Last night, I took the Metro to the east side of Montreal. After a hiccup with my connection, I finally arrived at the Villa Maria station, where I began the short walk up the western slopes of Mount Royal to meet with two Canadians. After a while, the conversation drifted to my research for my dissertation. After I explained my interests, one of my hosts asked if I had done any work at the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, or BAnQ. I explained that I had not yet done any work there, but I hoped to spend a good deal of time there in the upcoming semester to explore their holdings. My host, who had some familiarity with the institution, had some advice for me.

“Don’t risk blowing your first impression with them,” he warned me. “Make sure that you address the first person you see in French, even if you bungle your French. With any luck you’ll make it through and they’ll be able to help you. Or else maybe they’ll speak English, or find someone who speaks English if they can’t help. In any case, you don’t want to start off by speaking English. You can’t risk putting them off like that in case they decide they don’t want to prioritize helping you. And if you stay around here, definitely don’t tell them that, even if you can converse with them in French.”

His advice to me stemmed from one of the more contentious aspects of Quebec’s culture and society: the uneasy tension between the Francophone and Anglophone communities in the Province of Quebec. I sat down with my hosts in the town of Westmount; technically part of the city of Montreal, but legally distinct from the municipal government. In 2002, the community of Westmount had, after a bitter struggle, been merged into the city of Montreal. Opponents of the merger had claimed that Westmount had a special status as an Anglophone enclave and therefore should not be merged into the Francophone city of Montreal. But in 2004, after the government had changed, the town voted to remove itself from the municipality of Montreal. After the vote to demerge, Montrealers remained bitter about the primarily Anglophone community’s seeming contempt for their Francophone neighbors. The conflict over language in this case also masked other socio-economic tensions. The area encompassed by Westmount encompasses some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Montreal–and historically some of the most affluent in all of Canada. Their departure from Montreal entailed a substantial loss of tax revenue for the city. But the conflict played out in terms of linguistic divisions.

The cultural divide between Anglophones and Francophones in Quebec extends far back in Canada’s history. After the British conquest of New France, which included the territory of Quebec, in 1763, a small contingent of Anglophone merchants and settlers began to trickle into the French-speaking region around Quebec. After the American Revolution, the trickle turned into a flood as Loyalists fleeing the new American republic fled to British Canada. The British Crown split Quebec into two provinces in 1791, creating Lower Canada, a primarily Francophone region, and Upper Canada, inhabited by an Anglophone majority. After failed rebellions in both Upper and Lower Canada in the late 1830s, the British reunited the two regions as the Province of Canada, until the Constitution Act of 1867 created Ontario and Quebec, more or less as we know them today.

Section 133 of the 1867 Constitution Act set forth both English and French as the official languages of the both the Canadian Parliament and the Parliament of Quebec. Industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century heralded in a wave of Anglophone immigration to Quebec, especially in the urban center of Montreal. English became the language of business here, even as the majority of the population of the city remained Francophone. Concern over the growing provenance of the English language and the marginalization of Francophone Canadians in the politics and business world of what they considered “their” province led the nationalist government in 1977 to pass the Charter of the French Language, commonly known as Law 101 or loi cent et un. This bill and its provisions made French the sole official language of the Province, requiring that all business in the Province be conducted in French. Further provisions required that all signage, advertisement, branding, etc. be in French (as a concession to companies doing business throughout Canada, the law did not forbid English to appear alongside French, so long as the French had equal or greater prominence as compared to the English text).

Likewise, French became the sole language of education for most of the residents of the Province. In order for their children to receive an education at an English-language school in the Province, residents (to this day) have to demonstrate that they themselves received an education in an English-language institution. For example, if both of one’s parents grew up in Anglophone households, considered English as their first language, raised their own children in English, but nevertheless attended a French school when they were young, their children, despite being Anglophones, would be forbidden from attending an Anglophone school. My hosts—one native Anglophone and one native Francophone—explained to me that because they could prove that they both attended an Anglophone school for some time when they were young allowed them to send their own children to an Anglophone school for a year so that, in the future, their children would have the credentials to send their children (my hosts grandchildren) to an Anglophone school should they choose to.

