AHC: Large scale French immigration to the United States
- Thread starter leopard9
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Well, France was a fairly prosperous country that didn’t really have an autocratic system after the 1860s, so less push factors. Also, the French colonists didn’t go to the 13 colonies; they had Quebec instead. Religion also played a role, with most of the French being Catholic, although the Protestant Huguenots did immigrate in significant numbers.
I wouldn't call 3% of the US Population tiny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Americans.
France was a net recipient of immigrants between Napoleon and WWI if I recall correctly. France has a low population density and almost no population growth due to low fertility. The easiest way to do this would be to fix France’s fertility issues, which no one seems to be able to strongly answer.
I think I read about on this site a while back. Apparently for some reason France stumbled upon a rough replacement ratio way before other European nations did and that's the reason why there aren't a lot of French immigrant communities around the world.
That statistic is for ethnic identification, not immigration. Keep in mind that there can be overlap - people from French Canada may identify as of French origin.
Immigration from France to the US was 730 000 from 1820 to 1970. Immigration from Québec was greater than that.
If you go to page 80 in the link, you can see comparisons of immigrant population born in France vs. French Canada. The latter is consistently much higher than the former - in 1900 for example, there were 113 174 from France and 395 126 "Canada-French".
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France, unlike Ireland and Italy, was not densely populated and did not have high fertility. In the 1800s, France was a net recipient of immigration from other parts of Europe.
However... there is a possible way to change things.
Assume that the Franco-Prussian War is even more of debacle than OTL... And Bismarck and Crown Prince Friedrich of Prussia are killed somehow. (A lucky hit by long range artillery, or even better, an ambush by franc-tireurs.)
That leaves Wilhelm of Prussia to determine the peace by himself, and makes him vindictive. He orders the destruction of Paris as a reprisal for Friedrich's death, and the suppression of French guerrilla resistance by scorched-earth warfare and wholesale reprisals. A much larger part of France is annexed to Germany and forcibly Germanized. Eventually, Wilhelm sets up a puppet French state in the remainder of the country, headed by the Bourbon pretender, who IIRC is a flaming reactionary, and governs by police-state methods.
This array of horrors leads to mass emigration from France, with the largest share to the US.
France was very densely-populated in 1800. In present-day boundaries, its population density in 1800 was 53/km^2, which compares with 48 in the Netherlands, 39 in what would become the German Confederation, and about 60-65 in England (which even then imported food). The only countries that were significantly denser than France and England were Belgium (130) and Japan (104).
France was a low-emigration country in general:
"The French exceptionalism of small emigration was attributed to the French people's love of their land; for example, one French author wrote in 1860: 'It must be recognized that the French rarely emigrate. The fact is that among the various races of Europe there is none with a greater regard for his native land than the French, with a more instinctive, more inviolable affection for his home, his village, and his country...Only religious or political persecution have led in France to emigration on a scale of any importance.'75 However, the key to the difference is to be found within the distinctive French pattern of economic development in the long nineteenth century, the major feature of which was the survival of a large agrarian sector. On the eve of the French Revolution, the productivity of workers employed in British agriculture was already well above that of the French; in familiar fashion, the more favorable British land-to-labor ratios fostered more capital-intensive agriculture, producing a surplus for urban investment, which in turn increased rural out-migration. But in France, the revolution 'gave the peasantry what they had long wanted--full rights of ownership and freedom from the burden of feudal exactions from all kinds.' 76 Although French agricultural output remained consistently below that of the British, the landless peasantry formed a far smaller proportion of the rural population. The characteristics of the agrarian sector in turn conditioned the pace and pattern of industrial development along different lines. Compared with Britain, the workshop sector in France survived much longer, and industry used much less unskilled labor. Most significantly for the present purpose, the rural exodus was long delayed. *The French could afford to love their land, so long as they kept their families small.* [my emphasis--DT]
