The Nation on Separate Paths, 1918–1967

In the twentieth century, urbanization and cultural assimilation swept French-Canadian communities. While these were not new phenomena, they took on greater proportions than ever before. Structural shifts in the Canadian economy that had begun at the turn of the century intensified after 1920, so that by 1939 manufacturing represented 64 percent of economic activity in Quebec, while the forest industry accounted for 11 percent, agriculture for 10 percent, and mining for 9 percent. The second industrial revolution was based on export markets and on capital-intensive rather than labour-intensive industries. Because capital investment came mostly from the United States, Canadian governments – including the Quebec government of Louis-Alexandre Taschereau, premier from 1920 to 1936 – greeted American business people warmly. When nationalists criticized his policy of opening Quebec to foreign investment, Taschereau replied, “I would rather import American capital than export French Canadians.”

His successor, Maurice Duplessis, sought to modernize Quebec’s economy and believed firmly in free enterprise. As a result, he was just as accommodating as Taschereau, and his policies guaranteed employers favourable conditions, especially in the area of labour relations. After World War II, Duplessis’s government benefited from a healthy economy. Spurred by the world war, the reconstruction of Europe, the Cold War, and the Korean War, the Canadian economy expanded rapidly. Quebec was rich in a number of raw materials – iron ore, wood, paper, and non-ferrous metals – that were much sought after by Americans.

An increasing number of French-Canadian farmers, however, found themselves marginalized in this industrial and post-industrial economy. The cost of running their farms increased more rapidly than the prices they could charge for their produce. In 1961 farming accounted for only 5.7 percent of Quebec’s total output. The number of farms and the area of cultivated land were in steady decline. The farms that remained expanded, were mechanized, and produced more. The number of tractors in Quebec increased from 5,800 in 1941 to 70,000 in 1961. Farmers now participated fully in the consumer society. While before the crash of 1929 two thirds of a farm’s income was in kind, the proportion dropped to half in 1939 and then to a third after World War II.

The rural exodus also accelerated. In 1901 rural residents had constituted 60 percent of Quebec’s population. This proportion fell to 44 percent in 1921, 37 percent in 1941, 25 percent in 1961, and 20 percent in 1971. Many of these people no longer earned their income from agriculture. Throughout French Canada, mechanical saws and new forest roads completely overhauled the conditions under which wood was cut, and seasonal work in logging camps that had existed for more than a century was in decline. The hinterland of New Brunswick, Quebec, and Ontario, once given life by the agro-forest system, now languished as the system died.

The Montreal metropolitan area benefited most from the rural French-Canadian exodus. In 1941 Quebec’s urban centres included a metropolis (Montreal), a mid-sized city (Quebec City with a population of 150,000), four towns with populations of between 30,000 and 40,000, and twenty small towns with populations under 21,000. The people in these small towns worked in regional business, light industry, natural-resource exploitation, small business, and services. Some towns, such as Rimouski, were cultural and administrative centres as well. Urbanization, which came nearly to a halt during the Great Depression of the 1930s, gained strength again during the war and accelerated in the 1950s. Between 1941 and 1961 Montreal’s population doubled, reaching two million. This growth was especially advantageous for the construction sector, which also gained impetus from the need for new buildings in the old leather, textile, and pulp and paper industries. Historian Jean Hamelin writes that “Montreal and Quebec City became genuine crucibles, in which new values were developed and new solidarities formed.”

With improved roads, more modern means of transportation, rural electrification, and the revolution in communications, the draw of the city increased. It became a pervasive and irresistible cultural force. Sociologist Gérald Fortin has accurately noted that people in rural areas “had one foot in the country, while the other foot and three quarters of their heads were in the city.” French-language radio, which first appeared in Quebec in 1922 with the founding of station CKAC in Montreal, played an important role in the promotion of popular urban culture. During the war years, people religiously followed news from the front, and radio series began to replace the traditional storyteller as a form of entertainment. Even farmers shifted their work schedules to listen to Claude-Henri Grignon’s Un homme et son péché at 7 o’clock in the evening. In western Canada, francophone leaders well understood the cultural implications of radio and fought to get their own stations.

From its beginnings in 1952, television had an enormous impact on Quebec society: it promoted new values and shaped a new identity. In 1954 the CBC founded an entirely French-speaking station in Montreal, CBFT, while elsewhere in the province it authorized the establishment of affiliate stations owned by private companies, generally ones with newspaper and radio interests. Studios were built at a rapid pace, and in 1957 Radio-Canada was the world’s third-largest producer of television programs. Its output included variety shows, game shows, news, sports, plays, concerts, and drama series, all developed in Quebec. Television completely remade local beliefs and behaviour patterns by importing new ideas from around the world. The audience grew quickly: while in 1953 one household in ten was equipped with a set, 73 percent of households had a television set by 1956 even in a small town like Rimouski. By 1960 there were television sets in 89 percent of Quebec homes, and a second network was founded, this one privately owned.

Standards of living varied among French Canadians in both rural communities and urban centres. As Susan Mann Trofimenkoff has noted, almost everyone in French Canada was affected by the Depression, one of the pivotal events of twentieth-century history in the West. As early as 1927, overproduction in pulp and paper and electricity forced some production units in the Saguenay to close. Two years later hay producers in the Eastern Townships were devastated by the shift away from the use of horses for transportation. In 1931 declines in retail trade and industrial production triggered urban unemployment, and the following year a drop in the price of cod ruined the fishing economy of eastern Quebec. Only the Abitibi gold mines escaped the general economic deterioration.

Each time the Depression hit a region, ripple effects were felt throughout neighbouring areas. A single-industry town could suddenly find half its population unemployed, and this had disastrous consequences for local businesses, services, and markets. In rural regions, it was no longer possible to compensate for a loss of farm income with seasonal work in logging camps since the forest industry was also experiencing serious difficulty. From one day to the next, a farmer-logger’s credit was reduced to nothing. Having to hand their livestock, their equipment, and even their farms over to creditors, farmers had no choice but to join the growing ranks of the urban unemployed.

In 1932 the unemployment rate among unionized workers in Quebec reached 26.4 percent. It was la misère noire, a time of black misery. Municipalities made it their policy to turn away new arrivals, for fear of adding to their existing masses of unemployed. They established conditions of residence of up to two years for those who wished to draw on public financial aid. In 1933 in Montreal almost 300,000 people, or more than a third of the population, were forced to make use of municipal relief services. The poor were constantly seeking cheaper – which meant filthier – lodgings. Rents declined less than the cost of food, and relief never covered both. To fill the gap, fathers of families took on any job they could find, while their wives found themselves begging at the doors of middle-class homes for the odd day of domestic work. Men agreed to have their wives work outside the home only as a last resort, and some preferred deprivation to facing that kind of shame. The poor’s misery found expression in the songs of a popular singer, La Bolduc.

For many civil and religious leaders, returning to the land still seemed the best solution to this crisis. Governments sent many people to the northern regions of the prairie provinces and Ontario. In Quebec they founded settler missions and parishes in Abitibi, the Saguenay region, Témiscouata, the Matapedia valley, and the Gaspé.

