INTRODUCTION

English Quebec is the product of very particular historical circumstances and, as we must begin somewhere, let us start with the British conquest of 1759, itself a sequel of the geopolitics of Europe of the time. To make a long story short, we now know, thanks to Philip Lawson's recent work (1989) – although Gustave Lanctôt and A. L. Burt maintained as much over a century ago – that the British military and civil administrators, most of whom were Anglo-Irish or Scottish, became of the mind that French Quebec society was worth saving, and that the error of Ireland (the ‘Protestant Ascendancy’) was to be avoided. The concretization of this consensus was the Quebec Act of 1774, the motivations behind which have been, until the work of Lawson, attributed almost wholly to short-term strategic considerations – of buying ‘Canadian’ resistance to the rebelling ‘Americans’.

As the Parliament of Great Britain had contributed to saving Quebec from ‘Anglicization’, so French Quebecers helped to save Canada from Americanization. From their efforts, infused with the determination to save their society of the 60,000 ‘new subjects’ of 1774, and the determination of the 60,000 Loyalists who came north shortly afterwards (in 1783) to remain under British institutions, was born the Canadian political project: a conspiracy to conserve societies distinct from America.