The Return of Free Québec

Canada

The Return of Free Québec

The surprising resurgence of Québécois nationalism holds lessons for other peoples who do not want to disappear.

Vive le Québec libre! Delivered from the balcony of Montreal City Hall by General Charles de Gaulle at the end of his visit to Québec on July 24, 1967, this slogan was long seen, at least in some eyes, as encapsulating the destiny of Québec in the second half of the twentieth century. Québec was still awaiting its great political rendezvous, a rendezvous with its history, as the nationalists put it. It had to become independent and thereby throw off its tragic past. Crushed by the British Conquest of 1760, the country had been forced to evolve under the sovereignty of a not especially benevolent foreign power, becoming a stranger to itself. It had to become its own master. The terms remained to be defined, of course, but unless Canada were to undergo profound transformation and recognize Québec as among its founding peoples—something desired by many Québécois, who wished to believe that the Canadian history of Québec was not exclusively negative—independence seemed more than likely.

But it was not to be. In the aftermath of the failure of the second referendum on independence on October 30, 1995, which was decided by a few tens of thousands of votes, it became increasingly obvious that the cause of independence had failed, an impression that only grew with the passing years as the fact of defeat was absorbed and it became clear that the Canadian Federation was not amenable to reform. Québécois nationalism then sunk into a kind of political swamp for more than a decade. For some, the fight for independence even verged on political folklore. And yet, in the past few years, the national question has reconstituted itself before our eyes. There is even talk of a third—and, this time, decisive—referendum.

It is the history of this strange trajectory that I intend to sketch over the next few pages, all the more so as the history of the relationship between Québec and Canada offers a magnifying glass for the great ideological transformations that have swept across the Western world these past twenty years: Canada was even, in many respects, their laboratory.

One must return to the 1950s to understand Québec’s evolution. At the time, Québec passed for a particularly traditional society in the North American context. The Catholic Church played a major role in the social organization, with some going so far as to refer to it as a “priest-ridden province.” Following the British Conquest of 1760 and even more so the violent suppression of the Patriots’ Rebellion of 1837-38, which sought independence for Bas-Canada, those then known as Canadiens and, later, French-Canadians (the term Québécois only gained currency in the 1960s) turned towards the Catholic Church—or took refuge in it—and made it their foremost national institution, a bit like the Poles and the Irish did in similar circumstances to the degree that they were also dominated peoples deprived of full political existence. But, since 1867, the Franco-Canadian people nevertheless had partial political existence—it was at this time that the Province of Québec was created, after the fashion of a foundational component of the nascent Canadian Federation. There, they constituted a clear majority. French minorities were to be found in other Canadian provinces as well as in those that would be created in the decades following the foundation of the Federation, but they would all be anglicized. Québec unofficially but quite concretely had the status of a national state for the French-Canadians embedded in the Canadian Federation.

But it was above all at the dawn of the 1920s, with the work of the nationalists gathered around Lionel Groulx, that this mission was officially taken up. Defeated, profoundly alienated in cultural terms, and economically, as one would later say, colonized, Québec would begin to see the state as the vector of its emancipation, and, for the first time in a long while, some of its intellectuals began to contemplate independence. The traumatic experience of the First World War, although repressed in collective memory, played a role in the matter. French Canadians had no desire to put on the British uniform, for which they felt no particular fondness. They were nevertheless obliged to do so and thus fully resented the consequences of their minority experience in a Canada in which they perhaps had rights but did not have power. Similarly, it was at this time that they once again became aware of the profound hostility towards all things French in Anglophone Canada, particularly with regulation 17, in Ontario, which restricted and even practically forbade the teaching of French and the Catholic religion at school. One must also not underestimate the impact of the great demographic bloodletting of French-Canadians to the United States and, above all, New England, where they formed what were then called so many little Canadas, which have oddly left little trace, in contrast to the Irish, Polish, and Italians, who migrated there in mass as well.

From 1936 to 1959, with a notable parentheses between 1939 and 1944, Québec experienced its first autonomist nationalism, incarnated by the regime of the National Union, led by Maurice Duplessis. But Duplessis’ nationalism was excessively conservative for the era, particularly in terms of the moral rigor to which it laid claim and its acknowledged refusal of the welfare state. Above all, Duplessist nationalism adhered to a form of traditional patriotism even as the Québécois became ever more aware of being a dominated and colonized people, foreigners in their own country, and in need of a change of existential attitude were they to become masters of their own  home, if they truly desired this. But if this nationalism has had a bad reputation for sixty years, it is also because it was associated with a traditional society in the grips of true clericalism. This period is wrongly called “le Grand Noirceur,” the Great Darkness. The very existence of this term, contested by historians but anchored in popular memory, testifies to the traumatic nature of this troubled past.