Unfortunately, the land these new farmers were supposed to plough was too often no more than a pile of rocks. As might be imagined, the lives of the new settlers were not easy. Coming from the cities, they had to give up all the amenities of modern living. They were isolated, did not have regular religious services, and were far from markets in which to sell their wood. They were often exploited by forestry companies, although work in the forests did at least provide a bit of money. Misery was always knocking at the door. In the fall of 1938, many families in Saint-Jean-de-Brébeuf, a new parish in the Gaspé interior, lacked clothes, and collectively they owed $8,000 to the general store. In a moving letter to his bishop, the parish priest, François Casey, wrote, “I have just given up my own slippers, pants, and nightgowns.” It was not surprising that, like their predecessors in the nineteenth century, two-thirds of these Depression colonists eventually abandoned their hinterland settlements.

It took the start of World War II in 1939 to bring prosperity back to North America. War industries supplied more than enough jobs, and, when a munitions factory opened its doors, the municipality closed its relief offices. The unemployed got jobs in the factories and settlers left the mountainous landscapes of the Appalachians for working-class urban neighbourhoods. Quebec munitions factories alone employed more than 10,000 people, and the industrial workforce doubled during the first four years of the war.

Prosperity continued during the 1940s and 1950s, but it did not eliminate socio-economic, gender, or regional inequalities. On the contrary, labourers earning the minimum wage became poorer, while among unionized workers the situation varied depending on the industry, the region, and the province. Those who worked in the so-called “soft sector” (food, leather, tobacco, textiles) received inadequate income. In 1953 it was estimated that a textile worker supporting four other people would need at least $52 a week – rather than the $40 that such a worker generally earned. On the other hand, workers in construction and heavy industry earned wages that allowed them at least to keep up with the rise in the cost of living. According to historian Jean-Pierre Charland, the advent of a consumer society in Quebec did not really occur until the late 1950s. Quebec francophones at that time earned an average annual income of $3,876, compared with $4,094 earned by francophones in Ontario and $4,277 for those in Alberta.

Birth and death rates both declined. A demographic transition had begun at the close of World War I among the middle classes and skilled workers. However, after a dramatic fall during the Depression, the birth rate in Quebec increased during World War II and remained at a high level during the post-war baby boom, with more than 30 births per thousand population. The baby boom continued right up to the mid-1960s, when contraception became easily accessible. The birth rate dropped from 28 per thousand in 1959 to 14 per thousand – the lowest rate in Canada – in 1971. Life expectancy among Quebec francophones also increased: from 56.2 to 67.8 years for men and from 57.8 to 74 years for women between 1931 and 1966. Outside Quebec, the transition was even more rapid. From the 1920s on, francophone couples elsewhere seemed to have fewer children than couples in Quebec. Intervals between births were greater and people preferred to keep their children in school for longer periods rather than send them onto the job market too soon. In many places, legislators advocated or pushed through compulsory schooling legislation. To compensate for the loss of income, married women had to work outside the home, in marked contrast to what had occurred in the nineteenth century.

In 1930 in Quebec, women accounted for 19.7 percent of the workforce. But their situation was slow to improve and they generally held the lowest-paid jobs. Just before the Depression, women earned approximately 56 percent as much as men. They worked in the clothing industry, shoe manufacturing, tobacco, textiles, and personal services. The male-dominated government, Church, and unions believed, of course, that a woman’s place was in the home, and, on the rare occasions that these institutions intervened on behalf of women, it was always hesitantly and often without effect. Under pressure from the bishops, the Quebec provincial government refused to grant women the right to vote until 1940, even though they had had the vote at the federal level since 1917–18.

During World War II, thousands of housewives abandoned their unpaid and poorly paid labour as housewives, maids, and waitresses to flock to the factories. In some sectors, such as textiles and shoes, the presence of women was already an established custom. In other areas, such as aircraft and aluminum, women’s faces were new. In the autumn of 1943, to the dismay of traditionalists, women constituted a third of the industrial workforce in Quebec. After the war ended, the need to balance the family budget continued to bring a growing proportion of women onto the job market, and they represented 27 percent of the workforce in Quebec in 1961. During the same period, no doubt in reaction to this trend, the image of the homemaker as “queen of the house” developed.

The Catholic Church also underwent a profound if reluctant transformation. The 1920s and 1930s seemed to mark the peak of religious fervour among French Canadians, with 99 percent identifying themselves as Catholic. In Quebec, the ratio of priests and religious to the Catholic population was at its highest level ever: there was one religious for every eighty-seven Catholics. Feasts, celebrations, and devotions all reached a climax. Devotion to the Canadian Martyrs, beatified in 1925 and canonized in 1930, developed at this time. In 1938 the funeral of Brother André, the celebrated miracle worker of St Joseph’s Oratory, triggered unprecedented emotion and fervour. Hundreds of thousands of people visited his casket, which lay amidst hundreds of commemorative plaques. The same enthusiasm was expressed during the great Marian conferences. The conference organized to celebrate the centenary of the Ottawa diocese in 1947 lasted a full week and drew no fewer than 500,000 people. The guest of honour at the feast was an exact replica of the miracle-working statue at Cap-de-la-Madeleine, which took a month and a half to make its way to Ottawa, pausing 340 times along the route with a sacramental procession, sermon, and reception at each stop.

New lay societies also appeared, like the Knights of Columbus (which French Canadians borrowed from their Irish co-religionists), the Club Richelieu, and the Club Optimiste. Women’s Cercles de Fermières, despite their great piety, were considered too closely allied to government interests by the bishops. They promoted rival organizations instead, like the Union Catholique des Fermières (1944), the Syndicats d’Économie Domestique (1946), the Cercles d’Économie Domestique (1952), and the Union Catholique des Femmes Rurales (1957). All these organizations merged into the Association Féminine pour l’Éducation et l’Action Sociale in 1965.

After 1935, the clergy provided specialized movements for youth as well: Jeunesse Ouvrière Catholique, Jeunesse Étudiante Catholique, and Jeunesse Agricole Catholique. Even though only a few people were directly involved, the influence of these movements was widespread. Boy scouts and girl guides, which began in Quebec in the 1930s and joined the Catholic Action movement in 1943, shared the Church’s goals: giving youth initiative and encouraging them to strive towards a life of spirituality. Other organizations, like the Conseil des Oeuvres and the Oeuvre des Terrains de Jeu, seemed to have grown out of a desire to forestall provincial government initiatives.

As late as 1950, the Quebec Church had more priests in proportion to the Catholic population – one in 500 – than any other church in the western world. It was also one of the world’s most active missionary churches. Thousands of Quebec clerics and religious carried the good news to the outermost reaches of Christendom. The clergy had always been present in the education sector. The Catholic committee of the Council of Public Instruction, which included all of the province’s bishops, remained extremely powerful. Through it, clerics ruled on subjects, programs, and textbooks for all Catholic schools in Quebec. Even though some teachers and staff were lay, teaching and school life were thoroughly impregnated with Catholicism.

