Canada between Vichy and Free France, 1940-1945

Canada between Vichy and Free France, 1940-1945
Author: Olivier Courteaux
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2013-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1442612789

The relationship between Canada and France has always been complicated by the Canadian federal government's relations with Quebec. In this first study of Franco-Canadian relations during the Second World War, Olivier Courteaux demonstrates how Canada's wartime foreign policy was shaped by the country's internal divides. As Courteaux shows, Quebec's vocal nationalist minority came to openly support France's fascist Vichy regime and resented Canada's involvement in a 'British' war, while English Canada was largely sympathetic to de Gaulle's Free French movement and accepted its duty to aid embattled Mother Britain. Meanwhile, on the world stage, Canada deftly juggled ties with both French factions to appease Great Britain and the United States before eventually giving full support to the Free French movement. Courteaux concludes this extensively detailed study by illustrating Canada's vital role in helping France reassert its position on the global stage after 1944. Filled with international intrigue and larger-than-life characters, Canada between Vichy and Free France adds greatly to our comprehension of Canada's foreign relations and political history.

Le Canada entre Vichy et la France libre 1940-1945

Le Canada entre Vichy et la France libre 1940-1945
Author: Olivier Courteaux
Publisher: Presses de l'Université Laval
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2015-06-03T00:00:00-04:00
Genre: History
ISBN: 276372146X

A la veille de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, les relations entre la France et le Canada sont amicales, mais sans plus. La déclaration de guerre du Canada à l'Allemagne hitlérienne, en septembre 1939, ne change pas fondamentalement la donne. A Ottawa, on pense que la France et la Grande-Bretagne disposent d'un avantage économique de taille sur l'ennemi commun, et qu'en conséquence il n'y a pas lieu de resserrer les liens existant avec la France. L'effondrement brutal de la France brise ce bel optimisme. Il faut revoir les relations avec la France. La chute de la France pose des problèmes particuliers au Canada. La minorité nationaliste canadienne-française, fort agissante, a choisi de soutenir le régime fascisant de Vichy tout en critiquant, parfois en des termes violents, la participation du Canada à une guerre " britannique "; à l'inverse, le Canada anglophone a démontré une sympathie bien réelle pour le mouvement de la France libre du général de Gaulle, considéré comme un allié naturel dans cette guerre mondiale où, pendant de longs mois, la Grande-Bretagne s'est battue seule contre les armées de Hitler. Sur la scène internationale, afin de ménager les intérêts souvent contradictoires des Britanniques et des Américains, le gouvernement canadien dirigé par William Lyon Mackenzie King s'est vu contraint de jouer un subtil jeu d'équilibre diplomatique. Ce n'est qu'à partir de novembre 1942 qu'Ottawa prendra le parti d'apporter un soutien entier à la France libre. Intrigues internationales et personnages fascinants ponctuent cet ouvrage qui permet au lecteur de mieux comprendre la politique étrangère du Canada et son histoire politique pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale.

French North America in the Shadows of Conquest

French North America in the Shadows of Conquest
Author: Ryan André Brasseaux
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2020-12-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000281868

French North America in the Shadows of Conquest is an interdisciplinary, postcolonial, and continental history of Francophone North America across the long twentieth century, revealing hidden histories that so deeply shaped the course of North America. Modern French North America was born from the process of coming to terms with the idea of conquest after the fall of New France. The memory of conquest still haunts those 20 million Francophones who call North America home. The book re-examines the contours of North American history by emphasizing alliances between Acadians, Cajuns, and Québécois and French Canadians in their attempt to present a unified challenge against the threat of assimilation, linguistic extinction, and Anglophone hegemony. It explores cultural trauma narratives and the social networks Francophones constructed and shows how North American history looks radically different from their perspective. This book presents a missing chapter in the annals of linguistic and ethnic differences on a continent defined, in part, by its histories of dispossession. It will be of interest to scholars and students of American and Canadian history, particularly those interested in French North America, as well as ethnic and cultural studies, comparative history, the American South, and migration.

Canada and the World since 1867

Canada and the World since 1867
Author: Asa McKercher
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2019-09-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350036781

This book is a history of Canada's role in the world as well as the impact of world events on Canada. Starting from the country's quasi-independence from Britain in 1867, its analysis moves through events in Canadian and global history to the present day. Looking at Canada's international relations from the perspective of elite actors and normal people alike, this study draws on original research and the latest work on Canadian international and transnational history to examine Canadians' involvement with a diverse mix of issues, from trade and aid, to war and peace, to human rights and migration. The book traces four inter-connected themes: independence and growing estrangement from Britain; the longstanding and ongoing tensions created by ever-closer relations with the United States; the huge movement of people from around the world into Canada; and the often overlooked but significant range of Canadian contacts with the non-Western world. With an emphasis on the reciprocal nature of Canada's involvement in world affairs, ultimately it is the first work to blend international and transnational approaches to the history of Canadian international relations.

