THE QUIET REVOLUTION
The numerous major changes that took place or were initiated in Québec society during the 1960s are known as the Quiet Revolution. This decade offers a remarkable instance of collective dynamism that brought about profound collective transformations. During this period, the French Canadians of Québec, who represented around 80% of the population of this Canadian province, made a spectacular recovery,Footnote 2 and succeeded in transforming their collective identity.
It would be wrong to describe pre-1960 Québec as a “stagnant” society, given the scope of the positive changes it had undergone since the end of the nineteenth century (urbanization, industrialization, and economic growth, increased fertility and lower infant mortality, increasing primary literacy, and so on). That, however, does not detract from a number of well-documented facts: French Canadians, as an ethnic group, were socially and economically severely disadvantaged in relation to Anglophone Canadians. They were characterized by many Canadians and Americans as culturally inferior, overly community-oriented, unable to occupy high-level jobs, unfit for the challenges of modern life. These stereotypes were largely internalized by the Francophones (D'Allemagne Reference D'Allemagne1966; Harvey Reference Harvey1970; Vallières Reference Vallières1968). Québec political life was plagued with nepotism, corruption, and dysfunction. Post-secondary education was underdeveloped. The Catholic Church had, by and large, been an influential agent of conservatism, opposing modernity and exerting control or close surveillance over several spheres of collective life such as education, the family, welfare, labor relations, and the media. Censorship (mostly church-based) was still widely practiced at the end of the 1950s. Social thought, arts, and literature were impoverished by a submissive stance toward France acting as an authoritative normative center. Creativity, innovation, and bold collective endeavours were hindered by an acute sense of fragility and insecurity fostered by Québec's cultural minority status in North America. Finally, advocates of reform were in the minority and the very idea of change was considered highly controversial.
Against this backdrop, the Quiet Revolution has been widely interpreted as a major watershed in Québec's history. It is said to have brought about or initiated profound transformations and marked an abrupt break with the past, thanks to the initiatives of new elites that spearheaded a strong movement of national emancipation of Francophone Québécois, a movement that has rekindled the old dream of an autonomous if not a politically independent Québec.Footnote 3 Numerous studies have been published on this outstanding decade. Some of them, mainly excerpts from historical textbooks, offer short overviews of the period. Others focus on one particular dimension (the new national literature, the emergence of Francophone economic power, the restructuring of the State, the embrace of a liberal nationalism, and so on).Footnote 4
The paper seeks to investigate a debate that unfolded in the 1960s over the choice of a national language in Québec. At the time there was widespread agreement that French should be the national language, but what kind of French? The Parisian French that the elites were widely promoting or a vernacular form spoken by less educated Francophone Québécois? I analyze this question by focusing on the discursive strategies of a group of young leftist radicals who, through a new journal, Parti pris,Footnote 5 set out to advance the destigmatization and the emancipation of Francophone Québécois by way of a change in the national language. As I will demonstrate, however, Parti pris's discourse, like most ideologies, was fraught with contradictions: for instance, promoting a Québec vernacular language while resorting to Parisian French in their own writing. As we have learned from intellectual history, contradictions are frequently overcome by inventing or calling upon efficient myths that restore consistency or an appearance of consistency (Bouchard Reference Bouchard2003). The analysis looks closely at this aspect of Parti pris by scrutinizing the articles it published. More specifically, I seek to understand how and to what extent the intellectuals involved were successful in transcending those contradictions. However, the reader must bear in mind that the following analysis is intended neither to criticize Parti pris's thought nor plead in favour of the popular language known as joual.Footnote 6 It is an attempt to describe the deadlocks that beset Francophone society at that time.
This essay draws upon the approach to the study of destigmatization strategies developed by Michèle Lamont.Footnote 7 The originality of the paper is to focus on language as a collective tool for destigmatization at the national level. It also draws on a content analysis of a group of intellectuals' writings rather than oral data derived from interviews with ordinary people and expressing every day responses to perceived stigmatization. The paper also addresses the question of the efficacy of the symbolic destigmatizing strategies.
