Further Reading

Historical writing about the descendants of the first French settlers in New France is like all intellectual work, a product of its time and reflects contemporary interests and concerns. In works written since 1960, lyrical patriotism has increasingly given way to scientific questioning, the study of structures, and theoretical perspectives. However, while a variety of terms are used, the underpinning of almost all of these works is the paradigm of identity – national or other – and the interpretive schemas that go with it.

The last syntheses that attempted to deal with all the heirs of New France as a distinct group on the North American continent appeared in the early part of the post-1960 period. With the all-embracing vision of the nationalist historian, Lionel Groulx seeks to tell the epic story of the French-Canadian people in his Histoire du Canada français depuis la découverte (Montreal/Paris, 1950–51; repr. 1960). In Mason Wade’s The French Canadians (New York, 1945; rev. ed. 1968), the emphasis is on the differences between French Canadians and other North Americans. Paul-Émile Gosselin’s La francophonie nord-américaine (Lévis, Que., 1973–74) is a ragged patchwork of facts and events with heavy clerical-nationalist overtones and cannot be considered a synthesis.

More recently, researchers have tended to set their sights on particular geo-political entities: the United States, Canada, Quebec, other Canadian provinces, even regions and localities. Thus, some syntheses that deal with the building of the Canadian nation discuss francophone Canadians among other groups but make no reference to Franco-Americans. Two synthetic works of national history are notable for their more sustained interest in the French fact in Canada: Origins and Destinies, by R. Douglas Francis et al. (Toronto, 1996), and Histoire du Canada: espace et différences, by Jean-François Cardin, Claude Couture, and Gratien Allaire (Sainte-Foy, Que., 1996).

After the 1960s historical writing followed two paths. One of these reflects the territorial divisions among groups of descendants of the French settlers. Quebec, having established its own nation-state, became a necessary reference point, and historians seeking to understand the nature of this reference point have made it a particular object of study. Historians taking the other path see the study of history as leading the way to an understanding of the structures and development of society. In this spirit, summed up in Michel Brunet’s description of history as the “science of the past,” historical writing deals in the categories of scientific inquiry, explanatory schemas, and methodological approaches.

The Montreal school of historians has stood at the crossroads of these two paths, advocating a scientific conception of history. For Maurice Séguin, Michel Brunet, and, to a lesser extent, Guy Frégault, to approach history scientifically meant to deduce laws of causality, and from their reading of the Quebec case they identified standards that govern relations between conquerors and conquered, between majorities and minorities. Séguin’s theoretical studies, outlined in the synthesis Une histoire du Québec (Montreal, 1995), have been at the heart of this research program. Another approach to the scientific study of history is Marxist historiography, spearheaded in Canada by Stanley Bréhaut Ryerson. His work is a scientific draft that pinpoints some of the factors in the evolution of Canada and Quebec. For historians at Laval University in Quebec City, the main criterion for the scientific study of history is a rigorous method of investigation. A leading figure in this school is Jean Hamelin, one of Quebec’s foremost scientific historians. Histoire du Québec (Paris/Saint-Hyacinthe, 1976), edited by Hamelin, is an inquiry into the fashioning of homo quebecensis.

The modernization of Quebec society has involved both continuities and ruptures. Reflection on this process has produced some essential syntheses. The two volumes by Paul-André Linteau and his colleagues, covering the period since Confederation, are major contributions to historical writing: Quebec: A History 1867– 1929, trans. Robert Chodos (Toronto, 1983), and Quebec since 1930, tr. Robert Chodos and Ellen Garmaise (Toronto, 1991). The renewal of historical subjects and methods also extends to regional history. Noteworthy in this regard is the Régions du Québec series, comprising Histoire de la Gaspésie, Histoire des Laurentides, Histoire du Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean, Histoire du Bas-Saint-Laurent, Histoire de la Côte-du-Sud, Histoire de l’Outaouais, Histoire de l’Abitibi-Témiscamingue, Histoire de Lévis-Lotbinière, and Histoire de la Côte Nord (Quebec City, 1981–96).

Historical research also reflects redefinitions that have arisen within the francophone groups of the diaspora as a result of the emergence of a Québécois identity. The diversity of French-Canadian communities in North America and the many problems they face emerge in a series of studies edited by Raymond Breton and Pierre Savard, The Quebec and Acadian Diaspora in North America (Toronto, 1982).

