Day 3: Vive le Québec!
Jun. 3rd, 2014 02:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mousmeIt's Day 3 of the Tell me what to write about meme. No one has claimed June 5th yet, so now is your chance! In fact, well over half the dates are still empty, so you should go fill those slots. No, really. It's okay, I'll wait.
In the meantime,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sorceror has asked me to write about Québec history today, as apparently on this day in 1608 Samuel de Champlain landed at Tadoussac with a group of settlers and founded Québec City there a month later.
I'm guessingsorceror might have meant the history of the city, but I'm going to ignore that and talk about the whole province, because I can. ;)
Oddly enough, Québec history (and Canadian history) has never been a great passion of mine. I've always found history interesting, but like many others I find that Canadian and Québec history tends to be a little bit dry, especially the way it's taught in schools. This was especially true when it came to my school, because the difference between how they taught Canadian and European history was quite telling. A quick aside, in order to explain this: I went to a French school, but not French-Canadian. Honest-to-goodness French, with French ex-patriate teachers and the whole nine yards. At the end of our studies we received a French baccalaureate and everything. The sole proviso was that we also had to pass all of the Canadian exams on top of the French exams (there were a lot of exams, let me tell you), so we learned the Canadian curriculum as well as the French one. If anything, I'm extremely grateful for this, because I learned a crapton of stuff that most North American students never get to hear about at all.
So while we were taught European history the way it's taught in French schools, with the goal of understanding all the social, political and geographical currents that would put historical events into motion, Canadian history was taught the way it's taught, well, here. That is to say there were a lot of dates to be memorised, a lot of names, and not much by way of socio-political context. I like to joke that the only thing I remember from my high school history lessons is that the Act of Union was enacted in 1840. ;)
That being said, Québec history is actually rife with super interesting things! Québec in particular, being the black sheep of all the Canadian provinces, tends to have a lot of social turmoil at any given time. While my own interest in it is amateur at best, fleeting at worst, my father (I'm starting to sense a trend in these posts) was fascinated by the history of his province. My father, for those of you who don't know, is a pretty renowned sociologist. He's best-known for his work of the last 20-odd years on globalisation and free trade, but for the 20 previous years of his career his speciality was actually much closer to home.
Back in 1985 he published what would remain for a long time his best-known work, Les Trois Colombes ("The Three Doves"), which was an analysis of the political era ushered in by the departure of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Gérard Pelletier and Jean Marchand in order to run for the Liberal Party under Lester B. Pearson. While the latter two quickly faded into obscurity, of course Trudeau went on to become Prime Minister of Canada from 1968 to 1978 and then again from 1980 to 1984. The book is now sadly out of print, but it was lauded at the time as being an incredible insight into the politics of the time. I may be a little biased when it comes to my father, but the fact remains that he is a brilliant man, and although his colleagues may not like him (my father has a great gift for putting his foot in his mouth and also not taking others' feelings into consideration when he speaks) they all acknowledge that he is pretty much without peer in the realm of theory. Anyway, I digress.
I guess recent history in Québec has always been more interesting to me than the days of colonisation. Sure, it was neat when I was a little girl to learn all about the sailing ships and Champlain and Jacques Cartier (I made a cardboard replica of his boat as a school project once), and to know all about how the seigneuries functioned and the way they divided up the land among the farmers. That being said, once I knew that, there didn't seem to be much point in delving further into it.
Modern history, though, that was a different story entirely. L'Ère Duplessis is still part of living memory for many Quebeckers, after all, when the separation of Church and State was not even a thing. It's also known as La Grande Noirceur, or The Great Darkness. It spanned from the end of World War II in 1945 all the way to the death of Maurice Duplessis in 1959. Duplessis, for those of you unfamiliar with my province's history, was premier of the province during that time, and died in office on September 7th, 1959 (the day before my father's birthday, oddly enough). For Québec, like many other post-war occidental countries, it was a time of social upheaval: people were flocking to the cities in a rural exodus unlike anything anyone had seen before, the middle class was growing exponentially in numbers, and the post-war economic prosperity was only increasing with each passing year. The period also brought about union conflicts, the first appearance of television, and the emergence of a new intelligentsia. The result? The government and the church clamped down tightly on anything that didn't fit with their ultra-conservative views.