PARTI PRIS: A DECOLONIZATION AGENDA
Founded in 1963, Parti pris advocated no less than a revolutionary program for Québec. This journal aimed to free what was defined as an oppressed, colonized, and alienated nation from the grip of Anglo-capitalism and the Canadian political framework. It called for the downfall of the bourgeoisie (Francophone as well as Anglophone), the introduction of socialism, the liberation of the working class, the political independence of Québec from Canada, and a clear separation of state and church. The periodical was run by a group of ten to fifteen young, well-educated intellectuals, some of them with a working-class background.Footnote 8 Hard-core Marxists taking their cue from radical theorists and philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Berque, Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi, they sought to make the Quiet Revolution less quiet, so to speak.Footnote 9 They wished to replicate in Québec the decolonization movement that was still rocking Latin America, Africa, and Asia. To that end, they developed fairly sophisticated arguments in order to convince other Québec intellectuals, union leaders as well as members of the working class, to gain a greater awareness of their condition and to launch social protests, strikes, street actions, even violent acts. Having rejected the idea of a liberal democracy, they were prepared to use whatever means were available to them to break the bourgeois political and social order. They went as far as to flirt with the idea of terrorism (Chamberland Reference Chamberland1966, pp. 2–3).
According to one of their theses, the lousy popular language spoken in Québec, the joual, was a legacy and a reflection of the oppression inflicted upon Francophones by two centuries of colonization. Strangely enough, they depicted joual not only as a by-product but also as a cause of colonization. Consequently, the Parti pris activists believed that, by changing the status and/or the form of the language, they could bring about a significant change in the social order, thus contributing to the emancipation of Francophones. Some believe that upgrading the status of joual could lead to upgrading its speakers.Footnote 10 That, at least, was one of the viewpoints that the journal promoted. However, Parti pris folded in 1968 and the movement aborted both as a destigmatizing and as a revolutionary endeavour.
PARTI PRIS: A CONTRADICTORY ARGUMENTFootnote 11
Parti pris's program failed to materialize. Overall, as a revolutionary initiative, it was clearly a failure, which is not to say that it had no impact on public debate. Indeed, it influenced the minds of many young Québécois who, thanks to this radical, nonconformist journal, could develop a taste for social criticism and political militancy. It also influenced those who engaged in terrorism within the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ).Footnote 12
The failure of Parti pris's revolutionary endeavour had various causes. One of them was the fact that as an oppressed and resource-poor people, the Francophones were not that badly off when compared to African Americans or to most Third World societies in the 1960s. After all, Québécois had been living for a long time in a liberal democratic country and, despite their inferior socioeconomic status within Canada (see note 2), they were not tragically deprived in terms of living conditions.
Broadly speaking, I have pinpointed three major loci of contradiction and ambivalence in the journal's argumentation. I describe them below.
Joual: Beautiful and Praiseworthy or Ugly and Shameful?
Parti pris's position perpetuated an old argument condemning joual as a vulgar, degraded form of French that had flourished mostly among the popular classes and that inspired shame and ought to be eliminated (Brault Reference Brault1965, p. 44; Chamberland Reference Chamberland1965, pp. 34–36; D'Allemagne Reference D'Allemagne1966, pp. 80, 82, 87; Girouard Reference Girouard1964a, p. 63; Godin Reference Godin1965a, Reference Godin1965b, p. 57; Major Reference Major and Major1965b, p. 13; Parti pris 1963a, p. 3; Renaud Reference Renaud1965). In this respect, Parti pris was pursuing an old tradition among Québec's intellectual elite (Bouchard Reference Bouchard1998). As poet Paul Chamberland said in an interview with Malcolm Reid (Reference Reid1972), joual is a “decomposition of language, it is not a language. It is a monster” (p. 99–100). However, the periodical brought something new to the old argument. Strategically, it rejected the well-known solution favoured by traditional elites, which consisted in humiliating ordinary people, identifying them as ignorant, and making them feel shame for the way they spoke and, by the same token, for their identity as poor manual workers.Footnote 13 Rather, Parti pris adopted a pedagogical stance where the best course of action was to promote joual in novels and plays. This strategy was meant to help ordinary people to come to realize the ugliness of joual and to want to improve their language. Such was what could be called the self-therapy approach to joual.Footnote 14
