Premier of Quebec for eighteen years, Maurice Duplessis stood for everything that French Canadians had previously so desperately wanted to protect – faith, family, and farm, providing a small bonus to rural families and low cost loans to farmers.

Creator of the Union Nationale party, Maurice Duplessis’ government campaigned on the promise of good pensions and new roads and was openly corrupt. Afterward, his rule was termed “The Great Darkness”.

Well-loved by the people of Quebec, Duplessis was a devout Catholic who encouraged the influence of the Catholic church. He was responsible for leaving Quebec in a rural and uneducated state. Education at the time was “not for French Canadians”. Schools were run by the Catholic church and focused mainly on religion, most children only attending school until the sixth grade.

Despite his desires for a heavy religious influence, a strong rural base, and uneducated people, Duplessis made Quebec more prosperous than it had ever been before, while the rest of Canada suffered under the Great Depression.

Throughout Duplessis’ rule, a scandal grew concerning the placement of several thousand orphans (children of unwed mothers who had forcibly become orphans) in psychiatric hospitals. They came to be known as the Duplessis Orphans. These children weren’t by any means mentally ill, however, as funding for mental institutions was provided by the federal government, and that for orphanages were the responsibility of the provincial government, there’s no doubt that it was a clever scheme to obtain funding for these orphans.

Years later, upon the closure of these institutions, the victims emerged, traumatized after years of abuse and experimental drug use to treat their supposed mental conditions.

The effects of this incident have been compared to those of residential schools, and years after the victims have demanded compensation for their pain and suffering

Maurice Duplessis died in office in 1959, thousands attending his funeral, gaining popularity from respecting and fulfilling the Quebecois’ beliefs. The story doesn’t end there, however, as the Quebecois finally began to look around at the rest of Canada and realize how long they had been shun from the modern world

.Maurice Duplessis on the left, photo by Archives de la Ville de Montréal.

While the rest of Canada was industrializing and educating themselves, French Canadians worked on farms, went to the Catholic church, raised families, and were often illiterate. They came to find that they were unable to hold qualified jobs as they were detrimentally uneducated. Inevitably, the control of most major industries in Quebec had gone to the educated English Canadians.

Finally emerging from a reign of darkness, the Quebecois realized that something had to change, the Great Darkness providing momentum for the greatest societal revolution in Quebec’s history.

A video describing the Great Darkness and the outcomes that followed

Les Orphelinats

Mémoire d’asile projet photographique de Jean-François Dupuis photographe  Images du projet de l’hôpital psychiatrique Saint-Julien de Saint-Ferdinand et de la future exposition sur les orphelins Duplessis.

En Anglais

Duplessis and Quebec’s Great Darkness Terms: