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MAITRES CHEZ QUI?... COLONIZATION IN QUEBEC AS PRESENTED BY LEVESQUE AND THE PQ The Quiet Revolution can broadly be described as the moment FrenchQuébécois entered modernity.*® It saw political and economic reforms instigated by Liberal Premier, Jean Lesage, take power away from the Catholic clergy and place it in the hands of the province’s elected officials.*” Alan Wong describes the period as having taken a “life of its own in Québec’s national mythology” since it was then that “much of the Québécois populace was gripped by neo-nationalist fervor.”** Although Wong’s work tends to be overly critical of Québec, his assessment regarding the Quiet Revolution’s “neo-nationalist fervor” rings true. David Meren has stated that the works of “neo-nationalist historians” helped trigger the revolution.” Guy Frégault, Michel Brunet, and Maurice Séguin based much of their research on “Third World movements dedicated to anti-imperial and anti-colonial resistance.”°° By building on people of color’s experiences, they attempted to give plausibility to the idea that Québec’s French-Canadians were “the victims of [...] colonial authority” enacted by English-Canadians.*! The above-mentioned historians were not the first to present French-Québécois as colonized by English-speakers and they were certainly not the last,*? however, their ideas came to be promoted at a time when the ill-effects of colonialism were being disseminated globally thanks to the growing influence of mass media.** In Québec, the newspaper Le Devoir and the international affairs program Point de mire extensively covered the Algerian War during the 1950s.°* Point de mire, which (appropriately enough) was hosted by René Lévesque, gained special prominence as it premiered with a one-hour special on Algeria on the eve of the Suez Crisis.** Meren’s work argues that growing resistance to colonialism as well as the emergence of scholarship emphasizing French-speakers’ own 46 Alan Wong, The Disquieting Revolution: A Genealogy of Reason and Racism in the Québec Press, Global Media Journal — Canadian Edition, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2011), 146. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 14 David Meren, An Atmosphere of Libération: The Role of Decolonization in the FranceQuebec Rapprochement of the 1960s, The Canadian Historical Review, Vol. 92, No. 2 (June 2011), 273. 50 Ibid., 264, 273. 51 [bid., 273. 52 Lionel Groulx claimed that Québécois were “serfs” (Kaplan, Maitres Chez Nous, 416-417). Pierre Valliéres termed the province’s French-speakers “Négres blancs d'Amérique” (Pierre Vallières, Nègres blancs d'Amérique, Paris, Cahiers Libres, 1968). 55 Meren, An Atmosphere of Libération, 272. 54 Ibid., 272. 5 Ibid., 272.
