The Taste of Quebec

...Contrary to legend, they were habitants, peasants who tilled the land, made i t their own and gave themselves to it...

...Stop analyzing for a moment, take time to taste this land: listen to its voices, sense the rhythm of its life, its memories, its hopes...

...To most anglophones, nationality is a matter of citizenship, of the passport a person carries...

...To an American, Justin Wilson's cajun dialect stories may seem quaint...

...The people who worship here today can also claim a birthright in this city, though their native tongue is English...

...It is difficult no~ to sympathize with the longing of the Qu6b6cois to stop being ethnics, to stop being a minority, to be, at last, masters in their own country...

...Qufbec has a full internal autonomy within it and a half share in its common affairs...

...That sense of being at home is easier to feel than to define...

...But will and should it claim it...

...Vivent les Qudb~cois...

...It was two weeks after the election...

...The bond is real: the 4 February 1977:76 Qu~b~cois are not just with each other, they are entre eux...

...Along with them it claimed its land and created a culture...

...Qu6bec's conservative Catholicism, for one: the Qu~b6cois were always Catholic, but, after 1840, Catholicism became both a symbol and a bastion of national identity...

...That is something les anglophones--the Englishspeaking North Americans--find difficult to comprehend...

...Cut off from France, open to English immigration, the Qu6b~cois found themselves under increasing English pressure...

...Objectively, the Qufbfcois would seem to have nothing to gain and much to lose by breaking up the Confederation...

...Gen...

...Last year, it spent 1.5 billion dollars more in Qufbec than it took out in taxes...

...For a conquest it was...

...Share a beer with the lumberjacks in the Laurentides...

...Why should Canada inherit British Empire...

...But Qu6bec needs Canada, too...

...Yet it is not only mongdn~ral de Gaulle and a handful of fanatics who raise the cry of Quebec libre t. In the last provincial election, some 57 percent of the voters opted for the inddpendiste Parti Qu~bdcois...

...From a nation in its own land, Qu6b6cois became a minority in a vast British dominion committed to a policy of anglicization...

...Both Qu6bec and Canada have much to gain by it...

...Yet in a space of one generation, a quiet revolution transformed the land...

...Since around 20 percent of the electorate is English-speaking and unlikely to vote PQ, the results suggest that nearly three out of every four [rancophone electors voted separatist...

...Even their language, their most precious heritage, sank in daily use to the level of a patois of the hewers of wood and the drawers of water...

...Most of the traits which North Americans consider "typically French-Canadian" were shaped by the period of dogged resistance that followed...

...Encouraged by the Church, Commonweal...

...They can appreciate the "ethnic" heritage of the people whom they regard, on analogy with other "ethnics," as "French-Canadians," but a movement of national selfdetermination among them would seem as absurd as if Wisconsin's German-Americans were to demand a lreies Milwaukee...

...After a century of surviving as cheap and docile labor, Qu6bee simply did not have the prerequisites for independence...

...French in Canada...

...But it is also difficult not to sympathize with Canadian federalism...

...There are alternative constitutional models as well the act of 1791 may suggest one...

...It was the federal policy of biculturalism which provided the context for the quiet revolution...

...And yet I feel at home here...

...All that Qu6bec had were the memories, the people and the hope...

...The Church became parochial--and encouraged parochialism...

...Or stop to play with the children in a village clustered tightly around the church whose saint's name it bears, somewhere in the rolling country west of the Chaudri~re...

...The original French settlers, from whom present-day Qu6b6cois are (or at least feel) descended, were not transient trappers, traders and soldiers...

...They are a nation whose autonomous history begins not with a Revolution but with a Conquest...

...The cathedral, however, speaks of other memories...

...The Qu6b6cois may be capable of emotions as violent as their subtropical summer, but they are a people of the north, taught realism by their may speak for independence, but their reason tells them long subarctic winters...

...The Canadian Confederation is one of the world's most civilized countries...

...The Qu6b6cois seldom ask it, but an outsider, no matter how sympathetic, cannot help wondering how much democracy, how much freedom a deeply inbred, homogeneous society can preserve, locked into a ministate under heavy economic pressure...

...ful thinking...

...Canada has had its share of economic problems...

...The retrenchment preserved Qu6b6cois national identity, though at a high price...

...Following the pattern of their policy in Scotland and Ireland, the English hanged twelve rebels, jailed a thousand more...

...If it were successful, it would offer an alternative to the desperate choice of a narrow nationalism and an intolerant imperialism from which Europe has suffered for so long...

...Today, it is all different, yet the memory lingers...

...Qu~b~cois economy grew and modernized, education opened outward, a new and vital culture emerged, spearheaded by poets...

...I am a Czech and a citizen of the United States, doubly a stranger in Qu6bee...

