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Art history and cultural history in Quebec present many examples of “retours d’Europe” and of “French triumphs,” from the formative overseas stays of the “exotiques” in the 1910s to the stage success of Quebec “chansonniers” in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s. However, between the early 1930s and the mid-1950s, some of the most famous French-speaking artists based in Montréal preferred to go on tour in the United States. Many of them traveled New England year after year, sometimes going as far as New York City, to cheer the French-speaking public present along the way in the industrial cities of the region. Yet this episode of high mobility is almost absent from history, memory and cultural heritage in Quebec—and even more so in the United States. Beyond the impact of the Great Depression on Montréal’s cultural scene and of the Second World War on the possibility of visiting Europe, these artists have turned their eyes towards America because they participated in a transnational space, both geographical and symbolic, inherited from an era of great intracontinental migrations, then reactivated and reconfigured by the advent of sound and audiovisual media—discs, radio and cinema. By studying the history of the celebrity of Mary “La Bolduc” Travers, Rudy Vallée and Jean Grimaldi, this thesis attempts to access to the various layers of this phenomenon at the crossroads of cultural history, media history and migration history. Their intricate narratives therefore reveal the modality of mobility involved inside—and often times outside—of the French Canadian “imagined community.” By analyzing the heritagization process of these artists, it is possible to isolate some of the causes the oblivion of this transnational episode of francophone culture in North America, such as the rejection of mobility in the formation of national and ethnic identity narratives; the historical marginalization of popular arts; and the mistrust of the United States among cultural and political elites around the world at the time.