Teachers and staff of the classical colleges were for the most part members of religious orders. Laval University and the University of Montreal were run by priests. Philosophy classes disseminated a strict form of Thomism and pure Catholic doctrine. The Church also controlled teacher training as well as nursing schools, which were run by nuns. In French Canada, no one could undertake even the most limited studies without being taught by a priest, nun, or brother. Hospitals were just as Catholic as the schools. In mid-century, there were twenty-four large hospitals in Quebec, with an average staff of twenty sisters each, and some lay employees as well. The Sisters of Providence alone, with more than 2,300 members in Quebec, ran some twenty-five large charitable organizations in the Montreal region.

As already noted, Catholic activity in the trade-union field bore fruit with the founding of the Canadian and Catholic Confederation of Labour (CCCL), which grouped approximately 20,000 workers in construction, railways, machinery, shoes, textiles, garments, pulp and paper, and breweries. In agriculture, some 13,000 farmers were organized in the Union Catholique des Cultivateurs (UCC), founded in 1924. Neither the CCCL nor the UCC represented a majority of its potential constituency, and the CCCL was in constant competition with international unions, which in 1931 represented two-thirds of Quebec’s unionized workers.

Moreover, both the CCCL and the UCC had a dual purpose: to fulfil the moral and patriotic goals of their founders and to satisfy the economic concerns of their members. The clergy knew that unions were necessary and understood their strength. Workers and farmers, on the other hand, knew that the clergy could provide dynamic leadership, networks of influence, and moral security. Relations within the two organizations were not always harmonious. Internal divisions were reflected in arguments about strategy, financing, personalities, power, and the responsibilities of priests. After 1939, the clergy felt the need to provide workers with the Ligue Ouvrière Catholique, whose goal was to “reconquer the working class for Christ” by inviting workers to work towards improving the lot of their families while paying closer attention to their souls.

Although the bishops disapproved of compulsory education, it too became a tool of religious socialization after it was enacted in 1943. The Church used the press for this purpose as well, especially the eminently conservative daily L’Action catholique, widely read in eastern Quebec from 1907 on. The Church also made use of radio shows, such as L’heure catholique, L’heure dominicale, and, after the Marian year in 1950, the family rosary. Sometimes the clergy even owned their own radio stations. In Hull, for instance, the Oblates ran station CKCH after 1942, broadcasting from a parish hall. Even movies, which the Church had resisted ferociously in the early decades of the century and continued to censor, now became a tool to educate the Catholic masses. In 1951 the Church became involved in film production with the founding of Rex Films. As in the past, the Church tried to adjust to new constraints, increasing the number of parishes to accommodate urban development and adapting its approach to urban needs. After the Asbestos strike in 1949, Quebec bishops signed a collective pastoral letter in which they considered the question of work in light of Catholic doctrine, affirming that the city and its industries could offer as valuable a spiritual life as could life in the fields.

But these gestures were not enough. The big problem for the Church was that in a time of rapid and far-reaching social change it did not have the financial resources necessary to fulfil the tasks it had taken on. With many people now finding respectable and interesting jobs in the secular world, the Church was also beginning to feel the effects of declining numbers of new recruits, and it had to tone down its continental mission. The Church also lost some of its credibility when the archbishop of Quebec, Cardinal Rodrigue Villeneuve, preached in favour of the war effort during World War II and even appeared riding in a tank. This gesture diminished his authority considerably and many nationalists never forgave him for it.

Duplessis boasted that the “bishops eat from my hand.” After Cardinal Villeneuve’s death in 1947, the premier’s skilful manipulation of the episcopate prevented any subsequent prelate from successfully uniting the bishops. They regularly needed funds for various works and projects, and the premier was generous. But with each service he rendered, as Susan Mann Trofimenkoff has pointed out, Duplessis tightened his grip. Though he generally granted what was asked, he often made the supplicant wait a little, and rarely did he commit to a definite and precise sum. He knew well that each donation increased the recipient’s sense of indebtedness to the premier and that each award only served as publicity for a generous government. Some bishops, notably Philippe Servule Desranleau of the diocese of Sherbrooke, even became promoters for Duplessis’s party, the Union Nationale.

Quebec nationalist activists were increasingly preoccupied with industrialization, urbanization, and their attendant problems, and their attention turned away – sometimes imperceptibly – from the question of francophone minorities’ cultural survival. Even in the early years of the century, Henri Bourassa was interested in social issues, which he linked to the national question. He was especially concerned with immigration and the place of women in society: it was important to ensure that the massive arrival of immigrants would not engulf francophones, already a minority in Canada, and feminism threatened to distance women from their vocation as preservers of traditional French-Canadian values. Later, Bourassa urged his fellow French Canadians to become involved in small and medium-sized business. Other nationalists of Bourassa’s generation also took economic issues seriously. In a series of publications, Errol Bouchette advocated the idea that French Canadians should take charge of their economy. Alphonse Desjardins founded the first caisse populaire in 1900 in Lévis, on Quebec City’s south shore, and thus instituted the beginnings of the credit-union movement, which quickly grew.

Nationalists of the 1920s and 1930s followed in the footsteps of these precursors. Esdras Minville, Édouard Montpetit, and other professors at the École des Hautes Études Commerciales, along with Abbé Lionel Groulx and his disciples, denounced the hold of foreign capital on Quebec’s economy and the exclusion of French Canadians from the business world. Indeed, few French Canadians made it into the ranks of the capitalist class. People like Rodolphe Forget, who played a significant role in some large companies, and Alfred Dubuc, who carved out an important place for himself in the forests of the Saguenay and the pulp industry, were exceptions. Dubuc’s pulp mills went under when competition intensified in the 1920s, and francophone capitalists experienced siginificant losses during the wave of mergers that occurred between the two world wars.

In calling attention to social problems, nationalists focused primarily on the power and responsibilities of the Quebec government. They did not approve of its cooperation – what amounted to its collaboration – with big business. They wanted the provincial government to be much more vigilant when giving companies the right to exploit Quebec’s natural resources. They called on the government to study, organize, and plan the development of these resources, along with agriculture and industry. For a while in the early 1920s Action Française, founded in 1917 by Lionel Groulx, Bourassa’s successor at the head of the nationalist movement, even flirted with the idea of an independent Quebec. At the second conference on the French language in America in Quebec City in 1937, Groulx declared to an enthusiastic crowd that “we will have our French state.” At the height of his glory, Groulx had friends and contacts throughout the Catholic and independent nationalist press in Quebec and won over many zealous disciples among the intelligentsia.

He also had many allies among the clergy, especially the Jesuit Joseph-Papin Archambault, who in 1911 had founded the École Sociale Populaire. This organization played a crucial role in the development of the Church’s social doctrine and its application in a French-Canadian environment. In 1920 Archambault started the Semaines Sociales, a sort of itinerant university. At the end of each summer, in a different Quebec town, the Semaines Sociales gathered the lay and religious elites of the region. Open lectures and debates on social themes made the tools of social Catholicism available to participants and the public. The clergy learned to apply Catholic doctrine to concrete social problems, while lay people learned to take responsibility for these problems and work with priests in developing “typically French-Canadian” solutions.

