Maurice Duplessis - Death and Legacy

Death and Legacy

Duplessis died in office in Schefferville, Quebec, on September 7, 1959, after suffering multiple cerebral seizures. Following his death and the subsequent election of a Liberal government under Jean Lesage in 1960, Quebec entered a period later termed the Quiet Revolution (Révolution tranquille), a decisive movement away from the conservative policies of Duplessis and toward a secular social democracy.

Duplessis has not been without his defenders. Conrad Black's 1977 encomium, Duplessis, painted a sympathetic portrait of the man as a transitional figure towards modernism, and the victim of partisan attack and personal malady (Black revealed, for instance, that Duplessis suffered from hypospadias).

Nevertheless, Duplessis's legacy has been the subject of repeated criticism in the decades since his death. Quebec nationalists dislike his anti-separatist stance, liberals denounce his social conservatism. Some minorities resent the privileges granted the Catholic church as other religious groups were actively or passively discouraged His critics hold that Duplessis's inherently-corrupt patronage politics, his reactionary conservatism, his emphasis on traditional family and religious values, his anachronistic anti-union stance, rural focus and his preservation and promotion of Catholic Church institutions over the development of a secular social infrastructure akin to that underway in most of the postwar West, stunted Quebec's social and economic development by at least a decade.

In response, it has been argued that the notion of the Duplessis "black years" is a myth propagated by all subsequent major political actors in Quebec due to a fundamental aversion to Catholic church-oriented traditionalist patterns of development, with dominant intellectual movements combining various elements of this dislike. However, the counter-argument, that this is an over-simplification which fails to capture the complexities of Quebec politics, society and its economy, has consistently prevailed in public and academic discourse for some time.

Aside from occasional defenders of his anti-Communist and socially conservative views, defence of the Duplessis regime today comes primarily from traditionalist conservatives (paleoconservatives in North American definition) who view his regime as an essential reaffirmation of traditional values, and as an assertion by democratic means of the basics of church and family life with low social spending and suppression of labour unions. Duplessis is thereby held to have prevented "subversion" without the massive use of force and police repression that characterized the dictatorial policies of the Franco regime in Spain (which he supported).

The Canadian Historical Association in a booklet on file with Collections Canada puts it this way:

"The Duplessis regime may well have endured for too long, the Union Nationale leader's traditionalist policies may well have been anachronistic when compared with the relatively modern society that, in many respects, the Quebec of the 1950s had already become."

For better or worse, Duplessis lent stability to Quebec through turbulent times. For this he is praised by some and reviled by many. Few Quebecois view him favourably in public discourse today, but he devoted much of his life to public office and was sufficiently popular with the Quebec electorate of the period to spend almost two decades as Premier, a position he held until his death. Duplessis' defenders also note that political patronage under his government did not differ very much from a similar patronage system under Taschereau's Liberals in earlier decades. Furthermore, there is no evidence that Duplessis ever personally enriched himself, as he died in debt.

Ironically, it could be argued that Duplessis' greatest legacy was to lend impetus, after his death, to the societal changes he opposed throughout his political life. That his suppression of modernizing elements in Quebec produced a sense of urgency among the non-traditional populace and political elites which amplified the speed and scope of the social, political and economic transformation of Quebec under subsequent governments. In short, that the failure of the Duplessis regime to accommodate the demands of an increasingly cosmopolitan populace acted as both trigger and catalyst for the Quiet Revolution.