Vieux-Québec’s Lower Town
monument to faith in Place d’Armes in Upper Town.
Québec is Canada’s largest province. It covers an area of 1,540,681 square kilometers, basically the size of France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, and a couple Switzerlands put together, all in all an enormous territory. For the most part, it is filled with boundless forests and innumerable lakes (some say more than 400,000), vestiges of the huge Sea of Champlain that flooded the area 10,000 years ago.
Québec’s geography can be divided into three main regions. The Canadian Shield goes from the extreme north down to the plain of the St. Lawrence River and includes the Laurentian Mountains, said to be the oldest mountain range in the world. At the south of that plain, the Appalachians turn the landscape into a green and hilly area characteristic of the Eastern Townships region (southeast of Montréal) and extend down to the United States. A rift valley between these two antediluvian geological formations, the St. Lawrence is a 1,200-kilometer-long river that takes its source from the Great Lakes and ends up in the world’s largest estuary. The majority of Québec’s residents live along the banks of the river, and it’s also the center of Québec’s development. Looking out over the landscape from the window of a plane, you can see (along with the sprawling cities of Montréal and Québec) the rural landscape divided into narrow rectangular tracts of land extending from the river: These patterns denote the seigneurial land system, designed to allow each parcel access to water; they date back to the settlement of 17th-century Nouvelle France (New France).
Québec City, with a population of over half a million, thrives on the north bank of the St. Lawrence near its meeting point with the St. Charles River and not far from the foothills of the Laurentian Mountains. Built on top and around the 98-meter-high Cap Diamant, it overlooks the dramatic narrowing of the river that takes place in the St. Lawrence after Île d’Orléans. It’s from this narrowing that the city gets its name, taken from the Algonquin word kebec, which means “where the river narrows.”
This particular position made it a logical commercial port as well as a strategic military point. The ramparts surrounding Vieux-Québec’s Upper Town, the only fortified city left in North America, have made it an architectural jewel and helped the city earn the name the “Gibraltar of North America.” Near the southern edge of Cap Diamant, the Plains of Abraham (Québec’s version of Central Park) extend along the cliffs. It was on these rolling hills that North America’s fate was sealed in the haze of a battle between the British and the French in 1759.
One of the main physical features of the city is its two-level construction. Cap Diamant and its cliffs break the urban landscape in two, prompting significant opposition between Haute-Ville (Upper Town) and Basse-Ville (Lower Town). This opposition is as significant sociologically as it is topographically. Thus, Upper Town (with the exception of Faubourg Saint-Jean-Baptiste) is historically the home of the ruling bourgeoisie, while Lower Town (Limoilou, Saint-Roch, Saint-Sauveur), which developed along the shores of the St. Lawrence and St. Charles Rivers, was the home of seamen, dock workers, and factory workers. This antagonism is in flux nowadays, as exemplified by Nouvo Saint-Roch’s gentrification. Motivated by the city’s 400th anniversary’s celebrations in 2008, much urban redevelopment has been done, particularly along the banks of the rivers, making Québec City one of the most likable cities in the world.
“Mon pays ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver” (My country is not a country, it’s winter) sang Québec’s premier chansonnier (singer-songwriter), Gilles Vigneault. Truer words have never been spoken, especially regarding the six months during which winter takes over, changing the landscape and affecting the mood of its resigned inhabitants. Yes, wintertime temperatures have an average of -10°C and can drop down to -30°C. However, the winters aren’t as harsh, cold, and snowy as they used to be, thanks to global warming. But the freezing wind, blowing poudreuse (drifting snow) everywhere like a tempest in the desert, is probably the toughest thing about being here in the winter. When the temperatures dip to bone-chilling proportions, make sure to cover up everything from your nose to your toes or you could end up with frostbite.
Approximately three meters of snow fall every winter, but sometimes there’s more. Snowstorms are frequent and can last up to a day if not more. Snow removal can be interesting to watch if you’re a tourist and have never seen it before. The sidewalk and road snowplows can also be deadly, so be careful, especially when walking at night.
Despite being harsh and long, winters in Québec are also sunny, with a bright luminosity that can sometimes be blinding. Because of the length of the season, stoical locals have adopted an “if you can’t beat ’em join ’em” attitude in order to survive, and you’ll be surprised to see just how active Quebeckers can be in winter, putting on their skates and snowshoes after every snowstorm, sometimes going to work on cross-country skis and pulling their kids in toboggans along the sidewalks.
Of course, Québec isn’t just about winter, and people are often surprised to see just how hot and humid the summers are, with temperatures often reaching 35°C. After having complained about the cold all winter, locals curse the heat and turn their air-conditioners on full blast.
Autumn and spring are shorter in Québec, but in many ways they are the most impressive seasons. In spring, the snow melts away, revealing new blossoms, while autumn has a particular beauty as the trees change to a rainbow of colors before shedding their leaves.