Naturally, there was a backlash, in the form of the Révolution Tranquille, or the Quiet Revolution. This new era was ushered in quite quickly by the new intelligentsia and political leaders of the time, and was characterised by the adoption of the principles of the Welfare State and a clear separation of the powers of church and state. This was also the time when the Québécois identity was born, more or less, in its modern form--quite distinct (see what I did there?) from the French-Canadian identity and nationalism of yore.
I am grossly, grossly oversimplifying here. This is an LJ post, not a proper historical analysis. :P
In the 1960s, the average French-Canadian had roughly 2/3 the income of his Anglo counterpart. Unemployment rates among francophones were higher even than in the Maritimes, which were notorious for suffering from low employment, and the rates were twice the rates in Ontario at the time. French-Canadians were generally relegated to the lowest rungs of society by dint of their language alone. Even in larger companies and factories they only occupied the bottom ranks in terms of jobs. Factory foremen were almost always anglophones. In larger cities where both languages were spoken (mostly Montreal and Québec), French-Canadians predominantly lived in the poorer quarters. They also had no access to government services in their native (and often only!) language, and their access to education was severely limited, especially when it came to learning skilled trades. French Canadians comprised over 90% of Québec's population, but they were deemed to be only good as brute labour, barely worth paying for their work.
I have to say that this is partly why I have little to no patience for the screams of injustice and oppression coming from the anglophone community these days. While I don't intend to go into it here, I must say that while I don't agree with the methods the Parti Québécois has employed to maintain the status of the French language and to keep the French cultural identity alive, I disagree entirely with the notion that what they're doing counts as persecution. Stupid? Sure. Violating some people's rights? Debatable, but I can concede the point. Over the top? Absolutely. Counter-productive and damaging to the province's current and future economy? Most definitely. Persecution of the anglophone minority? Cry me a river. Anyone who moans that they "have to speak French" in order to get a job in this province seems to forget that we are, in fact, a bilingual country. A unilingual Francophone would have to learn English in order to get a job anywhere else in the country, and no one seems to rail about how unfair that is. :P
Okay, back to history. Anway, long story short, there was much political and social upheaval, including the creation of a caisse de dépôt and the régie des rentes specifically designed to help boost French-Canadian prosperity and to protect the rights of the population. This came around the same time as far more radical elements, namely the Front de Libération du Québec, aka the FLQ, decided to take matters into their own hands. They spent most of the sixties setting off incendiary devices in various buildings, conducting guerilla warfare against the federal government in an attempt to secure the independence of Québec. In what became known as La Crise d'octobre in 1970, they kidnapped James Richard Cross, the British High Commissioner, while he was visiting the province, and subsequently kidnapped Labour Minister Pierre Laporte. As an amusing side note, my father was his head of cabinet in the year before his kidnapping, as my father studied law and flirted briefly with politics. It's a good thing he discovered his love of sociology, because I can guarantee you that his temperament is not suited for politics at all. :P
Anyway, while Cross survived, Laporte did not. Accountings of his death differ wildly depending on who you ask, but the FLQ cell were all condemned for murder. This is one of the most violent chapters in Québec history, right up there with the Oka crisis in 1990 (though that was an entirely different kettle of fish).
Okay. I think I will leave that there. After all, hundreds of books have been written about all of this and more, and I'm not going to be able to cover it all in one post. One day I may make a post about Les Automatistes and Le Refus Global, since those are also relevant to my interests, but I think they would need a post of their own. They don't deserve to be squished in as an afterthought to this post, after all.