Often by the pen of the same writers, Parti pris would simultaneously set forth the opposite view: articles suggested that joual was the authentic creation of Francophone society and it should be preserved and promoted for this reason (Cloutier Reference Cloutier1966; Godin Reference Godin1965a, p. 19; Major Reference Major and Major1965b). Joual was also depicted as a beautiful language, full of life and truth, sensitive, pure, and poetic, in tune with Québec's reality and filled with numerous and wonderful inventions that expressed the soul of the nation. Consequently, what needed to be changed was the negative, condescending attitude of the elites toward the language, not the language itself. The goal was to reveal the beauty underlying the apparent ugliness so that everyone could agree that joual was a valuable part of Québec culture (Brochu Reference Brochu1965a, pp. 56–59, 62; Reference Brochu1965b, p. 58; Chamberland Reference Chamberland1965, p. 37; Godin Reference Godin1965a, p. 19; Maheu Reference Maheu1965, p. 4; Renaud Reference Renaud1965, p. 21). That moment would be celebrated as a reappropriation and a reconquest over the colonized past since it was believed that joual—or more precisely the disparaging of joual—was said to be a legacy of the British and English Canadian colonizers. That was the redeeming approach to joual.Footnote 15
Over time, as described in Larose (Reference Larose2004), some contributors to the journal considered establishing joual as the Québec (national) language, thus flatly rejecting the Parisian norm (pp. 183–186). This idea was short-lived (Gauvin Reference Gauvin1974) although it was revived in the 1970s by a new generation of authors. As much as the contributors to the journal resented the absence of a Québec language (stressing the fact that joual was not a language), they refrained from venturing further (Brochu Reference Brochu1965a, p. 56; André Major interviewed in Cloutier Reference Cloutier1966, p. 27; Girouard Reference Girouard1963, p. 33; Reference Girouard1964a, p. 64). However, some wished to use it as a literary language, at least on a temporary basis, until the revolution produced its purifying effects. Again, this quest for an original language (“une langue à soi,” or “a language that is ours” as one commentator put it) was deeply rooted in Québec's literary tradition, originating in the poet Octave Crémazie's call for a new language, in a celebrated 1867 letter (Gauvin Reference Gauvin2000, pp. 17–32).
To Change the Society or to Change the Language?
Let us take a step back and examine again the scenario where joual was depicted as undesirable and ugly. There were two conflicting options. According to the first one, joual was a social fact inherited from a long period of colonization.Footnote 16 It mirrored two centuries of oppression—hence the need for revolution as the only appropriate solution (Brault Reference Brault1965; Chamberland Reference Chamberland1966; D'Allemagne Reference D'Allemagne1966; Miron Reference Miron1965; Parti pris 1963b).Footnote 17 Decolonization and revolution alone would root out the deep seeds of this collective stigma. According to the second option, joual itself (whatever its origins) was the problem. It was a source of shame and humiliation (Chamberland Reference Chamberland1965; Renaud Reference Renaud1965). Therefore, its speakers had a duty to correct it, that is: to “improve” their language and even (at least implicitly) to align it with Parisian French (or what was also vaguely called International French), just as conservative intellectuals had, for a long time, advocated. The first option called for a radical change in society, while the second sought to change the language. These conflicting positions did not leave much room for compromise or intermediate arrangements, especially given that the Parisian norm was highly elitist and often legitimized in an authoritarian and paternalistic fashion.
