Le Maine Francais was a French-language weekly newspaper founded in Waterville, Maine in October 1912, by director and editor Florian Fortin of Beauceville, Québec. Fortin was president of Waterville’s Elm City Publishing Company (“Book, Job, and Commercial Printers”), who published Le Maine Français through 1914. Like many other French-Canadian newspaper publishers in New England, Fortin was very well known within the Franco-American community, working also for Lewiston’s short-lived French-language newspaper, Le Petit Journal. In 1914, Fortin returned to Québec and became editor of Sherbrooke’s La Tribune. In 1920, he became managing editor of the oldest French daily newspaper in Quebéc, L’Evénement, and founded the first French daily in the city of Trois-Rivières, Le Nouvelliste.
Very little is known about this publication except its intended audience: Waterville’s French-Canadian migrant population, today known as Franco-Americans, attracted to central Maine’s growing textile and paper industries. Le Maine Français‘s 1912 inauguration was noted in an announcement on the front page of Montréal’s newspaper, Le Canada, suggesting an early transnational appeal. The only known extant issue of Le Maine Français is a special souvenir issue that appeared on June 26, 1913 (Vol. 1, No. 39). Running 32 pages long, this memorial publication includes rich local advertisements, photographs and biographies of local religious and political leaders, rosters of mutual aid societies and social groups, a history of the Ursuline religious order of women, various celebrations of French heritage in the United States, a history of “Catholic Franco-Americans in Waterville: 1723–1913,” and more. Overall, the publication was known for being independent, informative, and lively. According to a 1914 literature review in Le Bulletin de Parler français au Canada, an issue of Le Maine Français celebrating its second year of publication proclaimed itself to “want to contribute a little to the education of compatriots…and above all it wants to be the newspaper that we read to preserve the French language” [translated from French]. Elm City Publishing Company touted itself as one of the best equipped printing houses in Maine, for all types of printing work in English and French. The Annual Maine Year-book, Register, and Legislative Manual publications for both 1913 and 1914 include Le Maine Français among all newspapers published in the state in those years, though the newspaper’s final publication date remains uncertain./p>
