Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health- by Dave Jaffe; Chapter 26: The Poet As Quebec Revolutionary.

The Poet As Quebec Revolutionary: The Life and Times of Paul Chamberland. by Dave Jaffe
 First Section

   Not many Canadian poets wrote poetry Like Paul Chamberland. But then Chamberland was and is a Quebecois, "a French Canadian" as some people used to say, referring to someone who speaks French as a first language and lives in the province of Quebec.
     In 1966, fifty years ago Quebec was in the sixth year of what was called "A Quiet Revolution'. Everything in the province seemed up for grabs, including Quebec's place in Canada. A province that had been repressed for many years under the harsh rule of the late premier Maurice Duplessis, had at last emerged into the sunlight of the liberal 1960's. The Liberal party of Quebec won the 1960 provincial election and tried to sweep away the  cobwebs of Duplessis's rule.
     Under Duplessis's Union Nationale government, and since the 1880's, most big businesses in Quebec were owned by Americans. These firms included mines, pulp and paper mills, forest firms and fishing companies. English speaking Canadians or anglophones as they are called now, managed these American owned companies while French Canadians or francophones toiled away as low paid workers in these places.
     "They were hewers of wood and drawers of water," some people observed about the francophones. This was not completely true. Some francophones belonged, as Marxists used to say to back then, to what was called 'The petty bourgois,'. The men in this group and they were nearly all men, were lawyers, doctors, priests and politicians. Allied to big and small business gruups, was the Roman Catholic church.It ran schools, hospitals and other places for the francophone population.
     The Catholic Church had a very strong and very conservative hold on the minds of most francophones.
     Immigrants to Quebec like Jews, Italians and other English speaking Catholics ran small businesses. And there were rich francophones too,like the family of Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau who lived in the upper class French speaking enclave of Outremont. This municipality was full of mostly French speaking people who were quite affluent.
      In the National Assembly in Quebec, Maurice Duplessis's Union National Party ran the province with a right wing iron hand. Duplessis  was allied to the big business tycoons who owned large swaths of Quebec.
     It was a good deal for some people in the province. Yet then came the Liberal Party's victory in the 1960 provincial election and the new premier of Quebec Jean Lesage opened the gates to change.
 Now new groups sprang up among the francophones of Quebec. And from 1960 to 1995, the major political question in Canada was "What does Quebec want?"

   End of the first section. To be continued.