Quebec

SIX HUNDRED MILES north of Montreal, the land is so wild and forbidding that even the moose won't put up with it. Around La Grande Riviere, where the snow begins to blow in mid-September, but stops soon after Christmas, when it becomes too cold even for that, the caribou begin their range.
The fishing is terrific in this crumpled, glacier-scoured plain. The land is so tattered with lakes and ponds that, despite the thousands of years the Indians and Eskimos - Cree and Innuit - have lived off it, there are untold numbers of waters where trout and pike have never been disturbed by man.

Before they are covered by winter, exquisitely fragile and microscopically detailed mosses hug the pink, marblelike granite and quartz. They are, in places, plush doormats, dark green and velvetlike. Nearby are cool patches of pale lichens, a green on the edge of ice-blue. Accented by the crimson of dying vines, they beckon you to a crouch, the better to study and marvel at their world, so impossibly tiny compared with the black spruce that tower sixty feet over them, taller than some office complexes, un-climbable, remote.

Across La Grande Riviere there are more majestic black spruce, in sparse stands. It's important to focus on the idea that those far trees are every bit as big as the ones that dwarf both you and the moss, because the sight of what has been done to this stretch of the northern bank of La Grande numbs the mind and blows out any sense of scale.

The trees on the far bank, despite their size, are mere after-thoughts of the landscape, which is thoroughly dominated by an improbable, incongruous, canyonlike staircase that has been blasted into the rock.

Try to imagine two football fields of solid granite, laid side by side, with a great deal of space to spare in the end zones. Imagine that on the right sideline, where the bleachers should be, there is a sheer rock wall the height of a three-story building, running the length of the field and more.

On the left sideline of the left-hand football field, there is a sheer drop-off as deep as the right-hand wall is high. Beyond the end zones, in either direction, are two more sheer granite walls. Each of these is three times as high as the sideline wall.

What you've got is a plain two hundred feet wide and four hundred feet long. The thirty-five-foot-high right sideline wall and the thirty-five-foot-deep left sideline drop-off exist because this plain is part of a terrace.

This terrace consists of eighteen of these plateaus, stepping smartly down from the top of the valley of La Grande Riviere to its shore - a distance of over half a mile, a sight that would be impressive enough, even if these giant's stairs were not sunk one hundred feet straight down into the rock of the slope. This hundred-foot drop is what yields the towering walls at the end zones of our metaphorical football fields.

Standing, looking at this broad, deep, manmade canyon in the wilderness, two and a half hours by prop-jet from civilization, you try to reach for some perspective. Craning your head back, you take another look at the tallest branches of your friend the spruce tree. You think of what it would take to fell this giant, cut it up into cordwood, and then haul it away, truckload after truck-load. It's a job that's within human comprehension, and the comprehension is that the job would be hard. Hell, just getting the truck this far north would be hard. Then you look back to the canyon, which is to the tree as the tree is to the tiny lichen, and try to imagine what it took to carve those right angles and straight lines into the granite, and you can't do it. How do you move that much earth when on the average day of the year it's 7 degrees below freezing? How did they get the rock out of there? How much dynamite did that take? What kind of fundamental craziness did it require even to think of doing such a thing?

I relate all this by way of introducing Quebec, the most improbable, and yet most undeniable nation of the nine. Quebec, a small collection of six million people, relatively few of whom speak English, surrounded by hundreds of millions of Americans and Canadians who do, built this canyon.

Yet the canyon, by the standards of Quebec, is something of a yawn. It's a straightforward piece of work. All it is, is a safety device. It's a spillway to dump unwanted water out of the reservoir of a hydroelectric complex called LG 2. It's nothing compared to the dam that holds back the river. That's almost two miles long, and taller than the United Nations building is high. The tiny speck you see crawling along the top of it is a 110-ton, $400,000 Caterpillar 660 belly-dumping earth mover, the tires of which cost $7000 apiece and are taller than a man. The reservoir behind it covers more than a thousand square miles, which would drown the entire state of Rhode Island. To fill the reservoir, three rivers - the Eastmain, the Opinaca, and La Petite Opinaca, which used to quietly flow west into La Baie James - have been diverted by more dams so that they now flow north, into La Grande Riviere. If not another drop of water were added to it, it would still take Los Angeles more than forty years to drink the resultant lake dry.

