Robin S. Gendron. towards a Francophone Community

Robin S. Gendron. Towards a Francophone Community. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006. 191 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $75.00 hc. Robin Gendron's Towards a Francophone Community chronicles the complicated relations between the Canadian government and the French-speaking world in the years following the Second World War. As Quebec began to establish international relations of its own in the 1960s, it became embroiled with the federal government in a protracted struggle over who could claim the right to legitimately represent French Canadians internationally. And for a while--much to the dismay of officials in Ottawa--Quebec appeared to be winning. Quebec nationalists had argued, Gendron states, that Quebec needed to forge international relations of its own in the 1960s because of the federal government's long-standing neglect of French-speaking countries, a neglect which cut Quebec off from relations which it deemed to be of crucial cultural significance. For Gendron, this argument--which has been tacitly accepted by scholars of Canadian foreign relations--is in profound need of revision. Towards a Francophone Community, therefore, sets out to demonstrate that Canada did indeed have an active interest in the wider French-speaking world, an interest which stretched back to the years following the Second World War. This relationship, however, was fraught at its inception. In its attempts to save NATO from implosion, Canada worked hard to maintain its relationship with France, often rendering it deeply complicit in the crimes of the French empire. Even if Canadian officials at times expressed sympathy for Third World decolonization, the Canadian government placed higher priority on defending its imperialist allies and protecting larger Western interests Canada, for example, knowingly supplied arms to the French military for use in its vain attempts to maintain colonial rule in Indochina, and it consistently supported French rule in Tunisia and Morocco. As Gendron explains, as long as France remained intent on maintaining its position in North Africa, the Canadian government concluded that it had to protect France from its attackers (24). Gendron's research also demonstrates that the general thrust of Canadian foreign policy towards French Africa did not change much in the early 1960s. During the bloody and drawn-out Algerian war, Canada refused to demonstrate any support for Algerian independence until, of course, France, judging that the war could not be won, had done so itself. When French paratroopers massacred Tunisian civilians who were advocating a withdrawal of French forces from their ostensibly sovereign country in 1961, Canadian diplomats in Paris pushed to have Canada punish Tunisia diplomatically, and the Canadian government opposed the holding of a special session of the United Nations to discuss the crisis. When sixty-six countries voted in the United Nations to condemn French actions, Canada abstained (58-60). The story of Canada's efforts to avoid antagonizing its NATO ally by supporting French imperialism grew more complicated with the election in Quebec of the reformist Liberal government of Jean Lesage. As the Quebec government began to attempt to represent French Canadians internationally, Gendron demonstrates, France began to bestow upon Quebec treatment usually reserved for sovereign countries. …

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