From French Canadians to Québécois: On naming, territory and identity
This article offers a reflection on the territorialization of identity in Quebec. Drawing from a corpus of newspapers published in Quebec from 1944 to 1970, it tries to determine whether this territorialization began before or rather during the Quiet Revolution, where most authors locate the origin of the phenomenon. For this, we systematically inventoried and analyzed the terms used to designate the territory and its inhabitants. The article proposes, among other things, the concept of “deprovincialization” to explain the phenomenon then underway and places its advent well before the Quiet Revolution. It also presents previously unpublished data on the moment of passage from French Canadian to Québécois (both as an adjective and as a noun) and seeks to determine whether usage has varied from one event to the next during this important period in the history of Quebec.