If rock-moving awes you, consider the caverns and tunnels four hundred feet underground that house and serve the turbines. If ordinary dump trucks had been used to haul the rubble from the excavations, and one had been loaded every ten minutes, twenty-four hours per day, every day without letup, it would have taken over six years to clear these caves.

The main "machine room," where the dynamos are located, is something out of science fiction. It's reminiscent of the vast underground hangar in the movie Star Wars, from which the rebels launch their fighters in the final attack against the Empire. The most significant difference is that the real thing at LG 2 is a great deal larger than the imaginary cavern in the film. It's much longer than either the 110-story Sears Tower in Chicago or the World Trade Center in New York is tall.

It's fifteen stories high, and more than half that wide. A grid of man-sized high-intensity lamps glare down from the entire length and width of the roof, casting a strange, shadowless light. Metal screeches against metal as men hanging inside control cubes confidently and at high speed jockey machines that offer no obvious explanation of their function.

When all the generators housed in this room are spinning, they produce more energy than six nuclear reactors of the Three Mile Island type.

And this is just LG-2, which began to produce power in late 1979. There are also an LG 3 and LG 4 to come in phase one of La Baie James-La Grande Riviere project over the next few years. (LG i will come later.) And that's just phase one. Also on the drawing boards for this hydroelectric basin, which is the size of England, are installations at the unpoetically designated LA I, LA 2, and EM 1 sites. And that's not all. La Grande Riviere de la Baleine - the Great River of the Whale - even farther north than La Grande Riviere, is scheduled to be tamed.And this is just the new construction. Even without it, Hydro Quebec, the Tennessee Valley Authority-sized outfit that is behind all this power, produced so much surplus electricity in the summer that it has a contract to help light and air-condition New York City.

And this is all done totally by the fiercely and proudly French province of Quebec.

Quebec's existence is utterly improbable. It's so unlikely that a French civilization should exist in North America hundreds of years after Louis XIV and Napoleon had written off the continent, that the Quebecois have worked it into their nuclear-holocaust jokes. What races will survive World War III? The Chinese and the Quebecois. The Chinese because there are so many of them, and the Quebecois because if they've survived the last four hundred years, they'll survive anything. Quebec is that part of North America that is so distinct from the rest, and against such odds, that it takes pride in serving to define what a nation is - and can be.

Quebec, the largest province in Canada, is three times the size of France - even larger than Texas. Its population is larger than that of Ireland or Denmark. The cornerstone of its civilization is that, despite being surrounded by English-speakers, over 80 percent of the population speak French as their mother tongue, and the overwhelming majority speak no English at all. Quebec is becoming relatively diversified, economically, with raw and semi-transformed materials, like pulp and paper, iron ore, lumber products, aluminum, asbestos, and copper, going to the States; manufactured goods and food products, ranging from textiles to yogurt, being traded within Canada; and high-technology know-how, the most prominent being hydroelectric and transportation expertise, getting exported to other continents. Quebec is strategically located, controlling both sides of one of North America's greatest trading rivers, the St. Lawrence, which is the major way out of the Great Lakes to the sea.

By the standards of North America, the population is amazingly homogeneous. Most people can easily trace their roots back three hundred years or more to the arrival of their first ancestor in Quebec. It's a place with a long-standing and well-founded sense of oppression at the hands both of the Anglophones (the local word for English-speakers) and the Catholic Church.

But most important, it's a place where the people feel like a nation.

In food, music, fashions, values, education, ways of thinking, politics, and other important ways, Quebecois have become, or are becoming, in their famous slogan, "maitres chez nous" - masters in our own house.

Nationhood is such an obvious reality in the minds of the Quebecois that most of the talk about the subject is by English-speakers explaining it to each other, not by Quebecois themselves.

In Quebec, for example, a discussion of whether the province will make it on its own economically, when it gains some sort of a divorce from Canada, is not considered a discussion about nationalism. It's regarded as a practical discussion about what one should do about this pre-existing nationalistic "French Fact." The point of this distinction is that it is logically possible to demonstrate that Quebec could do badly, in economic terms, as a nation. But it would be dead wrong thus to draw the conclusion that nationalism does not, or should not, exist. For, ultimately, nationalism is a human, not an economic, reality.

