This paper is limited to the French-speaking Canadians; it does not include those who live in the United States, in the West Indies, in Latin America. In time it applies mainly to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The cultural foundation of the French Canadians is rooted in the sixteenth century. Most of the settlers who came from Old France to New France had been born in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, or were sons of these.
Their culture was made of a rich folklore still alive, of the laws then called the Coutume de Paris, which survive in the civil law still applied in the province of Quebec, of social attitudes which for a long time were characterized by the seignorial system, of ideas about education, of scientific curiosity then awakening in Europe, and of religious attitudes.