Tiny store in Townships was introduction to French
My first encounters with French in Quebec were at a tiny store in the Eastern Townships
In this series of columns, one-time Alliance Quebec president and media personality Royal Orr reflects on his relationship with his second language.
I was clutching a dime in my fiveyear-old hand, looking puzzled (or maybe panicked) at Mme Brochu behind the candy counter of her tiny convenience store in the Townships village where I grew up.
It was a Saturday morning, my mother would have given my older brother and me each a dime and we’d walk the gravel road from my parents’ farm, through the covered bridge, and into Mme Brochu’s store.
This was the site of my first encounters with French in Quebec.
Mme Brochu never spoke English to me. Our little farming village was more than 90 per cent English-speaking — how the apparently unilingual Mme Brochu found her way there is a story I do not know. Everyone liked her and her family, me included. But it was a confusing challenge for me, aged five, to get through the micro-transaction of buying red licorice because she was firm on the point that the price of candy in her store was never just 10 cents, but at least a minimal exchange of pleasantries in French, too.
Perhaps Mme Brochu had decided that she was going to take the village children in hand and begin our integration into the new reality of Quebec society. This was 1961, after all. Maybe she saw herself as a tiny echo of the équipe du tonnerre of Jean Lesage that had taken power in Quebec City the year before with a pledge to make French and French-speakers central to the modernization of Quebec.
My candy-buying trips were, in hindsight, the fragile beginnings of a Révolution tranquille for me. Her diligence in insisting on French had limited results — eventually I could say “Bonjour Mme Brochu!” though it took a very long time before I had the words or the confidence to ask for réglisse rouge.
But other Quebecers were planning to build on the tiny victories for French of Mme Brochu. Chief among them was Arthur Tremblay, who in 1961 was working with the powerful minister Paul Gérin-Lajoie and would become the first deputy minister of the new Ministry of Education, with a mandate to modernize Quebec’s school system.
In rural, English-speaking Quebec, modernization meant the regionalization of secondary schools with a new focus on vocational education and French instruction.
When I was ready for high school, the full flowering of the Tremblay-inspired renewal of Quebec’s education system was awaiting me and 3,000 other adolescents in the new mégapolyvalente of Alexander Galt High School in Lennoxville.
A friend who studied Tremblay’s thinking about education, and who worked as a Galt administrator, once explained to me that the factory-like environment of polyvalentes — their bare concrete walls, regimented “house” systems, computer-generated schedules — all reflected a conscious attempt by Tremblay to create a new generation acculturated to urbanized, industrialized, French-speaking life.
That new reality of industrialized, francophone Quebec was pushing into our lives as Englishspeaking farm families in more tangible ways as well. Along the borders of our municipality, new housing developments were springing up — modest homes built for working-class people from Sherbrooke. They were French-speaking and they wanted municipal services more commensurate with the city than the country.
And they expected, naturally enough, that these services and their administration would happen in French. These expectations turned into a struggle for power in local government that was primarily urban-rural in nature but had an edge of French-English rivalry that often felt threatening.
I don’t recount this history of the early presence of French in my life as a “move to innocence,” suggesting some kind of victimhood in the face of the rise of French. But I do want to establish that in my young life, continuing into the arrival of the governments of René Lévesque and Camille Laurin, French was the language of power and unbidden change and, sometimes, domination; and that, inevitably, shaped my relationship to it.
But then, life can’t always be a bed of red licorice.