The impact of Acadian deportation on the aesthetics and poetics of the French-language theater in Canada

This article has two goals. The first goal is to present a historical process which forced the
Canadians to become a minority towards the British and to show the complicated relationships
in which these two nationalities had to live after the numerous wars waged in
North America between the British Crown and the Kingdom of France. The second goal
is to show the evolution of the aesthetics of the francophone Canadian theater being
the result of the Acadian’s deportation. In this context, three theatrical plays, which are
dramatic texts representative of various stages of the difficult Acadian-Canadian history,
will be used as examples: Le Théâtre de Neptune (1609) as a representative of the theater of the period of the French dominance in the New France; Le Drame du peuple acadien
(1930) as a stage in the poetics of the Acadian martyrology; and La martyrdom Saguine
(1971), depicting the aesthetics influenced by the Quiet Revolution, where Acadia
becomes a nostalgic place, in a way an open-air museum, where thoughts are returned
without a tormenting sense of injustice.