I hope that at least some of you found this a bit interesting, maybe just enough to prompt you to go look up some things on your own. And now, I have to get back to work. :)
In the meantime,
sorceror has asked me to write about Québec history today, as apparently on this day in 1608 Samuel de Champlain landed at Tadoussac with a group of settlers and founded Québec City there a month later.I'm guessing
sorceror might have meant the history of the city, but I'm going to ignore that and talk about the whole province, because I can. ;)Oddly enough, Québec history (and Canadian history) has never been a great passion of mine. I've always found history interesting, but like many others I find that Canadian and Québec history tends to be a little bit dry, especially the way it's taught in schools. This was especially true when it came to my school, because the difference between how they taught Canadian and European history was quite telling. A quick aside, in order to explain this: I went to a French school, but not French-Canadian. Honest-to-goodness French, with French ex-patriate teachers and the whole nine yards. At the end of our studies we received a French baccalaureate and everything. The sole proviso was that we also had to pass all of the Canadian exams on top of the French exams (there were a lot of exams, let me tell you), so we learned the Canadian curriculum as well as the French one. If anything, I'm extremely grateful for this, because I learned a crapton of stuff that most North American students never get to hear about at all.
So while we were taught European history the way it's taught in French schools, with the goal of understanding all the social, political and geographical currents that would put historical events into motion, Canadian history was taught the way it's taught, well, here. That is to say there were a lot of dates to be memorised, a lot of names, and not much by way of socio-political context. I like to joke that the only thing I remember from my high school history lessons is that the Act of Union was enacted in 1840. ;)
That being said, Québec history is actually rife with super interesting things! Québec in particular, being the black sheep of all the Canadian provinces, tends to have a lot of social turmoil at any given time. While my own interest in it is amateur at best, fleeting at worst, my father (I'm starting to sense a trend in these posts) was fascinated by the history of his province. My father, for those of you who don't know, is a pretty renowned sociologist. He's best-known for his work of the last 20-odd years on globalisation and free trade, but for the 20 previous years of his career his speciality was actually much closer to home.
Back in 1985 he published what would remain for a long time his best-known work, Les Trois Colombes ("The Three Doves"), which was an analysis of the political era ushered in by the departure of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Gérard Pelletier and Jean Marchand in order to run for the Liberal Party under Lester B. Pearson. While the latter two quickly faded into obscurity, of course Trudeau went on to become Prime Minister of Canada from 1968 to 1978 and then again from 1980 to 1984. The book is now sadly out of print, but it was lauded at the time as being an incredible insight into the politics of the time. I may be a little biased when it comes to my father, but the fact remains that he is a brilliant man, and although his colleagues may not like him (my father has a great gift for putting his foot in his mouth and also not taking others' feelings into consideration when he speaks) they all acknowledge that he is pretty much without peer in the realm of theory. Anyway, I digress.
I guess recent history in Québec has always been more interesting to me than the days of colonisation. Sure, it was neat when I was a little girl to learn all about the sailing ships and Champlain and Jacques Cartier (I made a cardboard replica of his boat as a school project once), and to know all about how the seigneuries functioned and the way they divided up the land among the farmers. That being said, once I knew that, there didn't seem to be much point in delving further into it.
Modern history, though, that was a different story entirely. L'Ère Duplessis is still part of living memory for many Quebeckers, after all, when the separation of Church and State was not even a thing. It's also known as La Grande Noirceur, or The Great Darkness. It spanned from the end of World War II in 1945 all the way to the death of Maurice Duplessis in 1959. Duplessis, for those of you unfamiliar with my province's history, was premier of the province during that time, and died in office on September 7th, 1959 (the day before my father's birthday, oddly enough). For Québec, like many other post-war occidental countries, it was a time of social upheaval: people were flocking to the cities in a rural exodus unlike anything anyone had seen before, the middle class was growing exponentially in numbers, and the post-war economic prosperity was only increasing with each passing year. The period also brought about union conflicts, the first appearance of television, and the emergence of a new intelligentsia. The result? The government and the church clamped down tightly on anything that didn't fit with their ultra-conservative views.