This is what 1960 represents in the history of Québec. It was then that the Quiet Revolution began, today still the foundational epic of modern Québec. Québec then underwent a great transformation, a total metamorphosis. The French-Canadian people changed their name, becoming the Québécois. Québec had been conservative, very conservative; it became one of the most progressive places in the Western world. It had been Catholic; it then violently rejected its fate, to such an extent that it became radically hostile to everything touching upon religion, no matter remotely.

But this process of accelerated detraditionalization was not accompanied by denationalization. To the contrary, the Quiet Revolution marked a renaissance of nationalism, which now sought to follow its ideas through to their conclusion by embracing the idea of independence, which then very rapidly spread. A marginal phenomenon in 1960, in the space of a decade independence imposed itself as the guiding idea of Québécois nationalism. The objective: a Québec that was free and French. This latter term was particularly significant. Henceforth, the Québécois sought to put their language and their culture at the heart of public life. Social democracy then presented itself as the inescapable horizon of social organization.

The first independence movements, the most well known being le Rassemblement pour l’indépendence nationale, were created in 1960 (in fact, the first, l’Alliance laurentienne, a forgotten precursor, goes back to 1957). The great march of the indépendantistes gathered around the Parti Québécois, founded by René Lévesque in 1968, brought them to power in 1976 with the stated project of holding a referendum on independence. The promise would be kept in 1980, but the result would be disastrous, the Yes side receiving the support of only 40 percent of the population and only 50 percent among francophone Québécois, with Anglophones and immigrant-origin communities overwhelmingly voting No. 

Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister at this time and a man resolutely hostile to Québécois nationalism, used the defeat of the Yes campaign to instigate great political maneuvers that would result in Canada’s constitutional refoundation in 1982. Québec would not be a signatory to this new constitution, which among other things amputated its cultural and linguistic powers, and it still is not to this day. The new constitutional dynamic was defederalizing, with the establishment of a Charter of Rights that simultaneously laid the foundations for government by judges and the ideological supremacy of multiculturalism. I will return to that in a moment. Canada thus experienced, even if it was not immediately aware of this, the great turning point of its history.

The 1980s would be marked by the consequences of Québec’s exclusion from the Canadian constitutional framework. Brian Mulroney, the conservative prime minister (1984–93), sought to reintegrate Québec into the Canadian Constitution with the Lake Meech Accord, put forward in 1987, which among other things recognized Québec as a distinct society in the constitution. The accord provoked profound rejection by the English-speaking provinces. It was at this time that what remained of the dualist matrix that some believed to be at the origin of Canada once and for all collapsed.

The failure of Meech in 1990 led to a renaissance of support for independence in Québec, leading to a second referendum on independence in 1995, which also failed, though only by a little and in dramatic circumstances. The results were heartbreaking for the nationalists: Yes received 49.4 percent, No, 50.6 percent; 61 percent of Francophone Québécois, who at the time represented 82 percent of the population of Québec, voted for independence. The Anglophones and non-native speakers joined forces to block the nationalists. This led the leader of the Yes camp, Jacques Parizeau, to explain the defeat by reference to “money and the ethnic vote,” an expression for which he would long after be reproached. This second defeat for the separatists in fifteen years broke the back of Québécois nationalism, which then entered a period of decline, of decomposition.

The series of events that began in the wake of the defeat of 1995 belongs to our era and illustrate the profound ideological refoundation of Canada. The Québécois had the habit of seeing Canada as a country consisting of two nations forced to redefine their association via an egalitarian pact. English Canadians, for their part, saw it as an Anglophone, even Anglo-Saxon, nation, with a burdensome French minority for the most part concentrated in Québec. They were nonetheless aware of its insurmountable duality and knew it to be less a marriage of love than of reason. 

After 1995, this matrix fell apart once and for all and Canada underwent a rapid ideological transformation, already present in the constitution of 1982. Increasingly, it would define itself as a post-national and multicultural country. Pierre Elliot Trudeau had wanted it thus. Appearing before the U.S. Congress in 1977, he had stated that Québec’s independence would be a crime against human history, for it would discredit the possibility of a political community transcending the small-minded framework of the nation-state.