Conversely, Quebecois would point out, all the arguments in the world which lead to the conclusion that Canada makes sense economically cannot logically convince you that the diverse collection of entities called Canada is a nation. It's clear as consommé to the Quebecois how they are different from English Canada, not to mention the United States and, for that matter, France; and the rest of this chapter will examine these differences. What's less clear to them and, for that matter, some Americans, is in what sense English Canada is so different from the United States in the deepest, gut terms in which they describe nationalism. Some Quebecois have come to refer to English Canada's collective identity as "mapism," not "nationalism." The idea is that, compared to Quebec, the only thing Canadians hold in common are the same maps, with the same arbitrary surveyors' lines drawn on them. "Canada," the government of Quebec has observed archly, "is obliged to use a certain ingenuity to define itself as a distinctive culture."

Thus, discussions of French-English separation in Canada start off on a fundamentally wacky basis. The minority says of the majority, as one Quebec poet said, "Canada does not exist - just does not exist - other than on paper, and it has never existed and it will never exist."

When English Canada is forced by this argument into the incongruous position of attempting to explain what a poor Prince Edward Island fisherman has in common with an Alberta rancher who has oil interests, it starts skating dangerously close to the admission that they, for example, both watch reruns of "M*A*S*H," and both admire full-sized Chevrolets.

This strange situation did not arise overnight. In fact, it started almost four hundred years ago. When Champlain founded Quebec in 1608, the Quebec problem was born.

Today, in the Place Royale, the meticulously restored lower city of ancient mansions, pubs, docks, and warehouses at the foot of the cliffs of old Quebec, there is a museum that houses a wall-sized map, entitled, in French, "Quebec, Capital of an Empire."

Housed in an intimate, dramatically lit grotto reminiscent. of a chapel, the map outlines a French-explored North America that is, in fact, quite awesome. From Quebec it traces the western slope of the Alleghenies all the way to the Gulf Coast and then sweeps the continent to the west beyond the Rockies. It shows all the major river basins - the Ohio, the Illinois, the Mississippi, the Missouri.

It includes Toronto (originally Fort Rouille, 1749); Pittsburgh (Fort Du Quesne, 1754); Uniontown, Pennsylvania (Fort Necessite, 1734); Detroit (Fort Ponchartrain du Detroit, 1701); Vicksburg, Mississippi (Francois); Natchez, Mississippi (Fort Rosalie, 1716); Montgomery, Alabama (Toulouse, 1714); Mobile (de la Mobile, 1701); New Orleans (Nouvelle Orleans, 1718); and Point Comfort, Texas (St.-Louis, 1695).

Also, Sault Sainte Marie, Green Bay (St.-Francois Xavier), Atchison, Kansas (Cavagnol); Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin (St.-Nicolas, 16g0); Winnipeg (Fort Rouge, 1738); Dorothy, Alberta (La Jonquiere, 1752); Memphis (Assomption, 1739), and, of course, St. Louis, Missouri.

Near the map, in a historical note pointedly not accompanied by an English translation, but carefully phrased at a level that an Anglo with a few years of high school French can struggle through, it's observed that for 150 years after Champlain established the French presence in America, explorers and merchants fanned out across the continent from Quebec.

At its height, the note continues, the French Empire in "Amerique" covered almost all the continent with the exception of Florida and Mexico, which were occupied by the Spanish. As for the English, they hugged only the Atlantic coast south of the Gaspé Peninsula.

Unfortunately, France's interest in North America was short-sighted at best. Throughout the monarchies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, France wanted maximum exploitation of the New World with minimum development. In the seventeenth-century France of Louis XIV, the object of government in Europe was the consolidation of central authority and the reduction of the autonomy of satellite powers. The last thing that was wanted was encouragement of a Quebec that could stand on its own, if critical ties to the homeland were severed. In the eighteenth century, France was characterized by regimes that could be referred to, in their relations with the New World, only as corrupt, rapacious, stupid, and a few decades away from being on the wrong end of a guillotine.

Thus, by the mid-1700s, there were nearly fifty thousand French-speakers in the land that would become Quebec, but the society in which they had organized themselves was oddly constructed so as to be better at surviving the challenges to come than it was at resisting them.

The French settlers, or habitants, made some major adjustments to the institutions and patterns of thought of the Old World in their first 150 years.

