The Quebec Quiet Revolution: A Noisy Evolution‪.‬

Within the last three decades historians, social scientists, and observers of Quebec have been debating the advent of modernity in Quebec society and the significance of the Quiet Revolution in this process. The question is, as Paul-Andre Linteau states: "Did this Quiet Revolution mark a fundamental rupture with the past or was it an accelerated phase in the evolutionary change of Quebec, already begun many years before"? (Linteau et al. 2, 73; all quotations translated by the authors (1)). Throughout the 1960s the Quiet Revolution took on mythological proportions, which produced a simplistic reading of Quebec history and modernity that pitted la grande noirceur of the Duplessis era against the so-called enlightenment of the Quiet Revolution. This perspective still affects the historical interpretation and imaginative reconstruction of that era. For example Fernand Ouellet refutes the new so-called revisionist history of Quebec and reaffirms the revolutionary character of the event. Ouellet was responding to a growing number of specialists who since the 1970s have questioned this one-dimensional interpretation and have centered the debate, "on the nature of Quebec society before 1960" (Linteau et al. 2, 74). Ronald Rudin, who maintains a position similar to that of Ouellet, goes further in his criticism of these new interpretations of the Quiet Revolution, claiming that there is an underlying attempt to rehabilitate Duplessis and his era. For Jocelyn Letourneau, a noted contemporary historian, the Quiet Revolution legitimized the ascension to power of a new technocratic class in Quebec (2000b). This class created its own unique identity and history, which came to be conflated with that of the collectivity as a whole, i.e. the francophones of Quebec. This technocratic class emerged as the new dominant elite, and, as in the past, a new elitist culture of Quebec imposed its version of modernity upon the French-speaking population of Quebec.