Quebec since 1900

In the twentieth century the discourse of identity was at first dominated by Henri Bourassa, whose pan-Canadian version of nationalism was in part a reaction to increasing British imperialism. His views were expressed in Le devoir, the Montreal newspaper that he founded. The survival of the French language and culture in areas outside Quebec was closely followed in the province during the crises over French-language schools in Manitoba in the late nineteenth century and Ontario in the early twentieth. Organizations such as the Conseil de la vie française d’Amérique in Quebec and others in Acadia were founded at this time to support French language and culture. In Quebec the intent was also to promote local forms of French, whose particular expressions were adapted to the North American reality.

In the years before World War I, Lionel Groulx called upon literature to express the collective identity, which he began to define in regional terms. In reaction to the increasing failure of Confederation to protect the situation of French Canadians on a continental scale, Groulx began to shape a discourse of identity intended for the society within the province of Quebec, now seen as the true home of French-Canadian culture. Two of the best-known expressions of the new literary regionalism that reflected his ideas were Restons chez nous! (1908) by Damase Potvin and Maria Chapdelaine (1916) by the French writer Louis Hémon. Regionalism also contributed to the creation of a short-lived narrative genre consisting of brief evocations of the characters, objects, and customs associated with traditional country life. Camille Roy inaugurated this form in 1913 with “Le Vieux Hangar.” He consecrated regionalism in his long-used Manuel de la littérature canadienne française (1911).

The idealization of country life was parodied in Marie Calumet (1904) by Rodolphe Girard and Albert Laberge’s La scouine (1918), which portrayed it in a darkly ironic light. Other forms of opposition to regionalism appeared in Jean-Charles Harvey’s Les demi-civilisés (1934) and La chair décevante (1931) by Jovette Bernier. In these works, women were portrayed as playing an active role in determining their destiny, often as wage earners in the city, in contrast to their largely passive position in the novel of the land and the functions prescribed for them by the clerical-nationalist discourse.

In fact, opposition to the regionalist doctrine had existed in organized form since the founding of the École littéraire de Montréal, to which the poet Émile Nelligan lent much support and inspiration. Also known as the Exotics, the writers who made up this group, all poets, were influenced by the European symbolists and by the doctrine of art for art’s sake. Albert Lozeau and Arthur de Bussières were early practitioners of Exotic poetry. In the first decades of the century, the tradition was carried on in literary circles and through the establishment of periodicals such as Le nigog. The aim of this journal was to explain modern literature and art to the Canadian public. It advocated the creation of a universal art and the need to give primacy to form over subject matter in such productions. The regionalists were outraged. But Victor Barbeau continued to battle the tenets of regionalism, first with his column in La presse, signed “Turc,” and then through the journal Les cahiers de Turc, which he began in 1921. La relève, created in 1934, took up the issue of identity by calling into question the traditional image of France, as presented by the clerical-nationalist school, in contrast to the modern country. La relève also upheld the artist’s need for freedom of choice in subject matter, which need not be directed to safeguarding the people and the nation.

One of the most important of the Exotic poets was Paul Morin, whose Le paon d’émail appeared in Paris in 1911. The poetry in this volume, concerned with formal perfection, was applauded by those who contested the notion that French Canadians could succeed in poetic expression only through regional themes. In 1934 Alain Grandbois issued his surrealist Poëmes, and modernism definitely arrived with the publication of Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau’s Regards et jeux dans l’espace three years later. Some critics see the Exotics as having achieved a higher literary quality overall in their work than the regionalists, but no one disputes the very great literary merit of the later works inspired by regionalism. These include Félix-Antoine Savard’s Menaud, maîtredraveur (1937), Trente arpents by “Ringuet” (Philippe Panneton, 1938), Claude-Henri Grignon’s Un homme et son péché (1933), and Le survenant. These last two works became both radio and television series.