This idea fully took hold in the second half of the 1990s. Paul Martin, for example, prime minister from 2003 to 2006, aimed to make Canada the exemplary post-national country meant to incarnate the next step in the history of humanity, a country-world with no substrate of identity. This idea would be pushed to its extremity by Justin Trudeau, who as soon as he came to power in Ottawa in 2015 explained that Canada is a country with no specific cultural core other than its quest for ever-greater diversity. The Islamic veil and even the niqab were celebrated as symbols par excellence of what one must call the diversitarian regime. It was the same thinking that would later encourage the Canadian government to rally behind a mass immigration policy that sought to make Canada a country of 100 million inhabitants by the end of this century—which is rightly seen as an exceptional project of social engineering, inevitably leading to the destabilization of any society subjected to it. 

But a country cannot be boiled down to a pure ideological experiment. It must, at least theoretically, recognize some foundations. Trudeau’s Canada thus proposed to make Amerindian nations, now presented as “First Peoples,” as founding communities. As for the English and the French, formerly considered to be the country’s founding peoples, they are no longer seen as anything but two communities among others, all having arrived in the context of the numerous waves of migration that populated the country. This allowed the country’s origins to be de-Europeanized and also de-Westernized. At the level of the Western world, Canada became a true Wokistan.

Not surprisingly, Québec was not destined to recognize itself in this new Canada, in large measure founded on its negation and even the censorship of its existence. It was in large part in reaction to this context that nationalism set about refounding itself, in circumstances very unfavorable to it. We must return to history for a moment: The 1995 referendum defeat broke the back of nationalism and demoralized it, to such a point that it became convinced that it had to undertake its own diversitarian modernization and demonstrate that it had fully converted to what would come to be called the inclusive society. For ten years, Québécois nationalists were under the diversitarian spell. They would on the whole snap out of it starting in 2007-8 with what is known as the crise des accommodement raisonnables, which witnessed a generalized challenge to multiculturalism in Québec in the name of a more traditional conception of national identity. The historic Francophone majority once again claimed to be a culture of convergence. From that moment on, a shock, inscribed in the logic of history, became visibly political, between the Canadian multiculturalist regime and Québécois nationalism. In the fifteen years that followed, it would radicalize considerably.

Québec obviously could not accept Canadian multiculturalism, which entailed its symbolic humiliation by demoting it from the status of a founding people to that of one community among others in a plural Canada. This symbolic humiliation was accompanied by a loss of political power, with immigrant-origin populations increasingly betting on the Canadian constitutional system to evade the most basic demands of cultural and linguistic integration. The identitarian fragility of a little Francophone nation in North America is not to be underestimated. Whenever the Québécois seek to present themselves as the identitarian norm for the immigrants, they are accused of ethnic supremacism. Similarly, it quickly became apparent that mass immigration sought to once and for all demographically lock up Québec’s political future in the Federation by creating a blocking minority capable of imposing its veto on the souverainiste movement.

Mass immigration has contributed to Anglicizing Québec as never before, resurfacing the ancestral and rationally well-founded fear of disappearance. The Québécois began to become aware that, between now and the end of the century, perhaps even much earlier, they risked becoming a minority in their own territory—the only one where they may, where they ever could, exercise full sovereignty.

And yet, and this will not really come as a surprise, it was on the religious dimension of immigration’s demands that Québécois society dug its heels in. For Québécois society remains overwhelmingly antireligious—some will say this is at once its strength and its weakness. Faced with the demands of Sikhs and, above all, Muslims, it quickly perceived the return of religion. It was in this spirit that Québécois nationalists brandished secularism. Very concretely, it was a question of opposing Islamist demands formulated in the language of Canadian multiculturalism and made sacred by the Charter of Rights at the heart of the constitution of 1982. Secularism allowed communitarianism to be transcended and restored a political form to the nation. Starting in the late 2000s, the quest for laïcité became inseparable from Québécois nationalism. A first effort to draft a Charter of Secularism was put forward in 2013-14 by the ruling indépendantistes, before ending up in an amended version in 2019—when the time had come for the autonomistes to be in power.