The Old French Catch-22
From another standpoint, Parti pris intellectuals were caught in a double bind. On the one hand, they were not prepared to use joual as a literary medium as this would open the way to a parochialization of Québec culture, a perspective that was not palatable to those talented young writers eager to be published and to be read widely (including in France).Footnote 18 Moreover, some believed that by adopting Parisian French, they could help Québécois become fully part of a great, hegemonic civilization (as France was still perceived in the 1960s). On the other hand, writing in Parisian French meant succumbing to another form of colonization and alienation since the superior Parisian norm was also deemed foreign and unauthentic to the Quebec population (Brault Reference Brault1965, p. 44; Brochu Reference Brochu1965b, p. 58; Girouard Reference Girouard1963, p. 32). Thus, for Parti pris intellectuals, the scenario that would have been consistent with their social commitment conflicted with their cultural ambitions.Footnote 19
Interestingly, this catch-22 was also expressed prior to the foundation of Parti pris by a young conservative cleric (Jean-Paul Desbiens, aka Frère Untel) who popularized the word joual (although he did not coin it) in his celebrated Reference Desbiens1960 book.Footnote 20 A passionately dedicated teacher, he deplored joual, which he denounced as a shameful, humiliating language. At the same time, he never really came to terms with the Parisian norm that he perceived as snobbish and a source of alienation.Footnote 21 However, he did not go so far as to blame joual on political inferiority or colonization and to call for radical social change. His influence was considerable but ambiguous, since this writer never overcame the contradictions described above.Footnote 22 Yet Frère Untel nevertheless blazed the trail for more radical (although not more successful) undertakings.Footnote 23
Those are, briefly summarized, the contradictions of Parti pris's ideology about language. Subsidiary inconsistencies also hampered its efforts. For example, as advocates of popular culture, many important writers put themselves in a rather delicate position by using very little joual (or none at all) in their own poems and novels.Footnote 24 Others, such as Jacques Renaud (Reference Renaud1964) in his book Le Cassé, used joual and their work became emblematic of a new populist trend in fiction.Footnote 25 Nevertheless, Parti pris published very little joual literature during the decade. Moreover, by distancing themselves as intellectuals from joual and from French-Canadian popular culture, some writers were anxious about betraying their people, and even their family. For instance, Pierre Vallières (Reference Vallières1968), the author of Nègres blancs d'Amérique [White Niggers of America], forcefully expressed that feeling. He experienced as deeply distressing the fact that he was well educated while his father was illiterate and working as a journeyman (pp. 176, 189, 200). Similarly, Parti pris writers also felt discomfort or even a sense of alienation in belonging to an intellectual elite and in posturing as proletarians. This uneasiness translated into a distrust of aestheticism in literature, cast as a form of dilettantism. This was admittedly a strange stance for a group of poets and novelists (Aquin Reference Aquin1964; Brochu Reference Brochu1965a, pp. 56–57; Godin Reference Godin1965b; Miron Reference Miron1965).Footnote 26 Further, Parti pris authors did not display strong revolutionary convictions but featured indecisive, soul-searching, powerless, even remorseful heroes in their fiction. Their novels and essays often expressed cynicism, disenchantment, confusion, inaction, and failure.Footnote 27
Finally, after a failed attempt at political action in the Mouvement de libération populaire (Popular Liberation Movement) launched in 1965, Parti pris seemed willing to revise, if not to interrupt, its commitment to revolutionary action. An editorial announced a shift towards theorizing the Revolution rather than practising it, prompting some critics to wonder about the future of the journal and its ability to carry out its initial social and cultural agenda.
The journal's contributors also presented surprising blind spots. Amazingly, no clear definition of joual is to be found in Parti pris and other sources of the period. Rather, the journal offers various (often vague) definitions drawing on one or a combination of the following elements: Anglicisms, neologisms, syntactic improprieties or any violation of the French norm, popular language, the language of the poor, mispronunciations, impurities, the French spoken in big cities (particularly in Montréal), vestiges of obsolete seventeenth-century French (mostly in rural areas), a spontaneous language freed from any norm and censorship, the way most Québécois speak, the way male (“macho”) Québécois speak, the language of the countryside, the language of a defeated people. For some, joual was very old, yet for others it had appeared only in the 1950s. Overall, such uncertainty was detrimental since it made it very difficult to 1) produce a rigorous explanation of the source of joual and 2) elaborate a strategy that would have overcome the old dilemma.
In another vein, there was a consensual view that joual was the product of two centuries of colonization but, surprisingly again, there was no demonstration of this major assumption. Apart from the obvious influence of Canadian and American English on the language spoken by ordinary Québécois,Footnote 28 one wonders through what channels and mechanisms colonization distorted and impoverished the French-Canadian language. For instance, through what mechanism would this colonialism be exercised in joual-speaking rural regions removed from Anglophone influence?Footnote 29 That virtually no one seriously addressed this question may, in itself, be telling. Of course, the decolonization theory was so widespread at the time that it did not need a demonstration. However, could it be that in the Québec context, the colonial explanation was taken for granted because it was so convenient to all? Thus, one could blame the enemy for the despised language. This approach also left intellectuals blameless and free to look elsewhere for causes of collective failure. In fact, from an opposing viewpoint, were they not guilty of destigmatizing joual, a language that otherwise could have been considered a normal linguistic phenomenon, i.e., the expected by-product of oral culture over several centuries? Likewise, no effort was made to substantiate the claim that decolonization would spell the end of joual (another major contention). Besides, democratic, universal education was never mentioned as a possible tool to change the popular language, as had been the case in France, for example, through the Republican school system since the nineteenth century.