"In short, France made the transition from agriculture to industry and from rural to urban life without experiencing the shock of the Great Transformation. Not only did fewer of the French leave France, but fewer also moved to great urban centers, because the push on rural localities was much weaker than elsewhere. If 'migration begets migration,' the reverse is true as well: the absence of emigration in the early period of transition makes it less likely that, should a 'push' subsequently arise, emigration will follow. Concomitantly, in the absence of surplus population, the state had no reason to turn emigrationist. Although the precocious limitation of fertility in the middle decades of the nineteenth century was rational from the economic perspective of the rural population, it was problematic in other respects. Hence, uniquely in Europe, from the middle of the century onward, the French state became decidedly immigrationist..." http://books.google.com/books?id=Dqawo0Kpvz0C&pg=PA53
Incidentally, French emigration to the US may be less than official US figures indicate, according to the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (p. 380): "Before 1869, visitors--like Alexis de Toqueville--or merchants on tour were included in the tally. After this, US immigration authorities based their count on the country of last domicile, a practice that caused considerable error because many so-called French migrants were not French at all. Some of them were East Europeans who had temporarily settled in France, which, like the United States, has had a large immigrant population in modern times. Others were Germans who had acquired false papers in France; it had been easy for them to cross the Rhine where border controls were lax, but the more rigorous police regulations that prevailed in French seaports made it advisable for them to claim French nationality en route. American authorities counted such people as French citizens...French statisticians have estimated that only 75 percent of individuals listed as French by US immigration authorities were in fact born in France, but their sources are equally confused...In addition, the rate of return to France of French emigrants has always been high. The number of French people who actually decided to make their home in the United States may therefore be no more than half of what official US figures indicate, even if the total includes the natives of two regions that sent many immigrants to America: Savoy, which was Italian before 1861, and Alsace-Lorraine, which was under German rule from 1871 to 1918 (in 1920, one out of five French-born Americans was an Alsatian)." Anyway, the article continues, however one interprets the figures, they are quite small. "Norway, with one-tenth the population of France, has sent more migrants across the ocean."
And yet, despite their relatively small numbers compared to later immigrant groups, the French definitely did make an impact on the US, and not just in the New Orleans area:
"People, especially French and American people, tend to forget that the heart of the United States was once French. Not only was all of Canada and all of the Mississippi drainage from the Alleghenies to the Rockies under the French flag, as everybody knows, but French and French-Indian mountain men had penetrated to the West Coast before any of the officially recognized explorers and discoverers, for whom they were in fact often the guides. Deep in the Northern Rockies is the town of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. In Nevada, Wyoming, Oregon, many of the leading merchants in the small towns are descended from the French, and they often still name their children Pierre, Jeanne and Yvonne — conspicuous among the recent rash of movie-star first names, dictated by the mysteries of Hollywood “numerology” which cause the Roman Catholic clergy such distress at baptism. Not only are towns all over the Middle West named such things as Prairie du Chien and Vincennes, not only are their leading families named Sublette and Le Sueur and Deslauriers, but — something very few people realize — French life survived intact in hundreds of small isolated communities until well into the twentieth century.
"When I was a boy, during the First World War, I took a canoe trip down the Kankakee River from near Chicago to the Mississippi. We passed through many villages where hardly an inhabitant spoke a word of English and where the only communication was the wandering tree-lined river and a single muddy, rutted road out to the highway. There is a book about it, Tales of a Vanishing River, and there was a popular humorous dialect poet, Drummond, who used to recite his poems in high-school assemblies and on the Chautauqua Circuit (a kind of pious variety tent show for farmers, now vanished) back in those days. “I am zee capitain of zee Marguerite vat zail zee Kankakee.” This was not off in the wilds somewhere — it was a long day’s walk from the neighborhood of Studs Lonigan..." http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/essays/frenchpoetry.htm
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Maybe a France, were the Ancient Regime persists and the Revolution years never happened like in OTL reforms are slow and later reverted, economy is further in crisis. Clerus and nobility withdraw from reforms after internal feuds, nevertheless the King renaims a weak ruler. Maybe toleration of Protestants is also withdrawn, serfdom in the countryside is still der facto reality. Many Frenchmen immigrate over the Atlantic. Later on, as France ist more and more in debt and considered a weak man, voices in the Former British thirteen colonies are heard that push for either buying or militarily annexing the French colony.
