French Americans

A Variety of Immigration Streams

U.S. citizens of French descent are descended from several streams of immigration to North America and display varying degrees of ethnic identity. Some are the descendants of colonists who arrived during the 16th and 17th centuries in what are today eastern Canada and the upper Midwest. Another stream consisted of highly skilled and prosperous Protestants called Huguenots, who left France to flee religious persecution. This stream of immigrants went directly to the British colonies that later became the United States and rapidly assimilated into the English-speaking White Protestant majority. Approximately a third of all U.S. presidents have had some French Huguenot ancestry.

During the 16th century, French explorers and missionaries traveled to North America, in areas that later became part of Canada and the U.S. upper Midwest, seeking to participate in the fur trade and to convert natives to Christianity. Jacques Cartier claimed large territories around the St. Lawrence River for France, and subsequent explorers staked out areas in the Great Lakes region and the Mississippi valley. But unlike the British, who actively colonized North America with large numbers of British settlers, the French [Page 515]government limited efforts to build significant colonies in what they called “New France” to Quebec and Acadia (present-day New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island) in eastern Canada.

During colonial times, a series of wars was fought in North America between England and France, with both sides enlisting natives as allies. These resulted in British victories and the marginalization of French influence. In 1755, British authorities expelled thousands of French speakers from Acadia in what the Acadians called “le grand Dérangement.” Many died along the route, but others established communities along the Atlantic Coast, particularly in Massachusetts and Maryland. Another 3,000 to 4,000 built communities in Louisiana, which at that time was controlled by France. The Francophone community in Louisiana was later augmented by White and mixed-race French speakers who emigrated from Santo Domingo (Haiti) following the revolution there in 1804. That same year, Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United States. The Louisiana French-speaking community became known as Cajun, a corruption of the word Acadian.

Between 1840 and 1930, approximately 900,000 French Canadians migrated to the United States, mostly to New England but also to the upper Midwest. Many had been impoverished farmers working the small farms of rural Quebec. In New England, many found work in the region's abundant textile factories.

Only modest numbers of people left France during the great period of European migration of the 19th and 20th centuries. Many who did come to the United States during this period went to the West Coast. A group came to California around 1848 during the gold rush. More came after the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, particularly from the two eastern provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which were annexed by Germany. A third group of migrants from the Alps and the Basque region resembled other European immigrants of the period from 1881 to 1924 in that they were impoverished peasants looking for improved economic opportunities. Since World War I, French migration to the United States has been light but steady. Since the 1980s, approximately 2,500 French people have migrated annually to the United States, mostly to California.

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