Quand la jeunesse entre en scene: l'Action catholique avant la Revolution tranquille (review)

Since the 1980s, religious history in Quebec has experienced a considerable revival of interest among historians. To date, much of this work has turned upon a debate surrounding the timing and 'revolutionary' nature of changing Roman Catholic popular religious practices over the five decades extending between 1840 and 1890. Unfortunately, this historiography has either consigned twentieth-century transformations of Catholicism and their relationship to society and culture to relative obscurity, or has preferred to repeat the conventional ideology of the Quiet Revolution, in which Catholicism was synonymous with the political power wielded by a clerical caste, destined to inevitable displacement and marginalization by the growth of the modern state. However, another current of historical study, focused on the various Catholic Action movements that arose during the economic and social crisis of the 1930s, has begun to suggestively delineate a new and more dynamic intersection between Roman Catholicism and Quebec society, one that has tilted the balance away from the clerical ideologies and actions and towards laypeople. Of these recent revisionist works, Louise Bienvenue's Quand la jeunesse entre en scène is the most sophisticated and far-ranging, for unlike works such as Jean-Pierre Collin's La ligue ouvrière catholique canadienne, 1938-1954 (1996) and Lucie Piché's Femmes et changement social au Quebec: L'apport de la jeunesse ouvrière catholique féminine, 1931-1966 (2003), Bienvenue's volume is not limited to a single movement or a part of a movement, but provides a comprehensive examination of the structure of Catholic Action, as well as its content and function as a coherent public ideology over the first two decades of its existence.

The particular contribution of this study to the historiography of twentieth-century Quebec lies in its attempt to intersect the history of Catholicism with a wider international debate surrounding the history of youth. As Bienvenue notes in the introduction, the tendency among historians is to view 'youth' as an anthropological constant, rather than as a constructed, always fluctuating social category, one that can be analysed by historians to reveal wider social relationships. What was significant about the church's investment in Catholic Action during the 1930s was, according to the author, the explicit construction of youth as a social identity and as a category of public space. However, the author is well aware of the ambiguities of this new Catholic message: Although the youth movements deployed a generational language of contestation to critique the inability of adults to act as authority figures, these groups never intended to abolish age hierarchies or contest parental or clerical control in the private sphere. In contrast to previous studies of Catholic Action, which have largely accepted at face value the 'apolitical' and 'anti-nationalist' tenets of these movements, Bienvenue penetrates beneath this language to suggest a far more complicated relationship that prevailed between Quebec youth and nationalism and the political sphere. By the late 1940s, despite continued suspicion of manipulation by state authorities, the leaders of Catholic Action youth had largely reworked the corporatist ideology of 'intermediate' bodies standing outside of politics, to view their role as a liberal pressure group seeking to act upon government institutions and policies.

Throughout this study, the author does not lose sight of the central purpose: the elaboration of a dynamic relationship between Catholicism and changing definitions of youth as a social category. Indeed, the 'modern' definition of youth identity, which we would conventionally link with the cultural revolution of the 1960s - that youth was a time of preparation outside of work, narrowly identified with teenage years and student life, and characterized by excessive individual self-expression - was in fact a key aspect of post-Second World War developments within Catholic Action. The exposure of a number of Catholic youth leaders to a new 'internationalism' led significantly to the restriction of the broad social category of 'youth' - once inclusive of everyone aged fifteen to...