Lastly, Parti pris writers themselves expressed a basic view of Québec culture as utterly contradictory, stymied by old, insuperable deadlocks. According to Paul Chamberland (Reference Chamberland1965), for instance, there was a disorder underlying the day-to-day existence of the Francophones—a basic inconsistency, “l'incohérence fondamentale” (p. 37).Footnote 30
EMANCIPATION THROUGH LANGUAGE: A COMPARATIVE VIEW
My thesis is that Parti pris intellectuals were unable to overcome their contradictions. According to a first option, they could have made clear radical choices that would have eliminated their ambivalence: choosing the approach of therapy over redemption, the social over the normative strategy, authenticity over “quality,” joual over Parisian French—or the opposite. They rejected that option. Under a second scenario, they could have invented efficient myths that would have worked as mediating devices and allowed them to obviate their quandaries. This, precisely, is a common function of myth: to give an apparent consistency to contradictory propositions and transform them into powerful symbolic tenets. Again, Parti pris intellectuals failed to do so, which a few comparative studies of nations of the New World highlight.
In the following section, Québec is compared to other countries and to other minorities of the New World, which is doubly relevant since Québec was a cultural minority within Canada as well as a collectivity asserting itself as a nation struggling for political sovereignty.
Somewhere in their past, most of the New World incipient national cultures had to face the challenge of adopting a common language that would set them apart from their European mother countries. Most of them, however, responded differently to the challenge. In order to ground their distinctiveness and to secure their autonomy, they sought in the first place to avoid the language of their mother country. As a substitute, many considered inventing a language from scratch or borrowing from the Aboriginal peoples, from antiquity (Hebrew, Greek, Latin), and so forth. None of the options worked and, finally, all of those new nations turned to the language of their mother country. The conundrum that they then confronted was: how to fabricate distinctiveness from sameness, and more specifically, how to borrow without feeling indebted and dependent?Footnote 31
In this regard, the United States, Mexico, Australia, and Brazil were particularly successful. They retained and appropriated their mother country's language by magnifying their (sometimes minor) lexical and syntactic differences in such a way that they could anchor and reinforce their national identity. In the United States, this was achieved through a drawn-out process initiated in 1783 by Noah Webster, who published in 1838 the first edition of his celebrated dictionary (touted as the “founding” act of American English). Originally, every cultural feature coming from Great Britain was deemed corrupt but it was thought that the English language would be purified by the New World environment and by the noble uses to which it was put. Collectively, Americans exhibited a lot of self-confidence, even considering the language spoken in England as a dialect, inferior to American English. According to Mencken (Reference Mencken1926), British and American English had become two different languages: the former was exhausted and rapidly declining, the latter was flourishing, spurred by the regenerating forces of the new land and blazing the trail for all future civilizations and literatures (pp. 34–39). Thus, a strong mythology of the New World and its great future was a key factor in this case.
A similar situation was found in Mexico. According to an old national myth, this young country would spearhead a powerful movement towards a new race—even a “cosmic” race (Vasconcelos Reference Vasconcelos1925)—and an unprecedented civilization, through intense miscegenation. As Bouchard (Reference Bouchard2008) writes, like the United States, from the nineteenth century onward, Mexico had less a past to celebrate than a future to build (pp. 153–181). From the late nineteenth century onward, Australia shared the same optimism. According to Baker (Reference Baker1945), while the English of England had become “inadequate or effete,” the Australian language was new, original, inventive, and unique, and it was revitalizing English (p. 6). In Brazil, the same self-confidence led the elites to distance themselves from Portugal in the second half of the nineteenth century. They felt that they deserved a more prestigious and more progressive mother country, so they turned to Western Europe, particularly to France as the source of the great culture to imitate, starting with the French language which became the hallmark of distinction and a second national language among the dominant classes of Brazil. As for the Portuguese language, it became during the same period a truly Brazilian language, the year Reference Alencar1865 being a major landmark with the publication of Iracema, a mythical novel by Jose de Alencar. This stance was subsequently bolstered by the powerful myth of anthropophagy through which Brazilian intellectuals were able to reconcile their attachment to their indigenous roots and their aspiration to universality embodied by the prestigious European, especially French, culture. Indeed, according to this metaphor crafted by Oswaldo de Andrade (Reference Andrade and Caws2001) in his 1928 Manifesto Antropofago, all cultural norms or patterns that were imposed upon Brazilians as foreign or “other” should be eaten, devoured, and metabolized. As a result, the European culture was appropriated and it strengthened the Brazilian identity without igniting a feeling of alienation (Bouchard Reference Bouchard2008, pp. 163–164).
