Quote:
Originally Posted by Curmudgeon
Again, the reason why there was very little supplementation of the French-Canadian population from France itself after 1763 is entirely demographic.
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I beg to differ.
There's also the fact that the British authorities forbade French ships to navigate the St. Lawrence for nearly a century after the conquest. Makes it harder for the French to emigrate.
I also wonder about what was left of New-France/Canada, or better yet l'Empire français d'Amérique, in the French collective consciousness of the 19th century.
For instance, when French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville traveled extensively in the US for almost a year in 1831, he never considered visiting the former French colony nor wondered about its current inhabitants... until, while boarding a ferry in Minnesota, and to his great surprise, he was greeted in French by the owner of the ferry, a métis. In his mind, it was inconceivable that, 70 years after the end of the 7 years war, the french language would had survived in this corner of the world. That a learned man like him thought that at the time is a bit telling of the overall mindset in France back then.
Epilogue: he eventually made a two weeks side trip to Lower Canada, and what he witnessed over there was consterning and disturbing to him. He shared his observations in his famous book
De la démocratie en Amerique (1835). Must have made it harder for the French readers of his book to want to emigrate.