Jean Lesage The Quiet Revolution

Poet, playwright, and librarian, Éva Circé-Côté was a prolific journalist writing for progressive newspapers under a number of pseudonyms. As a feminist and a freethinker who fought for equality and secularism, she offers a non-conformist perspective on Quebec society and politics in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Freethinker is translated from the 2011 Clio prize winner, Éva Circé-Côté, libre penseuse, 1871-1949.

In this study of the intellectual origins of Quebec's Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, Michael Behiels has provided the most comprehensive account to date of the two competing ideological movements which emerged after World War II to challenge the tenets of traditional French-Canadian nationalism. The neo-nationalists were a group of young intellectuals and journalists, centered upon Le Devoir and L'Action nationale in Montreal, who set out to reformulate Quebec nationalism in terms of a modern, secular, urban-industrial society which would be fully "master in its own house." An equally dedicated group of French Canadians of liberal or social democratic persuasion was based upon the periodical Cité libre -one of whose editors was Pierre Trudeau - and had links with organized labour. Citélibristes sought to remove what they considered to be the major obstacles to the creation of a modern francophone society: the all-pervasive influence of clericalism inherent in the Catholic church's control of education and the social services, and the persistence among Quebec's intelligentsia of an outmoded nationalism which advocated the preservation of a rural and elitist society and neglected the development of the individual and the pursuit of social equality. Behiels delineates the divergent "societal models" proposed by the two movements by focusing upon such themes as the critique of traditional nationalism; the roles of church, state, and labour; the response to the "new federalism"; the reform of education; and the search for a third party. He shows how the rivals combined to help bring down an anachronistic Union Nationale government in June 1960. In one form or another, he concludes, Cité libre liberalism and neo-nationalism have remained at the heart of the political and ideological debate that has continued in Quebec since the Duplessis era.

The province of Quebec used to be called the "priest-ridden province” by its Protestant neighbors in Canada. During the 1960s, Quebec became radically secular, directly leading to its evolution as a welfare state with lay social services. What happened to cause this abrupt change? Genevieve Zubrzycki gives us an elegant and penetrating history, showing that a key incident sets up the transformation. Saint John the Baptist is the patron saint of French Canadians, and, until 1969, was subject of annual celebrations with a parade in Montreal. That year, the statue of St. John was toppled by protestors, breaking off the head from the body. Here, then is the proximate cause: the beheading of a saint, a symbolic death to be sure, which caused the parades to disappear and other modes of national celebration to take their place. The beheading of the saint was part and parcel of the so-called Quiet Revolution, a period of far-reaching social, economic, political, and cultural transformations. Quebec society and the identity of its French-speaking members drastically reinvented themselves with the rejection of Catholicism. Zubrzycki is already acknowledged as a leading authority on nationalism and religion; this book will significantly enlarge her stature by showing the extent to which a core feature of the Quiet Revolution was an aesthetic revolt. A new generation rejected the symbols of French Canada, redefining national identity in the process (and as a process) and providing momentum for institutional reforms. We learn that symbols have causal force, generating "chains of significations” which can transform a Catholic-dominated conservative society into a leftist, forward-looking, secular society.

The Catholic Origins of Quebec's Quiet Revolution challenges a versionof history central to modern Quebec's understanding of itself: that theQuiet Revolution began in the 1960s as a secular vision of state andsociety which rapidly displaced an obsolete, clericalized Catholicism.Michael Gauvreau argues that organizations such as Catholic youthmovements played a central role in formulating the Personalist Catholicideology that underlay the Quiet Revolution and that ordinaryQuebecers experienced the Quiet Revolution primarily through a seriesof transformations in the expression of their Catholic identity. In sodoing Gauvreau offers a new understanding of Catholicism's place intwentieth-century Quebec.