Frenchmen into Peasants: Modernity and Tradition in the Peopling of French Canada by Leslie Choquette

Choquette, Leslie. Frenchmen into Peasants: Modernity and Tradition in the Peo- pling of French Canada. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1997, 397 pp.

Leslie Choquette’s title, Frenchmen into Peasants, somewhat enigmatically announces her challenge to longstanding stereotypes about the settlement of New France, stereotypes that have been accepted without question by at least those of us not already immersed in the new historical demography. Choquette’s title evokes a strange vision of modern, urban Frenchmen being somehow transformed into Quebec peasants-when, of course, we all know that the people who crossed the seas to Canada were peasants to begin with, and pious ones to boot, good country folk who were driven from la belle France by the famine conditions of the ancien regime. This sort of mythology has been fostered not only by the Queb cois themselves, who for much of their history had a tendency to idealize their rural and religious nature, but also by right- wing Frenchmen of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who saw Quebec as an extension of la France profonde. In the words of one such writer, “From these houses of peasants departed, two hundred years ago, the sturdiest lads and the decentest girls, called beyond the seas to the conquest of a promised land” (16). And as has often been noted in studies of French critical reception of Quebec literary texts, even today many in France prefer to envision Quebec as depicted in Maria Chapdelaine rather than as a modern, multicultural society.