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These 25 essays provided a major survey of the intellectual history of French Canadian nationalism.
Based on four years of research in the French-Canadian press of the 1840s and the private papers of the main French-Canadian politicians, British officials, and Roman Catholic religious leaders, this book describes in rich and lively detail the conflict of French Canada's priests and politicians around the central issue of their people's relation to the British Crown during that period. Confederation in 1867, modern Canada, and the current tempest in French Canada cannot adequately be understood without constant reference to these men of the 1840s and the political and religious ideologies they represented. Indeed, it was in their enmities, in their friendships and loyalties that were laid the strongbi-national foundations of what Etienne Parent foresaw as 'une grande nationalité canadienne assez forte pour se protéger elle-même et vivre de sa propre vie.'
At Confederation, most French Canadians felt their homeland was Quebec; they supported the new arrangement because it separated Quebec from Ontario, creating an autonomous French-Canadian province loosely associated with the others. Unaware of other French-Canadian groups in British North America, Quebeckers were not concerned with minority rights, but only with the French character and autonomy of their own province. However, political and economic circumstances necessitated the granting of wide linguistic and educational rights to Quebec's Anglo-Protestant minority. Growing bitterness over the prominence of this minority in what was expected to be a French province was amplified by the discovery that French-Catholic minorities were losing their rights in other parts of Canada. Resentment at the fact that Quebec had to grant minority rights, while other provinces did not, intensified French-Quebec nationalism. At the same time, French Quebeckers felt sympathy for their co-religionists and co-nationalists in other provinces and tried to defend them against assimilating pressures. Fighting for the rights of Acadians, Franco-Ontarians, or western Métis eventually led Quebeckers to a new concern for the French fact in other provinces. Professor Silver concludes that by 1900 Quebeckers had become thoroughly committed to French-Canadian rights not just in Quebec but throughout Canada, and had become convinced that the very existence of Confederation was based on such rights. Originally published in 1982, this new edition includes a new preface and conclusion that reflect upon Quebec's continuing struggle to define its place within Canada and the world.