The best place to explore Québec’s rich and diverse fauna and flora is in the national parks. National parks offer interpretive materials and guides to help you understand just exactly what it is you’re surrounded by.
There’s not much chance to run into a moose or a black bear while getting a pint of milk at the dép (corner store). But, the city has Parc des Plaines d’Abraham, with protected fauna and flora, where you might see animals that can be exotic for some: red and gray squirrels, chipmunks, and raccoons.
Québec City is remarkably green for its size, with trees lining just about every side street. Originally part of the Laurentian forest ecosystem, the vegetation has changed over time due to urbanization.
Long before its European takeover, the North American continent was home to indigenous people for thousands of years. Historians date the population back to at least 12,000 years ago—though it may date back much further. One theory posits that hunting tribes crossed the Bering Strait in pursuit of game from Siberia. Those tribes then scattered all over the land, developing diverse ways of life as they adapted to different environments. By the time explorers arrived, the area that would eventually become known as the St. Lawrence Valley was populated by the nomadic Algonquin and sedentary Iroquoian peoples who lived off game, fish, and crops, and were particularly well adapted to their environment.
When it comes to the “discovery” of Canada, French explorer Jacques Cartier’s name usually pops up. But the truth is that by the time he finally made it to Québec in 1534, Newfoundland’s coastline had been periodically cruised by explorers and fishermen from different nations—the Vikings had sailed its coast and even put down a few roots 500 years before.
What Jacques Cartier did that other Europeans didn’t was explore the interior of the river, a river that he named in honor of the saint on the calendar the day he reached it: Saint-Lawrence. Sent by the king of France, Francis I, with the mandate of finding gold and—the typical request of the day—a passage to Asia, the sailor explored the region thoroughly, visiting Iroquoian villages Stadacona (Québec) and, farther upstream, Hochelaga, in present-day Montréal. After many voyages, he found neither gold nor Asia, bringing home instead a bunch of made-up stories told by fabulist natives and a handful of rocks he thought were diamonds (a popular French saying of the time was ”faux comme un diamant du Canada” (fake as a Canadian diamond). Deemed by the French to be inhospitable and dull, what we know today as Canada remained unvisited and almost forgotten by Cartier’s nation for half a century.
Two things rekindled the French interest in this part of the world: the fur trade and an appetite for colonial expansion. In addition to these two motives, the Catholic Church saw an opportunity to spread the gospel to the indigenous population and sent missionaries along on the expedition. Seeing promise in the new European fashion of fur hats and coats, trading companies quickly formed, including the Compagnie des Cent-Associés, which set up outposts around Québec where the French newcomers and First Nations peoples could trade.
In 1608, Samuel de Champlain set up the first permanent European trading post in an abandoned Iroquoian village that Jacques Cartier had visited 80 years before, building a wooden fort he called l’Abitation de Québec (kebec in Algonquin means “where the river narrows”). That first winter, most of the settlers died of scurvy and harsh weather, but the colony continued even though it faced numerous difficulties and was slow to grow. In 1635 (the year Samuel de Champlain, the Father of New France, died), the population was slightly more than 300 settlers, a fair number of them Catholic missionaries. Some of these missionaries organized the Société Notre-Dame de Montréal and, in 1642, decided to establish an evangelizing mission near the deserted village of Hochelaga. Called Ville-Marie, it would eventually become Montréal.
While colonists cleared forests and cultivated the land, the thriving fur trade attracted a different kind of young explorer, one daring enough to go farther and farther into the continent seeking bearskins, mink furs, and, above all, the popular and coveted beaver pelts. Called coureurs des bois (wood runners, or woodsmen), these adventurers are legendary figures in Québec, since they represent a life of freedom and a particular connection with nature that characterized the colonization of the continent. These coureurs also paved the way for the explorers and voyageurs to whom we owe the exploration of the regions of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley, much of which they claimed for the French. These explorers left their mark on places all over the United States, including Detroit, St. Louis, and Baton Rouge.
The commercial relations brought on by the trade helped the French secure alliances with the Hurons, who in exchange for the pelts received copper and iron utensils, alcohol, and rifles. This alliance put the French colony in the middle of a bloody war when the English-backed Iroquois Five Nations launched an offensive campaign to wipe out the Hurons, their long-time enemies. The war lasted 25 years, seriously affecting both the First Nations and the French colony.
The conflicting commercial and political interests of the French and English caused a succession of intercolonial wars. In 1713, following a military defeat in Europe, the Treaty of Utrecht resulted in France relinquishing control of Newfoundland, Acadia, and Hudson Bay, something that considerably hurt New France’s fur trade and jeopardized its colony. This date marks the beginning of the end for New France, even if it took another 50 years for the British to secure power, a takeover that seemed inevitable considering the difference in population. Indeed, on the eve of the final battle, there were 60,000 French living in a huge territory, surrounded by two million British colonists living in the narrow strip of the 13 colonies.
