The author is a historian, sociologist, writer and retired teacher from the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi in the history, sociology, anthropology, political science and international cooperation programs. His research focuses on collective imaginations.
Reacting to my text of January 7 on the temptation to return to French Canada (and summarizing it a little summarily), Joseph-Yvon Thériault affirmed, on January 10, that all things considered, the Quebec of today does not is hardly better than the old French-Canadian society whose serious shortcomings I had recalled. In a way, we would have returned to the equivalent of French Canada, the Quiet Revolution and its aftermath having failed to “remake” a society. We must therefore speak of decline rather than progress.
An anomic society?
In support of his thesis, Mr. Thériault invokes several arguments: after the second referendum, nationalism once again became autonomist; falling back on identity, it has fallen into anti-pluralism. The changes brought about by the Quiet Revolution have had very negative effects: an “excessively low” fertility rate, high suicide rates among young people, incomplete educational catch-up, a record number of children born out of wedlock, the disappearance of rituals (baptisms, marriages and burials), a “catastrophic” exit from religion.
In an unfavorable tone, he also evokes marriage for all, the redefinition of the family and medical assistance in dying. Our society, “disoriented politically and socially”, would be in the grip of a crisis, an “anomie” (which is defined as a society without rules, without organization, without common values). All of these traits are more pronounced among French-speaking Quebecers.
This depressing portrait of present-day Quebec presents at least four difficulties. First, it is audacious to assert that all these flaws already existed potentially in the reorientations inherent in the Quiet Revolution, an episode that occurred 60 years ago. In the meantime, has Quebec not been subjected to other influences, made other choices, taken other paths to overcome new obstacles? Could the upheavals that occurred in the West and in the world have changed his course? Would there be direct affiliations between the incriminated features and the 1960s?
How does the Quiet Revolution have anything to do with the recent avatars of Quebec nationalism, the number of children born out of wedlock, the crisis currently affecting schools, the impoverishment of ritual life, our low fertility, medical assistance in dying, the redefinition of the family and marriage for all? In all these cases (except that of nationalism), Quebec has simply reproduced a Western, sometimes planetary, evolution.
Second difficulty: the traits mentioned are given as signs of regression. I limit myself to four examples.
The redefinition of the family was necessary to better match it with the changes of recent decades and to better protect the rights of its members.
Those who have closely observed assisted death see in it a respect for freedom, an ennoblement of the end of life, and even an expression of humanism that softens the loss of a loved one and brings the family closer together (over 80% of Quebecers are in favor of it).
How would marriage for all compromise this institution by simply adding an option to it?
Has same-sex unions been proven to degrade the marital experience?
A third problem concerns the accuracy of the portrait presented. The author himself admits that it would take “a serious study” to confirm this. For example, the suicide rate among young people, after a sharp rise before the year 2000, now seems to be in the average of the countries for which data are available (it is impossible to carry out a rigorous comparison for the present years on a large scale). scale).
The lowest fertility rates are now found in Asia; Quebec is in the Western average. Assisted death, rigorously supervised, did not give rise to the skid that some apprehended. Characterizing Quebec as a society incapable of renewing itself is a fairly straightforward diagnosis. We are experiencing rapid changes of all kinds, often unplanned, brought about by globalization; isn’t this the case for the majority of companies?
Finally, the author believes that the flaws he lists have “something to do with […] the too rapid disappearance of French Canada”. Again, the demonstration would be difficult to do. The decline of religion and fertility, for example, are contemporaneous with the Quiet Revolution, but they are not planned or coordinated changes. They were not the result of campaigns by elites, but of individual choices. To suppose that a slower exit from French Canada would have dampened or spaced out these changes is somewhat tautological.
It is important to distinguish among the changes associated with the Quiet Revolution those which: (a) were brought about by institutions, including the state; b) resulted from citizen action, individual or collective, and c) reproduced at the national or “local” scale transformations occurring at the supranational scale.
The foregoing comments highlight the great complexity of the Quiet Revolution, which had its share of ambiguous effects and generated a proliferation of divisive interpretations. Finally, they show the danger of focusing attention on the ruptures of the 1960s without also considering the weight of the continuities.