DENIS LEDOUX, French Boy: A 1950s Franco American Childhood. [Lisbon Falls, ME]: Soleil Press, 2024. ISBN: 9798862703320

reviewed by Megan St. Marie

With the publication of French Boy: A 1950s Franco-American Childhood, author Denis Ledoux, who states in his bio that he has helped thousands of others write their memoirs through his Memoir Network, offers an account of his own early life. Though not intended as a scholarly work, footnotes after each chapter expand on points in the main text, and photos add visual interest—though problems with layout, cropping, and resolution undermine some pictures’ ability to enhance the text. The unusual choice of a sans serif font may also seem like a design flaw to some readers, but the text’s warm, engaging contents should override such concerns, especially for readers interested in Franco American history, borderland studies, and ethnic studies.

Employing a conversational tone enhanced by nostalgia, psychoanalytic insights, and keen cultural analysis in equal measure, Ledoux situates his personal story in the broader history of Franco America—and particularly in that of Canadien immigrants to the United States. Canadiens is the term Ledoux uses to refer to Canadian Francophones, instead of French Canadian or Québecois, explaining in a footnote, “I use the French term Canadiens to distinguish Francophones whose roots date from before the Conquest of Canada from Anglophone Canadians who came as a result of the Conquest” (24). This careful word choice and consistent capitalization of the terms Francophone and Anglophone throughout the memoir are representative of Ledoux’s efforts to center historical, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural identities in his work.

Throughout French Boy, Ledoux peppers his prose with French words and colloquialisms that evince his bilingual upbringing in Lewiston, Maine, and he returns time and again to themes of “emotional and cultural displacement” (15). As he poignantly writes in the introduction, “I am not a refugee, but I am a person living in another country than the one that ought to have been mine.” Of course, “the one that ought to have been” his is Canada, and more specifically, the province of Québec. At the outset, Ledoux takes pains to document that a full 50% of Canadien immigrants who came to New England in the late-19th and early-20th centuries returned to Canada, in contrast with 25% of European immigrants (21). Geographic proximity facilitated this homegoing, of course, and Ledoux emphasizes the economic concerns that prompted Canadiens to cross the border, if only temporarily. He quotes his aunt Aurélie Bilodeau Aubut to note that the primary motivation for immigration in the first place was, “‘to make un tas d’argent (a pile of money)’ so they could return” (21).

Ledoux sensitively acknowledges an apparent gender divide in the Canadien desire to return to Québec, with women more often than men preferring to remain in les États. Whereas men might’ve been nostalgic for the farms they left behind, especially after toiling as factory workers or miners under the authority of industry bosses, many women seemed to feel liberated by greater opportunities in the United States that expanded their roles beyond the farmhouses. He suggests that women also seemed more disinclined to depart from grown children and grandchildren in the U.S. (22; 107).

Among those Canadiens who stayed were Ledoux’s ancestors, whom he depicts with respect for their individuality and with admiration and gratitude for the ways they managed to preserve their common Canadien-ness in the face of burgeoning assimilationist tides. Their Catholic faith, work ethic (vaillance), and above all, their French language, defined them as Canadiens, even as they became American citizens and raised American-born children. “It is probably hard for someone who is not Franco to understand how, as a culture, we were smitten with ‘la survivance,’ even with survival in the face of inevitable defeat,” (261) he writes regarding efforts to maintain his own French language skills and reinforce them in his youngest sister, Rachel, after he and his siblings learned English in school. He recalls feeling troubled that his parents had increasingly begun speaking in English to each other and to Rachel, and this disquietude reveals the intersections of language and faith and cultural heritages: “We had a saying that ‘Who loses his tongue loses his faith.’ Was that where we were headed? Would we become Anglophone Protestants?” (261).

