Two Theories of Legault

As presented to the American Council of Quebec Studies Biennial Conference, Quebec City, October 3, 2024

Of What is Legault an Instance?

When it appeared on the Quebec political scene in 2011, and then won a majority government in 2018, the Coalition Avenir Quebec portrayed itself as something new, a party that would end the federalism-sovereignty duopoly that dominated Quebec politics since the 1970s.  There are a number of intellectual traditions in Quebec politics, and the Liberal-Parti Quebecois debate covered a narrow range, both rooted in the rougiste aspects of the Quiet Revolution.  There remained other intellectual currents, and the rise of the CAQ showed that other forgotten currents were merely dormant and were open to revival.  What does the success of the CAQ and Francois Legault tell us about the vitality of other intellectual currents, and how can we use existing frameworks of Quebec intellectual history to understand Legault’s rise?

While two political parties dominated, there were three dominant currents of the constitution-and-referendums era, associated with Pierre Trudeau and the federal Liberal Party, Rene Levesque and the Parti Quebecois, and Andre Laurendeau, indirectly with the Quebec Liberal Party.  The first two currents are well known to any who follow politics in Quebec,and the third one is crucial for understanding Quebec political discourse since the Quiet Revolution.  Duality was at the heart of Quebec’s constitutional goals once the Quiet Revolution began.  It argued that the Canada of 1867 was the result of a pact between two founding peoples, in which Canada was an equal partnership of those peoples, and Quebec the political expression of one of the founding peoples.  The dualist approach was also the thesis of the report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, as well as the failed Meech Lake Accord.  Many incorrectly assumed that Trudeau’s 1980 pre-referendum promise to reform the constitution meant he was embracing duality.  The duality argument was inextricably tied to federalism, as it was a theory of the relationship with the rest of Canada, and after 1995, Quebec’s attention turned elsewhere.  This was the shift that made the Coalition Avenir Quebec possible.

Groulx, Duplessis, Bock-Côté:  Legault Is a Bleu

The forgotten tradition was the conservative, or bleu, one, historically tied to the Catholic church, which dominated Quebec society throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.  Two important proponents after the 1930s were Lionel Groulx and Maurice Duplessis, both of whom were nationalist and autonomous but not independentist, though Groulx had his notre État français moments.  Scholars like Louis Balthazar call this nationalism French-Canadian in order to distinguish it from the Quebecois.  Duplessist nationalism had little interest in building a provincial state and resisted efforts to build a federal welfare state after the end of World War II.  Catholicism broadly seemed more important than language.  The French language kept Quebec Catholic (la langue, gardienne de la foi).  Duplessis was hostile to minority religions, but it was in the context of keeping the French-Canadian majority separate from minorities, especially in francophone Catholic  schools.  These minorities did not have a need to learn French, and conservative nationalists never worried about why they did not, in contrast to Quebecois civic nationalists, for whom everyone could be part of the Quebecois nation but it was expected that all would adopt French as the common language.  This belief informed the provisions of the Charter of the French Language on the language of education, and eventually the policy of interculturalism.

The most visible intellectual agitator behind the rebirth of conservative Quebec nationalism has been the sociologist and political commentator Mathieu Bock-Cote.  Though now based in Paris, and focused primarily on broader arguments about multiculturalism as a threat to the integrity of nations, he writes regularly for Quebecor publications.  In addition to his columns, he wrote a 2007 book that called for a reorientation of Quebec nationalism from the social democratic Parti Quebecois back to its conservative roots, arguing that nationalism properly sits on the bleu side of the rouge-bleu spectrum.  For Bock-Cote, the CAQ sits on one side of the new political spectrum, with the Liberals, Parti Quebecois, and Quebec solidaire all opposing it from the left, and all less committed to the nationalist project. 

The question is often asked if Legault represents a revival of Duplessis.  He has sometimes called the CAQ the new Union Nationale.  Recall the Twain adage, which he likely did not say, that history rhymes rather than repeats.  The CAQ and the UN rhyme, but the CAQ is something different.  They share a francophone rural base with no Montreal appeal.  Legault often puts on a “father of the nation” act that echoes Duplessis and that appeals in certain quarters.  Both leaders passed controversial legislation that was accused of trampling on minority rights.  Catholicism gave way to secularism, but the latter was presented as a civic religion, and Muslims seemed to become the new Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Legault’s nationalism does harken back to the same intellectual currents that produced Duplessis, though it is too rooted in the Quiet Revolution to embrace anything beyond a performative catho-laicité.  It draws on a revival of writing and debate among conservative intellectuals meant to rehabilitate Duplessis, and to break the connection between Quebec nationalism and the social democratic sovereigntist project of the Parti Quebecois.  It is focused not immediately on federalism or on broad initiatives for constitutional reform (Legault’s CAQ rejects the 1982 constitution but has not sought any Meech-like initiatives to reconcile with the rest of the country), and rules out a third referendum on sovereignty, or even rhetoric meant to reignite support for independence.  Rather, the focus is internal, upon building a francophone society that enjoys the greatest autonomy possible from the rest of Canada, including the federal government.  There is some inclination to focus on the French-Canadian nucleus as the society to be protected, and CAQ discourse on the health of French seem to suggest that only old stock French Canadians matter, shown in the tendency to shift indicators cited in analyses of language use.  For example, mother tongue or language used in the home is more of a concern than language used at work or in public, which were the chief concerns in the Bill 101 era.  There is less sense of a civic nation to which all people living in Quebec could belong, and more one of a French-Canadian core and outsiders hostile to the core, even if they use French in their daily lives.