It is noteworthy that it was autonomist nationalists, rather than independentists, who succeeded in writing secularism into law. The twenty years that followed the 1995 referendum saw Québécois nationalists shift from the quest for sovereignty to the quest for Québécois identity. Nationalism had to seek the defense of this identity in the Canadian framework by reaffirming the principle of Québec First, without quite severing the relationship with Canada. For some, this stance was sincere; for others, it was strategic. Autonomism thus presented itself as a necessary detour before one day once again possibly taking up the cause of independence.

But the identitarian shift of Québécois nationalism inevitably entailed a return to independence, for Law 21, the Secularism Charter, is fundamentally contrary to the spirit of the Canadian Constitution. A few years from now, the Supreme Court of Canada will have to reach a verdict regarding it. It is not just possible but likely that the court will declare part or all of it void. A constitutional crisis would then follow, with the Canadian regime dismantling an identitarian law very strongly supported in Québec.

It is likely that this shock will bring about a new push for independence, all the more so because the autonomist nationalism that has been in power in Québec since 2018 has very little to show for itself. It believed itself capable of repatriating many of the powers of the federal government to the Québécois government. It has not succeeded in this. Ottawa always flatly refuses any such thing. Without wanting to, the autonomists have proven the impossibility of defending Québécois identity and, indeed, Québécois autonomy within the Canadian framework. This can only favor a renaissance of independentism.

One must keep this in mind to understand the renaissance of the Parti Québécois, the historic vehicle of Québécois independence, since 2022, after most analysts foresaw its disappearance. Since 1995, the PQ had gone from one defeat to the next, except in 2012 when it scored an electoral victory but was barely able to form a minority government. Many thought independence had been once and for all defeated and condemned to a residual existence in the folkloric margins of Québécois nationalism. That was not the case. 

The new leader of the Parti Québécois, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, realigned it on a politically promising niche combining identitarian nationalism with social democracy, reminiscent of the evolution of the Scandinavian left. At this writing, the Parti Québécois leads the polls, and if elections were held tomorrow (the next ones are anticipated for 2026) it would very likely form a majority government in Québec. It has already promised to hold a new referendum on independence. Support for independence currently stands at around 38 percent, but one may reasonably believe that the start of the referendum dynamic would cause that number to significantly rise.

We know in advance what story will accompany it. Whereas the first referendum, that of 1980, took part in the romantic quest for the country to be born, and that of 1995 appeared as the only possible response to Canadian refusal to recognize Québécois national difference in the framework of the constitutional crisis discussed earlier, the next one, should it take place, will directly concern the survival of the Québécois nation. For that is the true issue at stake at present in Québec. We are simultaneously witnessing the regression of the demographic weight of Québec in Canada and of the Francophone Québécois in Québec.

If current trends hold, and everything gives one to believe that they will, Francophone Québécois will become a minority in their own country in a few decades, well before the end of the century. This is what just a few months ago led the Prime Minister of Québec, François Legault, to speak of the approaching “Louisianization” of Québec, an old expression brought up to date that refers to the fate of the Francophones exiled in Louisiana, who today survive only in a folkloric state. He might also have spoken of “Acadianization,” another expression from the past, which refers to the Acadians, a sister people of the Québécois, who were deported in 1755 in what was the inaugural ethnic cleansing of modern times. Even after returning to their homeland at the end of an epic undertaking, they were never able to escape an alienating minority status, and their identity dissolved, as we see above all in New Brunswick, the Canadian province where they gathered.

In the short term, the independentists may still win and consequently reverse these trends by establishing Québec as an independent state. The independence of Québec, it must never be forgotten, is considered attainable even by its critics, which question its relevance, never its feasibility. Also, in contrast to other nations seeking independence in the Western world, the Québécois have genuine international support, that of France, which since the “vive le Québec libre” of General de Gaulle has never ceased supporting Québec’s aspiration to nationhood. Jacques Chirac gave explicit support to the independentists in 1995, and more recently former French prime minister Gabriel Attal said he saw in the Québécois cause a model of a French-style society that should be pursued in America.

There are obviously some who fear another referendum defeat, which is always possible given the massive support of immigrants and Anglophones for Canadian federalism. The first referendum defeat led to a hostile constitutional takeover in Québec; the second, to the unprecedented demonization of the very existence of the Québécois nation. A third failure, many fear, will lead to the identitarian collapse of the nation.

They are not wrong, but everything they fear from a referendum defeat will happen at more or less the same rhythm if no referendum is held and the possibility of independence is not put on the table. Not holding the referendum amounts to losing it while awaiting winning conditions that will never present themselves. Sometimes, sheer will is the last cartridge of a people.