During the 1970s the territorial categorizations within the French-Canadian diaspora were refined. These finer distinctions, along with the development of multiculturalism and the emergence of western Canadian regionalism, are evident in the French-Canadian communities of the prairies and British Columbia. Cornelius Jaenen focuses on the early settlements in his study “French Roots in the Prairies,” in Jean Leonard Elliott, ed., Two Nations, Many Cultures (Scarborough, Ont., 1979). Lionel Dorge lays bare aspects of FrancoManitoban memory in Le Manitoba, reflets d’un passé (Saint-Boniface, Man., 1976). A good historical synthesis about the Fransaskois has appeared; in Histoire des Franco-Canadiens de la Saskatchewan (Regina, Sask., 1986), Richard Lapointe uses existing documentation with flair and studies the community as a whole, not just the local elites. Donald B. Smith’s “History of French-speaking Albertans” in Howard and Tamara Palmer, eds., Peoples of Alberta (Saskatoon, 1985), is more synthetic in nature. In Le fait français en Colombie-britannique (Vancouver, 1979), Glen Cowley devotes a few pages to the history of the Franco-Columbian community. Only an impressionistic overview has been written about the Franco-Ténois: Denis Perrault and Huguette Léger’s Leroux, Beaulieu et les autres ... (Yellowknife, 1989) is very superficial.

In the small French-speaking islands of northern, eastern, and southern Ontario, the 1980s were a time of reflection on the nature of the Franco-Ontarian community. The development of a Québécois identity had a particularly strong impact on Franco-Ontarians. Migration within the province and cultural and ethnic effervescence also led to new questions about Franco-Ontarian specificity. Robert Choquette deals with the Franco-Ontarian institutional network in his textbook L’Ontario français (Montreal, 1980). In studying the social basis of Franco-Ontarian identity, Roger Bernard emphasizes in De Québécois à Ontarois (Hearst, Ont., 1996) the community’s “charter group” status. The collection Les Franco-Ontariens, edited by Cornelius Jaenen (Ottawa, 1993), sees the Franco-Ontarians as a profoundly complex society. The multidisciplinary collection La francophonie ontarienne, edited by Jacques Cotnam, Yves Frenette, and Agnès Whitfield (Ottawa, 1995), surveys the last twenty years of scholarly research on French-speaking Ontario.

According to the economist Albert Faucher, emigration to the United States was “the major event in French-Canadian history in the nineteenth century.” Syntheses written in the late 1980s reflect the vitality of historical research in this area. Based on exhaustive documentation, Yves Roby’s Les Franco-Américains de la Nouvelle-Angleterre, 1776–1930 (Sillery, Que., 1990) belongs to the category of the new social history. In Les Franco-Américains 1860–1980 (Paris, 1989), François Weil integrates social and economic history with cultural history, dealing with both the Franco-Americans’ experience as immigrants in an industrial environment and the institutional network that led their struggles for cultural survival.

The work of geographers bears witness to the importance of space as the first point of reference for identity – a place that people take for their own and that forms the environment for their relationships. Raoul Blanchard pioneered the study of the human geography of French Canada, and his years of fieldwork are encapsulated in the two volumes of his Le Canada français (Paris, 1960– 64). The Atlas historique du Québec, vol.1: Morphologies de base, and vol.2: Population et territoire, edited by Serge Courville, Normand Séguin, and Jean-Claude Robert (Sainte-Foy, Que., 1995–96), integrates recent research on human relationships in a renewed geographical perspective. In the absence of a synthesis on migration, readers interested in the subject should consult the collections edited by Yves Landry et al., Les chemins de la migration en Belgique et au Québec, XVIIe–XXe siècles (Louvain-la-Neuve/Beauport, 1995), 28547.

Since the 1970s, geographers have seen the francophone communities of North America as constituting a series of islands in an archipelago. This is the perspective adopted in French America: Mobility, Identity, and Minority Experience across the Continent, edited by Dean R. Louder and Eric Waddell and translated by Franklin Philip (Baton Rouge, La., 1993). Two articles by the same authors are useful supplements to this landmark work: “Picking up the Pieces of a Shattered Dream: Quebec and French America,” Journal of Cultural Geography, vol.4, no.1 (1983), 44–56, and “Le défi de la francophonie nord-américaine,” Quebec Studies, no.7 (1988), 28–47.

