This intellectual history explores how the idea of manhood shaped French Canadian culture and Quebec’s nationalist movement. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, Quebec was an agrarian society, and masculinity was rooted in the land and the family and informed by Catholic principles of piety and self-restraint. As the industrial era took hold, a new model was forged, built on the values of secularism and individualism.

Jeffery Vacante’s perceptive analysis reveals how French Canadian intellectuals defined masculinity in response to imperialist English Canadian ideals. This “national manhood” would be disentangled from the workplace, the family, and the land and tied instead to one’s cultural identity. The new formulation was crucial in the larger struggle to modernize Quebec’s institutions while preserving French Canadian community, faith, and culture. It offered French Canadian men a way to remodel themselves, participate in industrial modernity, and still assert cultural authority.

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Jeffery Vacante is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario. He is an intellectual and gender historian whose research focuses on modern Quebec. His work has appeared in some of Canada’s leading journals, including Canadian Historical Review, Journal of Canadian Studies, Left History, and University of Toronto Quarterly.

Jeffery Vacante livre dans sa monographie une étude brillante sur l’articulation entre masculinité, nationalisme et modernité au Québec.

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