Contenu du sommaire : Où en est l'histoire du Québec ?

Reaction as Legacy ? Quebecers have always had a fraught relationship with France. While the traditional elites admired the France of the Grand Siècle and Louis XIV, they nonetheless rejected the country's republican ideals. This article seeks to illustrate that, since the 1960s, Quebec's French heritage has been totally discredited by the most well-known Quebecois intellectuals. These new modernist elites simultaneously reject France's inequitable Ancien Régime and its republican model of integration for immigrants, which has come to be seen as intolerant in light of the recent debates on secularity. The appeal of the concept of “Americanness” and the support for liberal multiculturalism expressed by intellectual elites in Quebec help to explain this rejection of French heritage as a whole.

Groulxism and Politics This article offers an analysis of Lionel Groulx's relationship to politics during the interwar years. By subordinating his nationalism to Catholicism, which he consistently refused to instrumentalise for political purposes, Groulx developed a traditionalist and providentialist ideology that paid little attention to questions of the regime or institutional reform. This in turn left Groulx relatively shielded from the influence of Maurrassism. Groulxism did contain, however, a measure of ambiguity toward the political inasmuch as it envisioned, to some extent, the creation of an independent “French State”. The growing dialectical tension between the national and religious issues within the realm of French Canadian ideology was one of the main causes behind Quebec's Quiet Revolution in the 1960s.

The French-Canadian Great Darkness (Grande Noirceur) in Quebecois History and Memory More than a specific historic period (from the 1930s to the 1950s), the Grande Noirceur, or Great Darkness, is often viewed as an era to be rejected. It is a period that has achieved quasi-mythical status in Quebec's modern narrative. This constitutive myth is a means by which to manage the past, attempting to account for the period's so-called authoritarian legacy. Representations of the Great Darkness, while often presented under the guise of scholarly history, in fact put forth a sort of “mythistory” that perpetuates a dominant narrative from generation to generation. This article examines both the discourse that created and propagated the idea of the Great Darkness, and the counter-discourse that has attempted to challenge its veracity and historical scope. Our goal is not to determine the degree of ‘darkness' of the period preceding the Quiet Revolution, but rather to explore the milestones leading up to the social and historical construction of the 1960s movement, and to better understand the more recent deconstruction of these mythologically burdened narratives.

1968 and its Aftermath in Quebec This article compares the student rebellions which shook both France and Quebec in the late 1960s. We do not limit ourselves to merely juxtaposing facts, but seek to identify the points of contact that existed between these two geographically distant societies. Breaking with most traditional studies which simply assess France's influence on the orientation of Quebec's student groups, this article furthers the analysis and looks to establish an interpretive model, which, borrowing primarily from French studies, enriches our understanding of the various factors that fuelled political activism in the late 1960s on both sides of the ocean.

Linguistic Stakes in Quebec The issue of French as the language of public use in Quebec has created tension and conflict for many decades. An inescapable historical reality, the language issue has re-emerged dramatically, and sometimes violently, since the 1960s as a product of citizen activism. Faced with these tensions, the State of Quebec has legislated to promote the use of French in the public sphere. This article offers an analytical overview of the language issue in Quebec. It adopts a political perspective in order to identify the causes that led to citizen mobilisation on the question of language and the strategies that the government has adopted to manage this social debate.

The War Conferences of Father Sertillanges (1914-1918) This article analyses the war rhetoric expressed by Father Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges during World War I. A professor at Paris's Institut catholique and a leading figure of pre-war French Catholic culture, when the war broke out the Dominican friar became the spokesperson for the most nationalist fringe of the French clergy. The sermons he delivered at La Madeleine and a variety of unpublished archival sources illustrate the ambiguous attitude of French Catholics towards the war, which was on one hand seen as divine punishment for the sins of men, but also, on the other, as an extraordinary chance to rebuild the Christian society destroyed by secularization after 1789.

The March on Buenos Aires The people of Buenos Aires were stunned on 13 October, 1935, when they witnessed an unprecedented phenomenon: about 100,000 citizens from the province of Buenos Aires were gathered in the Plaza de Mayo, in the heart of Argentina's capital, to show their support for Manuel Fresco, the Conservative Party's gubernatorial candidate. In this context, the “March on Buenos Aires” reflected a significant change in the way that the Party viewed political representation. The study of this rally and the context in which it occurred allow us to understand this change, at the moment when the province of Buenos Aires entered the era of mass mobilisations.

The Relations between American and French Student Movements in the 1960s This article analyses the relationship between the two largest student unions in the 1960s, the French Union Nationale des Étudiants de France (UNEF) and the United States National Student Association (NSA), and highlights the similarities and differences that marked this relationship. Despite being radically different with regard to their philosophies, operations and objectives, these two student unions nevertheless maintained regular and friendly relations. This stemmed less from any desire to collaborate than to spy each other, in an attempt to identify each other's weaknesses, thus discrediting their opponents and gaining prestige over other national student unions.

Public Management and Agricultural Development This article examines how new tools to control and manage agricultural development policy were introduced in the early 1970s. This managerial turn was not imposed from the outside, but was part and parcel of internal fights in French professional agricultural organisations and specific administrative branches. The new methods introduced in the wake of the Rationalisation des choix budgétaires (RCB, Rationalisation of Budget Choices) policy helped to delegitimise the traditional concept of agricultural development, which linked the selection of farmers with the promotion of family farms, instead favouring the fragmentation of the work of the agricultural council, relying on performance indicators, and encouraging specialisation and intensification.