Conservative Crossroads: Anti-Americanism and Anti-modernism in French Canadian Intellectual Discourse, 1891–1945

Abstract

America has generated a great deal of thought and writing in Quebec, but this commentary has never possessed the obsessiveness and anxieties that have characterized English Canadian writing on the United States. Yet both English- and French-speaking Canada share a vigorous and long-standing anti-American tradition. Indeed, from the eighteenth century to the present day, leading French Canadian writers and intellectuals have offered sweeping condemnations of American society. This apparent continuity masks a fundamental shift in the underpinnings of anti-American rhetoric in Quebec: primarily a left-wing idea today, anti-Americanism was essentially a right-wing doctrine until the postwar years. This paper explores the nature and origins of anti-Americanism in French Canada before 1945 and finds it tied to notions of anti-modernism on the part of French Canadian intellectuals.