History of Quebec

Quebec has played a special role in French history; the modern province occupies much of the land where French settlers founded the colony of Canada (New France) in the 17th and 18th centuries. The population is predominantly French-speaking and Roman Catholic, with a large Anglophone minority, augmented in recent years by immigrants from Asia. The political alienation of the Francophones from the Anglophones has been a persistent theme since the late 19th century. Tensions were especially high during the First World War. Historically, British merchants and financiers controlled the economy, and dominated Montreal. The Catholic Church, in close cooperation with the landowners, led a highly traditional social structure in rural and small town Quebec. Much of that changed during the Quiet Revolution of the 1980s. Quebec's separatists, calling for an independent nation, gained strength, but were narrowly defeated in two referenda. Quebec imposed increasingly stringent laws favouring the French language; many Anglophones left, as did many of the national and international corporations that had been based in Montreal.

Aboriginal settlements were located across the area of present-day Quebec before the arrival of Europeans. In the northernmost areas of the province, Inuit communities can be found. Other aboriginal communities belong to the following First Nations:

The aboriginal cultures of present-day Quebec are diverse, with their own languages, way of life, economies, and religious beliefs. Before contact with Europeans, they did not have a written language, and passed their history and other cultural knowledge along to each generation through oral tradition.

Today around three-quarters of Quebec's aboriginal populations lives in small communities scattered throughout the rural areas of the province, with some living on reserves.

Jacques Cartier sailed into the St. Lawrence River in 1534 and established an ill-fated colony near present-day Quebec City at the site of Stadacona, a village of the St. Lawrence Iroquoians. Linguists and archaeologists have determined these people were distinct from the Iroquoian nations encountered by later French and Europeans, such as the five nations of the Haudenosaunee. Their language was Laurentian, one of the Iroquoian family. By the late 16th century, they had disappeared from the St. Lawrence Valley.

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