The example of post-Communist Europe, where sustained low fertility rates have consisted with high rates of emigration, suggest to me that a France that has a worse time of it in the 19th century might become a significant source of emigration. A France that did not industrialize, or a France that has been more unstable, might well be a France more people would leave.
It does strike me as at least possible that the lack of French emigrants may be a simple matter of chance, of the idea of migration not taking off. Areas on the fringe of France, and of Francophone France, like Alsace and the French Basque Cpuntry, were disproportionately large sources of emigrants from France. Could it be that Francophone France just did not make connections? If France had kept Canada, say, I can imagine that it might have become a destination for Normans and Bretons.
Albert.Nik
Banned
France is a country in Europe with a good geography and economy and also stable compared to places like England,Germany from where the immigrant percentage is the highest. They also had nearby Algeria,Tunisia and Morocco with good Mediterranean climate. Is this the reason? This is a minor reason. We must also understand that French Empire had been at war with British Empire a lot of times. In America and India,this happened directly. This left the French with North Africa and smaller colonies here and there. Those regions were already populated. The regions below the Arab populated region has zero Greenery and no rivers or water supply and hence,it makes it impossible for a pre-industrial or a newly industrialized country to settle up colonies there. Getting to the West coast of America/Mexico/South/Central America to settle an Empire would be very difficult due to logistics problems as to get there,empires had to be crossed and sea route is very long from France.
What if the Napoleonic Wars go worse for France and lead to more internal instability such as oppressively high taxes to pay for the war, the resumption of the Reign of Terror to silence Napoleon's critics, and counter-invasions as other countries revenge themselves upon France? Could that lead to greater French emigration to America? Yes, French immigrants would be Catholic going to a majority Protestant country, but so were Italians and Irish. And unlike them, the French would have a reputation of coming from a stalwart ally of America against Britain.
Partly later marriage and partly "primitive" contraception methods such as what the Dutch call "leaving the church before the singing starts"...
For a related but somewhat different analysis:
"It is instructive, in this regard, to review two recent syntheses of what has been called French exceptionalism, the peasant-based fertility decline of France.
"One is by Jean-Claude Chesnais, who begins by citing the revolution of ideas and decline of religious sentiment that unfolded in the course of the eighteenth century, culminating in the political and social revolution of 1789... Dismantling the hereditary estates of the past, this transformation resulted in a more open society in which social ambitions and the thirst for equality were realized. The "pursuit of happiness" thereafter came to include the enhancement of material well-being, perhaps at the cost of having more children.
"Consistent with his interest in migratory movements, Chesnais goes on to cite the failure of France's colonial policy to secure overseas outlets for "excess population," this limitation being reinforced through anti-emigration laws. In addition he analyzes the divergence of French from English agricultural history. Already smallholders before the revolution, French peasants, through their rebellions, interdicted the penetration of a central feature of agrarian capitalism—legally sanctioned enclosures—into the countryside. (Significantly, neither potatoes nor cottage industry gained much of a foothold either [see Lesthaeghe 1990: 18].) This, Chesnais argues, delayed the formation of an industrial proletariat and with it France's industrial revolution, but precipitated a demographic revolution as yet more smallholders remained on the land. The "triumph of the small" or the "revenge of the small against the large estate" was realized. Two-thirds of France's 32 million inhabitants in 1830 belonged to landowning families; in Britain, including Ireland, only 54 percent had this status (see Hobsbawm 1962).
"Chesnais considers, but rejects, the nineteenth-century thesis of Le Play that the Napoleonic Code, with its provision for equal divisions of property among all heirs, was the decisive element inducing peasants to limit family size or face an intolerable fragmentation of their resources. Fertility decline began before the code was instituted--indeed in some regions before the revolution. There was even early evidence for it in places of single-heir inheritance in southern France. He concedes, however, that enforced partibility may well have intensified a process already underway..." https://books.google.com/books?id=Hgzorr7xG3QC&pg=PA200
So to prevent French "exceptionalism" (low fertility, low emigration) you really would have to prevent the Revolution and the advantages it gave to the small landowner--and even that might not be enough, given the divergences that already existed between French and English agriculture before 1789.
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