...Present-day Qu6b6cois, for all their inddpendiste moods, remember the value of that symbiosis...

...The cathedral complex remains an English island, faintly reminiscent of a garrison compound in a colony...

...Many voters might simply think it time for a change...

...Many Qu6b6cois, too, are raising that question...

...By the late 1830s, rallied by Louis-Joseph Papineau, they first protested, then rebelled...

...The Qu6b6cois would have been hard pressed to preserve a distinctive identity within the solidly anglophone, Protestant United States...

...The Qu6b6cois assumed the low profile of cheap and docile labor...

...Among the better educated, the "ethnics'" ambivalence of their nationality appeared...

...That vestige of national identity, however, appears to them strictly a private peculiarity, charming but publicly irrelevant...

...Industry, finance, commerce, even culture spoke English...

...Sir G. E. Cartier spoke for the rest: "We are Englishmen who speak French...

...It would be a gross exaggeration, but not an outfight lie...

...In the wake of the election, Ren6 Levesque, the chairman and elder statesman of Parti Qu~b~cois, said that Qu6bec will be ready for independence when the Qu6b6cois nation has achieved full national maturity...

...The Qufbfcois are not "ethnics," essentially anglophone North Americans preserving bits of an European heritage...

...Surely, the Qufbfcois are already one of the freeest people on all this sore and oppressed planet...

...Not every vote for the PQ need be a vote for independence...

...Similarly, Canadian economy provided the context for Qu6bec's industrialization...

...The Qu6b6cois fought alongside their conquerors to repell American invasions...

...Your accent will mark you as a stranger but you will sense it still: Au Quebec, vous n'~tes pas ld, vous ~tes chez nous...

...There, in the American melting pot, the creoles sank to the level of "ethnics," Americans with a peculiar accent...

...Today, writers like Anne H6bert or Jacques Ferron, film directors like Claude Jutra, sociologists like Marcel Rioux and popular singers like Marcel Vignanlt are giving the Qu6b6cois a renewed sense of national dignity...

...Independence, which small European nations are today trying to overcome through the European Common Market, may well be the most expensive, least productive path to national self-determination...

...That is a sense of kinship which Americans ordinarily experience only when they meet by chance abroad, surrounded by strangers...

...The fleurdelisd, the quartered blue flag of Qufbee with its fleurs-de-lys, greeted me along the way...

...4 February I977:78...

...the British North America Act of 1867, to this day Canada's constitution, added the rest of Britain's North American colonies...

...Perhaps most symptomatically, a cultured French is rapidly displacing the jouat, the patois of the cheap and docile labor, as the dominant language of Qu6bec...

...To the individual Qufbfcois, Qufbec's membership in the Confederation assures a living standard and a range of opportunities which no national ministate could match...

...The Qu6b6cois will tell you, with their wry humor, that, unquestionably, after independence they will have to eat d'la rnerde--the only question is whether there will be enough to go round...

...Canada needs Qu6bec: biculturalism gives it much of its distinct national identity in its cultural confrontation with the United States...

...There is a sense of deferred hope in the air: within a generation at most, the nation whose autonomous existence began with a conquest and survived more than a century of anglicization will be ready to claim its independence...

...Their country is a continent, their culture global...

...Vive le Quebec . . . what...

...With the waning of the British Empire, the Qu6b6cois began to raise their sights, first in an attempt to catch up to English-speaking Canada, then to affirm a cultural autonomy within it, then to raise the question of independence...

...There were some armed clashes, a quixotic Declaration of Independence, then defeat...

...They have before them the fate of the other French settlement, Louisiana...

...Wolfe's victory over the French forces on the Plaines d'Abraham did not open wilderness to English colonization: it conquered a nation for the Empire...

...That federalism may be hobbled at the moment by deeply ingrained attitudes and by its unfortunate constitutional basis in the British North America Act of 1867...

...You will sense the other, unconventional reason: a nation is being reborn here...

...My ears were still tuned to English and the slogan sounded strange...

...Unfortunately for present-day Canada, the imperial symbiosis did not survive the waning of the American threat and the growth of British nationalism...

...The Qufbfcois carry Canadian passports --surely, they must be Canadians . . . . To be sure, in addition to their American or Canadian "nationality," most anglophone North Americans do claim something they call their "ethnic" heritage, as Polish-Americans or Italo-Canadians...

...To a Qu6b~cois, they are painful--and tragic...

...Walk through it today, its walls lined with reminders, plaques and votive tablets that reflect its intimate link with this land and its people...

...Then again, the Parti Libdral was in power for six years in the 'sixties and then .again since 1970...

...Patti Qu~b~cois, whose program includes national independence for Qufbec, had won a clear majority in the provincial parliament, displacing les rouges, the federalist Parti Liberal of provincial Prime Minister Bourassa and federal Prime Minister Trudeau...