The final showdown happened on September 13, 1759, on an open field by Cap Diamant, now called the Plains of Abraham, in present-day Québec City. After a two-month-long siege, the French army, led by General Montcalm, was attacked by surprise early in the morning. General Wolfe and the British army used a dried-up old creek to climb the cliff, something everyone thought was impossible. The Battle of the Plains of Abraham, which sealed the fate of French North America, was bloody, lasted barely 20 minutes, and cost the lives of both generals. One year after, Montréal capitulated and thus France lost all of its colonies in North America, leaving behind a small population of deeply rooted French Catholics in an ocean of British Protestants.
Though at first they tried to assimilate the French minority by imposing British Common Law and having them swear an oath to the British king, the victors decided that it was wiser to accommodate the French, wanting to secure their allegiance as social unrest and rebellion smoldered in the south. To cement the support of the French-Canadians, England wrote up the Act of Québec in 1774, recognizing both the French language and French civil law, and granting them freedom of religion. These concessions succeeded in preventing the French-Canadians from joining the rebels in the south who started the American Revolution a year later.
At the end of that war, in 1783, 50,000 United Empire Loyalists (British Loyalists) had fled the United States for the province of Québec, many of them settling into the Eastern Townships region, a hilly area southeast of Montréal. To accommodate these Loyalists, who were an English minority in a French-speaking majority, a new Constitutional Act was signed in 1791, dividing the province in two: Upper Canada (which would eventually become Ontario) and Lower Canada (the province of Québec). The names Upper and Lower Canada were given according to their location on the St. Lawrence River.
The 19th century was marked by the power struggles between the Francophones and the Anglophones in Lower Canada. The elected French-Canadian representatives were constantly at odds with the colonial British executive and legislative powers. Over the years, the nationalist and reformist Parti Canadien denounced the untenable situation, ending up in an armed insurrection. The Patriots War (Guerre des Patriotes) of 1837-1838 was immediately crushed, and an emissary was sent from London to study the problems of this wayward colony. The solution proposed by Lord Durham was radical: Make every effort to assimilate French-Canadians. This was the impetus behind the Union Act, laid down by the British government in 1840. Along with unifying Upper and Lower Canada and giving them an equal political power—despite the fact that Lower Canada was much more populated—it also made English the only official language, although the vast majority were French-speaking. These new laws and the constant arrival of English-speaking immigrants prompted a major exodus of Francophones, many of whom emigrated to the United States.
The troubled politics of the subsequent years coupled with a dire economic situation prompted leaders of Upper and Lower Canada to unify. The British North America Act, signed in 1867, is the constitutional act that solidified Canada as an independent nation that would eventually stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
It also created the two-level structure of government, in which power is split between the federal and provincial levels. Even though Québec’s minority status was deepened by it, the new structure granted the province jurisdiction over education, civil law, and culture, among other things. Québec maintained a central importance in the evolution of the country, and before long a French-Canadian, Wilfrid Laurier, became prime minister of Canada. Elected in 1896, he was the first of many Québécois, including Pierre Elliot Trudeau and Jean Chrétien, who would lead the country—most recently, Justin Trudeau was elected prime minister.
Faced with a prodigious period of economic growth at the beginning of the 20th century, Prime Minister Laurier declared it “Canada’s century.” The prediction fell short, though, when the Great Depression disrupted economic and social progress in Québec for many years. World War II finally put an end to the economic doldrums, and Québec came out of the war economically stronger than ever before and ready for social change, as the anarchist manifest Refus Global (Total Refusal), signed by artists and writers, made clear.
Despite this exciting new energy and mind-set, the province would remain under the spell of Maurice Duplessis and his conservative party (Union Nationale) for another 15 years. In spite of its considerable economic growth, this period is often referred to as “La Grande Noirceur” (The Great Darkness), the last obstacle before real transformation.
After the death of Maurice Duplessis in 1959, Québec was ripe for change, and the Liberal Party government of Jean Lesage was elected the year after, kicking off what would be dubbed the Révolution Tranquille (Quiet Revolution), a wide range of bold economic and social reforms. The most important result of these reforms is the secularization of society, putting an end to the centuries-long overarching power of the church in every aspect of Québécois society. Education, health care, and social services were no longer under the control of the church as the state began to take over.
The most ambitious economic project of the time, the nationalization of the province’s electric companies under Hydro Quebec is a powerful symbol of that new ambition. The Quiet Revolution also witnessed the rise of nationalism. Jean Lesage’s Liberal government election slogan, maîtres chez nous (masters in our own home), meant to put a stop to the unbridled selling of the province’s natural resources to foreign business interests.
Québec’s fortifications protected New France from English incursions.
Montréal hosted two major international events that still define its identity: the 1967 World’s Fair (Exposition Universelle—Terre des Hommes) and the Summer Olympic Games in 1976. The sentiment of empowerment at the time exacerbated enthusiasm for the idea of a stronger autonomy within the Canadian federation, and more and more people became attracted by the idea of building a new country instead, some groups even falling into extremism. Thus, the Front de Liberation du Québec (FLQ), founded in 1963, used terrorist tactics against the Québec and national governments and businesses with the aim of establishing a socialist independent country.