Work in the geography of language plays an important role in this area. Some noteworthy studies include: Anne Gilbert, “L’Ontario français comme région: un regard non assimilationniste sur une minorité, son espace et ses réseaux,” Cahiers de géographie du Québec, vol.35, no.96 (1991), 501–12; Université Laval, Groupe de Recherches en Géo-linguistique, Atlas de la francophonie (Quebec City, 1989); Forest C. Nickerson and Armand Bédard, Atlas des francophones de l’Ouest (Winnipeg, 1979); Gilles Sénécal, ed., Territoires et minorités (Montreal, 1989); Jules Tessier, ed., Un trait d’union entre les espaces francophones (Quebec City, 1988); and Gaétan Vallières and Marcien Villemure, Atlas de l’Ontario français (Montreal, 1982). The following studies focus on spacial representation and the mental arrangement of territory: Luc Bureau, Entre l’Éden et l’Utopie (Montreal, 1984); David H. Kaplan, “Maîtres chez nous: The Evolution of French Canadian Spatial Identity,” American Review of Canadian Studies, vol.19, no.4 (1989), 407–28; and André Langlois, “L’espace comme élément stratégique: l’importance de la répartition des francophones de l’Ontario,” Études canadiennes, vol.30 (1991).

Since 1960, French-Canadian women have been the subject of a copious scholarly literature. The latest research is included in Collectif Clio’s valuable synthesis, L’histoire des femmes au Québec depuis quatre siècles (Montreal, 1992). This work is complemented by a collection edited by Nadia Fahmy-Eid and Micheline Dumont, Maîtresses de maison, maîtresses d’école (Montreal, 1983).

Colonial history begins with the arrival of French immigrants, but they were not the first people on this territory. They encountered the Other. In The Myth of the Savage (Edmonton, 1985), Olive P. Dickason explores the mental universe of the meeting between Europeans and aboriginals. Art historian François-Marc Gagnon has some penetrating observations on the same subject in Ces hommes dits sauvages (Montreal, 1984).

With the conquest in 1760, the settlers of New France encountered a new set of Others. Jean Bouthillette’s essay Le Canadien français et son double (Montreal, 1972), rooted in the reflection that surrounded the Quiet Revolution and inspired by the teaching of Maurice Séguin, takes a dark view of the alienating encounter with the English. Each side in this encounter occupies its own social position, especially outside Quebec, as A.A. Hunter shows in his article “A Comparative Analysis of Anglophone-Francophone Occupational Prestige Structures in Canada,” Canadian Journal of Sociology, vol.2 (1977), 179–93. For francophones this position is a minority one, and this circumstance has significant consequences for francophone communities, as the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (Laurendeau-Dunton Commission) demonstrated in its Report (Ottawa, 1967–70). Peter S. Li and Wilfrid Denis look at a particular example of the consequences of minority status in “Minority Enclave and Majority Language: The Case of a French Town in Western Canada,” Canadian Ethnic Studies, vol.15, no.1 (1983), 18–32. The respective positions often involve antagonism, as Robert Choquette, looking at the Ontario case, shows in his Language and Religion (Ottawa, 1975).

After the conquest, the Other did not come from the British Isles alone. Several studies look at relations between Quebec and France, notably Claude Galarneau, La France devant l’opinion canadienne (Paris/Quebec City, 1970), and Luc Roussel, “Les relations culturelles entre la France et le Québec” (Ph.D. thesis, Laval University, 1983). Cultural relations between Quebec and the United States are analysed in a collection edited by Claude Savary, Les rapports culturels entre le Québec et les États-Unis (Quebec City, 1984). Historians and other social scientists study the ways in which the American idea is constituted in Quebec culture in a collection edited by Gérard Bouchard and Yvan Lamonde, Québécois et Américains (Montreal, 1995).

With World War II, new Others appeared, bearing witness to the fragmentation of the French-Canadian identity into several identities. Richard Montour looks at the example of Quebec in “De Canadien français à Québécois: la transformation d’un référent national” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Montreal, 1989). Sometimes people seek to integrate the Other. Martin Pâquet studies this ideal in Vers un ministère québécois de l’immigration, 1945–1968 (Ottawa, 1997). The case of relations between Franco-Ontarians and Québécois is examined in Denis Gratton, “Production de la différence: le cas ontarois” (Ph.D. thesis, Laval University, 1990), and especially in Marcel Martel, Le deuil d’une nation imaginée (Ottawa, 1997).

