Learning to Love the French
Posted by Charles A. Coulombe on December 21, 2007
I am a Franco-American. By that moniker, I am not claiming kinship with the brand of canned spaghetti, but rather am using a somewhat antique term for descendants of the French-Canadians who flocked into New England between the Civil War and World War I. My Great-Grandfather, Joseph Coulombe, was born in Rimouski in the Province of Quebec, and arrived here in the 1880s; his son and grandson were born in the old whaling-turned-industrial town of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Most of the emigration arrived in the States to work in the mills of New England; the Coulombes came to entertain them.
The New England Franco-Americans are a strange breed; coming from a culture heavily imbued with the teachings of the Catholic Church and the ethos of pre-Revolutionary France, they arrived in a land consecrated to the notions of “a Church without a Pope and a State without a King.” The inherent (and today almost completely lost) psychological conflict this dichotomy would engender in the psyches of the descendants of that emigration gave rise to a great deal of violence and alcoholism. One remembers Stephen King’s memorable characterization of our people in his short story “The Woman in the Room.” He describes a man driving in a Maine town, listening to French music on the radio: “Lewiston is still a French-speaking town, and they love their jigs and reels almost as much as they love to cut each other up in the bars on lower Lisbon Street.” For many, perhaps most, of New England French, the pressure to assimilate has led to loss of both the language and the Catholic faith of their ancestors, engendering for many a strange kind of nameless dread and guilt, made all the worse by the fact that it cannot be openly addressed. After all — how can conformity to the mainstream be a bad thing, especially when coupled with escape from dreary ethnic ghettoes in decaying industrial towns?
Whatever pain this mindset may cause, it has produced some mighty fine writers: names like Jack Kerouac, David Plante, and the Brothers Theroux. In the work of most such Franco-American writers there is an element of dreamy unreality, of impressionism, which many are quite willing to attribute to their heritage. Some resent that heritage; some regret it; but all seem to agree that it is irretrievably lost, the price of joining the great American club. Moreover, their success often seems somehow connected to the vociferousness with which they reject the religion and manners of their fathers. God forbid that one, such as Kerouac, might begin finding his way back — that would be sacrilege, in a secular sense (and would not bode too well for such a writer’s career or memory).
For my own part, I was fortunate. My father left New Bedford to serve in World War II, and then moved to New York where he met my Austro-English mother. When I was five, we moved to Hollywood. But for all that he embraced this country (and to some small degree suffered from the angst earlier described) he passed his religion and language on to his sons. It is not too much to say that in the socially and politically chaotic decades through which I have lived, being a practicing Catholic Francophone gave me both creative distance and a clear prism through which to gaze upon developments without being too caught up in them. As an added benefit, the wonder tales passed down from our ancestors that he told us — of the loup-garou, the lutin, the feux-follets, the chasse-gallerie, and so many more stimulated my imagination tremendously (as well as readied me for medieval literature). For, you see, in the mind of old French Canada, religion and wonder were mixed, and so it has ever been for me. The alternatives the culture in which I found myself in had to offer simply seemed dead, when not outright disgusting.
Added to this was that this Francophone heritage made me much more simpatico with the Hispanics amongst whom I found myself in Los Angeles. For all our differences, their attitudes and values often made more sense to me than did those of my Anglo friends. So many of their customs were close to ours, such as the crèche at Christmas and visiting the graves All Souls. My mother’s heritage made me sympathetic to Austria and the greater Germanic Catholic world as well. In time, what united the world’s various Catholic (and in truth, as I would discover, Orthodox as well) cultures was far greater than what divided them. This included the great sense of loss of heritage referred to earlier. What PBS’s advertising for their program, The Irish in America said of that group, “They got what they wanted; they lost what they had,” is true of all. Of course, one also began to realize that the same was true of various long-settled by economically neglected areas of the United States.
But alongside this catholicity of attitude, there arose in me two other realizations: one was of the tremendous anti-Catholicism of American culture as a whole, partly due to historic enmities, but also because of the increasing degeneracy of the nation’s elites, who found the Church’s moral teachings an ever greater reproach; but the other was a specifically anti-French bias.
I first became aware of it in grade school, studying the French and Indian War. The book we used opened with a blood curdling account of the Schenectady Massacre of 1690; we children were treated to an account of how awful the French and their Indian allies really were. What went unmentioned (until I — perhaps unwisely — did so) was that that raid was in reprisal for the more merciless — in terms of slaughter of women and children — Lachine Massacre of the year before. This observation on my part, earning me as it did a visit with the principal, taught me a valuable lesson.
Certainly, it became apparent through my entrance into adulthood that the French were ridiculed and attacked in a way that few other nationalities could be. Matters came to a head in my middle age, with the commencement of the great global democratic revolution, launched by Mr. Bush in 2003. For reasons of their own, the French decided against joining the great crusade — oh, sorry, I forgot; we’re not supposed ever to use that word again: my bad. In any case, they were universally excoriated as “Surrender Monkeys.” Most famously, the President ceremonially renamed “French Fries” as “Freedom Fries” (the Germanic side of my soul recalled Wilson similarly redubbing Sauerkraut “Liberty Cabbage” in 1917).” With my brother and other friends and relations deployed in the great conflict, I was near to exploding; but John Kerry pushed me over the edge the following year.
Although a famously annoying and hypocritical man, one can understand Kerry’s casual attachment to his religion — it is traditional among Democrats, and, as one sees with Rudy Giuliani, can be with Republicans as well. But Kerry has many French relatives, and speaks the language well; despite this, he insisted upon using English with French reporters. Now, obviously, the Bush side would have attacked him for betraying his lack of linguistic ignorance, something many Americans are proud of; but it was a cowardly act.
In the meantime, an avalanche of books poured out, attacking France: Vile France, The Arrogance of the French, The French Betrayal of America, and best (or worst) of all, Our Oldest Enemy: best or worst because co-written by Mark Molesky, a truly fine writer. This latest tome opened with a heart-searing massacre from — you guessed it, the French and Indian War.
...continues
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Saturday, December 22nd, 2007
"Learning to Love the French": On being Franco-American
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