In 1970, during the October crisis, when the FLQ kidnapped Québec Labour Minister Pierre Laporte and eventually killed him, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, then Canadian prime minister, launched the War Measures Act against Québec dissidents, putting the country under martial law to much public controversy. After that, the FLQ declined drastically and eventually disappeared.
Despite these radical actions and a certain support the FLQ gained with the public, the majority of pro-sovereigntists preferred moderate nationalism. In 1967, René Lévesque, a rising star of the Liberal government, quit the party and founded the Parti Québécois (PQ). Soon after, in 1976, a stunning and unexpected victory brought the PQ to power, putting the question of sovereignty at the forefront of political and social life of Québec society for decades. Bill 101 in 1977 made French the only official language of Québec. In 1980 Lévesque’s government launched a referendum on the issue of independence, losing when the “no” side won with 60 percent of the vote. In time, the tensions with the federal government became aggravated, mostly over constitutional matters and Québec’s refusal to ratify the repatriated Canadian constitution in 1982.
In 1995, a second referendum campaign was launched. This time the results were extremely close, and Canada held its breath: 49.4 percent of Quebeckers voted “yes” and 50.6 percent voted “no,” underlining the deep division of the population over the issue.
However, the national question has faded in importance over the last 20 years, with public attention drifting toward other public matters like the environment and economy. In 2003, the PQ was ousted from power after 10 years, and the Québec Liberal Party, resolutely federalist, was elected. Led by Premier Jean Charest, they were voted in for a third term in 2009. Thanks to political unrest related to the rising costs of tuition, the PQ regained political power with a minority government in the autumn 2012 election. They lost to the Liberals again in 2014, in large part due to a bill the PQ introduced in 2013 called the Charter of Values, which would have, among other things, limited the wearing of “conspicuous” religious symbols by state personnel—small crosses would have been fine, but Jewish workers would not have been able to wear kippot, and Muslim women would not have been able to wear the hijab. The bill was met with some support as well as a strong backlash, and the Liberals took power in the next election.
Contemporary Québec is a province in flux: Multicultural and multi-linguistic, it is influenced by particularly French conceptions of secularism and free speech, as well as values that underscore the importance of a pluralistic society. Particularly for Francophone Québécois, it is increasingly important to find a balance between supporting and ensuring the strength and longevity of Francophone culture and the French language, while ensuring that newcomers to the province can thrive and be culturally recognized and supported here. Over the past generation, major gains have been made in cities like Montréal, where traditionally Anglophone Montréalers have embraced learning French, and French has increasingly become the language of business—this shift in power has allowed for a positive shift in cultural commingling. Of course, there are still tensions, and much work to be done, but visitors to the province will notice mostly the citizens’ warmth and cultural vibrancy.
Canada’s political system is modeled after the British parliamentary system it historically inherited. Central in the government organization is the House of Commons, sitting in Ottawa, a democratically elected body consisting of 338 members known as Members of Parliament (MPs). Each MP in the House of Commons is elected by simple plurality in an electoral district, also known as a riding. Elections are called within four years of the previous election or when the government loses a confidence vote.
The leader of the party that won the most seats generally becomes the new prime minister and forms the new government. Canada being a federation, this political structure is reproduced for every province. Therefore, each has its own parliament. In Québec, the provincial government is called the Assemblée Nationale, and its 125 elected members sit in Québec City, the province’s capital. The Canadian Constitution divides the power between federal and provincial governments. For example, defense, postal services, and international relations are under federal jurisdiction, while education, health, and natural resources are under provincial jurisdiction. Since the Constitution is not always clear about these divided powers, constitutional conflicts arise, a situation that has been particularly true between Québec and the federal government.
Canada is also a constitutional monarchy. People are often surprised to know that there is a queen in Canada: Queen Elizabeth II of England is the Canadian head of state. Though her role is mostly formal and symbolic, she does have a representative in Canada acting on her behalf: the governor general. She is represented by the lieutenant-governor in the provinces.
Though Canada’s first-past-the-post governmental structure favors a two-party system, in Canada’s case, five parties make up the federal government: the right-leaning Conservative Party, centrist Liberal Party, left-leaning NDP (New Democratic Party), the Bloc Québécois (the Québec sovereigntist party), and the Green Party (environmentalists who are relatively new on the scene and usually don’t hold many seats). In major political battles, the Conservatives and Liberals are generally the front-runners, but the NDP and Bloc Québécois are instrumental to how government is run and what bills are passed in the House of Commons.