According to younger residents of Quebec, however, the animosity between the Anglophones and Francophones has receded in recent years. According to a women in her twenties with whom I spoke, young Francophones have embraced the multicultural status of their home—at least in Montreal. The further I venture outside of Montreal or Quebec City, she warned me, the less likely I would find fluent speakers of English. Now that the impetus behind the separatist movement has died down, she suggested, much of the animosity has also abated, though some would have little sympathy for a visitor with no French language skills. But, as the tension between residents of Westmount and the rest of Montreal demonstrates, when the linguistic issue becomes entangled with other issues, it can still spark bitter animosity.

On 24 June every year, Quebecers celebrate Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, the fête nationale du Québec and, in the Catholic calendar, the feast day of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist.   As a statutory holiday, most residents of Quebec have off of work to celebrate, and grand festivities occur in most of the major cities and towns of Quebec.

The origins of the holiday stretch back to Quebec’s history as a colony of France. The Catholic feast day had historically been a popular holiday in France, and the French settlers who came to Canada in the seventeenth century brought the celebration with them. As a Catholic feast day (Catholicism being the official religion of the French colony), celebrants engaged in both religious and secular festivities. Residents of the colony attended mass in celebration of the feast day, and often constructed large bonfires to continue the celebrations into the evening.

The holiday took on new meaning after the British took over the colony in 1763. In the 1830s, the festival gained new significance as a celebration of French-Canadian culture and its distinctiveness within the British colony. In the years following the failed Lower Canada Rebellion of 1838, in which French-Canadian patriotic sentiment had been rallied to first support political reform in the colony to favor French-Canadians and later armed insurrection to force reform, the celebrations became much more muted. They grew again in size and popularity in the late nineteenth century, emerging as a celebration of French-Canadian culture, tied closely to the religious character of the holiday, since many French-Canadians remained pious Roman Catholics. In the early twentieth century, the holiday acquired new dimensions as Pope Pius declared Saint John the Baptist the patron saint of French Canadians in 1908 and the legislature of Quebec declared the day a legal holiday.

In the 1970s, during the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, a period of intense social and political changed marked by profound secularization and the growth of intense nationalism, the holiday took on a new, highly political charge. The Lieutenant Governor of Quebec, the Queen’s direct representative in the province, made the holiday a statutory holiday in 1977. Along with the secularization of the Province in the 1960s and 1970s, nationalist and separatist overtones replaced the religious significance of the holiday. The holiday transformed into a semi-official rallying point for nationalist movements, with festivities sometimes punctuated with political protest in favor of Quebecois sovereignty or independence.

Today, the holiday has reemerged as a celebration of French-Canadian culture. Official festivities occur throughout the province, highlighting francophone artists, performers, and cultural figures. Major cities in the province often host parades where the provinces official colors, blue and white, and the Fleurdelisé, the flag of Quebec, feature prominently in the parade and amongst parade-goers. While the celebrations feature primarily Francophone performers, the holiday’s status as a legal holiday means that both francophone and Anglophone Quebecers celebrate, and recently the holiday’s official organizing body have focused on inclusivity as a theme, recognizing the multicultural nature of Quebec’s society today. Yet, if asked, many still take pride in the holiday as a distinctive Quebecois holiday, especially given its timing just prior to the federal holiday of Canada Day on 1 July.   Since provincial government officially recognizes the holiday, and supports the organization which plan and coordinate festivities, official accounts of the holiday and the public perception of the holiday often align. The current theme of a society “distinct, yet accepting” celebrated in the holiday coincides with how many in Quebec see themselves. Those who I spoke to agreed with this account for the most part, but also emphasized that it was a day where they could take pride in being Quebecois and having preserved their distinct culture within Canada.