In last autumn's barely defeated referendum, supporters of sovereignty for Quebec claimed a "distinct society" as the strongest justification for severing most ties with the rest of Canada. The author explores that difference in the character of Quebec City.
Today, on a bright mid-September afternoon, I'm watching dozens of cars flash down the Grande-Allee, Québec City's major boulevard of the haute ville, the upper town, each car with its headlights on. It's not a cortege, not the funeral of a powerful Mafioso--it's the law. In Québec, running lights are wired to the ignition; they stay on despite the bright sun and long summer. No exceptions. It's safer that way, more responsible, mon ami. It's like, say, Sweden--Catholic, communal Sweden.
I started coming to la Québec (the city) in 1960, a 20-year-old hitchhiking up from Pittsburgh, looking for something he'd lost. My parents were Canadian, one French, one English, and they'd raised me everywhere except for my father's French Canada. After their violent divorce, I wanted to master all that I felt he'd denied me--his language, my identity. Québec City became his surrogate. Learning its habits, I began to understand him, and, slowly, to forgive. After a while, le Québec (the province) became an addiction. I thought I could become my father, replace him as the person he could have been if he'd had my chances. I brought my young family to Montreal and we lived there a dozen years. It didn't work, of course, but something rubbed off.
Nineteen-sixty was also the most significant year in modern Québec history. The election that year marked the birth of this reasonably tolerant, democratic, secular, outward-looking (almost Scandinavian) society that keeps its headlights on in the daytime, after centuries of autocratic, obscurantist, Jansenist Catholicism. I was witness to the so-called "quiet revolution" without even knowing it. A North American society with which I had passing acquaintance--and on which I even had some claim-had transformed itself overnight, without violence. What overwhelmed me then was the energy released in every direction. It seemed stirringly French, the equal of all the Godard and Sartre I'd been watching and reading, and it was happening to people with my name just 50 miles over the border from Eisenhower's America.
In those early years, concerts and plays were staged in open lots and the great chansonniers who would go on to stardom in the French-speaking world, Felix Leclerc, Jean-Pierre Ferland, and Gilles Vigneault, were singing for pittances in small bistros, coffee houses, or theaters just about every night. During the student riots in Paris in 1968, I heard the songs of Québec echoing through the cobbled streets of the Latin Quarter. I had the private satisfaction, a little smug, of knowing that the quebecois had been there first, more completely and more modestly.
Every city has its perfect season--Paris in April, Italy and Greece in May--and for Québec City it has to be mid-September, when the angled light seems to wash the air as it passes through. The college kids have nearly all departed, leaving only Europeans off their tour boats. The days are warm, the nights cool; sweaters in the morning, tweeds at night. Like the gloomy cities of Normandy from where the landless second sons and a few adventurers of the ancien regime waved their good-byes to Europe 350 years ago, Québec appears carved from a single block of gray granite, potentially the New World's most somber city. But on a bright day in the right season, dimensions rise in the grain of wood, nubbiness on the sleekest surface; fissures etch themselves on the granite blocks, adding a dignified levity to everything the light splashes against.