The nationalist cause was given strength by the Depression in the 1930s. Older and younger generations alike spoke of restoring moral order. The École Sociale Populaire denounced the prevailing “economic dictatorship” and in 1933 published the Programme de Restauration Sociale (program of social restoration), which drew on the doctrine of corporatism. Corporatist theories filled the pages of periodicals like L’Action nationale (Montreal, 1933– ) and L’Actualité économique (Montreal, 1925– ), as well as the classrooms of the École des Hautes Études Commerciales in Montreal and the classical colleges. Taking the family as its model, this doctrine argued that workers and employers should merge their interests within “corporations” rather than institutionalize their differences in labour unions and industrial associations. According to the corporatist model, the state should act as arbiter and conciliator and the Church as overall chaperon. Corporatism was also regarded as “a marvellous tool for economic recovery.”

As elsewhere in the country, some intellectuals and isolated activists in Quebec also expressed more extreme views: socialism, communism, and fascism. On the left, in 1925 Albert Saint-Martin set up the Université Ouvrière in Montreal to provide political education for his compatriots. In the 1930s it was a target of judicial repression as well as of some University of Montreal students who ransacked its premises. On the right, Jean-Louis Gagnon founded the magazine Vivre (Montreal, 1934–35), which published articles attacking democracy and the parliamentary system. Even more extremist was the Nazi movement led by Ardrien Arcand, who, with the support of German consular authorities, borrowed the symbols of Hitler’s regime: swastikas, brown shirts, the goose-step, and the Nazi salute.

The growth of nationalist awareness and the economic crisis reverberated on the political scene. Elected leader of Quebec’s Conservative Party in 1933, Duplessis sought out allies among young Liberals who wanted to revitalize the Liberal Party, which had run the province since 1897, and among lay people and priests committed to Catholic social action. Under the leadership of Paul Gouin, the son of former premier Lomer Gouin, these activists and dissident Liberals formed the Action Libérale Nationale (ALN), which based its program on the manifesto of the École Sociale Populaire in Montreal. Other leading nationalists such as the dentist Philippe Hamel, an indefatigable advocate of the nationalization of electricity, joined the anti-Liberal coalition formed by the ALN and Duplessis’s Conservatives. In the 1935 election the coalition spread its message through radio broadcasts and won almost as many seats as the Liberal Party, although not quite enough to oust the Liberals from power. In 1936 Duplessis gathered these disparate elements into a new party, the Union Nationale, which came to power in a new election on 17 August 1936. Almost immediately, however, Duplessis excluded the reformers from his cabinet and formed alliances instead with the Church, the lower middle class, the rural population, and American and English-Canadian capitalists.

In 1939 Duplessis was defeated by the Liberal Party under Adélard Godbout, who ran the province for five years and enacted a number of progressive laws. His government granted women the right to vote in 1940 and made education compulsory in 1943: neither of these measures pleased the bishops. Godbout set up the Conseil Supérieur du Travail (1940), the Conseil d’Orientation Économique (1943), the Commission de l’Assurance-Maladie (1943), the Commission des Relations Ouvrières (1944), and Hydro-Québec (1944). The premier had the support of urban voters, but elements of the clergy and nationalists opposed him. They found him soft on the federal Liberal government’s policy of centralization and held him responsible for Ottawa’s imposition of military conscription despite the high rate of recruitment among French Canadians.

In the 1944 provincial election the Union Nationale regained power in a three-way race with the Liberals and the anti-conscription Bloc Populaire. Duplessis instituted an authoritarian and conservative political system. In a time of rapid social change, his platform reassured people with its skilful combination of tradition and progress. As Susan Mann Trofimenkoff describes it so well, the premier “duplicated priestly paternalism and stood no affront to his own prestige as secular leader. He bound people to him with what were basically ecclesiastical and family ties: personal largesse, immense good humour spiced with the occasional fit of pique, vast storing and selective sharing of intimate knowledge about individuals, marks of favour, emotional blackmail, and a dose of fear.” His priorities were promoting economic growth and having the federal government respect provincial autonomy. He regularly sparred with Ottawa, with the most famous duels revolving around taxes and federal grants to universities. It was with hesitation, however, that Duplessis moved in 1948 to have Quebec adopt the fleur-de-lys flag – a symbol of the province’s distinct character at a time when its economy was more than ever integrated into that of the continent as a whole.

Trade unions increased their strength under Duplessis. As its membership grew and multinational corporations expanded, the union movement revamped its structures and revised its ideology. When Gérard Picard became president of the CCCL in 1942, it hired its first organizer, Jean Marchand. The following year the CCCL began to shed its denominational character, welcoming non-Catholic workers into its ranks and removing the chaplain’s veto over strike decisions. Without completely dropping its corporatist leanings, the CCCL adopted new socio-economic objectives: the planning of production and a more equitable allocation of goods and services. Under Picard’s administration, the CCCL became more passionately humanist and democratic. It advocated profit-sharing and worker participation in ownership and management. In 1948 it set up a strike fund, which was put to good use during the Asbestos strike (1949), and the Louiseville strike (1952). It dropped the term Catholic from its title in 1960 to become the Confederation of National Trade Unions (CNTU).

In addition to the CCCL, two other union centrals were formed: the Quebec Provincial Federation of Labour (QPFL) and, in 1952, the Quebec Industrial Unions Federation (QIUF). The QPFL was oriented primarily towards North American business unionism, favouring good relations with the private sector. The QIUF, on the other hand, constituted an avant-garde element in the union movement. Thus, the movement was far from monolithic and was often torn apart by rivalries. However, its various members did occasionally rally into a single force to fight the Duplessis regime. In 1957, as a side-effect of the merger of the AFL and the CIO in the United States, the QPFL and the QIUF joined forces to form the Quebec Federation of Labour (QFL). The QFL fought for free education, higher royalties on natural resources, and reform of the labour laws. The Corporation des Instituteurs and Institutrices Catholiques du Québec, founded in 1945, was also revitalized at this time by a massive influx of lay teachers.

The unions were not alone in fighting for social change. The universities and business schools produced a new generation of anti-establishment protesters. Few in number, young for the most part, shaped by the homogenizing mould of the classical colleges, and influenced by the Great Depression of the 1930s, these individuals were united in their desire to bring down Duplessis’s backward-looking regime. Laval University’s École des Sciences Sociales et Politiques, under the leadership of a Dominican, Father Georges-Henri Lévesque, offered inspiration to many after 1938. Sociologists, economists, and political scientists at Laval called into question the established order by studying social realities without using preconceived ideas drawn from religion or moral concerns. Business schools helped shape individuals who, as early as the 1920s and 1930s, advocated social change and increasingly found their place in industry, trade, and especially the civil service. And lay teachers, whose numbers were growing, began to challenge clerical control of the education system.

