After the referendum of May 1980, while working for Canadian Press, I wrote a series of articles seeking to explain why a majority of Quebec voters had rejected sovereignty-association and supported federalism. Two distinct trends impressed me at the time. One was the way in which popular sentiment had veered towards individualism and turned its back on collective values identified with nationalism. The other was the perceptible weakening of the social control exercised by various intellectual elites. It was on these two basic themes that I later composed this book.

The articles, entitledThe Decline of Nationalism in Quebec, provoked...

Few political leaders in Quebec have left such a lively and contradictory image as Premier Maurice Duplessis. More than twenty years after his death in 1959, people can still be heard condemning certain political ideas or actions as “a return to the age of Duplessis.” Others, given to nostalgia, deplore the absence in government of a strong hand capable of putting an end to the sterile confrontations paralysing Quebec and of setting it back on the right course.

The fascination he commands to this day cannot be explained solely by his personality, which dominated the province during a career spanning...

When the provincial Liberals led by Jean Lesage took power in 1960 they were resolutely antinationalist. In their minds nationalism was closely identified with the stagnant Duplessis regime and they saw it as standing in the way of economic growth, the exercise of personal rights, and even honest and efficient government. According to them, it was essentially a conservative movement or reflex promoting strict cultural isolation in order to forestall unwelcome social changes.

This way of seeing things was undoubtedly the product of long years of political opposition and of official discrimination on the part of the Union Nationale government....

In the general elections of 18 June 1962, the Conservative government of John G. Diefenbaker, which had been elected four years earlier with a record majority, barely managed to hang on to power. It unexpectedly found itself in a minority in the House of Commons. The biggest surprise of that election, however, was the appearance for the first time in Quebec of the Créditiste phenomenon. Of the 75 members of Parliament allotted to this province, the Créditistes managed to elect 26, the Liberals 35, and the Conservatives 14.

The Diefenbaker government survived precariously until March of the following year, when...

Throughout the twentieth century, the idea of equality has been at the centre of Quebec’s preoccupations and it has given a special colouring to contemporary nationalism. It provided the foundation for the claims put forward early in the century by Henri Bourassa in the House of Commons and in the columns of the newspaperLe Devoirwhich he founded in 1910. Later, in 1965, Opposition Leader (later Premīer) Daniel Johnson stated the alternative ofEgalité ou indépendance(equality or independence) as the basis for constitutional negotiations with federal authorities. More recently, when Premier René Lévesque proposed the concept of sovereignty-association,...

There are privileged areas which, in the minds of most people, are beyond the contingencies of everyday life. Sports is one of them, and so is whatever pertains to the pursuit of aesthetic goals. It is always with a great deal of resentment that athletes and spectators, or artists and audiences, see the intrusion of politics in these two areas. Those who are engaged in a dramatization of human experience will inevitably seek to protect the integrity of their respective domains against the subversion that results from political intervention. All these sporting or artistic activities seem to be endowed with...

The achievement of the nation-state is the ultimate objective with which the Parti Québécois has been identified since its foundation in 1968 and which it has inherited from its predecessor, the Ralliement pour l’indépendance nationale. This concept, which can be translated into different forms of political sovereignty, has fostered the revival and the modernization of nationalist thinking in Quebec. It was by rallying behind the idea of the nation-state that nationalists were able at last to accept the urban and industrial society which for such a long time had appeared to them as a threat to French cultural survival.

Until...

For fifteen years and more, Pierre Trudeau has been the embodiment of antinationalist sentiment in Quebec. Determined opposition to the autonomist course pursued by the provincial government of Jean Lesage in the spirit of the Quiet Revolution was one of the principal factors which led him to federal politics in 1965. He hoped to become an effective counterforce against the growing nationalism of the middle class and to stop the separatist movement, which was increasingly vocal and aggressive. The weakness of the federal government led by Lester Pearson, which had only minority support in the House of Commons, represented a...

An unmistakable indication of the imminent reversal of political values in Quebec is—paradoxically—the anxiety which the English presence continues to inspire among nationalist elements in spite of the immense progress of French in the last generation. Even though the use of English is becoming more circumscribed, a large number of people still perceive it as a threat to French survival, as if any accommodation between the two would inevitably work to the detriment of the French language.

This pessimistic view has inspired nationalists in politics and in the public service to oppose categorically the recognition of collective or...

With the reelection of the Parti Quebécois on 13 April 1981, nationalism remained the official ideology of the government and it continued to dominate the mental universe of a majority of French-speaking people in Quebec. The margin of victory had been a relatively narrow one. Nevertheless, the general view was that the Parti Québécois had managed to consolidate itself in power and that it would likely stay in office for quite some time without fear of an effective opposition.

Throughout the election campaign, there was an obvious reluctance to abandon the modes of thought which had come to the fore...