The refrain is known: before the Quiet Revolution, Quebec, in a state of survival and under the influence of the clergy, lived in the Great Darkness. French Canada was a conservative community, resistant to modernity and convinced that agriculture was its only destiny.
Basically, it was a backward society in every way. This dominant representation of our past largely explains why our history makes us a little ashamed instead of making us proud.
However, writes the historian Jacques Rouillard in The enduring myth of the folk society in Quebec history (Septentrion, 2023, 216 pages), this representation “does not stand up to analysis of the facts”.
In their excellent History of contemporary Quebec (Boréal, 1979 and 1986), the modernist historians Paul-André Linteau, René Durocher and Jean-Claude Robert, with the collaboration of François Ricard in the second volume, have shown that Quebec, since the end of the 19the century, was rather a normal Western society, “diverse and complex”, explains Rouillard, in no way foreign to industrialization and urbanization, to the business world and trade unionism as well as to liberal and social democratic ideologies.
It is true, recognizes Rouillard, that the Church has taken up more space in Quebec than elsewhere and that nationalism has been an “essential component” of our journey. “How could it have been otherwise,” notes the historian, “given its status as a colonized nation, placed in a state of inferiority and wishing to protect its identity and expand its autonomy? » It remains, asserts Rouillard, that the facts do not agree with the thesis of a Quebec locked in clerical-nationalism until 1960.
How can we explain, then, the birth and persistence of this representation? Rouillard first attributes it “to the perception of the Maurice Duplessis regime”, which embodies an ideological regression in Quebec society. By seeking to understand and combat this regime, intellectuals have come to see it as a summary of the entire history of Quebec.
Sociologists, particularly American ones, then took up the question and concluded that Quebec conservatism can be explained by a dominant anti-modern mentality in our path. They will talk about folk societyor primitive societies, to designate this retrograde French Canada.
Rouillard challenges the methodology of the work that led to this interpretation. This reading only takes into consideration “villages far from urban areas”, is based “on sources close to clerical circles” and is strongly influenced by stereotypes maintained towards Quebec by Americans and English Canadians. It does not present “reality in all its facets”.
Rouillard shows that a strong liberal current has existed in Quebec for a long time. As early as 1784, French Canadians demanded an elective House of Assembly. Around 1840, Papineau and others claimed American republicanism in the name of democracy. Wilfrid Laurier, in 1877, pleaded for the separation of political and religious powers. In 1896, he won the election in Quebec, despite opposition from the bishops.
From 1850, Quebec industrialized by embarking on the construction of railways in the interest of progress. In 1911, its active population worked in equivalent proportions (around a third) in the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors, as in Ontario, which is nevertheless said to be in advance. In 1931, 44.7% of the Quebec population lived in towns with more than 100,000 inhabitants, that is to say as many as in Ontario.
In the first decades of the 20th centurye century, the Liberals were in power in Quebec and advocated industrial development. The liberal press is more widespread than the clerical press and supports democracies elsewhere in the world, while condemning anti-Semitism. Under Adélard Godbout, prime minister from 1939 to 1944, the Liberals made a social-democratic shift, an ideology long defended by the province’s unions.
This modernist view has been accused by some of having a nationalist bias by relativizing the stifling conservatism of our past. Others criticized it, saying that it devalued the place of conservatism in our history at the risk of undermining Quebec identity, linked to this trend.
Rouillard rightly replies that it is the truth of the facts that counts in this matter. The thesis of Quebec being late, busy praying in its countryside until the Quiet Revolution, is false. It shrivels our history, shames us, wrongly, and makes us forget that Quebec is respectable enough to be a normal country.
This searing book is essential.
Columnist (Presence Info, Game), essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature at college.