La Belle Province de Quebec

Quebec

by Nicholas Andrian on Tuesday, April 6, 2010 at 10:22 a.m.

As I contemplate zipping up to Montreal for a few days, I'm reminded why I love that city (second only to my love for Paris). When I was in college, it was a poor man's trip to Paris...only 375 miles away where friends and I could put our French to use outside of the college classroom. Before the "quiet revolution" when the Quebeckers asserted themselves and passed laws making French the predominate language in the province, the injustices I perceived were similar to those going on in the South during the Civill Rights era (tho' less harsh, of course). For example, I was in Eaton's department store downtown one day and I approached a salesgirl in French about an item I wanted to buy. She said, "Oh, we don't speak French here." I asked her why not and she responded that to work in that English-owned store, French wasn't required. I said I wondered why the 85% of the population who were Franco-Canadians had to speak the language of the 15 % minority in order to work, but that the opposite did not apply and wasn't there an injustice in that?...Another time, I was in a car with three other French majors and one Quebecois friend looking for some go-go joint; we were lost when I spotted a lady walking a dog. I pulled over, rolled down the window and said, "Excusez-moi, Madame..." Before I could ask for directions, she said, "Why don't you Frenchies learn to speak White?" I assured her I could speak 'White' very well, but that I would find a Quebecois to ask for directions since they were more accommodating. Then the 'Frenchies' passed Law 101 which, among other things, said that all signs, public and private, had to be in French and that all immigrants coming into the province had to send their kids to French-language schools or else move to one of the other nine provinces to educate their kids. There were other regulations, but that law did the trick. Go to Quebec now and you are plunged into a totally francophone environment. Go into a store and everyone speaks French to you, even the Asian immigrants (mainly from Hong Kong) who almost never learned a word of French before. Same for the Greeks. The Quebecois culture is rich in history, literature, music and rivals any other in its depth. They managed to hold on to all of it (mainly thru their large families and the influence of the Catholic Church) during two centuries of the Anglos' attempts to suppress their identity...Read Longfellow's long poem, "Evangeline," about the ethnic cleansing the Anglos imposed upon the Acadians, those French-speakers from the Maritime provinces, who were forcibly removed to Louisiana (before France sold the Louisiana Purchase to the U.S.). That's where the name "Cajuns" comes from, a corruption of the French word "Acadiens," the name given to those Francophones from New Brunswick and Nove Scotia. A real success story, Vive le Quebec!