The purpose of this article is to analyze the socio-historico-political stakes of the current referendum context in Quebec by discussing how and why it marks a rupture between past history and history to be made. After having noted that the construction and reproduction of identity and a sense of belonging to a collectivity are non-linear and non-irreversible historical phenomena, the author points out that the specificity of Francophone Quebecois culture and the nationalist ideology of Quebecois Francophones are reciprocally constitutive and have been mutually reenforcing throughout history. The article continues by showing how Quebecois Francophone culture has played a strategic role in the fragmentation of Canada. This analysis reveals, however, that this fragmentation trend is not without its counter-trends, and that Quebecois civil society itself is currently subject to strong "dualizing" pressures largely attributable to the refusal of Anglophone and Allophone minorities to participate in the collective subject constitutive of the much larger majority Quebecois Francophone collectivity. This is followed by an examination of the impact of the integration of certain techno-economic innovations, particularly in the media domain, on the institutional system of social reproduction. It is shown that, faced with the accumulation required by change, a number of institutions emerged to reorganize the reproductive sphere. In Canada, however, this institutional emergence is subject to the structuring trend of fragmentation, which results in the fragmentation of these institutions into Anglophone and Francophone institutions or federal and provincial ones, particularly as a function of specific quotidian experiences and social structures specified and fragmented over time. On this basis, the article turns to a discussion of the role of the media in the reproduction of Quebecois identity and civil society in Quebec. Once again, the author demonstrates that this process is not without its counter-trends, in which "federalizing" institutions play a major role, producing and nurturing, among other things, an identificatory ambivalence within Quebec's Francophone collectivity. Continuing the examination of the counter-trends to the reproduction of the specificity of Quebec's civil society and Francophone Quebecois culture, the article next examines the impacts of internationalization-globalization on national sovereignties and cultural production and diffusion. The argument comes to a recognition of the need, for societies wishing to participate fully in the construction of the future, as much their own as the planet's, for the articulation of cultural development policies. The article dwells on this issue, examining the former cultural policy of the federal Liberal party on the one hand, and the impact of the "after Meech" context on the development of Quebecois identity and culture on the other. Next, the author attempts to identify what should be the parameters of a serious Quebecois cultural development policy. This leads him to conclude with a discussion of the place of interlinguistic relations in Quebec's internal affairs.