...The Notre-Dame-des-Victoires in Place Royale was raised while this was still /a Nouvelle-France, to commemorate the feats of French arms...

...The taste of Qufbec surrounded me--the intimate familiarity of a people who belong to a land and to each other...

...Then walk up to the Anglican Cathedral of the Holy Trinity...

...Conversations still echoed the slogan--Vive le Quebec libre...

...As a matter of historic fact, the conquest was to prove an advantage when France was gripped by the Revolution and England's other thirteen colonies claimed their independence...

...British standards line its wails, the commemorative plaques speak of men who came to a strange land to serve their Queen, strangers in a conquered city...

...By the time General Wolfe's force drifted up le fleuve Saint-Laurent to seal the fate of la Nouvelle-France in 1759, the habitants were no longer the...

...The Qu6b6cois, however, have always been surrounded by strangers...

...Their memories and emotions of their real interdependence with (English) Canada...

...But, conversely, conventional reasons do not explain all the PQ votes...

...Libre...

...There is another explanation...

...It was far easier within England's multi-nation empire, especially since Qu6bec was by far the most important component of that Empire in North America...

...Qu6bee's memories, however, pose the question differently...

...In 1840, the Act of Union merged Qu6bec with the English-speaking Upper Canada...

...Twenty-five years ago, the answer was obvious...

...For Qu6bec is not a place: it is icitte, chez nous...

...Nothing in their experience equips them to understand the idea of a nation in the peculiar European sense of a community intimately linked by a language, a land, a history and a destiny...

...But the need is not economic alone...

...The logic is understandable but the analogy hopelessly inappropriate...

...Theirs is a nation that grew in North America alongside the American and, later, the Canadian nation...

...The valley of St...

...To an outsider, Qu6bec might have appeared as an English province where the lower classes speak a patois of their own...

...There was a sober undertone in the jubilation which followed the electoral victory of the Parti Qu$b~cois...

...To be sure, there are some conventional explanations...

...The ]rancophones, once voyageurs and explorers, turned inward from an English world...

...Vive le Qudbec . . . what...

...When it does, it might well exercise its independence by opting for a Qu6b6cois-Canadian confederation...

...But attitudes can change and are changing: each summer, Qu6bec's universities play host to young (English) Canadians eager to appropriate what they experience as the other side of Canada's national heritage...

...The left-leaning PQ might simply appeal to economic wishI I ERAZIM KOHAK, a pro]essor in the DepartnTent o] Philosophy at Boston University, studied at Universit~ Laval and is a ]requent visitor to Quebec...

...Lord Durham proposed a final solution: a firm, purposeful and definitive anglicization of the province...

...But I was coming from the United States...

...Metaphorically, you could say that there are no lonely crowds in Qufbec...

...I drove down agai n along the Chaudri~re, across toward Lac M6gantique and the American frontier...

...Canada's federal government, currently headed by a Qufbfcois, is committed to a policy of bilingualism and biculturalism...

...George III recognized their usefulness: by the Act of 1791, he constituted Qu6bec--the francophone Lower Canada--an autonomous domain within his North American empire, in effect sanctioning its cultural autonomy in exchange for imperial loyalty...

...Laurent is not just a part of Canada where many people speak French...

...Compulsory public education was not even introduced until 1942...

...Shelter from a downpour under the upturned roof of a stone farmhouse in Kamouraska or the Gasp~sie...

...In English Canada, that last step seems incomprehensible: why should one of Canada's provinces split off simply because its people speak French...

...The track record in other lands is not good: an independent Qu6bec might not prove all that libre...

...It is Qufbec, chez nous...

...THE TASTE OF QUEBEC ERAZIM KOHAK Not just a part of Canada where many people speak French I drove up the familiar road, past Lac Mfgantique and on along the Chaudri~re, into the land that is in North America without quite being of it, across the mighty river which here is le fleuve Saint-Laurent, to the old walled city of Quebec...

...The mood of two of Qu~bec's oldest churches speaks of it yet...

...English took over public administration, commerce, education and culture, the Qu6b6cois held on to their Church, withdrew into their parishes--and multiplied...

...77 the revanche des berceaux brought the trancophone population of Qu6bec from 1.3 million in 1881 to almost six million in 1971--and that with virtually no lrancophone immigration and with extensive economic emigration to the United States...

...As the English settlers had become Americans, they had become les Canadiens...

...With the passing of that empire, why should not each of its components, the Maritimes, Qu6bec, Upper Canada, reclaim its independence and chart its own course...

...The taste of Qu6bec was still in my mouth, the antimate, intoxicating taste of a nation awakening, a people reborn...