For one thing, the traditional French political tripod of manor lord, priest, and peasant was severely damaged, and with it the link to secular authority. In a harsh environment like Quebec's, the seigneur - the fellow who had received the land grant from the Crown and who in turn subdivided it among the habitants - was a poor imitation of the protective nobility of feudal France. He was hardly in a position to ensure the settlers protection from the startling new range of adversities of the St. Lawrence wilderness. So, in the face of ugly winters and unhappy Iroquois, the habitants organized themselves cooperatively, rather than hierarchically, even altering the centuries-old pattern of laying out farms so that it would be easier for one neighbor to help another rather than rely on the civil authorities.

Under such an arrangement, there wasn't a great deal of need for a bureaucracy. Social and agricultural affairs were taken care of informally, within the limits of the settlement made up of equals, and without a great deal of attention paid to the peasant ways of Europe.

Thus, two societies developed in New France, one metropolitan, educated, literate, and dependent for markets, wages, and ideas on the ties to the old country. The other, the ancestors of the bulk of today's Quebecois, was self-sufficient and, except for the maddening habit of thinking, acting, and speaking in French, utterly North American. While the habitants, for example, might not have had a clue as to how to behave amid French sophisticates, they certainly had some ideas about how to behave around, say, a North American bear, a development not unusual in pioneer societies.

As the habitants thus assigned less importance to life in a secular municipality, the ever-present parish priest moved into the power vacuum.

The priest was literate, which meant he was needed whenever a legal document like a will or a bill of sale was required. He was the guardian of recorded history - the records of births, marriages, and deaths. (In fact, he was so good at maintaining the public records that, to this day, Quebec's genealogical records are among the finest in the world.) The demands made on him as a spiritual overseer were brisk, because the French settlers were notorious for letting the good times roll, a cultural trait nurtured to this day.

But the key element in this march toward the future was that the priest's first allegiance was not to France. Ultramontanism was a very hot issue at this time. It held, essentially, that there should be one Church, independent of who was in power in what country. The Jesuits, specifically, of New France were great believers in this theory, so maintaining the culture of the empire was in no way as important to them as was reporting directly to the home office in Rome.

This was the kind of rickety social structure which was smashed by the British when they conquered the French colony by force of arms.

The taking of the city of Quebec in 1759, when the British general Wolfe overcame the defender, Montcalm, on the Plains of Abraham, resulted, in 1760, in the ending of a series of border wars between the two European powers. The Conquest also settled, for exactly two centuries, the fate of the Quebecois: an overwhelmingly French society was to be ruled by the English.

The lack of resistance on the part of the habitants to this arrangement after the Conquest was based on the burdensome treatment they had received at the hands of the old French ruling class, coupled with the amazingly tolerant, for its era, attitude of the British.

On the one hand, to the habitants who were well into their second and third generation as North Americans by now, France was becoming increasingly irrelevant. The old country had never really embraced New France except as a get-rich-quick scheme. In fact, the habitants had come to associate the transient French with scandals, extortions, and internal bickerings associated with the lining of their own pockets even at the expense of advancing the cause of the empire.

One of the major reasons the habitants gave of their lives and resources in the fight with their French cousins against the British before the Conquest was a misguided self-interest. They believed that with the French in power, all they had to deal with was the burden of corruption. With the British in power, they firmly believed, their language, religion, and way of life would be destroyed.

But the British, after the fighting, offered a canny deal that, for all practical purposes, started to freeze the development of Quebec society right where it was. All sides ended up accepting it with gratitude. The habitants got to keep what they wanted - their rural French North American society. The French elite was saved from instant ruin, although in short order they found themselves in decline, as some merchants and administrators left for greener pastures and others were crippled by the disruption of their lines of credit and sources of goods on the continent. The British got the peace and quiet that they would have loved to obtain from their thirteen Atlantic colonies to the south. And the big winner under the new English Protestant regime, ironically, was the Roman Catholic Church, which became the executor of this deal, and thus, in effect, the real wielder of secular power over the vast majority of the inhabitants of Quebec.

"The political authority of a Protestant society," writes Alfred Dubuc, "thus became the defender of the values and institutions of the Catholic Church, while the religious authorities of French-Canadian society upheld, in the eyes of their flocks, British institutions."