The short history of Ebonics (the term was coined in 1973) in the United States offers another example of self-assertiveness, although not on the same scale and in a quite different context. In this case, for African Americans, the shame associated with the practice of a so-called lousy, inferior language disappears once it is assumed that there are two different languages at work. Indeed, linguists such as Smith (Reference Smith, Perry and Delpit1998), O'Neil (Reference O'Neil, Perry and Delpit1998), Rickford (Reference Rickford, Perry and Delpit1998), and others have provided support for this linguistic duality myth.Footnote 32 Historians have also unearthed the roots of Ebonics in old African languages, as opposed to American English, which belongs to the Germanic linguistic family. Some argued that as a result, Black children do not have to feel guilty if they get poor marks at school since they were not taught in their mother tongue. Overall, what is remarkable is that a group of African Americans were able to invent and to sustain the myth of Ebonics as a language in and of itself despite the risk of isolation from the powerful American mainstream culture. Indeed—and this is further testimony of the power of myth—studies have shown that young Blacks who had enrolled in Ebonics classes (or in classes that took into account their vernacular language) performed better in standard English, thus proving that somehow Ebonics can favour integration rather than isolation (Perry and Delpit, Reference Perry and Delpit1998, pp. XI, 19, 146).
One can argue that, finally, Ebonics did not succeed in significantly upgrading the African American culture and putting it on a par with the American English. Nevertheless, Ebonics remains an interesting episode of assertiveness that, at least for a moment, opened a way out of the double bind.
Other examples could be evoked, illustrating discursive ways to transcend apparent symbolic deadlocks at the level of vernacular language. In Haiti, for instance, the cultural elites adopted Parisian French, despite their reluctance to borrow from a former colonizer that had crushed their Republican revolution and restored slavery on the island. To overcome that feeling, they invented the “pirating” myth, meaning that they had stolen the French language as if it were a spoil of war or more precisely, an act of piracy. This imagery was all the more appropriate since it resonated with the turbulent history of the Caribbean and the folklore of Haiti.Footnote 33 As to the “spoils of war” metaphor, it is also widely used in former French colonies in Africa in the same spirit, namely in the works of the Algerian activist Kateb Yacine.
Lastly, again in the French Caribbean islands (more specifically in Martinique), the “créolité” metaphor (introduced in the 1930s by Aimé Césaire and further developed in the 1980s by Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, Jean Barnabé, and others) proved quite successful. It calls for a syncretism of indigenous and French inputs, as well as the oral and the literary, aiming at a cultural reinvention that preserves the local and the universal. As a result, most of the Caribbean writers have been able to use Parisian French (and to publish most of their works in France) without feeling alienated (Barnabé et al., Reference Barnabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant1989). Concurrently, they also promoted the oral and written uses of creole, again without feeling torn between two incompatible options (Aguila Reference Aguila and Pérez1980). In that sense, their endeavour was successful compared to what happened in Québec.
THE FAILURE OF PARTI PRIS: AN EXPLANATION
These narratives of vernacular languages share a defining feature. Favorable power relations and self-confidence prove to be key factors in their survival in that it allows a population to make clear, sometimes radical, choices and to be comfortable with them. As we have seen, the production of robust supporting myths that unleash energy and incite collective mobilization is another defining factor. In contrast, Francophone Québécois were unable—and perhaps could not afford—to make that kind of choice. From a linguistic point of view, they could have endorsed the duality thesis by drawing on the lexical and syntactic idiosyncrasies of Québec French. But they stopped midway in that direction. This was the case for Parti pris writers who like most other Québec intellectuals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, felt intimidated by the towering figure of France, the powerful, prestigious, and authoritative center of international Francophonie. Unlike the New World intellectuals mentioned above, they failed to invent and to promote the myths that would have resolved the quandary. Although there was no shortage of candidates, none of them prevailed since they were just mentioned fleetingly, without being seriously pursued. This is the case, for instance, of the idea of a wild unfettered French (“un français sauvage”) set forth by Godbout (Reference Godbout1974), or the idea of the adaptable language of “Cantouques,”Footnote 34 or the figure of the bastard's language, free, averse to imposed norms, nurtured on day-to-day experiences, always at home,Footnote 35 and so on.
