The Quebec National Identity

Gérard Bouchard has shown how in the nineteenth century the traditional French-Canadian elites created an identity sustained by false representations. The historical writing of the period sought to find Quebec’s particularity in its being not a new society but the heir to a mythic past. The cultural world created by the elites was doomed by its lack of connection with popular culture. This gap between elite culture and popular culture became too wide to bridge, and it was popular culture that provided the quiet revolution with its major symbols. The nation as defined by its traditional elites no longer had the kind of meaning that could sustain a sense of belonging. The distance between cultural identity and national identity had become too great.

Francophone Quebeckers do not define their identity as one of many ethnic identities in Canada. They conceive of it as a national identity based on the French language, which is imbued with great symbolic value. This is why language carries such heavy emotional baggage and why there is widespread agreement among francophones that French should be promoted in institutions and in public space. But is language the only basis for the Quebec identity? Is there a Quebec distinctiveness, as the Quebec government’s 1978 white paper on cultural policy, La politique québécoise du développement culturel, argued? Or is Quebec culture an “imaginary territory,” to borrow an expression from Michel Morin and Claude Bertrand. Christian Dufour shed new light on this question by showing how identity is defined by borders and based on political power, which is the only real guarantee of its maintenance and longevity.

The Quebec identity has been constructed on the basis of belonging to a territory contained within the borders of Quebec. Within that territory, it proposes to bring together newly arrived Quebeckers of diverse ethnic origins with the existing core. The Quebec identity is now defined as a national identity. Quebeckers now see language as a prime instrument for integrating people of various origins into a single entity and ensuring their participation in the host society. As the official language of Quebec, French signifies membership in a given civil society and is intended to be the rallying point for individuals living in that society. French plays a role in Quebec analogous to the role of English in the rest of Canada and the United States: language is not only an indicator of membership in a particular ethnic group but also the means of participating in a whole society.

Jean-Jacques Simard distinguishes official language from civil language. An official language is the common language of a society’s citizens. It is the language new immigrants need to learn to be able to participate in the host society and the one that can be acted on by government policies, as can be seen not only in Canada but in the United States as well. A civil language, on the other hand, is a language of private life. Far from being the anxious reflex of a minority that cannot reproduce itself, Quebec’s language laws are an expression of its desire to integrate new immigrants. Once integrated, these new immigrants will transform Quebec in turn. In fact, it can be argued that Quebec is trying to do what societies such as Canada, the United States, and France have done and continue to do – establish a common language.

Discussions of French-Canadian nationalism have frequently stressed its defensive character, related to its emphasis on the struggle for survival, idealization of the past, and resentment. Contemporary Quebec nationalism is different, however. As Michael Ignatieff has argued: “Quebec’s nationalism is rapidly transforming itself from a nationalism of resentment into a nationalism of self-affirmation.” In other words, Quebec nationalism has become a civic nationalism, and, distancing itself from ethnicity, it has begun to express a will to be, as Daniel Jacques puts it. Observers have not always clearly perceived this transformation of contemporary Quebec nationalism, which promotes Quebec as the nation-state of all the people who live in it. The confusion between ethnic and civic nationalism is still widespread in the work of Canadian intellectuals (such as Ramsay Cook, who maintains that the idea of the nation expressed by the Parti Québécois is still that of a homogeneous cultural community), as is the confusion between national feeling and nationalism.

It has to be acknowledged that Quebec’s model of integration does not yet work perfectly. While new immigrants are learning French to a greater extent than those who came before the adoption of Bill 101 in 1978, English is still quite attractive, primarily because of the demands of the labour market and because the vast majority of immigrants are concentrated in the Montreal region, where bilingualism is most extensive. Because immigrants waver between French and English, they remain more attached to their mother tongue in Montreal than anywhere else in Canada.

But Quebec society also has a history: conquered and colonized, it belongs to Canada, representing a major component of Canada from any point of view. Hence, as all analysts have noted, it has an identity tugged between two poles of belonging. Jean Larose argues that “the Quebec nation finds itself between the dependence of the French Canadian and the independence of the Québécois.” Jean Bouthillette has probably pinpointed this duality better than anyone else in a 1989 book with an evocative title, Le Canadien français et son double (The French Canadian and His Double). Elaborating on this theme, Gérard Bergeron has shown that, for more than twenty-five years, the sense of double belonging was incarnated in two opposing charismatic politicians: Pierre Elliott Trudeau and René Lévesque.

There is still a strong feeling of belonging and attachment to Canada in francophone Quebec. But this attachment is undoubtedly directed towards the real or imaginary Canada of André Laurendeau, a Canada that would allow Quebec a large measure of autonomy in pursuing its own affirmation. In that regard, the allegiance of francophone Quebeckers is less to the Canada of 1982 than to the federal Canada of 1867, that is, to a Canada that accepted diversity – as defined by Donald Lenihan, Gordon Robertson, Roger Tassé, Jeremy Webber, James Tully, and Charles Taylor, to give only a few examples.

Finally, the continental character of the francophone Quebec identity needs to be highlighted. The Québécois may speak French, but they are also North Americans. This explains why the Quebec imagination is strongly attracted to, sometimes even fascinated by, the United States. This fascination was especially marked in the lower and working classes between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Such a phenomenon should not be confused, however, with Americanization. Rather, it indicates that the framework for Quebec culture is a new cultural space, which has replaced the traditional references.