The influential independentist sociologist-historian Marcel Rioux, in drawing political observations from these developments, says, "After the Conquest, Quebec society, far from continuing to develop like other Western societies of the era, becoming industrial, urbanized, and secular, on the contrary draws inward upon its popular and rural elements and, instead of becoming more urbanized, becomes more folklike. We observe, among other phenomena, a greater predominance of agricultural occupations; a greater scattering of the population among the rural parishes; more social homogeneity; reinforcement of moral and religious norms; less important internal stratification and differentiation; and finally, a more restricted territorial, occupational, and upward mobility."

And that's a polite way of saying it. What you had, until the "Quiet Revolution" began in 1860, was a society that, in hindsight, was amazingly backward and ingrown by North American standards.

In fact, many Quebecois now date the dark ages of their society not from the Conquest of 1760, but from the 1830s, when the democratic liberal secular elite from within the Quebecois society began to try to wrest power away from the Church and the English. This resulted in armed revolution by 1837, but the Patriotes, as they were called, were defeated by the same old coalition: French Catholic denunciation from the pulpit, and professional English military tacticians on the ground. It was after the crushing of the Patriotes that the Quebecois, while still far and away the majority in Quebec, began to think of themselves less as one of the races destined to rule North America than as a minority. In order to convince themselves that their survival was worthwhile, they immersed themselves in their ancient traditions, and thus was launched 150 years of petrifying conservatism.

It's tough to draw a parallel between the Quebecois experience of the last two centuries and anything in the rest of North American history, although it has been tried.

Pierre Vallieres, a leader of the now-defunct radical, terrorist FLQ - Front de Liberation du Quebec - wrote a book, while in prison in the late 1960s, called White Niggers of America. "To be a 'nigger' in America is to be not a man but someone's slave," it reads. "For the rich white man of Yankee America, the nigger is a sub-man. Even the poor whites consider the nigger their inferior. They say: 'to work as hard as a nigger,' 'to smell like a. nigger,' 'as dangerous as a nigger,' 'as ignorant as a nigger.' "

He then goes on to expound a liberation struggle that equates the French-Canadian population with "niggers, exploited men, second-class citizens."

There surely are vivid comparisons to be drawn between American blacks and French Canadians. Every Quebecois has his share of stories. The most pointed, perhaps, are the ones about Anglo bosses demanding that their underlings "speak white." Separatist Parti Quebecois founder, Rene Levesque, once referred to his English opponents as his "white Rhodesians." There are those who have been spat on or beaten up for speaking French in their own land. There are the jobs denied and school doors closed even to English-speakers with a French accent. There's the chic Quebecoise refused service in a restaurant or boutique in the heart of her home town of Montreal for not speaking English. The workers in Anglo-owned asbestos mines brutally suppressed by thugs paid for by their own government. The "two solitudes" of English and French lived side by side for generations, never communicating with each other. Alarmingly, there was also the built-in sense of inferiority that might cause a grandmother to refuse to buy a stove built in Quebec because if it was built by her own kind, "it can't be any good." But that comparison doesn't completely satisfy. To get a sense of the Quebecois, you have to throw in a little American Indian, for example.

By North American standards, the Quebecois have been here since the dawn of time. Not only were they entrenched well before the Pilgrims landed (as were, for that matter, the Spanish in Sante Fe), but the whole society, from the Conquest to the present, is remarkable in the relationship it has to the land.

I found myself in a high-rent economic think tank in Montreal in 1979, in casual conversation with a quick, bright, bilingual Quebecoise. She happened to ask how a plodding Anglophone like myself had come by such a French name, and, showing off the genealogical research I had done, I told her my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather had helped found the town of Boucherville, across the river and slightly downstream from Montreal. In fact, I said, puffing out my feathers, I was about certain that I'd found the house he'd built in 1670, which was still standing.

"Oh!" she said in all seriousness. "You mean you've been denied your patrimony?"

Patrimony is such an odd word in North American English that it wasn't until hours later that it dawned on me that she was expressing sincere sympathy for my having to put up with strangers living in my eighth-generation ancestor's house. The point is that, though many things have changed for the Quebecois in this century, the acres of Quebec, its rivers and mountains and towns, are still integral to their nationalism. Even to those natives who shrug at the cold, rocky soil and deplore the ancient agrarian ways, it simply makes no sense to talk about a collective identity that does not reflexively relate to this land, their land.

