Caught in the Blind Spot: Organized Labour in Revisionist Explanations of the Quiet Revolution‪.‬

The Quiet Revolution, in the words of Rene Levesque, was "a period when the people of Quebec set their docks to the time of the twentieth century ... [B]etween 1960 and 1964 Quebec lived through the most exalting and fruitful aggiornamento" (Levesque 184, 186). Until recently, Levesque's view encapsulated the conventional wisdom about this decade in Quebec's history: the 1960s marked a pivotal turning point when a backward society belatedly entered the modern age.(1) "Quebec awoke only very slowly from its long winter," Pierre Vallieres wrote in White N*****s of America (42). For Vallieres, it was the 1960 election victory of Jean Lesage's Liberal Party that shattered the monolithic ideology of the "great darkness" and ushered in a period when all of the traditional shibboleths and the dominant institutions in Quebec were called into question. In the most influential sociological accounts of the Quiet Revolution, the principal engineer of this sweeping transformation of Quebec's society and political institutions during the 1960s was a rising new middle class of highly educated young francophones. This group's upward mobility had been blocked in the postwar period by an unholy alliance of the Catholic Church, private capital (largely American and English-Canadian), and the autocratic, conservative, nationalist government of Maurice Duplessis. In order to expand their occupational space, the new middle class pressed for the expansion of the provincial state and its incursion into sectors of social life--health, education, and welfare--which had previously been the preserve of ecclesiastical bureaucracies.