Refus global, the manifesto written by the automatist painter Paul-Émile Borduas and signed by a number of artists and intellectuals in 1948, is often cited as the first expression – indeed, explosion – of the modern in French-Canadian society. This document decried the stultifying character of society at the time, in which the combined weight of past tradition and the current authoritarian hierarchy often crippled individual development and expression. Yet the discussion above shows that Refus global had been anticipated earlier. Nevertheless, the manifesto was innovative in that it integrated the question of collective identity with that of modern form.

The discourse of identity took another turn with the arrival on the scene of the magazine Cité libre in 1950. The bourgeois intellectuals who formed its editorial board, including Gérard Pelletier and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, were searching for new values and a new identity. Their orientation was humanistic and progressive, secular and anticlerical, and also anti-nationalistic. While they proposed significant economic changes, they did not fundamentally challenge the existing socio-economic structures. An “anti-citélibrisme” sprang up later among the group producing the magazine Parti pris and in the publishing house of the same name, which consisted of a rejection of bourgeois capitalism and a desire to fight in the political arena rather than only in the economic sphere. The group behind Parti pris was influenced by major leftist currents: Marxist-Leninism, Sartrean existentialism, and the movement to decolonize the Third World.

Though at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, these two movements shared a rejection of the traditional messianic role of the French Canadian as heroic perpetuator of Roman Catholicism in the New World. The abandonment of this notion was reflected in a new type of literary protagonist. In a series of cabaret shows, Gratien Gélinas created the anti-hero Fridolin, an autobiographical figure upon whom is modelled the title character in his play Tit-Coq (presented in 1948, published in 1950). The public identified closely with this play, in part because of the French-Canadian Everyman who is the main character, but also because, for the first time in theatre, the characters spoke like real French Canadians.

The 1950s were a very productive time for poets. Their work amalgamated the two currents that had previously been mutually exclusive – the use of modern artistic forms and the expression of a national character - thereby bringing together social preoccupations with formal experimentation. The poetry collections of Roland Giguère, who founded Éditions Erta in 1949, used images and typography to echo the poetic voice. His work reflected the historical and social evolution of the people of Quebec, while expressing very personal themes. For Gaston Miron, the main force behind the new publishing house L’hexagone, poetry was “erupting into the social sphere ... realizing its power to transform man.”

The novel moved to the city in this era, reflecting demographic patterns: the population had been predominantly urban since the 1920s. Among the notable works with an urban setting were Roger Lemelin’s Au pied de la pente douce (1944) and Les Plouffe (1948) and Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion (1945). The novel also became psychological in the work of Robert Charbonneau (Ils posséderont la terre, 1941), Françoise Loranger (Mathieu, 1949), Jean Filiatrault (Le refuge impossible, 1957), and Anne Hébert (Les chambres de bois, 1958). At the same time, the attraction of open spaces continued to be expressed in such fictions as Marius Barbeau’s Le rêve de Kamaelmouk, Roy’s La petite poule d’eau (1950), Yves Thériault’s Agaguk, and Louise Genest (1950) by “Bertrand Vac” (Aimé Pelletier).

The evolution of the visual arts had followed a similar trajectory. The first pictorial representations by Europeans of what is now Canada were pen-and-ink drawings of the peoples, animals, and vegetation of the New World, such as those of the Jesuit Louis Nicolas (c. 1685). The French settlers of the seventeenth century imported paintings and engravings from France, and little work was produced locally at this time. Extant portraits of the famous seventeenth-century founders of Canada are mostly imaginative renderings created in the nineteenth century. Painting in Canada was dominated by European taste and convention until the 1840s, when Cornelius Krieghoff began to depict the everyday life of the habitant. Marc-Aurèle Suzor-Coté is remembered for his small-town scenes from the early twentieth century, which represent pictorially the ideology of the land. Maria Chapdelaine was stunningly illustrated in gouache in the regionalist style by Clarence Gagnon in 1934. Other painters associated with regionalism are MarcAurèle Fortin, who painted village scenes and farmhouses and worked in the Charlevoix and Gaspé regions, and Jean-Paul Lemieux, who in his early work also favoured traditional Charlevoix scenes. Several sculptors, including Fortin, Suzor-Côté, and Alfred Laliberté, moulded in bronze the characters associated with traditional country life. Ozias Leduc moved towards modernism using a symbolist-influenced style in his portraits and landscapes.