In the early 1960s, when the Quiet Revolution was beginning in Quebec, a poet and songwriter named Gilles Vigneault came out with "Mon Pays" ("My Country"). It blew minds the way Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a-Changin' " electrified Anglo young people at about the same time. And it was about nation-hood and the land. "My country," he sang, "is winter." It's like reading the words of original Native Americans from the last century talking about the buffalo and the Plains and themselves as inseparable concepts. One is not, without the other.

By the same token, Quebec has had its own trail of broken promises.

Anglos were not the only people with an American Dream. Quebec had one, too, and it also was one of being an American people, with culture, values, and language spreading from sea to shining sea. This didn't end with the Conquest of Quebec, for the French continued to push on like the English and Americans to conquer the continent. In fact, at the time of Confederation, in 1867, when English-speaking Ontario and French-speaking Quebec united in an uneasy union called Canada, and then convinced two eastern colonies to join them as provinces, not only were there abundant French-speaking Acadians in the Atlantic provinces, but there were major settlements of intermarried Indian Quebecois, called Metis, in the prairies. In 1869, when the land they considered their own was bought by Canada from the Hudson's Bay Company, these French-speaking Metis, led by Louis Riel, rebelled against the territorial government and demanded provincial status with protection for land rights and the French language. It was granted, and Manitoba became a province in 1870. When their land rights were threatened again in Saskatchewan, they rebelled again, but this time they were crushed by Canadian troops, and Louis Riel was put to death.

The execution, which took on the proportions of a martyrdom, marks the clinching embattlement of the French people. For them it soon became clear that their future horizons would not be broad if the rest of Canada had anything to say about it. Although the British North America Act, which set up Confederation, stated that existing Catholic (that is, French) and Protestant (that is, English) school systems were to be maintained, in 1871 New Brunswick, the heart of Acadia, dropped sectarian public schools in blatant violation of that core treaty, on which the ink was hardly dry. No one stopped it.

In 1890, Manitoba, the land of the Metis, did the same thing, and, though the federal government at first tried to keep the dual schools, it soon capitulated to the provincial government. In 1905, when Alberta and Saskatchewan were created, the federal government tried to set up the mandated dual school systems, but caved in to local English opposition. In 1912, Ontario limited to the first two grades the use of French as the language of instruction; in 1914 it closed some publicly supported French-language schools, and the federal government made no attempt to stop it.

The list goes on. In both World War I and II, the Quebecois had no reason whatsoever to be interested in fighting and dying for England. Thus, they voted on each occasion to allow Canada to join the fray on the condition that there would be no draft - that such sacrifices as had to be made should be made by those who wished to volunteer for it. That promise, too, was soon broken.

Thus did a once-continental people find themselves backed into a reservationlike situation, despite every promise.

But even leavening the black analogy with that of the American Indian doesn't completely relate Quebec to the rest of the continent's experience. Quebecois have a lot in common with Hispanics. For one thing, obviously, they speak a language that isn't English. For another, they share a religion that was despised for generations by Anglo Protestants.

In fact, Arthur R. M. Lower, writing about Quebec in 1900, said, "In Quebec, the first loyalty was to the race and to the church. If a choice had to be made between the two . . . the race would be put first. French Canadians were so peculiarly a band of blood brothers, they had come through so much since the Conquest, were so conscious of the hostility of the English, that there is nothing surprising in this devotion to the 'race.' It was devotion stimulated by every possible device in order to assure the French what has already seemed to them the one thing needful, 'la Survivance.' " This passage would hardly sound strange to Mexican-Americans. They sometimes refer to themselves as "La Raza," the Race. In Texas, the Hispanic political party is called La Raza Unida.

But beyond that, Quebec's history has important parallels to Hispanic homelands.

The national inferiority complex of both Mexico and Quebec, for example, was strongly shaped by military defeats inflicted by Anglos. Mexico's trauma was losing California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colhe language lapses into the jargon of a specialty, be it defense or energy or journalism, in which a lack of knowledge of the meaning of shorthand words that express entire ideas leaves even a thoughtful person out in the cold.

This is not to say that one system is necessarily better or worse, or more or less honest. It's just to say that it's special to hear a Quebecois say, "His reasoning is faulty." In Washington, you'd never question anybody's thought process; you'd question his data. (Not to mention his motives.)

