There are three events in Quebec’s history that have marked our
collective consciousness as a nation more than any others: the Conquest of 1760; the Annexation of Lower
Canada in 1840 following the defeat of the Patriotes in
1837-38 and the passage of the Act of Union by the Westminster Parliament in
1840, which combined Upper and Lower Canada into a united Province with a
single legislature; and, finally, the Constitutional reform of 1982 to the
exclusion of Quebec.
These, we may say, represent three major “defeats”
in the history of a people whose name gradually changed from Canadiens to Canadiens français and most recently to Québécois.
Moreover, these three defeats are defining events in our history — our
political history of course but, clearly with regard to 1760 and 1840, in other
dimensions as well: economic, social, and cultural. Today, the quest for the
survival of a French identity in a majority English-speaking country and
continent remains central to Quebecers’ identity and a reality inseparable from
the Conquest.
The first major defeat: 1759
After 1760, Canadiens not only lost their commercial empire in the
West but most of their access to executive positions, to the detriment of
individual socio-economic success and the capacity to shape their destiny as a
people. Before 1760, Canadiens had access to most of the most important
business, military, and political positions in the colony, as illustrated
(toward the end of the regime) by Philippe de Rigaud Vaudreuil (1698-1778), the
last governor general of New France, a Canadien born and raised in Canada.
After the Conquest, not only did the population
lose some of their elites, who moved on to pursue their careers elsewhere in
the French Empire, but those who remained in New France lost their handle on
government, administration, big business, and the military. The Canadien gentry
entered into decline. Gradually, the colony’s elites were overwhelmingly
composed of the WASP minority, power residing in the hands of London and of men
nominated by Britain. Later that overarching power shifted to Ottawa, an almost
entirely English-speaking government before the 1970s, and one that from
Quebec’s perspective remains today the expression of an English-Canadian
majority, even if at times with strong Quebec contingents.
If the upper class and executive levels of Quebec
society were, for the most part, inaccessible to French Canadians, the Quebec
Act of 1774, resolving the status of French civil law and setting up a
legislature, did leave a space for a French Canadian middle class to
consolidate its position and eventually to lead a movement contesting
inequalities in the colony, especially using the Legislature founded with the
Constitutional Act of 1791 (for which some members of this class had petitioned
in the 1780s). So much so that, having become overly optimistic, the leaders of
what was first called the Parti
canadien, later termed Parti patriote and
led by Papineau, were for decades confident that self-determination would be
obtained gradually without great difficulty, and at first within the Empire.
They saw this as the natural course. If the American and French Revolutions
were more radical, they believed Britain, with its liberal constitution, simply
espoused the same ideals with a more moderate approach, and thus would accept
the gradual and friendly emancipation of its colonies. They believed long
before that they could obtain for Lower Canada the same things that in time the
English-Canadian majority achieved for the Dominion in 1867.
Indeed, the North American colonial context had
proven favourable toward alleviating the oppression of French Canadians. The
legal exclusion of Catholics in 1763 with the Proclamation Act was reversed in
1774 with the Quebec Act. In 1791 the Constitutional Act went
one step further with the creation of a Legislature to which the colony’s
Catholics could be elected. Monsignor Plessis, in 1799, thanked Providence that
the Conquest had saved Canada — French Canada — from the French Revolution (as
well as the American one).
The leaders of the Catholic Church were not the
only ones to develop a positive outlook on the Conquest or on British rule.
Even though the constitution of 1791 was gained at the expense of the loss of
considerable fertile land to Upper Canada, the Canadiens’
new political leaders, after 1791, were generally optimistic. They believed
British imperial policy would evolve positively, that democracy and
self-determination, through gradual autonomy, were achievable for Lower Canada.
London could even be an ally, they believed, against the more rabid
representatives of British imperialism within the colony, hardline elements
that had clashed with governors Murray and Carleton in the early days of the
British regime. This proved to be wrong: the emancipation of Lower Canada
garnered a strong and vehement opposition from British colonists. Lower
Canadian independence, they argued, was not in Britain’s interest. Lord Durham
would state this explicitly in his report in 1839, proposing a plan that
would ensure French-speakers were a minority in a merged province. Based on his
report, the Union Act of 1840 placed the French in a minority.
