Frenchmen into Peasants: Modernity and Tradition in the Peopling of French Canada.

By Leslie Choquette (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997. viii plus 397 pp. $45.00).

This work is a tour de force and a tour de sources. In accord with recent research in France and Canada, it redefines French emigration to Canada and French-Canadian society. In her pursuit of French emigrants to Canada, Leslie Choquette left - as her lengthy Introduction inventories - no stone unturned. Her rich Canadian and French documents allowed her to offer relatively precise numbers and make critical distinctions between types of migrants and emigrants by place, sex, age, profession, and period. Her Canadian sources proved a true embarrassment of riches. Along with France's experiment to establish a colony in North America went a "plethora of ecclesiastical, administrative, notarial and judicial records." Along with sacramental records, the church furnished telling letters of abjuration - records of the renunciation of one faith for Catholicism and a place in the new world - testimonials of freedom to marry, and patient lists from the Hotel-Dieu de Quebec Her French sources included passenger lists, lists of indenture workers (who formed, she estimates, the majority of civilian [not military] French emigrants), military records describing the uneven but important flow of soldiers to Canada, and official correspondence, which provides a way, at least in rough, to get at smugglers, prisoners, and those fils de famille who came with money.

Choquette's reaches several carefully drawn conclusions. Among them, carefully nuanced estimates are bountiful: Between 1660-1759 French Canada absorbed 18,000-19,000 French emigrants. The total French emigration to Canada numbered around 67,000 people but with seasonal migration included could have received as many as 75,000 in the two centuries of her study

Choquette's thesis is greater than her quantification. She seeks to confront conceptions of the static nature of France's ancien regime and le vieux Quebec. She animates the Canadian settlement with dynamic people not unlike the English who settled the adjacent North American colonies. She chooses to depict French Canada as a creation of vigorous and expanding Atlantic economy. It was settled largely by an active colonizing state with people in France largely connected with the emergence of "a capitalistic economy."

Choquette's attempt to define her thesis forms the body of her work. With admirable skills, she demonstrates region by region - even department by department - that while virtually all of France contributed to the emigration the most likely areas to send emigrants (permanent and temporary to both Quebec and Acardie) are associated with the emerging Atlantic economy and especially the Northwest, for which she records 38.6 percent, followed by Centerwest, 19 percent; Southwest, 10.9 percent; East, 9 percent; Paris region, 8.5 percent.

She concludes from these numbers and the east-west emigration axis she draws from Rouen to Toulouse, that the "international connection represented by the Atlantic economy superseded the cultural backwardness generally attributed to southern France as a whole." Without validating the emigrants' self-identified place of origin, family urban-rural migration patterns, and just how rural even a town or city might still be, she concludes that the emigrants were urban rather than rural: only one-third of her sample come from village or countryside, with the remaining two-thirds of her sample coming from towns, of which, in turn, approximately two-thirds were from cities with populations in excess of ten thousand.

She is surprised by her own findings. The emigrants were exceptions to an overwhelmingly rural France in which (she cites Pierre Goubert) 85 percent lived in communities of fewer than 2,000 and 80 percent gained a living directly off the land. This stands in shocking contrast to traditional portraits of the settlers of Canada. She puzzles over how remarkable this is when one considers their destiny in a Canada with only three "urban centers": Quebec and Montreal and Trois Rivieres, the first two not greater than 8,000 inhabitants at the time of the British Conquest and the third "merely a rural bourg, irremediably tied to the activities of the surrounding countryside." Perhaps, her puzzlement is solved by recognizing this was an age in which a place on the land still best assured food, family, status, and even money.

Her extensive treatment of women emigrants confirms her findings. They were even more likely to be town dwellers. "The distinction," she writes, "noted for emigrants overall between ... commercial and subsistence agriculture blurs considerably or even disappears entirely, when female emigrants are concerned. It appears that the lesser attraction of overseas migration for women in more backwards areas, postulated above to explain the virtual absence of female departures south of Charente, extended also to the pockets of traditionalism north of that boundary."

Her data on class and occupational background - as well as age and religion - also square with her notion that French emigrants disproportionately reflect the most urban and, hence, the most modern elements of France's ancien regime. The over representation of elites together with that of artisans and laborers matched by the under representation of peasants, led Choquette to conclude that the French peasant was the only real absentee from the movement. "French Canada's subsequent history as citadel of rural traditionalism cannot be explained by in reference to an influx of sturdy, pious, and backward-looking Vendeens. Such a group unquestionably emerged but ironically, it did so from roots that were urban, mercantile, and above all mobile."