Within the Church itself, a 1956 manifesto on political immorality by two priests, Gérard Dion and Louis O’Neill, expressed new ideas that challenged the established order. In 1960 a religious brother, Jean-Paul Desbiens, published Les insolences du Frère Untel, a stinging attack on the archaic education system and the corruption of the French-Canadian language. His book was a runaway best-seller.

Artists also contributed to social protest. In 1948 the automatiste painter Paul-Émile Borduas and several of his colleagues and students published a manifesto, Le refus global, in which they rejected the narrow structures of a society closed in on itself, structures that were strangling art and thinking. In the same year, with less commotion but just as much effect, the young playwright Gratien Gélinas subtly criticized the structures of the family, church, and state in his play Tit-Coq, the story of an illegitimate child who is denied any semblance of a normal life by his society. These revolutionary impulses soon found their couterpart in literature as well, and a large portion of the intellectual world was shaped in direct opposition to traditional values. Pioneering scientists, while less vociferous, also made a crucial contribution to this cultural modernization. As sociologist Marcel Fournier points out, “dogmas were shaken, new relationships to reality and nature were established, and a new vision of society and the individual was developed, which called into question old truths and identities.”

Other forces for change included the Montreal daily Le Devoir, which in 1946 began publishing articles and editorials by André Laurendeau and Gérard Filion that favoured economic, social, and political reform as a means to modernize and purify Quebec. Three years later the journalist Gérard Pelletier and others helped to focus the public spotlight on the strike in Asbestos, Quebec. At Asbestos the clergy supported the Catholic unions against anglophone management, which in turn was supported by the entire weight of the judicial apparatus and the police force of the Duplessis government. In January 1950 Pelletier and his friends founded a new magazine, Cité libre (Montreal, 1950–66, 1991– ), adding to the voices of protest. Also in 1950 Georges-Émile Lapalme became leader of the Quebec Liberal Party, and under his leadership the party developed a mass base and a claim to be the ideal instrument of change.

A serious recession that began in 1957 led to unemployment in peripheral regions and an increased rural exodus. As they had done a quarter of a century earlier, politicians and members of the intelligentsia tried to find the structural causes of the widespread distress. They noted the economic inferiority of francophones throughout Canada, even in their “own” province of Quebec, where anglophones on average earned 35 percent more than francophones. Constituting only 7 percent of the workforce, the anglais held 80 percent of the best-paid jobs in the manufacturing sector. And the profit margin of a “foreign” business in Quebec was twice as high as that of a francophone business. The elite again took up the idea of a strong provincial state that, among other things, would allow francophones to catch up and reclaim their rightful place in Quebec society. A right-wing splinter group, the Alliance Laurentienne, even advocated the independence of Quebec under the banner of “God, Family, Homeland.”

The nationalists’ arguments and statistics and Duplessis’s anti-Ottawa declarations all found resonance among French Canadians, who knew from their own experience that they were hugely overrepresented at the lower end of the job and wage scale. Logging camps, la shop, la facterie, the mine, and the mill all bore English corporate names and le boss was always anglophone. The foremen and clerks also spoke English. From Newfoundland to British Columbia, francophones lived “at the bottom of the hill” surrounded by their cultural institutions: the family, the school, the convent, and the caisse populaire. They often shared their backyard with commercial buildings. Across the country, the only ethnic group with less education than French Canadians were the Italians. In Canada as a whole, 53 percent of francophones did not go to secondary school; in Ontario the proportion was 79 percent. From this vantage point, the “top of the hill” seemed a long way off – opulent suburbs to which only a small number of francophones gained entry. “To succeed socially,” writes geographer Paul-Y. Villeneuve, “you had to climb the hill.” Even remote forests were dominated by the English, whose hunting and fishing clubs were closed to local residents.

This explains why the draw of the English language was strong, even in Quebec where francophones were a substantial majority. English tended to be the language of use in mixed-marriage families in Quebec, as well as among French-Canadian parvenus who lived on the “English streets” of small industrial towns, frequented their bosses’ golf and tennis clubs, and anglicized their given names, Jean-Jacques becoming John Jack. These at once sad and absurd situations contributed to the feeling many ordinary people had of being torn between opposing needs and feeling like outcasts in their own land. Many developed a cultural inferiority complex, while others became angry.

The death of Duplessis in September 1959 and that of his successor, Paul Sauvé, four months later, shook the Union Nationale to its roots. A series of scandals led to the party’s defeat at the hands of the Liberals in the election of 22 June 1960. Now led by Jean Lesage, a forty-eight-year-old lawyer and former federal MP, the Liberals accelerated and institutionalized the modernization of Quebec. Spurred on by a small group of zealous technocrats, the new government rapidly built a complex state apparatus and introduced social legislation to improve the distribution of goods and services. It also broadened democratic structures by extending citizens’ rights in the social and economic sectors, where people’s well-being was determined. Within a few years, Quebec completely transformed its liberal democracy under a government whose support came primarily from the middle classes. In the Liberal mindset, massive intervention by the provincial government was the way to secure Quebec’s future: the state and the nation, the social and the national, were one.

But these profound and rapid transformations upset some rural Quebeckers and the lower-middle class who seemed excluded from the Liberals’ program of rattrapage or catching up. The election of 14 November 1962 was at once a referendum on the nationalization of electricity and an attempt to broaden the Liberal government’s base. The Liberals were returned to power and benefited from strong economic growth, which provided jobs for new workers entering the job market. Between 1961 and 1966, 74,000 new jobs were created each year, and unemployment fell from 9.2 percent to 4.7 percent. A steadily increasing proportion of this workforce was employed in service industries (finance, transportation, trade, teaching, construction, professional jobs, and the civil service). In 1941 this sector constituted 40 percent of the workforce; in 1966 it was 60 percent.

Some economists saw this as a happy sign that Quebec society had entered the post-industrial age, but others worried about the stagnation in manufacturing and the decline in primary industries such as agriculture and forestry. During this time, the ambitious projects of Montreal Mayor Jean Drapeau – Place des Arts, new expressways, the metro subway line, Expo 67 – stimulated the construction industry and created sizable economic spin-offs. With almost 40 percent of Quebec’s population, Montreal had more than 50 percent of the province’s economic activity.

Skilfully taking advantage of the ideological consensus in its favour within universities, unions, the civil service, and the media, the Liberal government continued its modernizing thrust. It revised the labour code, the electoral map, and the municipal system. It established a ministry of education, a universal pension plan, the Caisse de Dépôt et de Placement, the Régie de l’Assurance-Récolte, and the Société Québécoise d’Exploitation Minière. A spirit of reform reigned throughout the province. Experts spoke of “rational space development,” planning and regional development, socio-economic management and organization of the territory, and “rational agriculture.”

