Caught in the Blind Spot: Organized Labor in Revisionist Explanations of the Quiet Revolution (Quebec‪)‬

Introduction The Quiet Revolution, in the words of Rene Levesque, was "a period when the people of Quebec set their clocks 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 Niggers 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.