It’s August! French tourists arrive in Canada like Champlain, who came to map theEntirely Unknown Extent of Country. They only have one for the “large spaces”. To believe that they see their own country – like many Quebecers doing the opposite route – as a big Luxembourg.
Posted at 10:00 a.m.
Heard: “Normandy is 3 km from Brittany”; “Ah not a little more, but here everything is huge! Note to those dizzy: there are 679 km from Pas-de-Calais to Brest, more than from Quebec to Manic-5!
Let’s dispel a few myths for the attention of visitors, suddenly that they would have gotten lost in the wide open spaces of the Quai de l’Horloge.
Quebec would be 5, 7, even 20 times larger. Really ? It is 1.67 million square kilometers (including salt water bodies). The land area of Quebec (including lakes) is 1.36 million square kilometres. Metropolitan France covers 551,000 square kilometers of land. It’s hard to see on these world maps where Greenland seems bigger than Africa (Nunavik is stretched too), but the reality is that Quebec is only 2.4 times bigger.
The French territory is equivalent to all the territory of Quebec minus the Nord-du-Québec region (707,000 square kilometers for 40,000 inhabitants).
This Rest-of-Quebec, that is to say the portion of the south almost passable (but including places as out of the way as Schefferville, Blanc-Sablon or even the Otish mountains), covers 593,000 square kilometers. It is very vast, and few Quebecers have traveled it, but it gives the measure of the immensity (yes, yes) of the French territory, the largest, by far, in Western Europe.
We tease the cousins and their unmissable Toronto-Gaspé (1458 km) by rented car. It’s smaller than theirs! There are 1499 km between Menton and Le Conquet. It’s more than a Gatineau-Natashquan (1449 km). Brittany, moreover – although one of the small French regions – is larger (27,208 km2) than its Atlantic counterpart, Gaspésie (20,272 km2). Crossing the Saint-Laurent from Les Escoumins to Trois-Pistoles (34 km) evokes that of the Gironde estuary from Verdon-sur-Mer to Royan (11 km).
“It’s the Noooord!” This replica of the Ch’tis is a good laugh in Quebec. However, a Perpignan-Dunkirk (1143 km) is equivalent to a Montreal-Eastmain (1170 km), or even a Sherbrooke-Fermont. That’s nine degrees of latitude. When the terraces open on rue Saint-Denis in March, it is still -35°C up there…
Funny fact, the cold record in France (in Mouthe, in the Doubs) is – 36.7 ° C, lower than that of Quebec. But you have to go back to 1977 (and before that, in 1921) for the last 40°C here. Nordic honor is safe (even if Montreal is further south than Paris).
Population
France still has eight times more inhabitants (64.8 million). Ile de France (12,012 km2) is quite equivalent to the regions of Montreal, Laval and Montérégie (11,875 km2), but three times denser (12.2 million inhabitants for 4.1 million). Let Parisians breathe right from the first inground swimming pool in Brossard, we want it.
This leaves 52.6 million inhabitants of the 539,000 km2 of the province. It is less than 100 inhabitants per km2, the equivalent of California (a quarter smaller). No wonder France harvests slightly more wood than Quebec, has two-thirds of its installed hydroelectric power, and produces as much wheat as all of Canada.
The Saint-Laurent valley, where the majority of the population resides, is very similar, in size, landscapes, topography, agrarian vocation, hot and humid summers, to the Loire Valley (39,151 km2 for 2.6 million inhabitants). We even have our Chambord.
Quebec is not limited to this corridor. Backpackers who will push on to Havre-Saint-Pierre, Lake Mistassini or the Monts Groulx will find them, their wide open spaces, far from the smog of the valley. It remains that it would be necessary to do the very epic Baie-Comeau loop twice, Trans Labrador HighwayBlanc-Sablon, boat to Natashquan, Baie-Comeau (1700 km) to cover a cycling Tour de France (3500 km, a Montreal-Calgary).
The cause of the historical misunderstanding of the “small” and the “large” country – when in the end they are not badly the same (all things considered, France that can be driven on is much more extensive) – quickly gives way to psychopop at five cents and at the background doesn’t really matter. Travel memories are sedimented one new horizon at a time. You just have to manage to leave the Island.