Quatre Vignettes

The Quiet Revolution is not an event, but an advent. For the francophones of Quebec, it represents a turning point, both a break with the past and a new beginning. Goodbye la Grande Noirceur — the Great Darkness — hello modernity. Goodbye dominance, hello awakening. In the 1960s, Quebec stopped being a belle province that could be readily bought or brought to its knees. Climbing out of the historical bed to which it had been confined, a nation stood up and set about regaining its place among other nations.


Were Quebec high school students asked to recount the history of their province, they would likely focus on two fundamental episodes, one with tragic overtones, the other with euphoric effects.

The first is the Conquest of 1759, a crucial moment of collective reversal for a society that, having already begun to gather speed, was halted in its national progression and bottled up. The second event is the Quiet Revolution, a crucial moment of collective recovery — a transformation of sorts, when Quebec, breaking its accumulated silences, endeavoured to once again become master in its own house and to cast aside restraint.

What is noteworthy here is the degree to which two events, though 200 years apart, have each come to seem like the reverse of the other. The defeat at the hands of the British, which marked the beginning of two centuries of survival; and then the triumph, not so much over the English as over the Self, long entrapped by the Other.


When he took over as leader of the Quebec Liberal Party in 1998, Jean Charest toyed with the idea of rethinking certain accomplishments of the Quiet Revolution that, in his view, had over the years become hindrances. In his speeches during that period, he suggested the need to break with the development model of the 1960s, which he deemed unsuited to the prevailing challenges. Stigmatized for infringing on the sacrosanct, Charest did not make this mistake again. He, too, came to exalt the Quiet Revolution as “a period in which we took charge of our destiny,” and a “powerful impetus that continues to drive us today.”


Je me souviens. I remember. January 1995 at Mirabel Airport near Montreal, in the shuttle bus between the terminal and our plane. In front of me, a small man, but a giant of modern Quebec. Almost seventy-five, he sat straight as an oak, his eyes full of light. British in appearance (he had been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford) but resolutely on the side of Quebec (he had, for example, memorably argued that international policy was within its jurisdiction), he was bound for Paris.

I looked at Paul Gérin-Lajoie with admiration for several minutes. The course of my life was so closely bound up with his goals. Just before we went our separate ways, I found the courage to express my thanks to him, and to tell him how much his efforts in the mid-1960s as minister of education had changed the trajectory of a whole society. Not to mention my own, destined as I was from childhood to be a labourer for the Davie shipbuilding company of Lauzon, PQ. Thanks to the education reforms he had directed, I had been propelled toward an infinitely broader horizon.


hat do these four vignettes have in common? They suggest the degree to which the Quiet Revolution, whose inception fifty years ago is being commemorated in 2010, marks Quebec today. It is something the province can move away from, but never forget. In the Québécois collective imagination, the Quiet Revolution — a term coined by a Torontonian — represents a happy, liberating, and fruitful passage that demarcates Before from After.

And yet Quebec in the late 1950s was actually in sync with the times, not stuck in a past that refused to pass. True, it faced nepotism and corruption, anti-communist witch hunts and anti-unionism, natural resource handouts to the Americans and timid state regulation, rampant poverty and the under-education of the masses, excessive middle-class moralism and the ever-present priests. But these were not specific to the province. And the era also saw the rise of television and the inauguration of a Paris–Montreal air link, the revitalization of the École Polytechnique and the building of Place des Arts, suburban growth, and the proliferation of carport-equipped bungalows. In addition, there was the construction of the Metropolitan Boulevard expressway and the start of work on Place Ville-Marie — two icons of the modernization of Quebec. The extent of post-war activity in the province has often been overlooked.

Everyone in those days wanted to step confidently into the future, but intense struggles were taking place over the best route to follow. Under Maurice Duplessis, the conservative Union Nationale had come to power in the last years of World War II. It proposed to stay loyal to tradition while not shutting itself off from progress — to be both “traditional and progressive.” On the other hand, the provincial Liberals, who had not won an election since 1939, were endowed with a bevy of young visionaries and decisively inclined toward progress, though still committed to upholding a certain tradition. Their mantra could have been paraphrased as “Let’s move forward, but not smash everything along the way.”

The death of Duplessis in September 1959 tipped the balance toward change. “Désormais [henceforth],” said Paul Sauvé, over and over. Modernization would now take priority. But Sauvé was cut down by a heart attack, and his little revolution lasted less than four months. Still, it was with his ascension on September 11, 1959 — ironically, 200 years almost to the day after the British victory on the Plains of Abraham — that things began to shift. Soon the change would be dramatic.

ollowing the deaths of Duplessis and Sauvé, the Union Nationale became disorganized. The general elections of June 22, 1960, were won by the Liberal Party, though by a narrow margin: fifty-one seats versus forty-three for the Union Nationale, which was being led by a low-profile politician, Antonio Barrette. Did the Québécois really want change? Yes, but gently, gradually, and in small doses. This was consistent with their usual political culture: seemly and sensible, peaceful and moderate, conciliatory and modest (quite the opposite of the image often projected on them from the outside).