Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [228]
Part of the solution to this was to send out well-brought-up French girls, filles à marier, to marry the settlers and create French-speaking homes. Among them were the famous filles du Roy, ‘king’s daughters’, mostly orphans from bourgeois families, whose travel and subsistence costs—and in some cases dowries—were borne by the Treasury. Some nine hundred of them were sent out between 1665 and 1673, to boost the population (3215 according to the census of 1665), and improve the sex ratio (2:1 male to female). Although the intendant of the colony, Jean Talon, told Colbert that he would have preferred village girls, ready to work like men, rather than these delicate young ladies, they seem to have been a good investment. The population of Nouvelle-France reached 20,000 in 1713 and 55,000 in 1755. The fertility rate averaged a whopping 7.8 children per woman. Although only some 40 per cent of the immigrants spoke un bon français, over half of the women did, and the variant dialects of the immigrant families seem to have been levelled out in the seventeenth century, in favour of standard French learnt at Mother’s knee. In 1698 the Controller-General of the navy remarked: ‘People speak here perfectly well without any bad accent. Although there is a mixture from almost all the provinces in France, none of their dialects can be distinguished in the Canadian provinces.’37
And the marquess of Montcalm, the French general who was to lose the city of Quebec to the British in 1759, had previously admitted: ‘The Canadian peasants speak French very well.’38
The Treaty of Paris in 1763 spelt the end of France’s empire in North America. American France yielded to the overpowering numbers in the British colonies, even if the coup de gršce had come from the dominance of the British navy in the Atlantic* The French defeat did not, however, put paid to French-speaking in the north-east. Even though Canada soon became the destination for large numbers of English-speaking loyalists from the Thirteen Colonies, unwilling to live in an independent United States of America,† the French were still vastly preponderant, approximately by a factor of seven, in the settled areas of what was still a territory with a small European population. It is estimated that in 1791 there were 140,000 francophones and 20,000 anglophones in Canada.§ The French have since put up a redoubtable defence of their community’s existence, polarised around the Catholic Church, French civil law and the continued use of their language.
They were, however, increasingly joined by immigrants who either spoke or adopted English, and certainly by the midpoint of the next century, when the European population was about 1.5 million, French speakers had ceased to be the majority. And the population movements had not yet peaked. Another 2.3 million were admitted between 1821 and 1910.39 In 1998 the country’s population had reached 30.5 million, of whom 6.7 million or 22 per cent spoke French natively, as against 60 per cent brought up to speak English.
Despite this disappointing finale, Canada is the main success story of French as transplanted overseas. But it is certainly not the only story. France had also had a major piece of the action in the sugar business, and throughout the seventeenth century the most populous francophone colony had in fact been the French Antilles,