Le Messager

Over 400 U.S. French-language newspapers and periodicals were published in enclaves of northeastern American cities between the 1830s and 1980s, chronicling the daily lives of francophone Canadian emigrants. These Franco-Americans established their own Catholic parishes and schools, businesses, and social organizations, in addition to their own tradition of journalism. Printing local, national, and international news, as well as social events and serial literature, Franco-American papers reflected the complexity of assimilation for these transnational communities, who often faced disdain from relatives back home and discrimination from new neighbors because of differences in language, religion, and class.

The most notable Franco-American newspaper was Lewiston’s Le Messager, which began as a weekly in March 1880 and ran continuously for 88 years, longer than any other French-language newspaper in the United States. It was only Maine’s second French newspaper, after Biddeford’s L'Emigré Canadien, which lasted just six weeks in 1870. Catering primarily to the migrants working in the textile and shoe industries of the Androscoggin River Valley, Le Messager's readership extended beyond Maine and today remains a historical touchstone for Franco-Americans throughout the Northeast.

Le Messager was founded by Louis J. Martel, a prominent local physician and statesman, and Joseph D. Montmarquet, a New York newspaper proprietor with ties to Worcester’s French newspaper, Le Travailleur. Le Messager‘s four-page first issue featured a masthead that included the phrase, "Religion et Nationalité," a nod to what is commonly known as "la survivance," or preservation of language, Catholicism, and French-Canadian national identity; at the same time, from the beginning, the paper promoted naturalization to the United States. Though purportedly nonpartisan, Le Messager took anti-Republican stances early on and, over time, aligned more with the Democratic majority of its readers, later overtly supporting the Democratic Party and its electoral candidates.

Beginning with nearly 500 subscribers, Le Messager struggled in its first decade. Ownership changed hands eight times, editorial leadership ten times, and newspaper offices moved five times before finding security in the 1890s, expanding to two issues per week by 1891 and three by 1906, when it counted over 3,000 subscribers. A staff of eleven men and four women appear outside the paper’s Lincoln Street imprimerie in a 1908 photograph; a personnel list and photograph two decades later show twenty-two staff, including six women.

In 1934, Le Messager began printing Monday through Saturday, and circulation climbed over 7,000. Readership remained strong into the 1950s, when inflation and rising production costs reduced the paper to a weekly in tabloid format. The paper later alternated between weekly and biweekly until its final issue in May 1968.

The longest and most prominent proprietor of Le Messager was Jean-Baptiste Couture, who purchased it in 1893, while still in his early twenties, having already been an employee and editor there. After his death in 1943, the paper was owned by his sons and sold in 1951. The Couture name became synonymous with Franco-American journalism and resistance to assimilation. Jean-Baptiste was outspoken against intra-Catholic inter-ethnic discrimination, and as a member of the Maine legislature, Couture presented a bill in 1910 to challenge the state law naming the Bishop of Portland sole owner of all Church property in the entire Maine diocese, known as the Corporation Sole controversy. While the bill failed, the preference of many Franco-Americans to maintain local control over their churches was voiced in the pages of Le Messager. Public debate over issues like this in the Franco-American community helped energize regional readership and grow the newspaper’s stature.

Among Le Messager's noteworthy writers were Louis-Phillippe Gagné, who wrote for the paper for over 38 years, penning the column "l'Oeil," becoming news director in 1934, and holding elected offices in Lewiston; and Camille Lessard-Bissonnette, who moved to Lewiston from Québec in 1906 to work in the textile mills, becoming an ardent advocate for women’s suffrage, expressing her views as a columnist for the paper as early as 1910, and publishing the autobiographical novel Canuck serially in Le Messager in the 1930s.