From 2006 to 2015, the Conservative party, under the leadership of Stephen Harper, formed the federal government, ruling alternately with a majority rule and a minority rule. In 2015, facing growing public criticism over issues like nonrenewable energy, press freedom, and senator expense scandals, the Harper Conservatives with ousted in favor of the Liberal Party under the leadership of Justin Trudeau, whose father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, served as the prime minister of Canada from 1968 to 1979 and again from 1980 to 1984. The Liberals, who have a majority government, were elected on promises to develop renewable energy strategies, work on reconciliation with indigenous peoples in Canada, and change the electoral system from first-past-the-post to some form of proportional representation. (So far on shaky ground in terms of keeping those promises, it’s anyone’s guess as to what will take place next election year.)
On the provincial stage, two parties have been exchanging power for half a century: the centrist, federalist Québec Liberal Party, and the sovereigntist Parti Québécois founded by René Lévesque. In the 1980s and ’90s, the Parti Québécois (PQ) became the center of international attention when it organized two referendums on Québec sovereignty. The consecutive defeats of the PQ in these referendums and in recent elections have laid the sovereigntist question aside for the time being, and the Liberals are currently in power.
Since the beginning, Québec’s natural resources have been the major asset in the province’s economy. Vast forests, mining resources, rich agricultural land, and a huge potential for hydroelectricity—because of all the lakes—make this province, like much of Canada, good for a primary, resource-based economy. Historically everything began with the fur trade, kicking off the European colonization of the territory and sustaining it for over a century. In the 19th and most of the 20th centuries, wood, pulp, and paper industries took the lead and are still, along with the mining sector and hydroelectricity production, the most important sectors of Québec’s economy.
The government plays an important role in the economy and is the largest employer in the province. Despite the trend toward more privatization, this strong state involvement reaches a certain consensus in the population and is considered essential due to the small size of its economy. Government-owned Hydro Québec, the world’s leader in hydroelectricity, remains a national pride, and dams and development projects in the north are thoroughly followed by the population. Another economic national jewel is aerospace and railway maker Bombardier, a world-class company started in 1942 by Joseph Bombardier, the inventor of the snowmobile.
Québec City has discreetly developed into a very successful city, with one of the lowest unemployment rates in Canada at 4 percent. Most jobs in Québec City are found in public administration, services, and tourism, with a large proportion of civil servants, because it is the seat of the entire provincial political apparatus.
The past decade has seen a particularly sound growth rate and many urban development projects, probably prompted by the enthusiasm occasioned by the city’s 400th anniversary. The result of this growth meant that Québec City virtually averted the economic crisis of 2008 and has continued to grow since then.
Québec’s first inhabitants were indigenous peoples. Ten different First Nations tribes, as well as the Inuit in the northern part of what is now Québec, have made their homes here for tens of thousands of years. Today, after centuries of harsh colonial policies, indigenous peoples represent a small but growing part of the population. Three quarters of indigenous peoples in Québec live on reserves throughout the province: The Mohawk reserves Kahnawake and Kanesatake in the Montréal region and the Wendat-Huron reserve Wendake north of Québec City are some of the bigger ones. Though some indigenous peoples live in areas where they can hunt and fish, many reserves preclude following a traditional way of life, and the federal government has not honored commitments to ensure their livelihood—or sometimes even provide basics like access to food and clean drinking water.
One of the most important political events of the past decades was the Oka Crisis: For two months in the summer of 1990, Mohawks barricaded one of the main bridges into Montréal, protesting land claims and issues of self-government. The incident forced native issues to the forefront, and in recent years nation to nation agreements have granted indigenous peoples more autonomy—though there is still much work to be done if Canada is to honor its treaties and work in good faith with indigenous peoples.
The vast majority of the Québécois people are descendants of the settlers who arrived between 1608 and 1759. From the 60,000 French-Canadians in 1759 there are now seven million living in Canada. Part of the reason Québec has such a strong cultural and social heritage is because of the population’s demographics. In the late 18th century with the arrival of the United Empire Loyalists, the French-Canadians became nervous at the idea of being overpopulated by the English-speaking contingent. One response to this immigration was something that would later be called the revanche des berceaux (revenge of the cradle), which saw the families of French-Canadians growing larger by the year. Of course, the province’s Catholic background helped, and throughout the years Québécois families were typically large and women had an average of 8 children (Céline Dion is from a family of 14 kids). In the 1970s, however, the birthrate dropped considerably, and it remains one of the lowest in the world.
Though today the province is experiencing a baby boom, it is a mere blip compared to the numbers in the mid-20th century. Much of the growth to the province’s Francophone population now comes from immigration.
The first Anglophone immigrants arrived after the British conquest in 1759. Most of them were well-to-do Protestant merchants, forever forging the stereotype of the rich Anglophone. However, this wasn’t always the case; one of the most important groups of immigrants was the working-class Irish, who arrived in the province as early as the founding of New France. The biggest wave of Irish immigrants came 1815-1860, driven from Ireland by the potato famine. They came to the province by the boatload, disembarking at Grosse-Île, an island off the shores of Québec City that was set up as a reception center. During the summer of 1847, thousands died during a typhus epidemic, and the orphaned children were adopted by Québec families. It is estimated that a staggering 45 percent of Quebeckers have Irish ancestry, even if most of them don’t know it. In Québec City many immigrant families were relegated to the slum-like dwellings in Petite Champlain.
