Although more than 10 million Americans claim French ancestry (more than Poles or Native Americans), this pales beside the claims of German and Irish ethnics. Franco-Americans are also divided by their historical experiences of coming to the US, directly or through other colonial possessions. Yet, relations of international history culture and class tend to separate these immigrants from general American principles of ethnicity.

Perhaps no other European group is so closely identified with its homeland rather than with an American ethnic identity France has a strong historical image in the US as a historic co-revolutionary ally from Lafayette and the American Revolution to shared struggles in the World Wars. The Statue of Liberty consummate symbol of the US is, after all, a centennial gift from France. France has also been a model of elegance for fashion, architecture and style, and an image of sensuality from Bernhardt to Bardot. While hordes of American tourists and expatriates, and mass cultural marketing—movies and McDonald’s—may alarm French cultural critics (see American images abroad), the two countries maintain a close, continuing relationship on many levels which seems to overshadow the immigrant experience.

Direct migration from France to the US was also early and especially evident in the formative periods of the American Republic, when France provided leadership and service in American Catholicism and important commentaries on the American dream through De Tocqueville and Crevecouer. This migration was swamped by larger waves from other parts of Europe and later global immigration. French migrants (or claims to “Frenchness”) are often associated with positions of education, art, fashion or other high cultural realms; this might be exemplified in Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy as a public citizen of French descent. Between 1941 and 1990, however, French immigration actually surpassed legal Irish immigration.

French-American citizenship has also been constituted through secondary migrations and expansion. Early Huguenots settled in South Carolina, for example, were joined by French West Indian planters escaping unrest in Hispaniola. Cajuns and Creoles in Louisiana, meanwhile, were incorporated into the United States through acquisition of this former French colony.

French Canadians, an ancestry claimed by 2–5 million Americans, represent a special secondary migration in many New England areas where families sought industrial opportunities in periods of underdevelopment in contiguous Quebec. These immigrants built strong settlements around churches and families. Other French Canadians have created more temporary “colonies” in the US around winter homes and retirement complexes in Florida and the Sunbelt.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, France has actively promoted a panFrench identity of language and culture that often is represented through high cultural and language activities—art shows, university programs, film festivals or the Alliance Francaise. Yet despite this external support—or perhaps because of it—French Americans lack the cohesive identity one associates with Germans, Irish or Italians. One interesting test point for this identity in fact, will be seen in the growth of Caribbean (Haitian) and African Francophones as American ethnics.