A definite breakthrough to modern forms came in the 1940s. Alfred Pellan, who returned from Paris at this time, created lyrical works influenced by cubism and surrealism. Paul-Émile Borduas was also highly indebted to contemporary French art. His desire to express a revolution of the spirit took the form of automatism, the name given to the work of a group of painters whose spontaneous approach to painting was inspired by the stream-of-consciousness writing of French surrealism. This style gave way in the mid-1950s to the harder-edged abstraction practised by the plasticiens.

The creation of a national television network in 1952 played an important role in the evolution of a collective identity for French Canadians. The medium was appropriated in a very different way in francophone than in anglophone Canada. During the 1950s and 1960s, the French-language arm of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Montreal created an enormous live-production centre. From its inception it hired canonized authors to write scripts, among them Germaine Guèvremont, Claude-Henri Grignon, Roger Lemelin, Robert Choquette, Marcel Dubé, and Victor-Lévy Beaulieu. The characters created by these writers were brought to the screen by accomplished actors who were already well known to the public for their work on stage. Today, according to the ratings, nine out of ten of the most watched shows in Quebec are French-language productions made in the province. There are four French networks, in addition to numerous community stations. As Pierre Bourgault has remarked, “Radio-Canada is the most powerful instrument of culture and identity in Quebec, much more than the CBC is in Canada.”

Since its appearance at the outset of the twentieth century, film has often been used to express and promote the identity of Canadian francophones. The first Canadian feature film was Évangéline, which was based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem about the Acadian deportation. Produced in Halifax in 1913, it was a critical and financial success. The priests Albert Tessier and Maurice Proulx were among early producers of film in Quebec and used their talents to promote the settlement of new agricultural land in Quebec in the 1930s. There were no French-language productions in the first years of the National Film Board, but newsreels were made in French during World War II and feature films soon after. Film-making in French was given a boost when the National Film Board moved to Montreal in 1956. Les raquetteurs (1958) a landmark film created by Michel Brault and Gilles Groulx, was technically important in the development of direct cinema; it was also notable as an expression of national identity. In the 1960s Brault, Claude Jutra, and Pierre Perreault, who worked both within and outside the National Film Board, all produced outstanding works of direct cinema, expressing national identity in the tradition established by Brault.

Perreault dominated in the genre of direct cenema, which he used both to document and to encourage the evolution of national consciousness. Denys Arcand used the technique for a somewhat different purpose. In On est au coton (1970), a film about workers in the cotton mills that was censored for six years, he worked for social change. A socio-political approach was also demonstrated by Jean-Claude Labrecque in La visite du Général de Gaulle au Québec (1967) and La nuit de la poésie (1970) and in Michel Brault’s Les ordres (1974), which documented the October crisis. Gilles Carle evoked a different tradition in his series of commercially and artistically successful films, which rely heavily on narrative, humour, and an appeal to the senses. Several well-known novels have been made into films, notably Kamouraska (Jutra, 1973) and Les Plouffe (Carle, 1981).

Claude Jutra stands out among the many cinematic directors in Quebec in the 1970s with his highly acclaimed Mon oncle Antoine (1971). In the late 1980s and early 1990s Denys Arcand has been the most celebrated film-maker from the province. His Déclin de l’empire américain (1986) and Jésus de Montréal (1989) are examinations of the crisis of ideals in contemporary society that foreground regional and cultural identity. Robert Lepage, first known for his work in the theatre, has also turned to the screen with Confessional (1995), which looks at society through the prism of religious practices in Quebec.