More Than a Flag of Convenience: Acadian Attitudes to Britain and the British Around the Time of Queen Victoria's 1887 Jubilee

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, the Deportation of 1755 was a vital part of the growing nationalism of francophones in the Canadian Maritimes. However, on 4 May 1887, the Acadian newspaper Moniteur Acadien claimed as an indisputable fact that Her Majesty has no more loyal subjects than the Acadians. Through analysis of newspaper coverage of British news and the Queen's Jubilee celebrations in two Acadian newspapers in New Brunswick, this paper explores aspects of the Acadian attitude to being British, as opposed to being American, Irish, Scottish, or English. It concludes that shared materialism and trade ties were important and a distant unintrusive monarchy was intriguing, but some Acadians also looked to Britain for an accommodation, so far elusive, between Catholic and Protestant and between francophone and anglophone communities in Canada.