There are numerous studies of birth, such as Hélène Laforce’s Histoire de la sage-femme dans la région de Québec (Quebec City, 1985). The delicate balance throughout people’s lives between sickness and health is analysed in Jacques Dufresne et al., Traité d’anthropologie médicale (Quebec City/Lyon, 1985). André Cellard describes the social representation and treatment of various behaviours that are considered pathological in his study Histoire de la folie au Québec de 1600 à 1850 (Montreal, 1991). The evolution of death in a Christian context from the turn of the nineteenth century to the present is traced in a major work by Serge Gagnon, Mourir d’hier à aujourd’hui (Sainte-Foy, Que., 1987).

Demographic studies present a collective bill of health for French-speaking communities. For the historical context, the works of Hubert Charbonneau and his associates, such as the excellent Naissance d’une population (Montreal, 1987), cannot be ignored. Yolande Lavoie analyses migration to the United States in her L’émigration des Québécois aux États-Unis de 1840 à 1930 (Quebec City, 1979), while Roger Bernard studies migration to northwestern Ontario in Le travail et l’espoir (Hearst, Ont., 1991). An overall picture of the population of Quebec is presented in a study sponsored by the government of Quebec, Démographie québécoise (Quebec City, 1983).

Assimilation is a major theme of demographic studies of communities outside Quebec, such as Richard Arès, Les minorités franco-canadiennes (Ottawa, 1975), and Roger Bernard, Le choc des nombres (Ottawa, 1990). Louise M. Dallaire and Réjean Lachapelle present a province-by-province portrait of minority-language communities in their series Profils démolinguistiques des communautés minoritaires de langue officielle (Ottawa, 1990).

Among human beings, in the territories where they live, a variety of forms of solidarity develop and become reference points for their identity. One of these, the family, begins at birth and is undoubtedly the most significant for a person’s self-definition. In recent research into the family, sociologists and historians no longer simply uphold the traditional model. Philippe Garigue’s La vie familiale des Canadiens français (Montreal, 1970) is a classic study. The collection Famille, économie et société rurale en contexte d’urbanisation, edited by Gérard Bouchard and Joseph Goy (Chicoutimi, Que., 1990), takes a historical and comparative perspective. Bettina Bradbury’s Working Families (Toronto, 1993) is a significant work that looks at the ways in which the industrial revolution affected the family unit. Sylvie Beaudreau and Yves Frenette develop some of these themes in a long-term perspective in “Les stratégies familiales des francophones de la Nouvelle-Angleterre: perspective diachronique,” Sociologie et sociétés, vol.6, no.1 (1994), 167–78. In Ménagères au temps de la Crise (Montreal, 1993), Denyse Baillargeon looks at the functioning of the family economy and the role of women’s work within the family. Finally, in a historical work influenced by Philippe Ariès, Denise Lemieux examines childhood in New France inLes petits innocents (Quebec City, 1985).

Solidarity is formed within civil society as well, notably in the context of economic activity. Since the early 1960s researchers have looked at the preconditions and the process of socio-economic modernization among the French settlers and their descendants. Noteworthy contributions have been made by Louise Dechêne in Habitants et marchands de Montréal au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1974) and Le partage des subsistances (Montreal, 1994), and by Jean Hamelin in Économie et société en Nouvelle-France (Quebec City, 1960) and Histoire économique du Québec, 1851–1896 (Montreal, 1971), the latter written in collaboration with Yves Roby.

There has been a debate about the agricultural crisis in Lower Canada and its implications for people’s attitudes, pitting Fernand Ouellet on one side against Jean-Pierre Wallot and Gilles Paquet on the other. In Economic and Social History of Quebec, 1760–1850 (Toronto, 1980) and Le Bas-Canada (Ottawa, 1976) Ouellet concludes that attitudes were still stuck in the ancien régime. In Un Québec qui bougeait (Montreal, 1973) and in a brief synthesis written in collaboration with Paquet, Lower Canada at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century (Ottawa, 1988), Wallot presents a much more entrepreneurial view of the French-Canadian farmer. André Raynauld takes a close look at the take-off of the Quebec economy in the twentieth century in Croissance et structure économique de la province de Québec (Quebec City, 1961). Finally, two recent synthetic works provide an overall picture with historical perspective. In Structure and Change (Agincourt, 1984), the economist Robert Armstrong emphasizes both institutional change and economic growth. Brian Young and John A. Dickinson focus on socio-economic relations in A Short History of Quebec: A Socio-economic Perspective (Toronto, 1988).