The arrival of the United Empire Loyalists between 1783 and the beginning of the 19th century shaped not only the Eastern Townships, where most of them settled, but also the future of the country. They fled the United States in such great numbers as to facilitate the division of the province into Upper and Lower Canada. The 19th century also saw the largest number of immigrants from the British Isles, many of whom would put down roots in Montréal and, in the case of the Scots, found McGill University.
In the 1970s, after the rise to power of the PQ and the October Crisis in particular, many English speakers left Québec, often settling in Ontario. Nowadays, they make up only 10 percent of the total population of the province and live mostly in Montréal. Of the English-speakers who did stay, the vast majority are now bilingual.
Immigration from countries other than Britain and France began in earnest in the 20th century. Canada’s growing ethnic diversity is particularly obvious in Montréal, whose history has been defined by successive waves of immigrants. After World War II, the majority of immigrants arrived from Italy, Greece, and Portugal, communities that continue to have a stronghold in Montréal neighborhoods like the Mile End and Little Italy. For the most part, these immigrants aligned themselves with the Anglophone community, raising Québec’s perennial concerns over French language subsistence. In 1977, the Parti Québécois passed Bill 101—among other things, the children of newcomers were required to attend French schools. Immigration demographics began to change in the latter part of the century, and the 1970s and ’80s saw exiles from Vietnam and Haiti join the ranks, followed more recently by North African, Middle Eastern, Chinese, and Central European immigrants. Many immigrants now arrive speaking French, and the government funds programs for those who don’t so that they may, with financial support, acquire French proficiency.
Québec also has a large Jewish community, whose roots can be traced all the way back to the British conquest, while a large Hassidic community can be found in the Mile End and Outremont, two popular neighborhoods in Montréal.
The first recorded gay establishment in North America, Moise Tellier’s apples and cake shop, opened in Montréal in 1869. At that time, homosexuality was illegal in Canada, and punishable by death. It wasn’t until 1969 that the federal government, under Pierre Elliot Trudeau, decriminalized homosexuality. In the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, LGBTQ rights were slowly recognized and added to charters of rights and freedoms provincially and federally across Canada; in 2005, same-sex couples gained the right to marry in Canada.
Though Québec City doesn’t have a gay village (most larger Canadian cities do, including Montréal, Toronto, and Vancouver), there is a good concentration of LGBTQ and LGBTQ-friendly bars and restaurants along rue St-Jean, just outside the fortified city in the Saint-Jean-Baptiste neighborhood. LGBTQ and LGBTQ-friendly accommodations—often, B&Bs—also dot the city.
Québec City hosts an annual pride celebration every Labor Day weekend; decorations go up all over rue St-Jean, and Place d’Youville turns into a street party.
There is no denying the influence of the Catholic Church on the history of Québec, and almost every street corner features a three-story-high cathedral, though today many of them have been converted into condos. Instrumental in the founding of the nation and throughout most of its history, the Catholic Church only really began to lose its prominence in the 1960s and ’70s. For the most part, Francophones remain Catholic (though most are non-practicing) and Anglophones are Protestant, but there are also diverse religions encompassing Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and Sikhs.
Language is arguably the most important for Québécois Francophones since it’s really what makes them both distinct and recognizable. Francophones, particularly older generations, can be very touchy about how other people view their language, be it toward other Francophones who consider joual (colloquial Canadian French) a mere dialect, or toward people who obstinately refuse to make any efforts to speak French. Don’t be afraid, though; people are usually not hard to please, and using a mere bonjour (hello) or merci (thank you) will demonstrate an awareness that you realize you’re visiting a French-speaking province. Francophones who speak English will often switch to English if they see you struggling.
In order to understand linguistic tensions in Québec, you have to understand the history. After the British conquest in 1759, even though language, religion, and other rights were granted to the French community, they were barred from political and economic power for a long time. This linguistic exclusionism, in which access to the upper levels of business and power was barred to the French-Canadians, lasted well into the 20th century. In fact, until the 1970s English-speakers were the minority that ran many of the businesses and held positions of power in the province.
The Quiet Revolution in the 1960s, however, helped to change all that as it fostered nationalist sentiment, which reached a peak when the Parti Québécois was elected in 1976. In 1977, Bill 101 was passed, asserting the primacy of French on public signs across the province, and apostrophes were removed from store fronts in the 1980s to comply with French usage. English is allowed on signage as long as it’s half the size of the French lettering. Despite the debate that surrounded the bill when it was first implemented, many believe it has helped to preserve the language.
Anyone with a good ear will likely be able to tell that there’s a big difference between the French spoken here and the French in France. The French here is said to be its own evolved version of the French spoken in the 17th and 18th centuries in France, partially preserved due to its geographical isolation. The language spoken in everyday life is full of funny expressions and syntax. Depending on where you are in the province, some accents may be harder to understand than those in the cities.
