New France

The cultural region that outlived the colony, and the reason a French North America still exists. New France as a polity ended in 1763, but the sixty thousand people it had settled along the St Lawrence did not leave, and their descendants now number in the millions. What preserved them was a British decision: rather than assimilate the conquered population, the Quebec Act of 1774 restored French civil law, guaranteed Catholic practice and dropped anglicisation, largely because the American colonies were about to rebel and London needed the province quiet. The Church then filled the political space for two centuries, running schools, hospitals and rural life, and encouraged the high birth rates known as the revenge of the cradle. The region extends beyond Quebec: Acadians deported in 1755 returned to the Maritimes or reached Louisiana as Cajuns, and francophone communities persist in Ontario, Manitoba and New England mill towns. The Quiet Revolution of the 1960s replaced clerical authority with a secular state in a decade. Bill 101 made French the language of work in 1977. Two sovereignty referendums were narrowly lost. Quebec holds about nine million people, most of them francophone. French is the sole official language of the province. Around a third of Canadians outside Quebec report some French ancestry. Louisiana's Cajun communities descend from the Acadian deportation. Quebec City's old town is a World Heritage site and the only walled city north of Mexico. Joual and other Quebec French varieties preserve features lost in France, including vocabulary from seventeenth-century Normandy.

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