FRENCH CANADA

Press, Volume LXXV, Issue 22883, 2 December 1939, Page 16

FRENCH CANADA

The French Canadians To-day. By t Wilfred Bovey. J. M. Dent and ,' Sons Ltd. 362 pp. (15/- net.) It is quite possible that one of the reasons why the Duplessis Government was so heavily defeated in Quebec, recently, is that it had throughout Canada been' so often identified with Fascism and Nazism. In fact, the Union Nationale and its programme showed nothing in common with Fascism or Nazism; but there are swastika-wearers in Quebec, they call themselves National ■Christian Socialists, they are antiSemitic. Mr Duplessis has been assisted to his downfall by .rumour that connected his Government with these fe w but noisy muddleheads. What the Union Nationale stood for, how it reached power, why it is the Liberals (with whom Mr Duplessis had begun by co-operating) that haye now unseated him— : these are questions upon which most New Zealanders are entirely uninformed. The answers lie in the later chapters of Colonel Bovey’s excellent book. - , with a sound and wideof the settlement and development of French. Canada, and*then, reaching .modern times and modern problems, deals in detail and. very,, illumipatingly with their social,. economic, *%nd political aspects. For example, only last year that Mr Duplessis repealed a one-yeaf-oJd law which' had, in effect, set the French form- of the law above the' English arid destroyed the necessary bilingual principle recognised at Ottawa. But the cultural-racial problem remains. Colonel Bovey’s chapters on edudacation, the youth movements, the economic handicaps of French Canada, and religious and political attitudes to social reforms are all valuable in themselves. They are still more valuable as they help to illuminate a people’s effort to preserve its own mode of life ori even terms with the English-speaking minority of the province and with the English-speaking majority of the Siminion. Two chapters on art and erature in French Canada are very veil done, _ . 1