Towards a Francophone Community by Robin S. Gendron

Author:Robin S. Gendron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS006000
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2006-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

6

Jostling over French Africa

Towards the end of the 1950s, the people of Quebec grew increasingly restless with the parochialism of Quebec society and the Duplessis government. For decades, the French-speaking people of Quebec had lived within a cultural milieu that idealized traditional features of Quebec’s agricultural, Catholic Church-dominated past with its conservative family and social structures as the pillars of French Canadian culture and identity. To many individuals in Quebec, this focus on the past resulted in a dangerously backward French Canadian society badly in need of reform to help it survive and prosper amidst the widespread changes of the twentieth century. The Liberal Party’s victory under Jean Lesage in the provincial election of 1960 subsequently unleashed a flurry of governmental and societal activity that, over the succeeding decade, modernized and secularized Quebec society and challenged the established order both within the province and within Canada in general.1 During the 1960s, Quebec’s government greatly expanded its powers and assumed new prominence in virtually all aspects of Quebec society including education, social welfare, the economy, and cultural and linguistic affairs. In becoming one of the principal agents of change in Quebec, the provincial government benefited immensely from fervent new expressions of French Canadian nationalism in Quebec, which emphasized the importance of the state and of the government of Quebec in particular, in the defence of French Canadian interests.

French Canadian nationalism was not a new phenomenon in Canada. Up to the 1950s, however, mainstream French Canadian nationalism in Quebec had been, with a few exceptions, largely concerned with protecting French Canadian culture and the status of the French-speaking minority within Canada as a whole. Though French Canadian nationalism often clashed with competing visions of the country, these crises typically involved attempts to define Canada rather than to subvert or destroy it. Quebec’s Royal Commission of Inquiry on Constitutional Problems reflected this dimension of French Canadian nationalism in its conclusions, known as the Tremblay Report, published in 1956. Harshly critical of the centralization of power within Canada by the federal government, the Tremblay Report advocated re-balancing the responsibilities of the federal and provincial jurisdictions according to the Compact Theory of Confederation, the late-nineteenth-century argument that the provincial and federal governments were equal in status and sovereignty. In addition to restoring Quebec’s lost powers and autonomy vis-à-vis the federal government, however, the Report also sought for the province a special role or place within the confederation as the representative and voice of one of Canada’s founding peoples.2 As the historic home of the French Canadian people and the only jurisdiction within Canada that had a French Canadian majority, the Tremblay Report argued that Quebec had a responsibility for protecting French Canadians and their culture. In this, it echoed another version of the old Compact Theory of Confederation which held that Canada itself had been the result of an agreement, a compact, between its French-and English-speaking peoples. The Tremblay Report was thus firmly grounded in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century intellectual and constitutional traditions of French Canadian nationalists like Honoré Mercier and Henri Bourassa.

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