The French Connection: Why Maine’s Forgotten French-Speaking Communities Are Suddenly Cool Again

The road signs begin to deceive you as you travel north on Route 1 through Aroostook County. Madawaska. Van Buren, Frenchville. names that cling to a tale that the majority of Americans have forgotten and sit strangely in their mouths.

On the other side, in New Brunswick, people are speaking the same language that their cousins on this side were once disciplined for using in school. The Saint John River runs along the edge of it all. It’s difficult to ignore how silently, almost ashamed, that history sits there.

In Maine, speaking French was limited to whispering or not speaking at all for the majority of the 20th century. An entire community was shattered by a 1919 state law that prohibited French-language instruction, not just classrooms. According to Patrick Lacroix, who oversees the Acadian Archives at the University of Maine at Fort Kent, that one statute changed people’s perceptions of their own language. Even though the law was repealed in 1969, the harm had already been done. As children grew up, parents made the decision—often without speaking it aloud—that their children would do better in English. Safer and easier. American.

One of those children is 68-year-old Cecile Thornton. She was born into a francophone family in Lewiston with the maiden name Desjardins. She heard her people made fun of as a child and carried that shame for many years. She raised English-speaking children, married an anglophone, and gradually lost the words she used to think in.

Then, in 2016, she nearly unintentionally entered a French-language gathering hosted by West African immigrants in Lewiston. Something broke open. She claims that the Africans made her feel proud to be Franco once more, a claim that has more significance than it first seems.

Conversations throughout the state continue to bring up that particular detail. Once employing thousands of Quebecois, Lewiston’s mills are now surrounded by communities of Somali, Congolese, and Djiboutian families, many of whom came speaking French as a second or third language. The newcomers, according to Jan Sullivan, who runs a French conversation group at the Franco Center, have revived the language in the community. It’s almost poetic to see a community that was on the verge of burying its French being given it back by people from a different continent.

Don Lévesque operates Le Club Française in Madawaska, up north, from a town that clings to the Canadian border as if it is still unsure of its national identity. He is 76 years old, Acadian, and acknowledges that his attitude toward everything varies daily. On certain mornings, he feels optimistic. On other mornings, he refers to himself as “the French speaking dinosaur in an English world.” In addition to organizing movie nights and cultural excursions into New Brunswick, the club offers conversation classes for adults and after-school programs for children. The question that no one can quite answer is whether any of it sticks with younger Mainers.

The figures are not helpful. There were about 30,000 French speakers at home in 2022, compared to over 40,000 four years earlier and 33,000 in 2018, according to the Census Bureau. The trend line is unmistakable and unfavorable. Even so, you would think the language is doing well if you were to enter La Kermesse in Biddeford on a summer afternoon and smell the aroma of butter from the pastry tents while listening to accordion music drifting over a parking lot. There’s a feeling that French people in Maine have given up trying to survive in private and are once again making an appearance in public—awkwardly, joyfully, and on their own uneven terms.

Perhaps that is the true appearance of a revival. A small club in a border town that refuses to close, a Senegalese teen helping her practice, and a grandmother taking lessons once more are examples of a gradual re-entry rather than a spectacular one. It’s still unclear if it’s sufficient. Being Franco in Maine, however, feels less like a secret and more like a tale worth sharing aloud for the first time in a long time.