Histoire sociale des idees au Quebec (review)

In Quebec historiography, the 1970s can certainly be characterized as the golden age of research on ideologies. At the very beginning of that decade, Fernand Dumont, Jean Hamelin, and Jean-Paul Montminy supervised the production of a series of volumes on Les idéologies au Canada français, in which graduate students wrote chapters analysing the ideologies in Quebec newspapers - large and small, well-known or obscure - and organizations from 1850 to 1976. As a sociologist, Dumont himself produced a theory of ideologies in his important 1974 book, Les ideologies. He also prefaced the now-classic study of Jean-Paul Bernard, Les rouges, published in 1971. It is in this decade that a flurry of important theses and books by Nadia Eid, René Hardy, Pierre Savard, and others established the now-standard view on liberalism and ultramontanism with its heroes and villains. Toward the end of that decade, in 1977, a first synthesis, written by the political scientist Denis Monière, was published under the title Le développement des idéologies au Québec: des origines à nos jours. More analytic than narrative, it proposed a periodization that has changed little since then: New France, 1760-91, 1791-1840, 1840-67, 1867-96, 1896-1929, 1929-45, and 1945 to the date of publication. Interestingly Monière tells us that his periods were chosen to highlight the progressive forces that contributed to or hindered the economic and political liberation of Quebec workers (10). Though more recent writers on Quebec ideologies probably do not share such an explicit ideology, their periods still remain essentially the same.

Now, a quarter of a century later, renowned historian Yvan Lamonde proposes a vast new synthesis in three volumes covering the period 1760-1960, two of which have now been published and are reviewed here. There is no point in trying to summarize once more the many ideological debates of that vast period. Assuming that interested readers will read the books to learn the history of Quebec ideologies, we will concentrate on general issues raised by this trilogy. For even in the absence of volume 3, the general approach of the author is clearly fixed and will hardly change in the last volume.

Despite its use of the more trendy expression of 'social history of ideas,' the narrative of this descriptive synthesis is part of the tradition of history of ideologies that emerged in the 1970s. In that sense, the title is a misnomer, and a more exact title would have been 'History of Political Ideas in Quebec,' or more directly, 'A History of Ideologies in Quebec.' The fact that four chapters out of fifteen in volume 1 cover the history of cultural institutions (focusing mostly on Lamonde's own work and fields of interest on printers, libraries, the commerce of books, and the Instituts canadiens) does not change the main trend of focusing attention on political and religious leaders and other ideologues like Tardivel. The main periodization clearly reflects this bias towards the usual political events: 1760-1815, 1815-40, 1840-77, and 1877-97, for volume 1. Here 1815 is chosen to reflect European influence on North American politics, and 1877 replaces the usual 1867 because Lamonde sees in Wilfrid Laurier's discourse on liberalism in 1877 a major turning point in the debate with the ultramontanes. He insists on that event not only in volume 1 but also repeatedly in volume 2, where he tells us that this discourse contributed to his election in ... 1896 (2:269). In the second volume, the periodization is more simple and has only three parts: 1896-1917 and 1917-28, with a third covering the whole period plus one year (1896-1929) in which he discusses some educational and cultural events as well as French and American influences. Not surprisingly, this volume focuses - too heavily, for the taste of this reviewer - on l'Action française (French as well...