Dream of Nation: A Social and Intellectual History of Quebec by Susan Mann (review)

humanities 111 university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 system for perception and another for action. While these normally work seamlessly together in co-ordinating human behaviour, Goodale shows how they can be experimentally isolated. In certain cases, it is possible to have perception without action, and even action without perception. Mohan Matthen=s >Our Knowledge of Colour= is by far the most philosophically challenging and sophisticated paper in the book. He stakes out an original position on the epistemology of colour vision, showing along the way how it instructively contrasts with our perception of musical harmony. One minor annoyance in this book is that there is virtually no crossreferencing between the articles. Given that many of the papers contain both significant overlap in subject matter and fundamental disagreement on major questions, it would be nice if the editor had had the authors do a bit of internal calibrating of their respective positions. Otherwise, she has put together a very useful collection of essays. (ANDREW POTTER) Susan Mann. Dream of Nation: A Social and Intellectual History of Quebec McGill-Queen=s University Press. 344. $75.00, $27.95 It is good to see Dream of Nation back in print. Susan Mann, who first published it in 1982, is a gifted writer who accurately summarizes academic debates while also bringing historical moments to life. And what moments they were! Mann was a dynamic, fluently bilingual member of the Université d=Ottawa history department in the 1970s when the largely francophone student body stayed up all night and partied in exhilaration as René Lévesque=s Parti québécois swept to power in November 1976. The faculty fiercely debated fédéralisme and libération in the halls of the department =s rickety old Victorian offices. On campuses and within Quebec=s new government, passions also ran high over feminist demands for daycare, abortion clinics, and fair pay. Mann was in the thick of things, and the book vibrates with the excitement of a Quebec hurtling towards B who knew what? Though the book is less rich in illustrations and statistics than Brian Young and John Dickinson=s useful Short History of Quebec, it captures the reader=s imagination. Dream of Nation conveys the feverish energy of Montreal =s imperious nineteenth-century Bishop Ignace Bourget, who enlisted numerous new orders of nuns and priests to replace the rouge nationalism of 1837 with an Ultramontane empire. This >Clerical Offensive= featured schools, orphanages, northern colonization treks, and even a Zouave regiment sent to defend the pope. Such initiatives helped create a willing audience for the anachronistic pulpit politics which associated even the congenitally conciliatory Liberal Wilfrid Laurier with spectres of godlessness and guillotines. Another chapter deftly synthesizes the reasons rural Quebeckers 112 letters in canada 2002 university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 flooded into Montreal and the conditions they found: smallpox, slums, bad milk, and >black holes= in factory basements for child cigarmakers who acted childish. A much reprinted chapter, >The Prussians Are Next Door,= explains how federal mishandling of Great War recruitment combined with Ontario=s suppression of French schools to channel French-Canadian militancy towards fellow Canadians rather than faraway Germans. A creative chapter on postwar culture conveys the dramatic impact of television in 1950s Quebec. If it opened up a world of consumerism, it also provided a forum for Quebec artists and entertainers. Quebeckers bonded around little black and white screens aglow with hockey, the comical Plouffe family, and a particularly riveting journalist named René Lévesque. Mann=s discussion of women is less felicitous. Building blocks were lacking: non-hagiographic historical writing on Quebec women=s history has been (and, according to historian Micheline Dumont, still is) rather thin. The author substitutes gendered analogy for gendered history in asserting the British Conquest was like rape; but neither the Quebec Act=s concessions to French law and custom fifteen years after conquest nor the ability to launch rebellion in 1837 suggest the battered and demoralized victim of a rape. A chapter on the 1970s that interweaves feminism with separatism and nationalism is confusing. Mann does summarize well the cautious feminism of...