La Justice de Biddeford was a French-language weekly newspaper first published on May 14, 1896, by Alfred Bonneau in Biddeford, Maine. On its inaugural publication, the newspaper was known simply as La Justice, a name shared by several other French-language newspapers in New England, until adding the city name to its title in 1907. La Justice de Biddeford lasted 54 years, making it the longest running of a dozen French newspapers and periodicals published in Biddeford alone between 1880 and 1960. The Thursday weekly was eight pages long; an annual subscription cost $1.00 in the United States and $1.50 in Canada. The newspaper’s audience was made up of Biddeford’s many French-speaking residents from Canada, most of whom migrated to the southern Maine coastal town from Québec in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seeking work in the textile and shoe manufacturing industries. Biddeford’s many French readers also had access to other regional francophone news publications like Lewiston, Maine’s Le Messager and Montréal’s La Presse, signaling the porousness of political borders in the late nineteenth century for this transnational francophone community.
Founding editor and proprietor Alfred Bonneau was born in Saint-Jean, Québec, Canada in 1862, one of twelve children. Like many of his contemporaries, he was educated in Québec and immigrated to New England in the 1880s. He is known for beginning his journalistic career as co-editor at Lowell, Massachusetts' long-running Franco-American newspaper, L'Étoile, in 1889. In 1893, he left L'Étoile and began a newspaper in Biddeford, Maine with J. S. Bourbon called L'Observateur. This paper lasted until 1896, the year Bonneau began La Justice. A staunch Republican, Bonneau found unlikely success with this publication in the highly Democratic city of Biddeford. However, like his Democratic counterpart Jean-Baptiste Couture, proprietor of Lewiston’s Le Messager, Bonneau was a key oppositional figure in Maine’s Corporation Sole controversy, resisting the Maine law that established the Roman Catholic Bishop of Portland as sole owner of all Catholic Church property in the Maine diocese. Bonneau supported Couture’s 1910 bill in the Maine Legislature to challenge this law, which they saw as a concerted effort of Maine’s Roman Catholic diocese to remove local control of churches and to anglicize and assimilate Maine French-Canadians into American culture. While the bill failed, and Bonneau and others dedicated to "la Cause Nationale" were threatened with interdiction for their activism against Maine’s bishop, fierce public debate over issues like this in the Franco-American community gained traction among local readers of La Justice de Biddeford.
Bonneau’s editorial posture in La Justice nevertheless stood out in both its social and political conservatism: strongly anti-communist and anti-socialist, devotedly Roman Catholic, a fierce advocate for the French language, and favorable toward traditional gender roles and the subservience of women. Some describe his editorial moral exhortations as "Jansenist," or emphasizing the inevitability of personal suffering and sacrifice. His clear "anti-Yankee" attitude maligned local anglophones and their public institutions, like schools, for their "godlessness" and ostensible contributions to juvenile delinquency. One scholar likened Bonneau’s newspaper to a Franco-American "Poor Richard’s Almanac," doling out sage advice in accessible ways.
Later in the paper's run, Bonneau had the help of his brother who would set the type and print the paper. Some say the reason why Bonneau's La Justice de Biddeford lasted so long was that he had financial backing, and the other papers did not. Bonneau died on December 29, 1929, after which J.C. Bolduc took over as editor. With Bolduc's editorial leadership, the paper’s political posture turned Democratic, and would remain so until it ceased publication in March 1950.