Unlike in France, where they’ve integrated English terms like “weekend” into regular usage, Québec—surrounded by Anglos and Anglo culture—is much more ardent about the preservation of the language. That’s not to say English words aren’t in common usage in Québec; there is simply a heightened awareness of them. The Office Québécoise de la Langue Française is an institution whose mandate is to translate new words, typically those related to IT or technology, into a French equivalent. For example, in Québec, email is courriel, the French contraction of electronic mail, and Québec’s stop signs are also written in French, with the word arrêt at their center, though even in France the signs read “stop.”
Without a doubt the province’s best-known recording artist is Céline Dion. Born in the small town of Charlemagne 30 kilometers from Montréal, she was a mega-star in Québec and France when she was just a teenager and well before she started singing in English. Although she was criticized at first by her Francophone fan base for “selling out,” her worldwide success is now a huge source of pride for the province, and fans now love (and buy) her English albums just as much as her French ones.
The province’s second biggest export, music-wise, is Montréal’s Arcade Fire, who took over the airwaves in 2004 with their infectious indie rock anthems and haven’t looked back. Despite their rock star status—they’ve shared the stage with everyone from David Byrne to David Bowie—they remain active in the community, and many of the group’s members play in other Montréal bands. Their success in the early 2000s was also part of a bigger Montréal indie rock explosion, with bands like The Dears, Wolfe Parade, and the Unicorns, among others. The scene has continued to grow since then and is constantly evolving. Francophone bands like Malajube, Radio Radio, and Karkwa—who won the 2010 Polaris Music Prize, Canada’s largest for an “indie” band—have been gaining fans across the language divide. Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Cœur de Pirate are two other favorite acts from the province, beloved for their craft and creativity.
Poet and singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen, who died in 2016, was one of Montréal’s most-loved inhabitants, and many of his melancholy and soulful compositions were inspired by the city, including the song So Long Maryanne. Grammy Award-winning artist Rufus Wainwright is also from Montréal, though he now resides in New York. Mixing symphonic sounds with a pop mentality, his sweeping compositions are utterly unique and catchy. His sister, Martha Wainwright, also a musician, is somewhat less experimental in her style, but continues to push the boundaries of pop. On one of her albums (Sans Fusils, Ni Souliers, à Paris) she sings the songs of Edith Piaf. Of course, it helps when you have good genes, and the Wainwrights have them in spades: Their father is American folk singer Loudon Wainwright III, and their mother is Kate McGarrigle; Kate and her sister Anna are two of the biggest folk singers in the province. Since the 1960s, the McGarrigle sisters have sung and written in both French and English.
It wasn’t until the 1960s that modern music really started to hit its stride in the province. Québec held a festival of experimental music in 1961, and by the mid-1960s, the symphony was starting to attract a larger audience. It was also the heyday of folk singers or chansonniers like Félix Leclerc and Gilles Vigneault. Leclerc in particular had been singing and writing for a long time, even finding success in Paris, before returning to find the same success at home. Singing about themes like nature and celebrations has made him one of the most revered musicians in the province.
After being under religious censorship during the first half of the 20th century, Québec cinema really kicked off in the 1960s, when a generation of directors formed the National Film Board (NFB). This film board gave them a platform, and they started to make movies mostly about the Québécois identity. Part of the enthusiastic social transformations that were happening in arts in this period, they shot documentaries and features that gained international recognition, despite their local flavor. Experiments in documentary film led to the Direct Cinema genre, which included Pierre Perreault’s Pour la Suite du Monde, a vivid documentary about the ancestral beluga hunt in Isle-aux-Coudres, and Michel Brault’s Les Orders, a rendition of the October crisis of 1971.
In the 1970s, a number of feature films gained wide critical acclaim and today are seen as part of a golden age in Québec cinema. Among these are La Vraie Vie de Bernadette by Gilles Carle (1972), J.A. Martin Photographe by Jean Beaudin (1977), and Frank Mankiewicz’s Les Bons Débarras (1979). Most important of all is Claude Jutra’s 1971 movie Mon Oncle Antoine, a coming-of-age story set in the rural Québec of the 1940s, which is considered to be the greatest Canadian film.
The Québec film industry is seen as the strongest in the country, and Québec films regularly win top accolades at the Genie Awards, which are the Canadian film industry awards. Québec’s French cinema has a stronger character than its English counterpart, which often struggles to differentiate itself from American cinema.
With movies like Le Déclin de l’Empire Américain (1986) and Jésus de Montréal (1988), Denys Arcand is probably the best-known Québécois director. Les Invasions Barbares (2003), a poignant critique of the aging generation of the Quiet Revolution, won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film and was Best Screenplay at Cannes. Other stand-out directors have been scooped up by Hollywood, including Jean-Marc Vallée, who directed Dallas Buyers Club, and Denis Villeneuve, who directed Prisoners. Xavier Dolan has been recognized at the Cannes Film Festival for his films J’ai Tué Ma Mère, Les Amours Imaginaries, (Heartbeats), Lawrence, Anyways and It’s Only the End of the World, and has set the course for a new generation of filmmakers.
