Lecture 9: Quebec -- Survivance in a sea of "enemies"

Major themes

•      At first, the French in Quebec were colonizers and traders who manipulated the First Nations.
•         The French colony was usually under serious threat from someone.
•        After the British took Quebec, the French were still colonizers, but they were also colonized
•       Survival in the face of threat (survivance) became a main theme of culture and politics and remains so now.
•        As we have seen in the lecture on propaganda , the creation of “enemies” and “threats” is an extremely powerful tool that’s used to unite people who normally have serious differences.

Explorers like Jacques Cartier were more concerned with exploitation that colonization.

France’s North American project was about strengthening France, not about developing a new country. That doesn’t mean French leaders did not care about the colony. It’s just that the priorities of France and the investors in the fur trade came first. The Church, almost a state-within-a-state, wanted converts wherever they could be found.

France made territorial claims while ignoring the actual political rights of First Nations. First Nations became military “proxies” for European powers like France and Britain, Holland and even, briefly, Sweden (which had a colony in what is now New Jersey).

Whether deliberately or not, the Europeans manipulated the First Nations politically, military and economically until they became dependent.

The Iroquois were the only Eastern First nation to remain  independent and powerful. That is one reason they got a bad press.

The French had no immediate plans to “settle” the interior. Instead, they traded from the edge of the continent. It was very lucrative. They could exploit the labour of the interior First Nations and generate big profits.

The French were able to find a silver lining to being on the losing side of the war between the French and the Iroquois. Threat became a major them in Quebec politics and culture after the killing of the Jesuit priests and the attacks on French settlements.

Here are some of the threats that are “remembered” in Quebec history and culture:

·         The Jesuit Martyrs

·         Adam Dollard

·         Madeline de Vercheres (Quebec’s Joan of Arc)

·         The Lachine  Massacre

Through most of the French regime, the Iroquois were a serious threat. So were the British, who tries twice to capture Quebec City.

France was over-populated but France did not try to get rid of its population surplus by colonizing.

Nor did it use its colonies as a dumping ground for criminals, political troublemakers or religious minorities, the way Britain did.

In many ways, the settlement of the St Lawrence Valley was an effort to supply and protect the Fur Trade.

From 1756 to 1763, Britain and France fought a World War, called The Seven Years War (in the US, it’s often called the French and Indian War, and in North America it actually lasted nine years but that won’t be on the exam.)

During the Battle of Quebec, the French commander the Marquis de Montcalm was killed (as was the British commander, James Wolfe). Montcalm became part of Quebec’s pantheon of martyrs – a courageous, honest and honorable man who fought the good fight but succumbed to overwhelming odds.

After the Conquest, the British guaranteed many of the rights of the Quebecois and First Nations by enshrining them in the Royal Proclamation (1763) and Quebec Act (1775). This caused problem with the Thirteen British Colonies along the Atlantic Coast. Their complaints about the Quebec Act are listed in the Declaration of Independence:

When Americans offered to let Quebec join the Revolution, most Quebeckers said No(n)

Quebec missed out on the rise of liberalism in France, the French Revolution, and the two subsequent smaller anti-monarchist revolutions of the 1800s.  In many ways, especially regarding religion, pre-Revolutionary France survived in Quebec, bolstered by Catholic priests who arrived for over 100 years as refugees from anti-religious policies in France.

The colony was fairly prosperous, very rural, with a simple staples economy based on furs, then lumber, with agriculture. Rural Quebec was always held up by Church intellectuals and Quebecois writers as the ideal bedrock society.

The one serious rebellion, in 1837, did not attract mass support and was crushed. Its leaders were hanged, sent to penal colonies in Australia or banished.

Through Quebec’s history, Montreal has always held both repulsion and attraction. Montreal had wealth and power but it also was dominated by English-speakers, and, in the 1900s, also had many foreigners, with new groups arriving all the time: English, Irish, Jews, and now Vietnamese, Muslims, Africans and Haitians. Very few of these newcomers (except a few English and Irish) lived in the countryside. Most formed communities in Montreal.

Through the early 1900s, writers like Abbe Lionel Groulx stressed the threats faced by Quebec from the British and Americans,  and reached back to the Jesuit Martyrs, Dollard, Montcalm and de Vercheres as heroes who stood up against overwhelming odds, even when they knew they would be defeated.

By the 1950s, the old deal between the Church, the province’s government, business owners (mostly Anglophone) and Ottawa began to fall apart. New Marxist-Nationalists wanted religion out of public life. Independence advocates of all ideologies wanted a strong Quebec provincial government. At the same time, many people stopped going to Catholic churches because of its teachings on birth control.  

Ideas of national self-determination, which underlay the recreation of states like Poland after World War I, took hold in Quebec.  The province’s political and media leaders started a revolution.

Some, like the Front de Liberation du Quebec wanted to move that revolution along much faster by using violent revolutionary tactics developed in Cuba and South America. France played its own game, financing the independence movement. Charles de Gaulle’s “long live free Quebec” speech in Montreal caused an international incident in 1967.

Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (196801979; 1980-1984) thought Quebec independence a ridiculous and dangerous idea and used a kidnapping crisis as a reason to crush violent revolutionaries and their sympathizers. Despite Parti Quebecois leader Rene Levesque’s charisma and personal popularity, he lost the 1980 independence vote.

With “independence” a non-starter with a majority, the PQ has sought new “threats” and has floated the idea of a “values” charter. Will fighting phantom enemies save the PQ? Or will Quebec’s campaign spread across the country and undermine multiculturalism in the rest of Canada?

Further reading: Susan Mann, The Dream of Nation: A Social and Intellectual History of Quebec (1983)