There has been an abundance of studies on agriculture and rural Quebec. Among the more noteworthy are Joseph Goy and Jean-Pierre Wallot, eds., Évolution et éclatement du monde rural (Montreal, 1986); Michel Morisset, L’agriculture familiale au Québec (Paris, 1987); and Maurice Séguin’s famous thesis, La nation “canadienne” et l’agriculture (Trois-Rivières, Que., 1970), originally defended in 1947. René Hardy and Normand Séguin focus on the role of the forest in the Saint-Maurice valley in Forêt et société en Mauricie (Montreal/Ottawa, 1984).

Work and life in the city have constituted another major subject of research. The development and social transformation that accompany urbanization are the focus of Paul-André Linteau’s Histoire de la ville de Montréal depuis la Confédération (Montreal, 1992) and of the study by John Hare et al., Histoire de la ville de Québec, 1608–1871 (Montreal, 1987). This subject has been studied in the context of French Canadians outside Quebec as well, as in Yves Frenette, “La genèse d’une communauté canadienne-française en Nouvelle-Angleterre: Lewiston, Maine, 1800–1880” (Ph.D. thesis, Laval University, 1988).

Since the 1960s there has been a boom in studies of the work world, based on the taxonomy of social classes. The collection Le mouvement ouvrier au Québec (Montreal, 1980), edited by Fernand Harvey, presents a thematic history of the Quebec labour movement since the mid-nineteenth century. The standard reference for labour history is Jacques Rouillard’s Histoire du syndicalisme québécois (Montreal, 1989). Arnaud Sales analyses the characteristics of the capitalist class in La bourgeoisie industrielle au Québec (Montreal, 1979).

Not all forms of community solidarity are based on market activities. The collection De la sociabilité, edited by Roger Levasseur (Montreal, 1990), studies particularties and changes in links among individuals. The political scientist Vincent Lemieux highlights the role of forms of solidarity in his analysis of the social organization of the Île d’Orléans, Parenté et politique (Quebec City, 1971). Political parties, analysed by Réjean Pelletier in Partis politiques et société québécoise (Montreal, 1989), not only are instruments of mobilization but also play an important role in socialization.

During the Quiet Revolution, the Quebec government became the engine of the province’s development. This change and its effects are astutely analysed in the collection Le Québec et la restructuration du Canada, edited by Louis Balthazar et al., (Sillery, Que., 1992). Jean Lafontant and his collaborators deal with the relationship between the government and minorities in l’État et les minorités (Saint-Boniface, Man., 1993). Finally, democracy provides the basis for the existence of a Quebec polity, in allowing its people to make decisions about the ways in which they wish to act collectively. This process is outlined in two reflections. In Raisons communes (Montreal, 1995), Fernand Dumont emphasizes the common goals that can underlie the vision of a democratic society. In his Plaidoyer pour le Québec (Montreal, 1995), Daniel Latouche outlines aspects of the particular logic of democracy in Quebec.

Religion forms another basis of solidarity, uniting human beings with one another and with something beyond themselves. Descendants of the French settlers have lived their faith primarily as Catholics. The multivolume Histoire du catholicisme québécois, published under the overall editorship of Nive Voisine, is a basic reference, presenting a subtle and complex picture of religious life in Quebec. The following titles have been published so far: Lucien Lemieux, Les XVIIIe et XIXe siècles: les années difficiles (Montreal, 1989); Philippe Sylvain and Nive Voisine, Réveil et consolidation (Montreal, 1991), dealing with the years 1840 to 1898; Jean Hamelin and Nicole Gagnon, Le XXe siècle, vol.1 (Montreal, 1984); and Jean Hamelin, Le XXe siècle, vol.2 (Montreal, 1984). Robert Choquette’s La foi, gardienne de la langue en Ontario (Montreal, 1987) is a serious analysis of the role of the Catholic Church in French Ontario. Robert Painchaud’s Un rêve français dans le peuplement de la Prairie (Saint-Boniface, Man., 1987) is an essential contribution to understanding the settlement and religious organization of western Canada.

