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Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce Lahontan, baron, officer, author (b at Lahontan, France 9 Jun 1666; d at Hanover 21 Apr 1716).

Charles Tanguy. French hornist, teacher, composer, b France ca 1845, d ?; premier prix french horn (Académie de Valenciennes and Paris Cons).

Récollets, a reformed branch of the Franciscan family, came to France at the end of the 16th century. The main objective of the Récollets was to observe more strictly the Rule of St Francis, and like other semiautonomous branches, they came under the minister general of the Franciscans.

Antonine Maillet, CC, OQ, ONB, novelist, playwright, translator, scholar (born 10 May 1929 in Bouctouche, NB).

Georges Mercure. Gregorianist, organist, choir conductor, composer, teacher, b Drummondville, Que, 19 Jun 1905, d Montreal 24 Aug 1993. He showed a talent for music from an early age and studied with Arthur Letondal in Montreal, while accompanying silent films on piano.

Jean-Pierre Ronfard, actor, author, producer, theatre director (b at Thivencelles, France, 1929; d 23 Sep 2003).

Paul Buissonneau, actor, director, author (born 1926 in Paris, France; died 30 November 2014 in Montréal, QC).

Acadia’s history as a French-speaking colony stretches as far back as the early 17th century. The French settlers who colonized the land and coexisted alongside Indigenous peoples became called Acadians. Acadia was also the target of numerous wars between the French and the English. Ultimately, the colony fell under British rule. Many Acadians were subsequently deported away from Acadia. Over time, as a British colony and then as part of Canada, Acadians increasingly became a linguistic minority. Nonetheless, Acadians have strived to protect their language and identity throughout time.

Jesuit Relations (Relations des jésuites), the voluminous annual documents sent from the Canadian mission of the Society of Jesus to its Paris office, 1632-72, compiled by missionaries in the field, edited by their Québec superior, and printed in France by Sébastien Cramoisy.

In 1983, the song 'Ils s'aiment' (two million copies sold) thrust Lavoie into the forefront of French-speaking singer-songwriters. It conveyed the anguish of young people in the 1980's, its tense, haunting melody matching the sensitivity of a new generation born with the atom bomb.

Thomas Baillie, soldier, administrator (b at Hanwell, Eng 4 Oct 1796; d at Boulogne, France 20 May 1863).

Josué Dubois Berthelot de Beaucours, military officer, engineer, governor of Trois-Rivières and Montréal (b in France c 1662; d at Montréal 9 May 1750).

André Michaux, botanist, explorer (b near Versailles, France 8 Mar 1746; d on Madagascar 11 Oct 1803?). He compiled the first North American flora which includes many plants collected in Lower Canada in 1792.

Léonard (Albert Joseph) Bilodeau. Tenor, b Quebec City 11 July 1935, d Québec City, 6 May 2008. He studied singing ca 1955 with Louis Gravel and 1957-61 on scholarship with George Lambert and Irene Jessner at the RCMT.

In early Canada, the enslavement of African peoples was a legal instrument that helped fuel colonial economic enterprise. The buying, selling and enslavement of Black people was practiced by European traders and colonists in New France in the early 1600s, and lasted until it was abolished throughout British North America in 1834. During that two-century period, settlers in what would eventually become Canada were involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Canada is further linked to the institution of enslavement through its history of international trade. Products such as salted cod and timber were exchanged for slave-produced goods such as rum, molasses, tobacco and sugar from slaveholding colonies in the Caribbean.

This is the full-length entry about Black enslavement in Canada. For a plain language summary, please see Black Enslavement in Canada (Plain Language Summary).

(See also Olivier Le Jeune; Sir David Kirke; Chloe Cooley and the Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada; Underground Railroad; Fugitive Slave Act of 1850; Slavery Abolition Act, 1833; Slavery of Indigenous People in Canada.)

Robert Arthur Douglas Ford, diplomat, poet (b at Ottawa 8 Jan 1915; d at Vichy, France 12 Apr 1998).

Charles Philippe Leblond, anatomist, cell biologist (born at Lille, France 5 Feb 1910; died at Montréal, 10 Apr 2007).