted until the Civil War. The speaking of French declined greatly, due in part to an influx of Northerners, and also the post-war poverty forcing many formerly wealthy plantation families to forego continued tutoring lessons and trips to France for their children. Many long-standing papers such as Le Meschacébé (1853 to ~1942) and L’Abeille de la Nouvelle Orléans (1827-1925) continued with French content until well into the 20th century (the former stopped publishing French content in 1917, the latter with its last issue). But it was widely recognized that by 1900, in the words of E.L. Tinker, “the use of French in Louisiana had become, not a necessity, but a mere sentimental addiction, indulged in by a rapidly decreasing few.” A deeper process of ‘Americanization’ was not to arrive until after World War I, when a widespread distrust of all things foreign swept over the U.S. attempting to eradicate all things ethnic in favor of a unification of the American people. Ethnically French people and culture remained in Louisiana, but the language was forced to all but disappear.
The third group of Francophone populations whose press was most notable in American history was located in New England. Quite a large group of Quebecois immigrants found themselves in New England states such as Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire during the latter years of the nineteenth century. Starting at the beginning of the American Civil War and lasting until about 1870, emigrés from Quebec piled into trains and moved to America, attracted by factory work and in hopes of a better life. By the end of this exodus there were at least 500,000 French Canadians in New England alone, forming a true enclave. Prompted by the slackening of Canadian commerce after the 1846 imposition of free trade by England, the motives for moving to the U.S. were above all economic, and many saw this as an “agrandissement de la patrie” rather than emigration; they thus tended to bond together as much as possible.
But, as years went on, many French Canadians seemed determined to stick it out in the U.S. in the face of Canadian campaigns for repatriation in the late 1870s. A notable paper of this era was the Messager of Lewiston, Maine, founded after the end of debates for repatriation. On June 3, 1880, the Messager summarized the debate and its own position thereupon: “Nous sommes ici, nous y restons et il faut se créer une position honorable. Nous sommes obligés de fournir notre part aux frais de fonctionnement de la chose publique, pourquoi refuser d’en tirer notre part du profit ? ” [ We are here, we must stay here and we must create an honorable position. We are obligued to pay our share of public operating costs, why refuse to take our part of the profit?]. Canadians were beset by xenophobic sentiment in the U.S., but their bonding together and determination to remain in this country was reflected in their newspapers. Similar to the Louisiana press, the New England Francophone press died out soon after World War I, and for the same reasons.
Despite the large number of French newspapers published in New England, not very many are held by the Library of Congress. Today, the French-American press remains active on a much smaller scale. Of the 1.3 million French speakers in the U.S., over 90% are bilingual, with 76% self-reporting as speaking English “very well.” A scant number of newspapers and periodicals were published for this segment of the population, most notably France-Amérique, a long-standing newspaper out of New York which was founded in 1943.
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