Such a musing reveals one of the core themes this memoir explores: an emergent sense of otherness in Ledoux’s developing Franco consciousness. “I became aware there were people who spoke what was called French and other people spoke this English that was unintelligible,” he writes of his early recognition of linguistic differences. “Thus my introduction to a sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’” (134). Ledoux’s burgeoning identity development was complicated by slippery terminology and a certain degree of ambivalence or insecurity regarding American citizenship. Writing of his paternal side, he recalls,

My pépère was an American citizen, but he wasn’t, because of that, un Américain. We knew the difference. He and our mémère called themselves Canadiens as did my parents. We children understood that we were ethnic Canadiens, but I don’t remember using that word. We usually said French as the Yankees called us—which, of course, introduced an identity problem as we weren’t French, not really. We knew people who were French of France, and they and we did not form an “us.” Nonetheless when not taking these people into account, we said we were French. This lack of a definitive word to describe ourselves was a source of “identity vagueness.’ But we knew we were also American in some way—not like our Yankee neighbors but still we were American. (210)

Central to his family’s navigation of their Canadien/French/Franco Américain/American identity was their vaillance in any work they pursued—an attribute that Ledoux takes care to distinguish from ambition. He reflects on his grandparents’ and parents’ work as farmers, factory workers, shopkeepers, plumbers, and homemakers, speculating that they aspired to “‘une bonne job’ for themselves, a job that would provide an income to live on day to day,” (53) but that they were generally “not inclined to be ambitious” (41). He grounds this observation not in an essentialist view of Canadiens as inherently lacking drive or vision, but in their status as a people subjugated for generations by Anglophone authority that systemically curtailed educational and professional opportunities (45).

When he considers others’ inner thoughts and feelings without the benefit of primary documents or notes from interviews or conversations, or when he cannot remember precise details, Ledoux is careful to employ the conditional tense. Recalling times when he accompanied his Mémère Ledoux to visit her sister Augustine, for example, he writes, “Mémère would chat with Augustine—perhaps engaging in placottage as gossip was called. Of course, they spoke in French. All around us was French, our mother tongue,” (185). In time, Ledoux would find this mother tongue “slipping into a family language in the world I was moving into, a world of loss and of a vague, nameless feeling akin to shame about our loss” (216).

This sense of loss and shame was compounded by Ledoux’s longing for role models who might have nurtured or guided his striving for what might be called a life of the mind. “I kept secret my disappointment that I did not have parents who could model how one went about going to college,” he writes of this yearning (300). On the other hand, he also repeatedly acknowledges his parents’ support of their four children’s education, noting a transformational moment in 1953 when his mother got library cards for him and his brother Billy, enabling them to check out a stack of thirty books for the entire summer. “My mother’s decision to participate in this library program was a strong support for actualizing the promise she and my father made to each other that their children would graduate high school” (170).

While his parents’ goal for their children and access to library books helped Ledoux succeed, just as important to his eventual career as a writer, teacher, coach, and editor was his lifelong interest in hearing his elders’ stories. “My grandmother [Ledoux] was a trouvère of the days when her family lived in a house her father had built for himself and his nineteen-year-old, soon-to-be bride, Aurélie Gagné,” (180) he writes. And, “The memories linked me to a heredity that was bigger than I was, and they linked me to something that was me […] But this history I was receiving had been lived in another country and in another time. They deepened the sense that I was living outside my history, and for all the connection they provided, they also made me feel separate from the present which seemed disconnected from the past—and inaccessibly American” (294).

Resolving the persistent alienation that these reflections present to the reader is not in the scope of this memoir, which closes when Ledoux is only in the eighth grade. The book ends on a hopeful high note, with Ledoux securing a scholarship to study at the Oblate Seminary High School, plus funds promised for continued study as a college student, as well. A planned second volume entitled My Nineteenth Century Life: A Franco-American Seminary Story is forthcoming, assuring readers as they close this first book (itself evidence of the author’s eventual progress into a life of the mind) that Ledoux is well on his way to surpassing his family’s dreams for him as he remains rooted in all they gave to him.