A Franco-American Pope

My dear friend Charles Coulombe is a Franco-American of Canadian descent. Here, he examines Pope Leo XIV's French roots and the French experience in the US.

From One Peter Five

By Charles Coulombe, KC*SS, STM

As all the world knows, Chicago native Robert Cardinal Prevost, O.S.A. was elected Pope on May 8, 2025, and took the name Leo XIV.  For many of us, the cessation of the preceding Pontificate came, tragically, as a relief.  The new Pontiff’s taking of a traditional Papal name and appearance in traditional Papal garments was a healing balm for such as these.  The fact that he was an American was a huge surprise for a great many – including this writer.  Almost immediately speculation began as to where Leo might take the Church; his background and character have been scrupulously researched to try and find clues as to his future behaviour.  How closely aligned are his views to Francis’?  Is he really a crypto-Traditionalist?  And on and on.  We will leave to others speculation along the lines of his studies, philosophy, and history, and focus on one thing which is not likely to get much play – his Franco-American heritage.

Traditionally, Cardinals from the United States have been Irish-Americans, either from the Northeastern corridor themselves or bishop of a see located there or both.  But Leo XIV was not.  His background is complicated – Piedmontese Italian and Lyonnais French on his father’s side, and French, Spanish, and Black on his mother’s.  One of the earliest interviews this writer read after his election was with a cousin of his who declared that when they were young, the family thought of themselves as French.  Certainly, as the Holy See’s official website explains, “On the left field of the coat of arms of the Holy Father Leo XIV, the blue background recalls the heights of the heavens and is characterized by its Marian significance, a classic symbol referring to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the lily or fleur-de-lis.”  But it is also a symbol of France and that country’s descendants scattered across the globe.  To understand where and how the new Pope fits in to the “French Fact in North America,” we must first look at that country so rarely explored by outsiders.

La Francophonie in North America has been well described as an archipelago – a group of islands of settlement in an Anglophone sea.  Although its roots reach back to the first settlement of Quebec City in 1608 – the year after the first English settlement at Jamestown – the accidents of history denied it the dominance of its early neighbour – so much so that only a fraction of Americans of French descent actually speak the language.  Nevertheless, most retain an abiding pride in their heritage.

The first wave of French colonists settled along the St. Laurence and Mississippi river valleys and the Great Lakes in the twin colonies of New France and Louisiana (the latter much larger than the state that retains the name to-day). Although the heartland of New France – the modern Province of Quebec – lies outside the boundaries of the United States, its settlers reached such Midwestern cities as Detroit and Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan; Green Bay and Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin; Mendota and St. Anthony, Minnesota; Dubuque, Iowa; Cahokia, Kaskaskia, and Prairie du Rocher, Illinois; Vincennes, Indiana; and St. Louis, Florissant, Ste. Genevieve, and Old Mines, Missouri. From there they went south along the Mississippi to Arkansas Post and Pine Bluff, Arkansas. They then headed into what is now Louisiana and the Gulf, founding Mobile, Biloxi, and New Orleans in rapid succession. 

The settlers south of Illinois down to the Gulf came to be called Creoles, in deference to being born in the New World.  Because French legislation regarding slavery required owners to acknowledge as their own any offspring they fathered on slave women, Louisiana saw the birth of a class of Free People of Colour, often educated in France, and owning slaves and plantations of their own – a phenomenon repeated in the French Caribbean islands.  The descendants of both sets of “Creoles” have retained something of their status down to this day.

For over 150 years, however, the French colonists were at war with the English in a succession of wars, which created a deep fount of anti-French and anti-Catholic hostility in the Anglo-American psyche.  One example of this was the expulsion of the French Acadians from what is now Nova Scotia; many went to then Spanish Louisiana, becoming the ancestors of the people called “Cajuns.”  When New France was ceded to Great Britain in 1763, the treaty required that that George III treat his new French and Indian subjects as though they were his own born.  The result was the Quebec Act, which expanded the boundaries of the Province, to include all the French-speaking areas in what is now the Old Northwest – and it freed its inhabitants from the anti-Catholic Penal Laws.  This greatly fuelled the flames of the American Revolution, but it kept the French Canadians on the British side in the resulting civil war and revolution.

Rebel victory in that conflict was made possible by French and Spanish intervention.  But it bankrupted France and opened the way for the French Revolution and the Latin American revolts against Spain.  French refugees from the upheavals in France, Haiti, and elsewhere founded the first Catholic churches in Savannah, Charleston, and Norfolk, and some of their descendants remain there – as does the memory of Venerable Toussaint in New York, and the many French priests who helped evangelise the American frontier in their exile.  Very many also came to Louisiana, reinforcing ties between the Creole State and the Francophone Caribbean.  This interplay is one reason why most Catholic Blacks in the United States trace at least some of their family to Louisiana (the other major source is Maryland, but that is a different story).

The early 19th century saw one regime follow another in France – and both regime change and the accompanying economic dislocation sent immigrants to the United States.  Thus emerged such settlements as Frenchtown, Pennsylvania; Besancon, Indiana; and Versailles, Ohio.  Many in this migration also went to Chicago, as did a great many French-Canadians, who also settled areas southwest of the city, such as Kankakee, Bourbonnais, and Ste. Anne.  French Canadians also moved west, settling parts of Kansas and Nebraska.  Moreover, the French and Indian Métis people followed the fur trade West, establishing settlements in the Dakotas, Montana, Washington, and Oregon.