Naturally, there was a backlash, in the form of the Révolution Tranquille, or the Quiet Revolution. This new era was ushered in quite quickly by the new intelligentsia and political leaders of the time, and was characterised by the adoption of the principles of the Welfare State and a clear separation of the powers of church and state. This was also the time when the Québécois identity was born, more or less, in its modern form--quite distinct (see what I did there?) from the French-Canadian identity and nationalism of yore.
I am grossly, grossly oversimplifying here. This is an LJ post, not a proper historical analysis. :P
In the 1960s, the average French-Canadian had roughly 2/3 the income of his Anglo counterpart. Unemployment rates among francophones were higher even than in the Maritimes, which were notorious for suffering from low employment, and the rates were twice the rates in Ontario at the time. French-Canadians were generally relegated to the lowest rungs of society by dint of their language alone. Even in larger companies and factories they only occupied the bottom ranks in terms of jobs. Factory foremen were almost always anglophones. In larger cities where both languages were spoken (mostly Montreal and Québec), French-Canadians predominantly lived in the poorer quarters. They also had no access to government services in their native (and often only!) language, and their access to education was severely limited, especially when it came to learning skilled trades. French Canadians comprised over 90% of Québec's population, but they were deemed to be only good as brute labour, barely worth paying for their work.
I have to say that this is partly why I have little to no patience for the screams of injustice and oppression coming from the anglophone community these days. While I don't intend to go into it here, I must say that while I don't agree with the methods the Parti Québécois has employed to maintain the status of the French language and to keep the French cultural identity alive, I disagree entirely with the notion that what they're doing counts as persecution. Stupid? Sure. Violating some people's rights? Debatable, but I can concede the point. Over the top? Absolutely. Counter-productive and damaging to the province's current and future economy? Most definitely. Persecution of the anglophone minority? Cry me a river. Anyone who moans that they "have to speak French" in order to get a job in this province seems to forget that we are, in fact, a bilingual country. A unilingual Francophone would have to learn English in order to get a job anywhere else in the country, and no one seems to rail about how unfair that is. :P
Okay, back to history. Anway, long story short, there was much political and social upheaval, including the creation of a caisse de dépôt and the régie des rentes specifically designed to help boost French-Canadian prosperity and to protect the rights of the population. This came around the same time as far more radical elements, namely the Front de Libération du Québec, aka the FLQ, decided to take matters into their own hands. They spent most of the sixties setting off incendiary devices in various buildings, conducting guerilla warfare against the federal government in an attempt to secure the independence of Québec. In what became known as La Crise d'octobre in 1970, they kidnapped James Richard Cross, the British High Commissioner, while he was visiting the province, and subsequently kidnapped Labour Minister Pierre Laporte. As an amusing side note, my father was his head of cabinet in the year before his kidnapping, as my father studied law and flirted briefly with politics. It's a good thing he discovered his love of sociology, because I can guarantee you that his temperament is not suited for politics at all. :P
Anyway, while Cross survived, Laporte did not. Accountings of his death differ wildly depending on who you ask, but the FLQ cell were all condemned for murder. This is one of the most violent chapters in Québec history, right up there with the Oka crisis in 1990 (though that was an entirely different kettle of fish).
Okay. I think I will leave that there. After all, hundreds of books have been written about all of this and more, and I'm not going to be able to cover it all in one post. One day I may make a post about Les Automatistes and Le Refus Global, since those are also relevant to my interests, but I think they would need a post of their own. They don't deserve to be squished in as an afterthought to this post, after all.
I hope that at least some of you found this a bit interesting, maybe just enough to prompt you to go look up some things on your own. And now, I have to get back to work. :)