Senior civil servants and academics conceived and implemented plans for regional development, the best known of which was the Bureau d’Aménagement de l’Est du Québec (BAEQ), a kind of social-science laboratory whose purpose was to enable eastern Quebec to catch up with the rest of the province. At its height in 1965, no fewer than sixty-five researchers and twenty community organizers, most of them young university graduates, were involved in the project. BAEQ submitted its ten-volume plan in 1966, although it was not until 1968 that the government began to implement its recommendations. After an initial period of euphoria, however, the people concerned quickly became disillusioned when they realized that locally favoured projects such as reorganizing the road network had been dropped, while the most significant projects being implemented involved shutting down a dozen towns and relocating their residents. Disappointment soon gave way to anger. Eastern Quebec would not catch up. The plan had failed.

In fact the Quiet Revolution, as the Liberals’ modernization program was called, had undermined the foundations of local administrations servicing small communities. The Church was particularly affected, since Quebec society was putting the finishing touches on its process of secularization and declericalization. Parishes were fast losing their status as the primary cultural reference point for communities, especially in urban and suburban areas. Unions and cooperatives also finally put an end to their religious connections. Vocations were in decline. Ordinations in Quebec fell from approximately 2,000 in 1947 to 80 in 1970. Religious communities relinquished their hold on educational institutions, and clerics and religious returned to lay life by the hundreds. Those who stayed no longer wore their religious habits and their average age increased. Parish associations and devotional groups languished.

The Second Vatican Council, which met from 1962 to 1965, brought about widespread liturgical reform. Latin and old hymns were dropped from the Mass, which was now celebrated towards rather than away from the congregation. There were concelebrations, Saturday evening Masses, and increasing participation by the “faithful,” a term that replaced the traditional “parishioners.” The homily supplanted the sermon and put new emphasis on the Word of God. Pastoral work was renewed. The notions of sin and hell were downplayed as the clergy placed greater stress on personal responsibility, opening the way for a new freedom in behaviour. Thomism was ousted from the teaching of philosophy, and theological study was renewed.

Also in the wake of the Vatican Council, new parish and diocesan structures were set in place, again oriented towards greater lay participation, with a pastoral council, a parish council, and a social-communications office. Ecumenical efforts were growing. Priests in some dioceses – much to the displeasure of their older colleagues and lay leaders – chose to move outside parish structures and live their calling among the poor, participating fully in the great social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. All these changes were reflected in religious architecture, with the sumptuousness and extravagance of earlier times giving way to greater simplicity and sobriety.

In this increasingly pluralist society, religious practice declined, and it was only through great effort that many parishes and religious institutions, especially in urban areas, avoided financial ruin. A gradual acceptance of non-belief and religious indifference developed among the people. Defying the teachings of the Church, large numbers of women took the birth-control pill. The number of civil marriages increased, as did the divorce rate. To a lesser degree, and at a pace that varied from region to region, these changes also took place among francophone minorities outside Quebec. Despite its overall contraction, however, the Church still won some important battles. When the Quebec Ministry of Education was established in 1964, the Church succeeded in guaranteeing the public school boards’ denominational character at both the elementary and secondary levels.

Trade unions became a major force in Quebec society. With public-service employees being granted the right to strike in 1964–65, union membership increased significantly. During union accreditation campaigns workers tended to favour the CNTU. The QFL suffered because of its former alliance with Duplessis and its affiliation with a Canada-wide central, although it gained strength again after Louis Laberge became president in 1965.

Opposition to the Liberal government and its philosophy grew between 1962 and 1966. The public debt increased, taxpayers complained, and farmers and workers did not see their concerns reflected in the costly and bureaucratic Liberal government, which seemed to have undermined the old foundations of social cohesion. Farmers’ lives were completely transformed and sometimes impoverished by the specialization of agriculture. Workers saw their wages increase, but taxes and inflation ate away at their earnings. The new school system, hastily put in place, did not work very well. In the election of 5 June 1966, the Union Nationale won fifty-five seats with 41 percent of the vote, enough to defeat the Liberals who won fifty-one seats and 47 percent of the vote.

But the socio-cultural transformation of French Canada was too far advanced for the Union Nationale to reverse it; if anything, it intensified after 1966. In Quebec, French Canadians became Québécois, a shift that matched their new sense of identity and new collective goals. The Québécois identity revolved around the preservation of the French language. In a period of secularization, urbanization, and mass communication, which encouraged increasing contact with North American society as a whole, language remained the only traditional reference point – and this reference point was solidified through the powerful medium of television. The Québécois people were North Americans who spoke French and whose language defined their individuality.

In a process begun by the nationalists of the 1920s, their new identity was also based on shrinking national borders. The physical territory occupied by the province of Quebec would henceforth become one with the imagined territory of the nation, so that “nous les Québécois” essentially implied the exclusion of francophones living outside Quebec, who were now seen to belong to another land, a foreign state, be it Canadian or American. To respond to the needs of this “Other,” Quebec founded a Service du Canada Français Outre-Frontières in 1961 within its new cultural affairs ministry. In the words of Premier Jean Lesage, Quebec saw itself as “the political expression of French Canada.”

The advent of this new Québécois identity was closely linked to arguments that had been circulating among the North American francophone intelligentsia for half a century. As early as the 1920s, the great school and conscription crises had very nearly convinced some Quebec nationalist leaders that cultural duality was impossible. Nationalist circles were beginning to understand the extremely difficult, if not illusory, nature of trying to ensure the cultural survival of minorities who were subject to the will of the majority. Did it not make more sense to gather the fold within Quebec’s territory, the only place where French Canadians could fully enjoy their religious and language rights?

The shift in nationalist arguments and public opinion in Quebec about diaspora French Canadians was not abrupt, of course. Quebec francophones continued to feel sympathy for French Canadians in Ontario, who in the 1920s were still fighting to overturn Regulation 17. Nationalist journalists continued to regale their readers with the educational misfortunes of Franco-Ontarians and, in April 1923, an impressive delegation from Quebec attended a big conference of the ACFEO in Ottawa. That same autumn, the name of Jeanne Lajoie, a Pembroke teacher fired by the school council for championing French instruction, made the rounds in Quebec. The Association Canadienne-Française de la Jeunesse Catholique successfully launched a new drive for the ACFEO. In 1924 Senator Belcourt, the organization’s president, was honoured by Action Française in Montreal, which awarded him its “Grand Prix.” Lionel Groulx used the occasion to describe the Franco-Ontarian minority’s fight as being a struggle in support of Quebec as well.

The network of French-Canadian cultural institutions remained a rallying point for members of the francophone elite in Quebec and elsewhere in North America. Notable among these institutions was the Ordre de Jacques-Cartier (OJC), a secret organization devoted to defending the interests of French Canadians working in the civil service. Although founded in Ontario and dominated by Ottawa francophones, most of its members came from Quebec after 1930. Three Union Nationale premiers, Antonio Barrette, Daniel Johnson, and Jean-Jacques Bertrand, were members, as were some influential Quebec cabinet ministers such as Pierre Laporte. In 1931 the Union Catholique des Cultivateurs Franco-Ontariens, founded two years earlier, became affiliated with the Quebec UCC. And, starting in 1945, the Clubs Richelieu offered a new meeting place for francophone businessmen and professionals in Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and New England.

