Extract – Quebec and its significant others | The shattered mirror of Quebec identity

A nation is never more than the reflection of the thousand forces which have helped to shape it. Now, who are these thousand forces, these “significant others” that have helped to shape the Quebec identity? A question put to several researchers and eminent specialists from various fields of expertise.

It is the English figure, that of Great Britain, which, like others, appeared first. At the time of New France, France could not be considered as another, even if identity differentiations began to be felt. It was under the English regime, after 1763 and particularly after 1791, following the granting by London of a representative assembly, that the “Canadians” became aware of their existence as a nation, as a people. These are the “English freedoms” that we want, could affirm Étienne Parent just before the rebellions of 1837-1838 and the Act of Union. Our first intellectuals were trained in the school of English liberalism (Adam Smith, Edmund Burke and, by “obligation”, Lord Durham). Our politicians will be mirrored in British institutions.

Catholicism and France will appear later, almost simultaneously, as a follow-up or a withdrawal from the disastrous events, for the nascent nationality, which led to the Act of Union.

The other English was the conqueror from which one drew his political freedoms. The French other will be a kind of return allowing the nation to be inscribed in a cultural matrix in the manner of the romantics of the 19th century.^e century.

Catholicism, particularly in its ultramontane version, will also be a place where cultural expressiveness is borrowed. The (providential) nation will be Catholic before being political (state), the Church-nation will try to replace the absence of a true state.

American America will accompany these significant others without our giving it the centrality that the school of Americanity imputes to it. America (Republican) was a safe haven when it became evident during the Patriot era (1826-1840) that the English dream of political autonomy would not come true. In the French-Canadian era, it will be a foil because of its Protestant, industrial, urban characteristics, and its English language. Despite the Americanization of society (first culture), the image of America will remain in the years following World War II a foil due to the Yankee imperialism inherent in the Vietnam War, rising up against the Third-world emancipation with which Quebec identified for a moment. The positive American other (Americanity) will reappear following the referendum failures: we will want to draw from it the hypermodernity of a plural and civic Quebec.

During the century of French Canada (1840-1960), there were new others, less present, but significant. 19th century liberalism^e century liked to consider as without history these small societies which nevertheless asserted themselves against history: Ireland, Greece, Poland, Belgium. South Africa, with its Afrikaners and its Boer War, here is another forgotten (or that we wanted to forget) yet central in the affirmation of Henri Bourassa’s anti-imperialism nationalism. Beyond nationalism and conservatism (or romanticism for some) which fed abundantly French Canada, the great ideologies of the century, liberalism, communism, fascism, will extend their shadow in a differentiated way: more present for liberalism, less for Communism and Fascism, although Iberian corporatism had significant echoes between the two.

We will also converse during this century through foreign intellectuals. Ultramontane thought will drink from Félicité de Lamennais as well as François-René de Chateaubriand.

Alexis de Tocqueville will take a short trip to the shores of the St. Lawrence. Lord Durham, commissioned by London to study the political situation in Canada after the revolts of 1837-1838, will leave a report marked by English liberalism in which we still reflect.

Rameau de Saint-Père will write in the middle of the XIX^e century of eminently comprehensive texts on the French in America; he will be one of the inspirers of the French-Canadian project. The American historian Francis Parkman, a specialist in Catholicism at the time of the French American Empire, will be in constant dialogue with the French-Canadian literary school.

In the 1930s, the American sociologist Everett Hughes will study Quebec in the light of the work of the Chicago school and will initiate a long debate on the folk society French-Canadian. The French intellectual and political scientist André Siegfried, for his part, will take an academic look at French Canada; we can consider him to some extent as the father of international Quebec studies.

The literary world is not left out. The foreigner is everywhere in the Quebec novel. It is a high place of symbolic interaction. Each of the great Quebecois has his novels. The reverse is less true: few foreigners have written their story in the country here. We exclude migrant literature from this lot, because it is not about another in the sense in which we understand it here. Let us recall all the same that one of the great novels of the Quebec terroir, Maria chapdelaine, was written by a passing stranger.

The 1960s dramatically changed our interactions with foreign countries. England has disappeared, replaced by Canada. France is no longer the mother country: it is now part of the Francophonie as a significant other. Our interactions with American America oscillate between the negative other (imperialism, the culture that comes from elsewhere) and the positive other (Americanity, the Americanization of our first culture). At the time of the Quiet Revolution, the Third World was inserted as a significant other. We are mirrored in the anti-imperialist and decolonizing struggles (Algeria, Cuba, Congo, Chile of Allende). In the Quebec edition of Portrait of the colonized, Albert Memmi wonders: “Are the French Canadians colonized?” “. Today, postcolonial thought takes up this discussion, reversing the portrait of the colonized: the Quebecer is now a colonizer.

Today, we can find in the study of small nations a link with the decolonizing thought of the 1960s. before the existential fragility of the Quebec nation. Intercomprehension or dialogue with small states (Scotland, Sweden, Norway, etc.), and their models of development or social democracy, which are also practiced in Quebec today, reproduce another aspect of the Quiet Revolution, that of being a global society, sure of itself. One, the small nation, reproduces the idea of ​​cultural fragility; the other, the small state, the desire to be big.

Quebec and its significant others

Collective led by Jean-François Laniel and Joseph Yvon Thériault

Quebec America, 2021

441 pages

Who are Jean-François Laniel and Joseph Yvon Thériault?

Jean-François Laniel has been a sociologist and assistant professor at the faculty of theology and religious sciences at Laval University since January 2019. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Studies in Religion / Religious Sciences, as well as director of the “Religion and Politics” and “Religious Sciences” collections at the Presses de l’Université Laval.

Joseph Yvon Thériault has been studying the issues of memory and collective identities in societies characterized by democratic individualism for more than 30 years. He is the author of Seven lessons on cosmopolitanism: political action and democratic imagination (2019), Critique of Americanism: Memory and Democracy in Quebec (2005), as well asEvangeline: Tales of America. He is a retired professor of political sociology from the University of Quebec in Montreal.