NATIONALISME ET LUTTE DES CLASSES AU QUEBEC (NATIONALISM AND CLASS STRUGGLE IN QUEBEC)

Ninety-one percent of the natives of Quebec are wage earners suffering on their own territory a double alienation, socio-economic and cultural. The largely proletarized French-speaking population of Quebec is subjected on the job and often in its public life, to authorities who do not literally or metaphorically understand its language. The socio-economic status of the proletariat and its linguistic isolation reinforce its inferiority complex. It is only in literature that this situation is documented, assessed and used as a springboard for self-vindication. However, Quebec literature appears to be considerably ahead of the times. Popular culture, controlled by mass media and international corporations, marketing consumerism as ideology, dominate the contemporary scene. Such an ideology pretends to ignore class and ethnic distinctions and facilitates the quiet reproduction of the existing socio-economic order that treats Quebec natives as cheap labor. A growing class of Quebec intellectuals, however, has become aware of its dispossession, dispossession of its country and of its identity. This class strives to regain them, at least through the mediation of language and literature. Such a form of struggle for identity and recognition has a limited impact on the actual situation since Quebec nationalism is primarily an expression of a class struggle that could only find a victorious outcome in a rather unlikely proletarian revolution.