The flow of her emigrant-adventurers does not match times either of exceptionable opportunity or of misery. She finds no correlation between global emigration and the annual course of grain prices or overall economic curves of boom or bust. Rather, Choquette finds that emigration occurred in response to the greater rhythms established by an expanding Atlantic economy. On this basis she frames her analysis against the background of an epoch in which at least a million Frenchmen a year changed residence; a city had to absorb in a century a rural surplus population of equal size not to lose population, and regional migrations over long and short distances already formed their own patterns and traditions as Jean-Pierre Poussou contends, making in his words, "a regional vision of migratory movements ... imperative." This fits Choquette's general notion of the importance of regional analysis and her thesis that emigration from Northwestern France arose out of "several traditions of regional mobility - those of seamanship, urban immigration, and compagnonnage."

Both total numbers of immigrants and return rates of approximately 70 percent suggest Canada did little to elicit and fulfill hopes for a new world of economic opportunity and individualism. "Canada never captured the French imagination," and all the efforts of merchants, seigneurs, and state "never managed to create a truly autonomous migratory movement centered on Canada." Never a popular destination, there were virtually no cities to absorb the new urban immigrants, and isolated farmsteads along the Saint Lawrence defy fanciful historical notions of community. Yet, comparatively, those who took to the countryside ate well, were free of taxes, and stood tall as "les habitants" in comparison to the paysans of the old country. Initially, new inhabitants preferred individualist agriculture, resisted the exaction of a relatively benign seigneurial systems, and speculated in land. But without economic opportunities and under directions of a mercantilist state and paternalistic church, they were transformed into peasants - who, nevertheless, remained happy to forsake subsistence agriculture whenever an opportunity to make a dollar presented itself. In fact, they rallied to the market in response to eighteenth century French liberalization and the liberal economic policies of their British conquerors, sustaining a commercial development in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, that weakened the seigneurial system and the church.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Quebec economy retreated up and down the line, as "the Canadian bourgeois were unable to make the transition from 'a colonial entrepreneurial class' to a new industrial bourgeoisie replete with tough professional managers and sources of capital" and the farmer habitants gave way to larger farms and a more stratified society. This culminated in a great exodus from rural Canada to the west and south and opened the period when the vanishing countryside of the past could be idealized in the present as an expression of community and la France profonde.

Choquette's book Frenchmen into Peasants is felicitously mistitled. It forces us to discuss what her data and analysis don't say. Her attempt to exploit the popularity Eugen Weber's of Peasants into Frenchmen fails by the very disjunction between demography and cultural history and between quantitative changes and cultural transformation. As keen as her work is it does not open, as Weber does, the minds of her subjects. She does not reveal the minds of emigrating Frenchman or les habitants. She weaves their mentality out of the coarse and the sheer classificatory polarity between what she labels the traditional and modern.

Choquette doesn't address the question how proximity to market makes one "modem" in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. She doesn't ask whether the great majority of soldiers, indentured servants, priests and entrepreneurs had forsaken their tie to the old order before they came to Canada or were still the cultural progeny of villagers and peasants in urban centers. Did traditional folkways and attitudes about life, land, and family endure in towns and cities and cross the Atlantic as stowaways? Or, does she simply not know how rural and traditional the old order was?

Even if her argument is granted that French emigrants were caught up in varying degrees with the forces of emerging Atlantic capitalism and the new activist state, she does not depict the interior resources of France's emigrants. (This might provoke a discussion about the adaptability and malleability of both peasant and rural peoples.) Surely opportunities for a new life, one of less pain and with such valuable possessions as land and craft, home, family, and community, are the greatest transformers of minds and ways. Clearly, they were not bountiful in the seventeenth century France or in its distant North American colony whose settlers came in such traditional roles as soldiers, indentured servants, orphans, and prisoners.

With a view, which in its own way fits the recent secularization of Quebec and a part of the French-Canadian elite's confidence to go it alone, she dismisses old French Canada as the dominion of la France profonde. She implies, though doesn't argue, that Quebec's rich folklore of rituals received its important place in French-Canadian history by romanticization of the old order. Nostalgic idealization fashions out of the past consolation prizes for members of a rural society incapable of adapting themselves to modern world.

Nevertheless, Choquette's contribution is considerable. She establishes numbers and distinctions crucial for comparative studies of French and Altantic emigrations. In place of static images of the old orders in France and Canada, she offers a dynamic portrait of capitalist penetration and associated migrations of peoples. She does all this with a felcitously mistitled work which asks cultural historians to explain how, at the turn of the century, as peasants in France became Frenchmen, Frenchmen in Canada became peasants.

Joseph A. Amato Southwest State University