After Paris, Montréal has the most French-language writers in the world, many of whom have been translated into English. Playwright and author Michel Tremblay wrote Chroniques du Plateau, which has made him one of the most prolific and well-recognized authors in the province. His stories about working-class French-Canadians in the 1960s, written almost entirely in joual (colloquial Canadian French), defined the writing of his generation. Other writers include Hubert Aquin, Dany Laferrière, Marie-Claire Blais, and Anne Hébert, whose Kamouraska looks at treachery and love in 19th-century Québec. Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute tells the tale of a young woman in working-class Verdun during the Depression.
Notable Québec City writers include Claire Martin, who won a Governor-General’s award for her 1966 book La Joue Droite, a feminist book recounting the narrator’s years at a convent; Octave Crémazie, a French-Canadian poet and bookseller known for his patriotic Québécois verse; and Neil Bissoondath, a Trinidadian-Canadian writer and critic of race relations and the multicultural system in Canada.
Early Québec art can be divided into two subject matters: landscapes and religion. The province’s first painters were Catholic missionaries who used paintings and engravings to convert indigenous peoples. Since many of the works were by priests and nuns, they have a particularly naïve quality, a trend that continues in Québécois art. The first great Québécois painters emerged in the 19th century and included Théophile Hamel, known for portraits of explorers; Dutch-born Cornelius Krieghoff, who depicted settlers and images of the wilderness; and Ozias Leduc, whose portrait Boy with Bread is one of the defining images of Québécois art.
Work continued to be defined by snowy city-scapes and bucolic farmland until the modern era of Canadian painting was ushered in by Paul-Émile Bourduas, John Lyman, and Alfred Pellan in the 1940s. Bourduas was the most prolific and outspoken of all three and developed a radical style of surrealism that came to be identified with a group called the Automatistes.
In 1948 Bourduas published the manifesto Refus Global (Global Refusal), rejecting traditional social, artistic, and psychological norms of Québécois society and the religious and bucolic art that defined it. The manifesto called instead for an untamed liberation of creativity and championed abstract art.
Canadian art and Québec’s artistic community were never the same again. Automatiste artist Jean-Paul Riopelle would soon emerge as the movement’s newest driving force, and his abstract works, called “grand mosaics,” would become world-renowned.
The 1960s and ’70s were defined by artists like Claude Tousignant and Guido Molinari, whose abstract works used hypnotic geometric shapes and unusual color combinations to almost psychedelic proportions.
Some of Québec’s biggest contemporary artists include David Altmejd, known for mixed-media pieces that incorporate various materials—everything from a decapitated werewolf head to shards of broken mirrors—into something cohesive and anthropomorphic. Valérie Blass also plays with a mix of materials and human yet non-human forms. Adnad Hannah’s film and photographic works play with traditional art history. Melanie Authier, born in Montréal, is an abstract painter whose playful, colorful style evokes Turner-like landscapes and weather events. Two of the province’s biggest artists are collectives: The work of BGL plays with conventional objects or pop culture icons in unconventional ways—a melted Darth Vader, or a motorcycle covered with snow in the middle of a gallery floor. Cooke et Sasseville play with similar ideas, and one of their works involves a giant flamingo laying its head down on train tracks.
The established Québécois culture and the province’s bohemian disposition help nurture a particularly diverse arts scene in both languages.
French theater is some of the best in the world, while English theater struggles to keep the pace. The country’s top performing arts educational institution, the National Theatre School of Canada, is found in the Plateau in Montréal, attracting Canada’s most promising playwrights and stage actors in either language.
An innovative contemporary dance scene in the province has fostered internationally recognized companies like La La La Human Steps, O Vertigo, and Fondation Jean-Pierre Perreault, as well as the careers of dancers and choreographers Margie Gillis, Marie Chouinard, and Benoît Lachambre. Québec supports two classical ballet companies, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal and Le Ballet de Québec.
Cirque du Soleil is undoubtedly the most famous Québécois circus, founded in Baie-Saint-Paul in the early 1980s by a group of street performers. These stilt-walkers, jugglers, and fire-eaters banded together to create a performance platform, since the circus tradition didn’t exist in the province at the time. In the years since then, they’ve become part of a rich circus culture they helped to create. Two schools dedicated to the circus arts are located in Montréal: the National Circus School, established in 1981, and Tohu, established in 2004.
Cirque Éloize, established in 1993, is another professional company situated in Montréal that is quickly following in the footsteps of Cirque du Soleil when it comes to pushing boundaries and innovation. They bring an edginess and dance sensibility to their shows, which can be seen throughout the world. This dedication to circus arts also means that the province has some of the best street performers in the world, who are especially visible during festival season.