A number of Parti pris writers navigated among those contradictions and conflicting options without addressing them squarely to offer a plausible account. To be sure, they realized their difficult position and they certainly suffered from it. But their deep feelings remained unspoken. However, some of them developed an awareness of their quandary and the challenge to find a way out. André Brochu (Reference Brochu1965b), for example, wrote about the need to achieve a synthesis of joual and Parisian French rather than to oppose them (p. 59). As to how this synthesis would be accomplished, he said only that it had to be the outcome of an internal dynamics of liberation contingent on the forces of Québec society. Others were less optimistic. As quoted by Gauvin (Reference Gauvin1974), Jean Basile, a literary critic at the major quality newspaper Le Devoir, asserted that Parti Pris failed to create the synthesis that would have freed joual from its unsavoury character while preserving its roots and vitality (p. 103). Somehow, this failure is epitomized by the narrator of the short story Peau neuve (Major Reference Major and Major1965b) who, confronted with the challenge of inventing a new language between joual and Parisian French, simply gave up.
As a result, even today, Québec is believed to be one of the very few nations in the New World that has not yet settled its national language question.Footnote 36 Why?
Québec history provides a twofold answer. First, Francophone Québec is a minority culture in North America and, since 1763,Footnote 37 it has had to wage a constant battle to resist assimilation attempts and to secure its future. Francophones have fought in the political arena to obtain legal protection of their linguistic rights and to be recognized as a nation. But Anglophones often depicted them as having no culture and as speaking not a real language but a patois, or slang. Thus, they were perceived as not deserving to be treated as a nation and their so-called dialect was not entitled to legal protection by the Canadian government. That is what the Governor, Lord Durham, had stated in an infamous Reference Durham1839 report: advocating the assimilation of Francophones into the superior English race, he referred to them as “a people without history and without literature” (pp. 112–113). As a strategy to counter that argument, Québec elites chose to define their nation as a cultural part of France in America. On this basis, they could claim that Québécois shared the same prestigious legacy and were parties of the same grandeur. The strategy worked quite well but, in return, it fostered a deep dependency on the mother country and an acute sense of fragility. The relationship to France became an umbilical cord. Like their forebears, Parti pris intellectuals were reluctant to sever that tie. They did not muster the resolve to set Francophone Québec on a course of its own. In that sense, there was no manifest destiny for Québec, only an ambiguous and uncertain future.
Québec history teaches us a second lesson. Each society relies on a set of founding or master myths, that is, basic, comprehensive, and relatively stable symbolic configurations that act as a matrix. At the secondary level, these matrixes dictate the production of derivative myths that are more amenable to change (Bouchard, Reference Bouchard and BouchardForthcoming). In keeping with the ever-changing contexts and conjunctures, every society must occasionally retranslate its set of derivative myths in order to articulate them more clearly or attune them more closely to the particular challenges of the time. In the long run, master myths also undergo some change but at a much slower pace. Besides, derivative myths can themselves act as master myths (at a third level) insofar as they give rise to other derivative myths. As a result, the structure of a collective imaginary can be seen as a complex pyramidal architecture comprising two or more layers of myths, master and derivative.
For the purpose of this essay, I want to highlight two of the master myths that have sustained Québec culture since the second half of the eighteenth century. First, there is the myth of the fragile, uncertain, threatened minority culture, always struggling to secure its future and in constant need of protection against the powerful Anglophone (Canadian and American) culture, and now against globalization. There is also the master myth of the oppressed, colonized, humiliated nation in search of emancipation and affirmation and dreaming of a reconquest in various spheres of collective life.Footnote 38 While the latter myth incites individuals to bold undertakings that seek to repair the trauma, such as the Quiet Revolution or the sovereignty movement, the former inspires fear, restraint, and even withdrawal. Thus, these two powerful symbolic forces tend to contradict each other; one galvanizes and pushes forward while the other holds back.
