How did Quebec get cultural nationalism mostly right?

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Ever since the bayonets were lowered on the Plains of Abraham, Quebec has had its elbows up instead.

Military defeat meant the fight for cultural survival had begun. The French fact in North America would endure through sheer cussedness if it was going to endure at all.

Two-hundred and sixty-some years later, Quebec francophones have not only survived but flourished. Their culture is as rich and distinct as that of any small nation anywhere in the world. And those elbows are still up – bony beacons for anglo Canadians, who are once again resolved to resist U.S. hegemony in all its forms.

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So how did Quebeckers do it? How did they get cultural nationalism mostly right? Elbows can be wielded many ways, as Gordie Howe (or Boom Boom Geoffrion) could tell you.

Start with some statistics, in case there is any doubt that French Canada has protected its identity more successfully than its English cousins.

Quebeckers simply consume far more homegrown culture. Fifteen per cent of the movies Quebeckers see in theatres are local productions – compared with 3 per cent for English Canada.

More than half the books the province’s francophones buy come from Canadian-owned French-language publishers – 54 per cent. The equivalent figure in English Canada is about 5 per cent. Our readers are 10 times less committed to buying local.

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As a result, even fairly esoteric Québécois literature can surf the zeitgeist in a way you rarely find in the rest of Canada. The sociological memoir Rue Duplessis by the Radio-Canada host Jean-Philippe Pleau, about his working-class upbringing in sleepy Drummondville, was inescapable last year. Released by the small highbrow press Lux, it was adapted for the stage and even had a sort of succès de scandale when members of Pleau’s family sued him for defamation. Lux’s editor Mark Fortier told me the book has sold 65,000 copies.

In English Canada, a book is considered a big bestseller if it notches 5,000 sales.

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It’s the same story with popular culture. The ratings for top TV shows in Quebec would seem hallucinatory to a Toronto producer. The current-affairs talk show Tout le monde en parle – fittingly, “Everyone’s Talking About It” – routinely brings in more than a million viewers on Sunday nights.

That eye-popping figure doesn’t even win the ratings sweepstakes most Sundays. Instead it’s usually a scripted drama like the former hit cop show District 31 or the talent competition Chanteurs masqués on the private network TVA.

Add it all up, and millions of Quebeckers are huddling around the tube every night watching the same three or four channels, like it was the 1950s – and they’re almost all watching Quebec shows, not reruns of American sitcoms. In his book Cracking the Quebec Code, the pollster Jean-Marc Léger pointed out that 28 of the 30 most-watched programs in Quebec were domestic productions. Only five of the top 30 in English Canada could say the same.

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The price of having a culture to protect is constant fretting about the state of that culture. Tell anyone in Quebec about how extraordinary a phenomenon like Tout le monde en parle is and they’ll reply that it’s not as popular as it used to be, and that young people are abandoning Quebec TV for Netflix. The media magnate Pierre-Karl Péladeau unveiled this fall’s TVA lineup with a hand-wringing speech about the state of the industry and a plea for more government support.

They’re not wrong to fret. It’s likely that no set of elbows is sharp enough to protect against the encroaching tide of English-language culture flooding in through digital channels.

Worse, the lingua franca of the internet is English – by some estimates, 60 per cent of online content is in the language of Leonard Cohen – which is of course the same language Quebeckers have been elbowing away for 250 years. The Concordia University sociologist Jean-Philippe Warren told me a few years ago about his angst at the way his adolescent son was drawn to these intriguing but inevitably English-language digital subcultures, niche stuff such as recaps of Napoleonic War battles on YouTube or pastiches of 1930s blues music on Spotify.

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“People are sucked towards universes that are anglophone,” he said, capturing the almost cosmic dread Quebeckers are prone to when contemplating the future of their culture.

That kind of fear can curdle into something ugly, as Quebeckers are the first to recognize – the famous repli sur soi, or folding in on oneself, that the province’s intelligentsia is always warning about.

Quebec is arguably in a period of repli right now. The Legault government has banned religious symbols for many civil servants, proposed outlawing public prayer and called current immigration levels “suicidal” for the Quebec nation. When the Vietnamese-Québécoise novelist Kim Thúy said in a recent interview that she felt “heartbreak” at the prevailing climate around immigration and diversity in the province, she was attacked by right-wing columnists for being insufficiently grateful of the welcome she’d received as an adoptive Quebecker – inadvertently reinforcing her point.

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At the same time, Thúy’s huge popularity – her bestselling novel Ru was adapted into a hit movie in 2023 – shows that this state of repli is not permanent. The journalist Francine Pelletier has traced the province’s gradual inward turn to the narrow defeat of the 1995 independence referendum and the embittered race-baiting concession speech delivered by then-premier Jacques Parizeau.

But in her recent book-length essay Au Québec, c’est comme ça qu’on vit (“In Quebec, This Is How We Live,” also from the little powerhouse publisher Lux), Pelletier describes her society’s existential fear as a tonic as well. Quebec’s cultural self-possession today was not inevitable, and benefited from periodic jolts to the collective nervous system.

In the first half of the 20th century, Quebec nationalism was taken up with sterile and largely defensive gestures; there was even a campaign against the Anglo-Saxon abomination of putting Santa Claus in store windows at Christmastime.

By the end of the 1950s, after the corrupt and repressive reign of premier Maurice Duplessis, Quebec was stuck in a rut. French-Canadians, as they still called themselves, were plagued by a sense of cultural and economic inferiority. Duplessis thought survival was enough, and treated la survivance as “an official vocation,” in the words of the sociologist Fernand Dumont, without worrying too much about the richness of what survived.

Sure enough, the province’s popular culture was derivative and Americanized, its pop music a combination of variety-show acts and French rip-offs of the British Invasion, as the critic Carl Wilson once wrote.

Through a combination of terror at the fate of their national project and a recognition that they had something original to contribute, Quebeckers suddenly produced a great flowering of culture in the next two decades. Pelletier’s book is in part a love letter to the Montreal she discovered as a Franco-Ontarian expat in the 1970s, a city effervescent with avant-garde theatre, radical folk music and experimental cinema, all bound up with a sovereignty movement that saw independence as the only route to collective self-actualization. It was as if the centuries-long pressure of hunkering down against an indifferent or hostile continent had finally produced a long-awaited diamond.

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Pelletier thinks Canada may be able to emulate Quebec’s experience of cultural resilience, despite our differences. We are both improbable societies that have survived against the odds, and that quality of survival defines us. As she put it to me recently, “The fear of disappearing does wonders.”

Language alone doesn’t explain Quebec’s experience, or work as an excuse for the rest of us. Yes, French protects against U.S. dominance, but at the end of the day, Pelletier writes, “culture is the banquet table, language is just the fork we use to dig into the buffet.”

Now that Donald Trump has given us the foil Quebec has always had, our elbows are finally up again. As chance would have it, Pelletier’s book has recently been translated by Toronto’s Sutherland House and published as Dream Interrupted, in time to act as a prod for anglo Canadians to learn what we can from Quebec’s sparkling, many-faceted culture.

“I would like to thank you-know-who for waking up Canadian nationalism,” she said at her Montreal book launch recently, “because now we have something in common.”