What had brought about Durham’s report and the
Union Act? In the 1830s, after decades of political struggle with few
substantial gains, the dominant leaders of the Patriote party,
following Papineau, had begun to lose confidence in the peaceful path to
democracy and self-determination. Increasingly, they believed London had to be
challenged — especially given that the Governor’s powers remained little
changed since 1791, while the colonization of new lands was being monopolized
by the government to the exclusion of the Canadiens. The firm rebuttal they received in 1837 with the
Russell Resolutions and the violent repression that ensued in the Rebellions of
1837-38 under General Colbourne, put an abrupt end to naive optimism. Canadiens would
no longer envisage their independence as part of an easy and gradual evolution,
in the natural course of things. As an immediate consequence of the failure of
the Patriotes to overthrow British rule in 1837-38, Lower
Canada was subordinated to the United Province.
Ever since the Union Act, which took effect in
1841, Quebec has remained part of a larger jurisdiction in which the
English-speaking element is a majority — in fact a majority that has increased
along the way. This is largely due to the rapid pace of population growth
through immigration when new Canadians integrate, culturally, to the
English-Canadian majority in much greater numbers than to Quebec’s francophone
majority.
For decades, most French Canadian leaders would
either partake in pan-Canadian politics, adapting to the English majority’s
vehicles, the federal Liberal or Conservative parties, or reverting to cultural
nationalism and resistance to assimilation. The latter, the nationalists,
attempted to find long-term solutions to their economic exclusion that came to
fruition in the 1960s and 1970s.
The ‘second conquest’: 1840
The renewed “conquest” of 1840 was a defining event
in Quebec history. It sealed, for more than a century, the destiny of the
French-speaking nation, reducing it to minority status in a manner that shaped
its national consciousness. French Canadians henceforth conceived of themselves
as a national minority, developing complexes about disadvantages and the
economic and political leadership set over them, to the extent that they became
afraid to make claims for themselves. The governing elite pronounced them to be
inferior, and French Canadians adapted to a world in which their exclusion from
certain circles and executive positions was almost a given, to the point of
interiorizing some of these complexes. This inferiority complex had not yet
crystallized before the failure of the Rebellions and the ensuing annexation of
1840, which may therefore be regarded as a turning point.
It might seem surprising, but confederation only
furthered the sense of inferiority because even though a provincial “nation
state” of Quebec was reinstated in 1867 with a capital and legislature at Quebec
City, French Canadians continued to participate in its governance as if they
were a “minority” in a British-dominated province. This is best illustrated by
the fact that their political formations, Liberal and Conservative, were in
every way incorporated and subordinate to the federal, Canada-wide party
structures. In a province with 75% or 80% Catholic francophones since 1867,
finance ministers were usually anglophone and Protestant, up to Maurice
Duplessis’s return to power in 1944.
The only real exception before the advent of the
Union Nationale movement was Honoré Mercier’s parti national coalition after
the hanging of Riel in 1885. Mercier was elected in 1886 but the passing of the
reins of power was delayed by the lieutenant-governor, who toppled the newly
re-elected government in 1891. Indeed, Mercier’s government, which actively
pursued national assertion and provincial autonomy, had already met with
serious federal opposition. Apart from Mercier, most Quebec politicians did not
rock the boat. After all, economic power still eluded the majority of
Quebecers.
Instead, nationalism found expression mainly in
intellectual movements such as those founded by admirers of Henri Bourassa in
the early twentieth century or in the influential network of movements around
the priest-historian Fr. Lionel Groulx. His latter movement found a political
expression in the Action Libérale
Nationale whose reformist programme was popular
in the 1935 and 1936 Quebec elections. They wanted to overthrow the “colonial
order” in Quebec and make French Canadians “masters in our own house” through
provincial legislation, such as by nationalizing hydro-electricity. Their
alliance with Duplessis conservatives, though, which bore fruit in the Union
Nationale under his leadership, resulted in the abandonment of all the more
radical changes proposed in their programme after the 1936 election victory, in
favour of a more restrained defense of provincial autonomy.
It is only with the Quiet Revolution that
governments renewed a more aggressive programme, including the nationalization
of hydro in 1962. This new dawn launched a fast-paced “emancipation” movement
that had been advancing slowly, almost subterraneously, in the preceding
decades, but which had for the most part been stalled or sidelined politically
since confederation.
