FRE 312: French Language Practice II

The main objective of this book is to explore the nature of the connection between nationalism and social policy from a comparative and historical perspective. At the theoretical level, this analysis will shed new light on a more general issue: the relationships between identity formation, territorial politics, and social policy.

Contents: Assault on New France -- 'The enemy are out to destroy everything that calls itself Canada' -- Mastering the St Lawrence -- Beachhead -- First skirmishes -- A new kind of war -- 'Trust me, they shall feel us' -- Competing iedas -- Defeat at Montmorency -- 'It is war of the worst shape' -- 'We find ourselves outnumbered and we fear, out generaled' -- 'This man must finish with a great effort, and great thunder' -- The landings -- The Battle of the Plains of Abraham -- 'Our rejoicings are not yet over'.

The Catholic Origins of Quebec's Quiet Revolution challenges a version of history central to modern Quebec's understanding of itself: that the Quiet Revolution began in the 1960s as a secular vision of state and society which rapidly displaced an obsolete, clericalized Catholicism. Michael Gauvreau argues that organizations such as Catholic youth movements played a central role in formulating the Catholic ideology underlying the Quiet Revolution and that ordinary Quebecers experienced the Quiet Revolution primarily through a series of transformations in the expression of their Catholic identity.

Designed for anyone who wants a general introduction to Quebec history, this text aims to provide a concise, readable account of the history of Quebec from pre-contact native cultures to the constitutional referendum of 1992.

In Beheading the Saint, Geneviève Zubrzycki studies that transformation through a close investigation of the annual Feast of St. John the Baptist of June 24. The celebrations of that national holiday, she shows, provided a venue for a public contesting of the dominant ethno-Catholic conception of French Canadian identity and, via the violent rejection of Catholic symbols, the articulation of a new, secular Québécois identity. From there, Zubrzycki extends her analysis to the present, looking at the role of Québécois identity in recent debates over immigration, the place of religious symbols in the public sphere, and the politics of cultural heritage—issues that also offer insight on similar debates elsewhere in the world.