Foucault and the Quiet Revolution - Part One.
As a Quebec resident, I have been living in Montreal for three years. I first heard of the Quiet Revolution from a school friend, who mentioned it as a very significant cultural movement; she was surprised that I had never heard of it.
This semester I’m taking a class on Foucault. It has some title like “Politics of the Body” or “Bio-Politics” - I can’t remember. We’re reading Society Must Be Defended and Power. I’m also spending time re-reading sections of my Essential Foucault Vol 1, and I’ve purchased the cambridge A short introduction to Foucault (the A short introduction series seems to be the best first step into any new area of study. I can’t recommend them enough.)
Quickly now: Foucaults Archeaological approach to Historical Analysis is designed to peel back the blanket of historicity, to reveal the mode of thought (episteme) of a particular period - that which gave force relations of that period its strength.
Over the next few installations I’d like to put into my own words the demonstration Foucault gives of a genealogy of sovereignty in Europe, while juxtaposing it with the rapid changing social environment of quebec during the period of the Quiet Revolution.
In SMBD we follow Foucault as he moves through a historical escavation of the Norman Conquest, which codifies a binary scheme of conquest/rebellion into european history. By the seventeeth century this theme is discovered by the french nobility while compiling notes on history for the prince to succeed Louie XIV. They were essentially given the task to do a comprehensive survey of France (the economy, institutions, and customs) in order to constitute the nowledge that would allow a king to rule, either wisely or with some sort of authority. But the interesting thing that happened was that when the nobility was given the task to compile history, they were also de facto given the power to order that history, and so it became weighed with the issues of interest to the aristocracy, rather than to those of interest to the future, or current sovereign.
The significance of this, as Foucault points out, is that this is the first time in history where a minority voice is expressed from history. The retelling of history, traditionally, is one in which power speaks to its own legitimacy: a celebration of a glorious past; the legitimacy of a historical right to rule; a divinely fated rule. But with the ordering of history by another voice, a discourse emerges. Foucault calls this new kind of discourse “Political Historicism”. From this point on, knowledge generated by inquiry into history all became part of this discourse, and all prior rights to rule based on historical legitimacy were open to challenge.
But who issues the challenge? Where exactly does the force of the challenge come from? Foucault points out that when the new discourse emerges, along with it comes a new “speaking subject”, from within the politics codified in history. The new “speaking subject”, which we may as well place in the center of the discourse, is a new notion that Foucault articulates as “the society” or even “the nation” - but then still closer to the “third estate”, and now closer to what we now understand as “civil society”, or even “the middle class”.
The result is that the sovereign must legitimize itself in a new way, in relation to a new subject - or rather, the first subject. Knowledge is appropriated into state institutions, to legitimize the state as knowledgeable, and legitimacy is forced to shift its agency from history, to a new speaking subject of history, the (civil) society.
The Quiet Revolution was a period of social and economic change in which reforms brought about a quick secularization of a Roman Catholic dominated school system and social services, as well as the creation of a welfare state.
Economic reforms aimed to benefit struggling francophones, and measures were taken to increase quebecois control over the provinces economy and resources, which until then had been primarily in the hands of foreign investment. According to the wikipedia page, until the second half of the 20th century, “the majority of Francophone Quebec workers lived below the poverty line and did not join the executive ranks of the businesses of their own province.” It was under the Minister of Natural Resources, Rene Levesque, in 1962, that the Liberal party put through it’s heaviest reform: the creation of Hydro Quebec, and electricity production and distribution was nationalized. In 1964 a new Labour code was adopted which made unionising much easier, and gave public employees the right to strike. As a move towards quebecois economic autonomy Many Public institutions/companies were formed to exploit the abundant resources of quebec: iron and steel, mining, forestry, and petroleum.
Education reforms aimed to improve the francophone schools. The ministries of Education and Health were were created as a way to organize and address the problems facing the francophone population (language gap, francophone institutions had low attendance and poor, not competitive with angle institutions). It was during this time in which CEGEP was introduced and the U of M was built.
The beginning of these reforms began following the 1960 provincial election of Jean Lesage of the liberal party. Prior to his election, politics had been dominated by the “fiercely conservative” Maurice Duplessis, leader of the Union National. Under his rule, electoral fraud and corruption were acknowledged and commonplace. The Union Nationale had support of much of the Roman Catholic Church clergy, which at the time continued to run the provinces schools, health care system, and social services. In fact, Parish Priests would sometimes quote the Union National slogan Le ciel est blue, l’enfer est rouge (Heaven is blue, Hell is red) which referred to the respective colors of the opposing political parties
Politics were also in a period of flux, but a new equilibrium was reached shortly after Expo 67, where (French) General Charles de Gaulle proclaimed “Vive le Quebec libre!” in a speech at Montreal City Hall. From that moment on, Quebec had an independence a separatist movement. In 1968 the Parti Quebecois was formed with Rene Levesque as its leader.
In Part Two, I’ll go into speculative detail on how a once covertly stratified society becomes overtly represented at the federal and provincial level, in federalist and separatist factions.