Must one include the renaissance of Québécois nationalism among the upsurges of populism and national conservatism elsewhere in the West? Not really, to the degree that Québécois nationalism, which shifted from right to left at the moment of the Quiet Revolution, has stayed there. And yet major qualifications must be made. Distinctions of left and right only ever apply very imperfectly to specific national situations. If social democracy remains dominant in Québec, it has become fundamentally anti-woke. We saw this in the summer of 2020 at the time of the great Black Lives Matter riots, which saw the entirety of the Canadian political class give itself over to a great penitential ritual. Justin Trudeau thus took a knee in Ottawa, proud of feeling guilty and demanding the same contrite face from all. Things were different in Québec. Prime Minister François Legault refused to submit to the concept of “systemic racism,” despite immense media pressure.

In the same way, Québec has set its face against cancel culture and the new forms of censorship that cut across the Western world. To conservatives in the United States and elsewhere, Québécois resistance would probably seem moderate, but in the Canadian environment it is fundamentally transgressive. The same could be said of Québécois secularism, which would seem very minimalist to a Frenchman but allows one to stand up to multiculturalism. Whatever the case, antiwokism is now at the heart of nationalism, whether autonomist or independentist.

And this is not a mere detail. For the Québécois, it is no longer just a question of leaving a federation that marginalizes and anglicizes them, but breaking with a state that has been swept along in an ideological delirium. This resistance finds its reasons not only in the principles of a liberal society but in a substantial national identity, which cannot be reduced to the abstract categories of the “civic nation,” what Americans calls the “proposition nation” and what Europeans following Jurgen Habermas call the “contractual nation.” The nation is a historical reality, and while it is possible to assimilate into it without belonging to it by birth—that goes without saying—it cannot be reduced to its legal or administrative dimensions.

It is this carnal, vital dimension of national identity that escapes contemporary political philosophy, which tends to conceal it when it does not deny it. The nation has greater powers of resistance than those philosophers recognize. History testifies to this. The Polish often lost their state and never stopped considering themselves a people in their own right, seeking to reconstitute themselves politically, which they succeeded in doing after the First World War. The Irish, though they were deprived of a state of their own, nevertheless had a very keen national consciousness. The breakup of Yugoslavia reminded those who doubted it that artificial countries, stitched together from above by an effort at nation-building, easily collapse when history is rekindled. The same might be said of the Balts, who recovered their lost independence with the fall of the USSR. The European Union may know a similar fate.

The case of the Balts is especially interesting, insofar as the Russians, during the period of the USSR, went to great pains to submerge them demographically. The aim was to render the Estonians, Lithuanians, and Latvians minorities in their own homelands. One could legitimately call this a demographic coup d’état, like that imposed on the Québécois by Canada even if the method obviously differs.

It is necessary to mentally and conceptually separate the historic people from the state to understand the great danger of our time, the reduction of Western peoples to minorities in their own countries. One might simply say their submersion, even if it is forbidden to mention this reality without being accused of peddling a racist conspiracy theory. The facts are nevertheless there. The South is heading North, and this massive population transfer is often driven by an unconscious desire for historical vengeance, which is accompanied by real territorial conquests, even if the media refuses to speak of them as such. This is truly revolutionary in its import. It has been known for some time now that parts of London have become Londonistan, that Seine Saint-Denis is no longer culturally French, that Belgium is the bridgehead for Islamism in Western Europe.

For thirty years, sovereignty in the Western world has meant the defense of independent states against the pressure of the globalized technostructure. It also referred to the quest of peoples for political independence. Today, it is indissociable from the fight to ensure that the peoples not be submerged in their own countries. The formula had already been used in France: What would the point be of an independent French Republic if it was an Islamic Republic? Similarly, what is the point of an independent but Anglophone Québec? The question can be posed in many ways. It reminds us of the great error of the globalists, who prefer the interchangeability of populations to the diversity of peoples. 

Québécois resistance in America, on a continent where the French fact should have long ago been engulfed, is altogether remarkable. It can serve as a magnifying glass for understanding the national question throughout the world. We are entitled to believe that, if the cause of Québec libre prevails in a few years, even between now and the end of the decade, the Québécois resistance will serve as an example to all other peoples who do not wish to see their history transformed into an obituary column.

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