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JOURNAL OF CANADIAN STUDIES Editor Associate Editors Editorial Assistants Editorial Board RALPH HEINTZMAN DAYID CAMERON JOHN WADLAND ARLENE DAVIS MARGARET PEARCE JEAN-PIERRE LAPOINTE MARGARET LAURENCE HARVEY McCUE JACQUES MONET, S.J. W.L. MORTON W.F.W. NEVILLE GORDON ROPER DONALD V. SMILEY DENIS SMITH PHILIP STRATFORD T.H.B. SYMONS W.E. TAYLOR CLARA THOMAS MELVILLE H. WATKINS ALAN WILSON Image and Consequence REVUE D'ETUDES CANADIENNES Directeur Directeurs adjoints Assistantes Comite de redaction In the current debate about the future of Canada and of the relations between Frenchand English-speaking Canadians, the tone and quality of the discussion are inevitably influenced by the images which both communities have of each other and of themselves. The ideas which one society entertains about the other colour its interpretation of the origin of the contemporary Canadian crisis and of the possibilities for the future. Each community's vision of the other one determines the share of blame they may assign to each other and the degree of enthusiasm for common or separate careers. With many important exceptions, Englishspeaking Canada's view of Quebec has been a relatively consistent one. For generations, most English-speaking Canadians looked upon French Canada as a backward society which was the author of its own misfortune. If French Canadians were economically less developed than other Canadians, if they were dominated and exploited by an obscurantist clergy, if their education system was impoverished and unsuited to the needs of a modern society, if they were corrupted and abused by a host of self-serving and unscrupulous politicians - and most of these things were assumed to be more or less true then the fault lay with the French Canadians themselves and in their own wilful backwardness . The failing of French-Canadian society was essentially cultural and ideological. It was a failure of will. Journal ofCanadian Studies This view of French-Canadian society was and is widely held in English-speaking Canada, but more so outside the scholarly community than within it. There have always been a number of English-Canadian intellectuals able to go beyond these stereotypes, but in English-speaking society at large they have been remarkably persistent. In Quebec, perhaps naturally enough, the situation was reversed. The mass of French Canadians were unlikely to embrace such an unflattering description of their own society, but there has always been a group of FrenchCanadian intellectuals whose assessment of their society was similar to that of the least generous English-speaking Canadians. According to these French Canadians, the problem of Quebec society was indeed a cultural one. French Canada was what it was because French Canadians wanted it that way. If they were out of step with the rest of the world (a fact which was simply assumed - and also assumed to be a bad thing) it was because they chose to be so. If they wished to change the circumstances of their society, nothing stood in their way. All that was required was an act of will. This interpretation of French-Canadian society probably reached its highest level of acceptance among Quebec intellectuals in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties. At that time, the leading edge of young FrenchCanadian writers and social critics, especially those associated with the magazine Cite fibre, developed an analysis of Quebec society which was strikingly similar, in its substance and severity, to the traditional English-Canadian view. They too condemned Quebec society for its backwardness, and corruption, a state of affairs they attributed above all to the weakness of its·traditional ideology. The unanimity of internal and external critics contributed to the invention of the myth of the Quiet Revolution. According to the myth, the election of the Lesage government in 1960 was the great turning point of Quebec history. Before 1960, Quebec remained plunged in the gloom of a reactionary culture and state. After 1960, the province was rapidly transformed into a progressive, modern society, one which, to the immense self-satisfaction of many English Canadians, seemed much more like their own. This arbitrary, and now widely accepted, division of Quebec history into the uniform bleakness 2 of the pre-Quiet Revolution years ("la grande noirceur") and the long...

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