After the American Civil War, thousands of French Canadians came to the Mill Towns of New England to work or to provide entertainment and other services to those who laboured in them – thus came my own family.  They created a network of Catholic parishes, schools, organisations, and newspapers – which led many commentators of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to fear them as unassimilable.

But the two world wars and an aggressive anti-French campaign in Louisiana schools starting in 1918 began the process of slowly eliminating French in New England and in Louisiana.  After Vatican II, many “French” parishes in both places and the Midwest switched from Latin Masses with French sermons to all English services of every kind.  The Church in the 1960s became as much an agent of assimilation as the public school.  To-day in either New England or Louisiana few are the “French” parishes to be found where the language is used – and few are the young people who know it.  As a great uncle of mine once said, “when a family loses the French, a thousand years of tradition die.”

Of course, there is always a greater or lesser anti-French slant to American politics and society.  Franklin Roosevelt did his best to cut the ground out from under General De Gaulle’s leadership of the Free French during World War II.  Eisenhower’s reneging on promises of support at Dienbienphu and Suez contributed mightily to French internal instability, although the former betrayal did lead to many American casualties when we took over the French role in Vietnam, thanks to their defeat.  Kennedy’s ultimatum to De Gaulle led to Algerian independence, and almost a million having to leave in two weeks for a “homeland” many had never seen.  This led to De Gaulle rushing construction of an arms industry and a nuclear arsenal.  When, in 1965, Lyndon Johnson demanded control of the latter, declaring that refusal would lead to expulsion from the military wing of NATO, De Gaulle refused.  For the next five decades France handled her own foreign policy.  As a result, when the French refused to follow Bush, Jr. blindly in his “Global Democratic Revolution,” he dubbed them “Surrender Monkeys,” and renamed French Fries “Freedom Fries.”  Echoing their president and party leader, in 2004 John J. Miller and Mark Molesky issued a book entitled Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America’s Disastrous Relationship with France.  Encompassing every bit of anti-French propaganda every issued in Anglophone North America from the French and Indian Wars to the present, it provides a clear guide to the anti-French – and by extension, anti-Catholic – current flowing in America’s subconscious.

This basic attitude on the part of the mainstream (taken together with the fact that outside very few areas there are no large concentrations of Franco-Americans as there are Irish, Italians, Poles, Blacks, and Hispanics) creates a very unusual mentality in many Franco-Americans.  On the one hand, most of us have a huge pride in descent from the Oldest Daughter of the Church.  We do not forget St. Louis and St. Joan of Arc – or Our Lady of Lourdes and so many other French places.  But we are also aware that unlike the Irish, Italians, Poles, Blacks, and Hispanics, the mainstream is not so much even hostile as uncaring.  We are an invisible minority – we simply do not matter.  We must adjust to it, each in our own way, because it will not – unlike with so many other groups – make any way for us.  This dilemma informs the work of writers like Theroux, Kerouac, Desdunes, Gayarre, and Fortier.

Coupled with it, however, is an intense – if often unrequited – love of these United States in which we were born, and under whom, if we lost our heritage and often our Faith, we have for the most part prospered.  My great uncles all fought in World War I; my father was a tail gunner against the Japanese in the Second War – volunteering, when, as the only son of a widow, he did not have to serve.  My brother and me both served – himself having a far longer and more distinguished career than my short stint in the ROTC and National Guard.  Similarly, Pope Leo’s father entered the Navy as soon as he graduated from college in 1943 and was commissioned as an executive officer of a tank landing ship, serving in the landings in both Normandy and Provence. 

But these two qualities, ironically, make it easier for one to be flexible, socially and culturally.  Since we must adjust, we tend to become adept at it – and to seeing the other fellow’s point of view, since he is unlikely to try to see ours.  We can joyously celebrate St. Patrick’s Day or St. Joseph’s Table or whatever with Irish, Italians, or whomever with as much gusto as they.  When meeting new people, we instinctively look for points of contact.  Moreover, because our ethnic loyalties have been rendered so tenuous, for those who retain the Faith, our religious ones become even more important.  We are certainly French, and just as certainly American.  But we are Catholic over all – and adept at joining these and other loyalties together.

I may be wrong; I may be reading into him.  But I believe I see these qualities in our new Pope.  His overarching love of unity seems to me to reflect the Franco-American’s endless reality of being on the outside.  His ability to adjust smoothly to life in Peru and to adopt Peruvian ways is all of a part with what his family has always done in the United States.  He is an American, to be sure – but without the superiority complex one notices in so any Americans overseas.  In a word Leo XIV is able to love both Americas and Europe equally because in a sense he was bred to it – as he was to seeing Catholicism as a unity, not merely as a battleground for contending sides.  The new Pope would rather find accommodation over less issues than fight over them – and this I have no doubt is a gift from his nationality to the Church as a whole.  I do not expect it to be acknowledged or even noticed; but I am sure we shall all benefit from it.