The sense of time and place is different.

To love Quebec, for example, is to love the Pontiac Firebird Trans Am with a 205-bhp, 301-cubic inch V8 and a flaming eagle painted on the hood. Quebecois are the worst gas guzzlers left in the world, statistics show. Any street in Quebec is testimony to their affection for full-sized LTDs and vroom-vroom Corvettes. Similarly, to hate Quebec is to hate traveling at ten or twenty kilometers over the limit and be passed by such a behemoth, through whose dust can be discerned only the words on the license plate: `Je me souviens" (I remember). It's a formidable combination in the 1980s to drive like a Frenchman in high-horse-power North American iron.

Their prides are different. Quebecois make a very big deal over how terrific their women look, and, indeed, compared to some of the brown thrush understatements of which English Canadian women are capable, Quebecoises can be very attractive. Women here are routinely referred to as "tres chic," and, in fact, the most striking statements are made by women whose heels are higher, make-up and perfume more pronounced, and fashions more Europe-conscious than others. Yet, by contrast, in, say, Denver, women can and do make a positive statement by pointedly avoiding being "fashionable," and acquiring a studiedly natural look. Even the politics and culture of good looks are different in Quebec from those elsewhere.

They swear differently. And not just because it's in French. In order to get nasty, they don't modify with references to excrement or sex. They modify with words like "tabernacle," "sanctuary," "chalice," and "host." If you really want to lean into a curse, you string them all together, until you get something like: "Lui, c'est un maudit, chrisse, 'osti, calisse de tabernac'." That'll get you a bar fight anyplace in the Gaspe.

They even think about their similarities with the rest of the continent in a different fashion. In making the point that, while Quebec was French, it was also a distinctly North American culture, one observer said, "Our culture is the way we do things; the way we eat. When we have breakfast, we eat cereal, we eat eggs, we eat bacon."

It's tough to imagine another North American culture trying to bring attention to its singularity by the fact that it eats bacon and eggs.

But, of course, in Quebec eating is very important to the way of life. One social scientist tells the story of an elaborate questionnaire sent to both English and French businessmen in Quebec in an attempt to determine differences in the way they operated.

The first thing the observer discovered was that the English manager called a meeting in the conference room of his subordinates, where the group formulated their responses.

The French, seeing how extensive the questionnaire was, eagerly seized on the opportunity to hack away at the problem over a long lunch.

No less an authority on gastronomic bliss than Calvin Trillin of The New Yorker, who, when in a strange town, automatically distrusts the ethnic cooking of any group not strong enough to elect at least two aldermen, characterizes Montreal as the city in which he was rendered speechless by the fettucine Danielle he encountered in an Italian restaurant on Rue Notre-Dame Ouest.

(For that matter, I ran into an excellent steamed gingered whitefish on the Rue de Bleury in the course of talking to a Vietnamese restaurateur about immigration. Presumably, in his previous life, an air traffic controller for the evacuation of Saigon, this gent insisted on relating everything he could in metaphors of military defeat, and talked of drumming up more business for his restaurant through the study of voodoo. But I digress.)

Quebec's food is so much a part of its culture that it is the final rebuke to those who insist that the interstates and the reprobates have rendered North America as homogeneous and undistinguished as powdered vanilla pudding.

Quebec brought a small tear to my eye late one September evening. Forced by horrendous plane connections to break a vow, I found myself in the Montreal Airport Hilton. With town so far away, the wake-up call so early, and my stomach growling, I took myself, with resignation, to the hotel coffee shop. The ambiance was so thoroughly of Atlanta or Houston or Toronto that I was hardly surprised, merely a little depressed, when the hostess illegally failed to greet me in French.

As she led me to my table, I listened to the well-done-sixteen-ounce-T-bone-steak-with-baked-potato-and-salad-with-Roquefort meals being snarfed down all around me and realized that, for the first time in days, I was totally surrounded by English-speakers.

To find out how many different versions of cheeseburger I was faced with, I picked up the menu, only to notice. At the bottom. Handwritten. In French: "Lapin aux pommel." Rabbit with apple. A meal of the country. Which turned out to come with a delicate sauce, finely flavored with, I believe, Calvados.

In Quebec, I thought with a sigh, picking clean the bones, you can't get a bad meal even at the Hilton.

In Quebec, it dawned on me, they resist.