Leonard Cohen and the Death of Anglophone Montreal

Last Canadian Standing

An interesting piece in the New Yorker. I am probably reading this into it; but the article makes me think that the true impetus for Quebec's "Quiet Revolution" was envy of the vitality of English-speaking Montreal culture, back in the days of Cohen, Layton, Klein, Richler, Scott, MacLennan and Moore. Having nothing to compare with it, the Francophone elite sought to destroy it.

In doing so, they destroyed the best hope for a native English-Canadian culture, in the city of its ideological founder, D'Arcy McGee. Since then, we have had nothing but multiculturalism.

All your bases are belong to us, maudits Anglais!

The author of the New Yorker piece, a Montreal Jew, points out that the Montreal Jewish community never really fit in to the "two solitudes," being neither English nor French. He does not notice that the same was true, to an even greater extent, of the Montreal Irish, mostly English by language but Catholic by religion. Together, these two groups probably constituted the majority of "English Montreal" during this century, and they were certainly the perpetrators of the Montreal literary renaissance. The "Two Solitudes" were a myth.

It was not the English the Francos crushed in the Sixties and Seventies. It was the Canadians, trying to forge a new Canadian culture which combined the best of all the many local traditions.