But the most significant meeting place for the francophone elites of North America was the Conseil de la Vie Française en Amérique (CVFA), founded during the second conference on the French language in America at Laval University in 1937. Within the CVFA – initially called the Comité Permanent des Congrès de la Langue Française en Amérique – these traditional guardians of language and style discussed and developed common projects. The CVFA devoted itself to helping minorities in both the United States and Canada. The organization gave francophone communities funds for their schools and grants to send their young students to study in Quebec. It also instituted what it called liaison française trips, sending Quebec delegations beyond Quebec’s borders to study the situation of diaspora communities.

The CVFA appealed to the federal government on numerous occasions to ensure bilingual services in the civil service. Finally, it took on the role of diversifying and extending the network of French-Canadian cultural institutions, so that several new specialized organizations were founded, such as the Union des Mutuelles-Vie Française d’Amérique, the Société Canadienne d’Établissement Rural, the Association Canadienne des Éducateurs de Langue Française (ACELF), the Association des Commissaires d’École Catholiques de Langue Française du Canada, and the Conseil Canadien des Associations d’Éducation de Langue Française.

But this list is somewhat misleading. Despite its dynamism, the network of French-Canadian institutions was elitist and often cut off from the communities for which it claimed to speak. Differing interests and points of view within the associations themselves also became more pronounced over the years. In 1933 the Franco-Ontarian UCC threatened to split off from the Quebec UCC because the magazine La Terre de chez nous (Montreal, 1929–) did not give enough space to the rural Ontario experience, among other reasons. Some of Quebec’s Clubs Richelieu were reluctant to accept the idea of being under Franco-Ontarian tutelage. Similarly, a protest against the OJC’s Ottawa leadership led to the demise of the organization in 1965. Women’s groups on the two sides of the Quebec-Ontario border also experienced these differences, as can be seen in the case of the Fédération des Femmes Canadiennes-Françaises, an organization founded in Ottawa during World War I. Drawing on the recommendations of Cardinal Louis-Nazaire Bégin, archbishop of Quebec, the Hull section of the federation tabled a motion against women’s suffrage in 1922. However, not only did members from Ontario and other provinces already have the right to vote at the time, but the federation was also involved in a campaign to have women made eligible to sit in the Senate. As a result it would not support the resolution, and soon afterward the Hull section withdrew from the federation.

The failures and splits within this institutional network reflected a fundamental social reality: after World War I, Quebec’s lower classes increasingly let go of their ties with French Canadians beyond the province’s borders. In the 1920s emigration to New England picked up again after two decades of gradual decline, but it stopped almost entirely with the Depression. The population drain had come to an end. After 1945 the sunny states of California and Florida drew some Québécois, but this movement never took on the scope of earlier emigration movements. On the other hand, the volume of Quebec francophone emigration to other Canadian provinces remained steady. In 1971 there were 144,160 French-speaking Québécois living elsewhere in Canada, almost unchanged from the 1921 figure of 145,100. Three-quarters of these francophones lived in Ontario. The prairie provinces and, after World War II, British Columbia – Canada’s own California – drew the rest.

Even a farming family living in relative comfort in the Lac Saint-Jean area might make its way to a community in northern Saskatchewan under the auspices of the Société Canadienne d’Établissement Rural, in an attempt to strengthen the community’s French Catholic character. In very rare cases, this “migration for cultural survival” even helped found new communities, such as Saint-Isidore in the Peace River region of Alberta in the 1950s. And there were always temporary migrants – trappers or prospectors – who travelled through the Northwest Territories and Yukon.

These population movements were proportionally smaller, however, than those of the previous half-century. While the number of French-speaking Québécois living elsewhere in Canada equalled 8 percent of Quebec’s francophone population in 1921, this proportion fell to 3 percent in 1971. Emigration to the United States was also virtually non-existent at this time, so that geographical mobility among francophone Québécois now occurred primarily within the province and Québécois had fewer ties beyond provincial borders. Family ties were now only with second-generation emigrants – first and second cousins whom one rarely saw. As a result, the fate of francophones outside Quebec was of less concern to Québécois. It appears that many people came to think like Georges-Élie Amyot, Quebec City’s most prominent industrialist during the 1920s, who argued that French Canadians wishing to settle in Ontario should not expect to live in French or to create “little Frances.”

If Québécois no longer saw their experience reflected in the lives of diaspora French Canadians, it was because both groups had changed. Like their French ancestors who had ventured to New France, those who would eventually be called francophones hors Québec had altered their French-Canadian cultural baggage and had developed new identities. As early as the late nineteenth century, a few Ontario francophones had begun to speak of Canadiens français d’Ontario as a group distinct from francophones in other provinces. In Saskatchewan, at the founding conference of a provincial association in 1912, participants were particularly concerned with choosing a name that would rally the greatest number and result in the least exclusion. They opted for the term Franco-Canadien rather than Canadien français. Forty years later, during the third conference on the French language in Canada, Louis-Philippe Mousseau told the Quebec delegates at length about the French Canadians of Alberta, whom he called Franco-Albertains. From the turn of the century on, the school conflicts, which historian Marcel Martel calls the founding myths of francophone minorities outside Quebec, helped these minorities become more aware of their differences from their Quebec cousins. While Québécois enjoyed a degree of cultural security, francophone minorities elsewhere had to fight to preserve their institutions and especially to gain access to schools in their own language. As in Quebec, the Catholic Church, which had once controlled the major institutions throughout the French-Canadian archipelago, increasingly lost its supremacy as schools, hospitals, and social institutions were taken over by the welfare state.

In the United States, socio-cultural estrangement from Quebec occurred even more rapidly. Francophones in the midwest were in many cases completely assimilated by 1918. And French Canadians in New England were in the process of becoming “Franco-Americans,” a term that highlighted their French roots and new American nationality but hid their Canadian origins. Unlike their Canadian cousins, Franco-Americans enthusiastically supported military conscription in the United States in 1917 and signed up in great numbers. Naturally, cultural assimilation and the shaping of a new identity did not happen overnight, especially since many New England towns were injected with new French-Canadian blood in the 1920s. Twenty years later, 82 percent of Franco-Americans still spoke French and, in towns such as Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and Lewiston, Maine, an uninformed visitor might easily conclude that French-Canadian culture had been well maintained.

Multiple identities emerged outside Quebec as a result of differing local environments, but urbanization and, to varying degrees, cultural assimilation prevailed throughout. The Depression that began in 1929 marked a turning point in the history of French Canadians outside Quebec. Most important, the communities essentially stopped receiving new immigrants from Quebec. Why should people leave Quebec when the situation was the same elsewhere? Priests and religious were virtually the only ones to emigrate in large numbers. There was internal migration, however, caused by the disappearance of traditional sources of subsistence, which occurred to varying degrees in different places. In western Canada the crumbling of the market for grain combined with a decade of drought eroded the vitality of the communities. Without money or coal, some left the denuded prairies and made their way to the wooded lands of the north. Others, believing the drought would last indefinitely, decided to return east. The people of Willow Bunch, Saskatchewan, looked to Maillardville, British Columbia, where conditions proved little better. In many places, whole villages were deserted.