The difficulty with positing Legault as the resurrection of Duplessis is that it portrays him as unfairly authoritarian, and overstates the role of nationalist ideology in his worldview.  He is indeed a nationalist, and advocated independence as a Parti Quebecois cabinet minister before forming a new party.  However, his 2013 book and his public statements indicate that economic growth is his main concern, and there is a historical rhyme between Robert Bourassa’s advocacy of James Bay hydroelectric development and Legault’s calls to develop the St. Lawrence River.  Legalt has long called for Quebec to aspire to Ontario’s productivity.  In its early years, and in the 2012 and 2014 elections, the CAQ platform focused on economics, and only made a turn to nationalism in 2015 that party insiders admit was done as an electoral gambit.

Laurendeau, Bourassa:  Legault as Post-Dualist

Indeed, in economic matters, Legault’s CAQ echoes the two periods of office of Liberal premier Robert Bourassa, where advancing Quebec nationalist interests was an important issue, but was never the raison d’être of the government.  This leads to the second theory of Legault’s nationalism, which is that it has its roots not in Groulx and Duplessis, but in Robert Bourassa’s final term in government, after his 1989 reelection.  That term included the failures of both the Meech Lake and the Charlottetown Accords, which put Quebec onto the trajectory for a second sovereignty referendum in 1995.  The rejection of Meech Lake rocked Bourassa’s government, and the Quebec Liberal Party internally, because there was a significant push, led by the youth wing and encapsulated in the “Allaire Report” that called for a major repatriation of most federal powers to Quebec.  Support for sovereignty soared, and Bourassa had to spend much of his final term preventing the sovereigntist surge from forcing his hand into holding a referendum on leaving Canada.  He was not able to keep his party completely together.  Jean Allaire, the chair of the committee that drafted the eponymous report, and Mario Dumont, president of the party’s youth wing, left the party to found Action démocratique du Québec, a new party with a conservative nationalist bent.  The ADQ never formed a government, but during nearly two decades of existence served as official opposition and firmly reestablished a multiparty system in Quebec.  While there was no formal or legal link between the ADQ and the CAQ that came after it, the CAQ has clearly occupied the ADQ’s space on the political spectrum, and scholars including Frederic Boily and Eric Montigny treat the two parties as a single intellectual current.  If we accept this premise, the CAQ becomes the product of the Liberal Party, similar to both the Union Nationale and the Parti Quebecois.

Boily and Montigny both describe the nationalist approach of the CAQ as a “third way” that is neither sovereigntist nor Trudeauist, but we need to go beyond their analysis to consider how the CAQ’s approach differs from Andre Laurendeau’s dualism.  Duality presumes the existence of, to paraphrase an old Radio-Canada sitcom, le moi et l’autre, that the central aspect of Quebec’s existence is its interaction with a partner that refuses to treat it equally.  The third way is autonomist rather than dualist, and argues that Quebec’s nationhood is self-evident, and does not require outside recognition or validation.  The focus is this not on constitutional reform or sovereignty referenda, but rather on internal integration, building an economy and embracing a singular identity, one rooted in secularism (Bill 21) and French-Canadian identity via the French language (Bil 96).

Forward to 2026

The CAQ won power definitively in the 2018 election, rising from third place in the National Assembly to claim a majority government.  It left the opposition parties decimated, with the Parti Quebecois reduced to fourth place and the Liberal Party reduced to its Montreal base.  The COVID-19 pandemic further reduced the visibility of the opposition as the National Assembly did not sit during lockdowns and Legault governed by Order in Council.  In the 2022 election, the CAQ won one of the biggest parliamentary majorities in Quebec history, the Liberals again reduced to a Montreal rump and the Parti Quebecois at 3 seats.  Only with loss of the Jean-Talon byelection to the PQ in 2023 did a sense of electoral competition return, with the sovereigntist party under Paul St-Pierre Plamondon taking a lead in opinion polls.  The Liberals continue to be without a leader, and need to elect that leader in order to start staking solid positions, and may need their leadership contest to be in full force before they come to grips with the identity questions that Legault and the CAQ have brought to the fore.  The 2026 electoral campaign could well involve a vibrant debate among contrasting schools of thought about the nature of Quebec society and nationhood, a debate that may well be more complex than those of the late 20th century.

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