The Expulsion of the Acadians: Grand Pré
Dark Poutine. Proudly and creepily Canadian
Monday, September 28, 2026 - 58 minutes
Episode 438: In September 1755, more than four hundred men from Grand-Pré, Nova Scotia, were summoned to their parish church and told their land, homes, and livestock had been forfeited to the Crown. They would not be going home, and neither would their families. The Acadians, French-speaking Catholic settlers who had farmed the Bay of Fundy’s tidal marshes for more than a century, were about to be deported in one of the largest forced removals in North American history.
Here we tell the story of what the Acadians of Grand Pré built, why the British destroyed it, and what became of the families torn apart and scattered across the Atlantic world. More than ten thousand Acadians were forcibly removed from their homeland over the course of the operation, and by some estimates, nearly half did not survive the decade that followed.
From Lieutenant-Colonel John Winslow, who carried out the deportation, to René Leblanc, the elderly notary who refused to abandon his people, we follow the Great Upheaval from the shores of Grand-Pré to the bayous of Louisiana, where the Acadian legacy lives on as Cajun culture.
Sources:
L'Histoire de l'Acadie | Moncton.ca
Expulsion of the Acadians | Wikipedia
Heritage Minutes: Acadian Deportation | YouTube
History of Acadia | The Canadian Encyclopedia
Centre d'études acadiennes Anselme-Chiasson, Université de Moncton
Acadian Expulsion (Plain-Language Summary) | The Canadian Encyclopedia
View of The Deportation of the Acadians from Ile St.-Jean, 1758 | Acadiensis
The Records of British Government at Annapolis Royal, 1713-1749 | Nova Scotia Archives
Papers Relating to the Acadian French - 1714-1755 | Akins, Thomas Beamish
Papers Relating to the Forcible Removal of the Acadian French from Nova Scotia - 1755-1768 | Akins, Thomas Beamish
Notes on Nova Scotian Privateers by George E. E. Nichols | Archives of New Brunswick
Great and Noble Scheme by John Mack Faragher
The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History by Christopher Hodson
Parks Canada - Expulsion of the Acadians National Historic Event
The Acadian Deportation, Women, and Refugee Resettlement in the British and French Atlantic (1755-1793)
Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Grand-Pré National Historic Site | Memorial church
Landscape of Grand Pré | UNESCO World Heritage Site 2012
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