268. Colonising Canada: Why Does Quebec Speak French? (Ep 2)

Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William De Rimple. So in the last episode we did this rather stuttering start to France's adventures in Canada, but we're going to dig into that a bit more because it's not the end of their story. And what I think is so interesting about this, and I hadn't realized earlier, is that this is all long before the British had got started here. The the French are way ahead of the British at this point.

And the British are are very much, well the English are very much the Johnny come lately to the story of the colonization of North America. And it's a whole chapter that I was completely unaware of before this. So we talked about Cartier last time. Do you remember Cartier and his Fool's Gold errand? I feel so sorry for Cartier.

Behold my diamonds, it's quartz. Behold my gold. No, it's not, it's pie right. Um, so you know, and he he's not the only person who gets fooled by this. People go to Canada and they expect to come back laden with chests full of basically paperweights and junk, which they're told it's all a load of rubbish they've risked their lives for.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (50 minutes, 9,197 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.