With this key in hand, one can revisit and shed a new light on major episodes in Québec's history, constantly alternating between collective expressions of energy and lethargy. The Parti pris endeavour must be analyzed through that lens. Ultimately, continuity prevailed: joual was left to the popular classes while the young revolutionary intellectuals grudgingly came to terms with the French linguistic norm, renouncing their dreams of authenticity, decolonization, and cultural autonomy through language. But they felt deeply uncomfortable with that option. Finally, the prestigious French connection mattered too much as a foundation for the Québec nation, a lesson that Québécois had learned since Lord Durham. That makes Parti pris and its struggle for a true national language an example of unfinished destigmatization and emancipation processes. More broadly speaking, the same analytical framework accounts for the fact that the Quiet Revolution was just that: quiet, unfinished (in terms of social policies, secularization, political autonomy, and so forth). In a nutshell, the minority master myth (the impediment) trumped the other (the booster).
However, as influential as it was, this cultural thread was embedded in a web of power relations wherein Québec was heavily disadvantaged. A cultural breakaway from France would have dramatically weakened the status of this Francophone collectivity dreaming of recognized nationhood and of political sovereignty. One must also consider that the joual option set forth by Parti pris was met with strong opposition within Québec elites. And finally, in addition to its difficult relationship with France, this small nation was also heavily dependent politically (Canada) and economically (United States). All in all, that accounts for the inability of Parti pris writers to make a bold decision.
Québec in this regard is reminiscent of New Zealand, a small “Western” nation stranded in the Pacific that established itself as a direct extension of Great Britain, a choice that was reinforced by churches, political and educational institutions, the legal framework, and language. Most of New Zealand's past was dominated by the mother-country complex and by a fair amount of inhibition, which is particularly obvious in the way New Zealanders talked about themselves in novels, poems, and so on. Added to that was the shame surrounding the emergence of an idiom of sorts, specific to New Zealand (the nasal “colonial twang”), which was shunned by the educated. At school, for instance, the students were taught that “those who talk through the nose think through the nose” (Bouchard Reference Bouchard2008, pp. 275–290; Gordon Reference Gordon, Novitz and Willmott1989; Gordon and Deverson, Reference Gordon and Deverson1998).
The experiences of Québec and New Zealand bring to light the predicament of many small nations when confronted with major dilemmas.Footnote 39 They also illuminate the impact of culture on the course of a society, and more specifically the strength of what I have called the master myths. This suggests that in order to understand a culture, one would be well advised to first identify the small body of master myths that govern the symbolic foundation framing both the social link and the power relations. Finally, a key factor that is also expected to heavily affect the course of a society is the extent to which those master myths contradict or complement each other.
This paper shows how language, as a social and cultural marker, can be used as a tool for destigmatization and collective emancipation. Comparison also establishes that it can work both at the infranational (cultural minorities) or the national level. However, two types of destigmatization come to light. Québec, New Zealand, Haïti, and other nations exemplify equalization strategies aimed at promoting a vernacular language and freeing it from the domination of the prestigious language of the mother country. In other cases such as the United States and Brazil, we observe what Fleming (Reference Fleming2011) calls a “reverse stigmatization” (resulting from a “normative inversion”) in that the language of the mother country itself is cast as inferior. Needless to say, it was not the case in Québec where the Parti pris intellectuals proved unable even to equalize the Parisian French and joual. This remark draws attention to the uneven efficacy of the symbolic destigmatization strategies, as instantiated by the comparison.
Finally, the analysis suggests that somehow competition and contradiction are inherent in the use of language for destigmatizing a minority or a nation. In the first case, the “local” language is challenged by the national language; in the latter case, it clashes with the language of a dominating nation (usually within a colonial framework). One way or another, the destigmatizers find themselves in a double bind that some of them are just unable to break. However, the sheer balance of power in favour of the stigmatizers is not the only factor at play. Internal divisions can prevent the predominance of one option. And, as we have seen in Québec, the antinomy may be compounded by the fact that a society is already handicapped by multiple dependencies.