Guaranteed a clientele wherever they went, professionals found it easiest to move. Their dispersal diminished the already weakened ranks of the francophone intelligentsia of the west. Everywhere, material survival became an absolute priority and cultural identity was moved to the back burner. Families had enough difficulty simply feeding and clothing themselves. They could not afford the luxury of supporting theatre troupes, brass bands, literary societies, or newspapers. In many places, the network of cultural institutions crumbled or was seriously shaken. Lacking participants and funds, many cultural entities disappeared. Provincial associations experienced difficulty selling membership cards and had to cut back on the scope of their activities. Newspapers also lost a large number of their subscribers and accumulated sizable deficits. Several had to merge or shut down altogether.

After 1940 the recovery of the agricultural economy and the mechanization of farms had both a positive and a disastrous impact on French Canadians in the west. Plentiful wheat harvests enabled them to meet their needs and mechanization eased their lives. The growing cost of machinery, however, plunged many farmers into serious difficulty. They had to increase their acreage under cultivation or give up their farms.

Over the years, many farmers sold their farms to their neighbours and found work in urban areas, and this choice had serious consequences for cultural survival. When they had run their own businesses and been surrounded by neighbours who spoke the same language, French Canadians in western rural parishes were able to earn their living in French, practise their religion in French, and entertain themselves in French. In short, they could live their own culture. This was rarely true in the cities, where outside the home they lived and worked in English. The first generation of migrants to the towns succeeded in preserving the essentials of their culture. The children of these homes, however, were more often than not educated in English and did not feel any great attachment to the language and culture of their parents, which they often associated with the status of second-class citizens. They married Canadians of other cultures and raised their own children in English. As the Fédération des Francophones Hors-Québec noted thirty years later, “The surrounding culture is a North American commodity that is necessarily anglophone.”

The Franco-Manitoban minority, on the other hand, suffered less from the ravages of assimilation owing to the old francophone centre of Saint-Boniface, which offered French-Canadian cultural institutions and services that somewhat attenuated the repercussions of urbanization. No comparable centre existed in Alberta or Saskatchewan. In 1971 the rate of assimilation – the gap between the number of people of French origin and the number whose mother tongue was French – was 50.9 percent in Alberta and 43.8 percent in Saskatchewan, while it was only 30 percent in Manitoba.

Assimilationist pressures were also felt in British Columbia, where wartime economic recovery and the rush to the suburbs had the effect of drowning Maillardville in an anglophone environment. The mechanization of the Fraser factory and the increasing role of service industries in the British Columbia economy forced third-generation francophones to leave for Vancouver, which resulted in cultural assimilation just as migration to urban areas did in the prairie provinces. In Yukon and the Northwest Territories, the decline in the fur trade had a negative impact on French-Canadian culture, now made to feel even more inferior and marginalized than before. Even in the distant Ozarks of Missouri, the transition to more modern techniques of mining signalled the end of French as a language of work and tool of socialization. Old traditions like the Guignolées – festive collections on behalf of the poor on New Year’s Eve – increasingly became relics of the past.

In Ontario, the rate of urbanization among francophones increased from a little less than 50 percent in 1911 to almost 70 percent in 1971. In some rural regions, especially Prescott and Russell counties, economic marginalization became the norm. In 1971 only 3 percent of Ontario francophones remained in agriculture. On the other hand, there was an influx of people to regional centres such as Ottawa and Sudbury, and Toronto drew francophone migrants from Quebec, the west, the Maritimes, and abroad, so that its francophone population reached 91,975 in 1971. But these urban migrants did not settle in the old French-Canadian neighbourhoods, which were now undergoing urban renewal. The former residents of these neighbourhoods settled in areas where the concentration of Franco-Ontarians was not as high.

In Ottawa, a number of families who were displaced in this way chose to settle on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, where housing was cheaper. Some of the poorest of these families stayed in Ontario and became dependent on social services offered mainly in English by government agencies that were insensitive to linguistic concerns. Moreover, as in Maillardville, French-Canadian communities located on the outskirts of cities underwent enormous change with the development of suburbia. With anglophones now settling in these suburbs, the dynamic of relations between the two language groups was significantly altered. It was not until the early 1980s that administrative and political restructuring of cities began to take into account the specificities of francophone communities.

In the west, French Canadians’ political influence and representation within the clerical hierarchy declined. The 1942 conscription crisis also intensified hostilities towards them. Saskatchewan, under pressure from the Ku Klux Klan, abolished French instruction completely and banned religious habits and crucifixes in schools. The Alberta government replaced the multitude of small school districts with regional school districts in 1936, followed by Saskatchewan in 1944 and Manitoba in 1945. As a result, francophones lost all control of their parish schools, and French-speaking school commissioners, instead of being able to determine for themselves what language their teachers would use in the class, had to seek the support of anglophone colleagues on the regional school board. The quantity and quality of French instruction declined in many places.

Activists working for cultural survival fought on two fronts, lobbying governments and battling language assimilation. On the first front, they sometimes succeeded in mitigating the disastrous impact of provincial legislation. In Ontario, they won a great victory when the government finally abandoned Regulation 17 in 1927. Activists drew on two arguments: the notion of two founding peoples and the enviable status of the Anglo-Quebec minority. They persuaded school boards to accept the presence of programs prepared and run by francophone associations in schools attended by French-speaking students. In Maillardville, on the other hand, parents had to choose between their language and their faith, since the English-language public schools offered better French instruction. They lost their fight with the provincial legislature over the right to choose between supporting public schools and supporting Catholic schools with their taxes.

Activists had even less success in the battle against language assimilation. They tried to create francophone parishes in urban settings, found their own newspapers, and start up radio stations. None of these efforts, however, held back the assmiliationist tide – especially since many middle-class francophones wavered between their desire to live in French in a country they considered their own and their fear of antagonizing the anglophone majority. In 1960 in Timmins, the businessman Conrad Lavigne called on the population to stop pressuring the telephone company to offer services in French. According to Lavigne, the complaints undermined the compromises and accommodations that the majority and minority groups in northern Ontario had agreed on. There are many other examples of this kind of attitude among the diaspora French-Canadian middle classes. While acting as ethnic intermediaries served their socio-economic interests, it also marginalized them.

Besieged on all sides and witnessing the rapid disappearance of their culture, francophone activists harboured an instinctive distrust of the lower classes and, like Conrad Lavigne, were afraid – with some justification – of inciting the opposition of the anglophone majority. They chose to focus their energies on preserving their network of cultural institutions in virtual isolation. They could not count on provincial governments, which had demonstrated their animosity time and again and had eroded francophone community leadership in an attempt to rationalize their bureaucracies. The francophone leaders, on the other hand, became increasingly aware that French unilingualism was no longer feasible and bilingualism legislated at the federal level could be the only guarantee of survival. Their position, however, conflicted with the stance that had developed among French-speaking Québécois over the past half-century, and the split was clear during the Estates General of French Canada in 1967.