Dominion of Race

Dominion of Race
Author: Laura Madokoro
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2017-06-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0774834463

How has race shaped Canada’s international encounters and its role in the world? How have the actions of politicians, diplomats, citizens, and nongovernmental organizations reflected and reinforced racial power structures in Canada? In this book, leading scholars grapple with these complex questions, destabilizing conventional understandings of Canada in the world. Dominion of Race exposes how race-thinking has informed priorities and policies, positioned Canada in the international community, and contributed to a global order rooted in racial beliefs. While the contributors reconsider familiar topics, including the Paris Peace Conference and Canada’s involvement with the United Nations, they enlarge the scope of Canada’s international history by subject, geography, and methodology. By demonstrating that race is a fundamental component of Canada and its international history, this important book calls for reengagement with the histories of those marginalized in, or excluded from, the historical record.

National Manhood and the Creation of Modern Quebec

National Manhood and the Creation of Modern Quebec
Author: Jeffery Vacante
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2017-06-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0774834668

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.

The Price of Freedom

The Price of Freedom
Author: David Foulk
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2022-11-04
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3031090667

This is a significant book that investigates how the French internal resistance and external Free French movement were financed during the Second World War. It brings together the secretive financial aspects of resistance inside France with those under the control of the Free French movement in London. To date, there have been a number of studies that have followed the Gaullist movement, but none have studied how they were funded. This exploration also demonstrates the global scale of the war. It shows how the Free French were not simply a European, Atlantic-based movement, but were, in fact, colonial and operated on a global scale, shedding light on French relations with their colonies in Africa and the Pacific. It underlines the role played by expatriates, those belonging to the French diaspora and third-country nationals, in Allied nations and neutral countries, including Central and South America. Through the combination of digital humanities methods, including social network analysis and GIS (Geographic Information Systems), the Allied funding for de Gaulle’s movement and the internal resistance will be unveiled, for the first time, in its entirety. The painstaking reconstruction of the financial records of the Free French and their lines of subsidy is a novel approach that sheds new light onto the financial networks between French, British and American officials who made this financing possible. This illuminates the complexity of international relations in a time of war. Using a combination of economic and accounting analysis, as well as primary-sourced historical research, this book distinctively applies sociological methodologies to this long-held question. This book will be of interest to those in economics, economic history, finance, accounting, digital humanities, modern history, international relations, political science and war studies.

Young Trudeau: 1919-1944

Young Trudeau: 1919-1944
Author: Max Nemni
Publisher: Douglas Gibson Books
Total Pages: 451
Release: 2010-09-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1551994003

This book shines a light of devastating clarity on French-Canadian society in the 1930s and 1940s, when young elites were raised to be pro-fascist, and democratic and liberal were terms of criticism. The model leaders to be admired were good Catholic dictators like Mussolini, Salazar in Portugal, Franco in Spain, and especially Pétain, collaborator with the Nazis in Vichy France. There were even demonstrations against Jews who were demonstrating against the Nazis' actions in Germany. Trudeau, far from being the rebel that other biographers have claimed, embraced this ideology. At his elite school, Brébeuf, he was a model student, the editor of the school magazine, and admired by the staff and his fellow students. But the fascist ideas and the people he admired—even when the war was going on, as late as 1944—included extremists so terrible that at the war’s end they were shot. And then there’s his manifesto and his plan to stage a revolution against les Anglais. This is astonishing material—and it’s all demonstrably true—based on Trudeau's personal papers that the authors were allowed to access after his death. What they have found has astounded and distressed them, but they both agree that the truth must be published. Translated by William Johnson, this explosive book is a key part of Canadian political history.

With Friends Like These

With Friends Like These
Author: David Meren
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2012-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0774822260

One of the most enduring images of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution is of Charles de Gaulle proclaiming “Vive le Qu?bec libre!” from the balcony of Montreal City Hall. The incident laid bare Canada’s unity crisis and has since dominated interpretations of the Canada-Quebec-France triangle. David Meren demystifies this cri du balcon by looking beyond de Gaulle to Quebec’s evolving relationship with France after the war and the clash of nationalisms that resulted. By seeking to understand Quebec, Gaullist, and Canadian nationalism, Meren not only casts doubt on established interpretations of events, he also reveals how the challenge of responding to American superpower and influence shaped the triangle.