Cultural fibres – systems of reference that compose an identity – make up the ties that bind communities together. In La construction d’une culture (Sainte-Foy, Que., 1993), Gérard Bouchard and his collaborators treat the development of culture in a very schematic and uneven manner. In Communities and Culture in French Canada (Toronto, 1973), Gerard L. Gold and Marc-Adélard Tremblay observe the communities and cultures of French Canada from an ethnological perspective. Three collections of conference papers deal with the relationship between cultural identity and the francophone community in the Americas. The first was edited by Émile Snyder and Albert Valdman (Quebec City, 1976) and the second by Alain Baudot et al., (Quebec City, 1980); both bear the title Identité culturelle et francophonie dans les Amériques. The third is Jocelyn Létourneau, La question identitaire au Canada francophone (Sainte-Foy, Que., 1994). The collection Identité et cultures nationales, edited by Simon Langlois (Sainte-Foy, Que., 1995), deals with the relationship between identity and culture. Modernity radically transforms cultural references. In L’avènement de la modernité culturelle au Québec, edited by Yvan Lamonde and Esther Trépanier (Quebec City, 1986), researchers examine the details of cultural modernization.

Through education, people are trained and a society’s ideals are transmitted. As a result, education plays a substantial role in the acquisition of identity, the development of culture, and the challenges facing a community. Although it is somewhat dated, the basic reference work for Quebec is Louis-Philippe Audet’s Histoire de l’éducation au Québec (Montreal, 1966). M’Hammed Mellouki and François Melançon focus on the work of teachers in Corps enseignant au Québec de 1845 à 1992 (Montreal, 1995).

The school question has been at the centre of the great debates on the survival of the French fact, as the collection Minorities, Schools and Politics by Ramsay Cook et al. (Toronto, 1969) demonstrates. Chad Gaffield shows in his essential work Language, Schooling and Cultural Conflict (Kingston, 1987) that the school question has also been a major factor in the birth of a Franco-Ontarian identity. Moreover, schools have made possible the creation and development of a distinct Franco-Ontarian community. David Welch’s “The Social Construction of Franco-Ontarian Interest Towards French Language Schooling, 19th Century to 1980’s” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 1988), throws light on this subject. Manitoba’s French schools crisis of the 1890s was a traumatic event that is embedded in the collective memory and identity of the province’s French community. A number of studies deal with its ramifications: Jacqueline Blay, L’article 23 (Saint-Boniface, Man., 1987); Lowell Clark, ed., The Manitoba School Question (Mississauga, Ont., 1968); G. Ramsay Cook, “Church, Schools, and Politics in Manitoba, 1903–1912,” Canadian Historical Review, vol.39, no.1 (1958), 1–23; and especially Paul Crunican, Priests and Politicians (Toronto, 1974).

Every community develops standards and a variety of strategies to perpetuate them. One area in which these standards operate is sexuality, as demonstrated by Serge Gagnon in the case of Lower Canada in Plaisir d’amour et crainte de Dieu (Sainte-Foy, Que., 1990) and by Gaston Desjardins in the case of post–World War II Quebec in L’amour en patience (Sainte-Foy, Que., 1995). Observers can also detect a community’s standards and imagination through the history of the codification of its laws, as do Murray Greenwood in Legacies of Fear: Laws and Politics in Quebec in the Era of the French Revolution (Toronto, 1993), Evelyn Kolish in Nationalismes et conflits de droits (La Salle, Que., 1994), and Brian Young in The Politics of Codification: The Lower Canadian Civil Code of 1866 (Montreal, 1994). Basic texts form the normative framework of political communities. Jacques-Yvan Morin and José Woerhling analyse the development of these texts in Les constitutions du Canada et du Québec du Régime français à nos jours (Montreal, 1994).

Ideology, arising out of definitions of the self, provides criteria of interpretation for the polity and for changes in it. Fernande Roy’s Histoire des idéologies au Québec aux XIXe et XXe siècles (Montreal, 1993) is a brilliant synthesis dealing with the development of ideological debates since the conquest, especially debates centred on the question of freedom. Numerous studies have focused on nationalism. Louis Balthazar takes a brilliant introspective look at it in Bilan du nationalisme au Québec (Montreal, 1986). Is Quebec Nationalism Just?, edited by Joseph H. Carens (Montreal, 1995), is a subtle and intelligent analysis of the question from an English-Canadian perspective. Fernand Dumont’s major work Genèse de la société québécoise (Montreal, 1993) presents a self-portrait of Quebec society as it willed and imagined itself under the direction of a defining elite.

For identity to have depth and richness, it needs to dig into the mine of memory and extract the lessons that experience provides over time. Jacques Mathieu and Jacques Lacoursière present a historical approach in Les mémoires québécoises (Quebec City, 1991). In L’avenir de la mémoire (Quebec City, 1995), Fernand Dumont looks at the future of memory in a culture that is changing radically and losing its references to the past.