Where was all this leading? The provincial Liberals
under Jean Lesage and the more conservative Union Nationale under Daniel
Johnson both believed that not only were they competing for a “national”
government, but that Quebec’s status required a wide-ranging modification of
the Canadian constitutional order which Johnson summarized in the slogan
“Equality or Independence.”
In its own way, René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois,
established in 1968 and advocating “sovereignty-association,” proposed another
version of this remodelling of the constitutional order. Short of outright
independence, they seemed to espouse a form of national self-determination of
Quebecers without breaking altogether from Canada, much like the status
gradually achieved by the Dominion of Canada within the British Empire.
A third ‘defeat’: 1980-82
At first, there even seemed to be openness to this
in Ottawa. It is not impossible to imagine negotiations between Daniel Johnson
and Robert Stanfield had they held power simultaneously in Quebec City and
Ottawa — in contrast to the brick wall presented by Pierre Trudeau. For a brief
moment, Quebec appeared to be confidently on the path toward freeing itself
from two hundred years of subordination.
Instead Trudeau, ensconced as Prime Minister,
emerged as the herald of those who staunchly opposed devolution. French
Canadians voted both for Trudeau and Lévesque, seeming to believe that both
could be their champions. Trudeau promised a “renewed” Canada. Rather than a
negotiated association between two nations, he advocated one Canada, bilingual
and multicultural, that would break away from its two national traditions
(British and French) in favour of a new identity.
The advent of Trudeau would lead Ottawa and Quebec
City to clash, and Ottawa to enter into a long-lasting organizational mould of
blocking as far as possible any devolution while at the same time always
expanding the role of the federal government. Faced with the opposition of a
French Canadian Prime Minister opposed to negotiation, and aptly pushing all
the buttons of Quebec’s inferiority complexes since 1837, Lévesque’s strategy
failed in the 1980 referendum. The prerequisite of Lévesque’s strategy was
reciprocal English-Canadian goodwill, open to negotiation, which meant that the
1980 referendum was doomed to fail once Trudeau returned to power.
This sealed the defeat of national affirmation,
with Trudeau imposing a new constitution on Quebec that saw his vision triumph:
bilingual (for individuals and services, but not truly bicultural or
binational), multicultural, and centered on the federal government. In
practice, this new constitution has been made very difficult to reform, blocked
first by Trudeauists’ influence on public opinion during the Meech Lake fiasco,
then by various laws limiting the possibility of constitutional reform under
Chrétien, according to principles of regional veto that hadn’t been respected
in 1981-82.
Quebec now seems stuck, half-in, half-out in
national terms, without any clear view of feasible solutions to this renewed
subordination in an order that it does not really accept. As was the case after
1840, Quebecers seem resigned to having to evolve as an unwilling national
minority. The persistence of a sovereigntist or separatist movement in Quebec
leaves open the possibility of new movements in the future — but at present
Quebecers seem not only divided but very hesitant as to what path to follow.
Perhaps what is most striking though, in 2012, more
than the election of the PQ with a small plurality of seats, is the overly
aggressive reaction to the Quebec campaign and the PQ’s nationalist programme
in much of the English-speaking media. Measures that are commonplace in many
Western democracies are suddenly presented in serious editorials as the most
viciously racist policies in the West. This surely is an indication that old
colonial complexes and relationships between English and French Canada linger on.
In the 1950s, historian Maurice Séguin used to say
that French Canada (or Quebec) was too strong to assimilate, but too feeble to
break away. In the 1960s and 1970s, with the Quiet Revolution, increasing
numbers of Quebecers — and even foreigners, notably De Gaulle of France —
believed this to be no longer the case. Most strikingly, René Lévesque himself,
in his 1967-68 essay Option Québec, claimed that sovereignty would be achieved easily
and soon, as a natural process. The rise to power of Trudeau proved him wrong
and, since the imposition of a new constitutional order in 1982, together with
two referendum defeats and the electoral collapse of the Bloc Quebecois,
Séguin’s conclusion would seem to enjoy a renewed resonance.
An excerpt from Three Conquests of Quebec by Charles-Philippe Courtois published in the Dorchester Review December 20, 2012
