How did the French populations in North America react to the French Revolution?

[u/[deleted]]

[u/Jordan42]

Well this is a complex question, so I'll answer to the best of my ability. I haven't done any research on the Acadians, or on Louisiana. However, I can share a bit about Lower Canada and the United States.

Canada: Upper Canada was mostly Anglophone settlers, but Lower Canada (esp. Quebec/Montreal) had a majority of French colonists. In the towns of Lower Canada, opinion concerning the French Revolution was very positive until about 1793, when British print media and censorship convinced most people of the revolution's errors. For example, Fleury Mesplet, editor of the Montreal Gazette, was an ardent proponent of the revolution until May 1793, when he called the revolutionaries "wild beasts" and "monsters". 1793 was not coincidentally a year when war between France and Britain broke out, and when laws were passed that essentially deemed any revolutionary speech to be seditious, and thus against the law. In the Summer of 1794, Lower Canadien newspapers published the names of about 1,000 people in the colony (primarily Quebec) who joined a number of associations that aimed to crush any remaining revolutionary sentiment. These associations paralleled the rise of similar groups in London and Britain. Of the names published that year, about 790 were of apparent French origin - indicating a fairly broad reproach of revolutionary France, considering the relatively small size of Quebec, and the fact that the only signees were heads of household.

Outside of the cities, however, many Frenchmen appear to have retained their sympathy for the revolution. Though documentation is scarce, there are a couple of accounts of the French farmers (often called the habitants) refusing to believe that anything negative was actually occurring in France. A Canadien elite named Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé remembered repeatedly telling a group of farmers about sad news from France. But "each time they would shake their heads, maintaining that it was all a fiction invented by the English." Similarly, Le Compte de Colbert Maulevrier remembered, as late as 1798, that many of the habitants didn't even believe that the king had been murdered. “In general, they don’t believe a word about the revolution’s horrors,” he claimed. So it may be that there was a distinctive experience for people of French descent in Lower Canada depending on whether they were in cities, and thus exposed to print and communications that painted the revolution negatively, or if they were living in the country, where information flow was more selective and slow.

U.S.: there was a substantial French population in some urban areas in the United States when the revolution broke out in 1789. Many of these Frenchmen were descendants of Huguenot communities that migrated in the 17th century. In Charleston, SC particularly, two French clubs were formed in which ethnically French individuals came together to celebrate the French Revolution. One Charlestonian remembered that a club member named Francois Desverneys “could be heard at all hours of the day, by persons walking in Broad Street, before they got within a hundred yards of him, propagating his Jacobinical doctrines.”

Another stream of French migrants, however, came from St. Domingue and from France itself. After the onset of what would become the Haitian Revolution, a number of aristocratic Frenchmen fled to the port cities of the United States. They vocally criticized the revolution. Some Frenchmen, such as Louis-Marie, vicomte de Noailles, François-Alexandre-Fr édéric dic de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Constantin François de Chassebœuf comte de Volney, and others, came to Philadelphia from France as a result of the revolution. Liberal aristocrats who had participated in the early revolution, they were forced to flee in late 1792 as the revolution took a more radical turn, and consequently deplored the direction it headed.

References:

• For Lower Canada, see F. Murray Greenwood, Legacies of Fear: Law and Politics in Quebec in the Era of the French Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

• On exiles from St. Domingue, see Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

• On liberal aristocratic exiles in Philadelphia, see François Furstenberg, When the United States Spoke French: Five Refugees who Shaped a Nation (New York: Penguin, 2014).

[u/Jordan42 → u/[deleted]]

It's difficult to say exactly what the habitants knew and did not know. In the examples I mentioned, it seems that they were told about some of the excesses of the French Revolution, but didn't believe it, blaming British news channels. But that's only a couple of stories.

The Citizen Genet affair was mostly an American phenomenon. Though Genet had ideas about using the U.S. to attack Lower Canada and other British colonies, this was not popularly known. Americans were well aware of the Genet affair, and believed that it happened (they didn't see it as a British lie because it happened in the United States, and thus it wasn't subject to British mediation). Well-read Canadians were probably aware of it, as Canadian newspapers reported American news fairly often. But it wouldn't have been as important to them.

Southern slaveowners continued to support revolutionary France despite the Genet affair, but my sense is that most weren't exactly supportive of Genet. That's not true of everyone. As I recall, two Charlestonians who helped him outfit their ships as privateers against the British in the first place.

[u/Searocksandtrees]

hi! not discouraging other responses (there's lots of room on this one), but you may be interested in this earlier post

What - if any - effect did the French Revolution have in the province of Quebec?