This song has nothing to do with anything related to this blog, but I love it.
It’s not 100 percent accurate– the Acadians were expelled starting in 1713 and the biggest expulsions were over by time of the British victory in the North American theater of the Seven Years War at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759. (The real expulsion began in 1755, a year before the war.) There were at least some who remained in that part of the world, because there are French speakers in the Maritimes that descend from the Acadians. Of course, the ones who went to Louisiana, which was French, then Spanish, then French, and then American, were called Cajuns.
Celine Dion, who is Quebecois, has a cover of this song. I’m not going to spare you that one!
This may be the only song in the English language that expresses the French side. Except for Evangeline, it’s about the only verse written in the English language with the French viewpoint.
Map of modern Acadian communities in the Maritimes and Maine.
