Quebec sovereignty is dead as a political force in Canada. Or in any case it is fading into the twilight. The resurgence of the Bloc Québécois in the 2025 federal election, perhaps overpromised to begin with, was greatly hobbled by a unifying anti-Trump sentiment that gave the post-Trudeau Liberals a new lease on their own precarious life. The right-wing sovereigntist provincial government has reached the nadir of its popularity after eight years in power and going into its own election later this year. The Parti Québécois, while still existing, evinces little momentum itself, with just seven seats in the National Assembly. And the most promising young leader is a random mayor, who is now an independent.
For most Canadians this development could not have come soon enough. Americans, for the most part, can look on at Quebec nationalism with the same amused detachment as they do the pet rock. It is a frivolous, if conceptually audacious, mindset; more sentiment than a coherent outlook, the predominant sentiment being grievance. “Try telling Quebec that,” the Canadians may say, having put up with its nuisance for decades, standing in total defiance of what they’d been assured, by no less than Quebec’s most famous political export, was their true destiny.
Canada was the nation-state of the future, that is, less a nation or a state than a state of mind in the emerging global consciousness. Canada was supposed to accomplish what America had accomplished, but more honorably. To be a border-light, identity-fluid polity. An idea more than a place, however beautiful a place it may be. Easy enough, considering Canada (despite recent, wholly unconvincing efforts to show otherwise) lacks much of a history to haunt it. Quebec, by contrast, is nothing but history; manipulated history at that. But now, at long last, and with a common enemy just over the border, Canada can assume its mantle, and the French can shut the fuck up.
Yet just as that silence seems all but assured, a certain section of Quebecois begin to stir. A poll released last year showed that 56 percent of Quebec voters aged 18 to 34 were favorable of Quebec sovereignty. Leaving aside the fact that that percentage declines as the age groups advance and that “sovereignty” is a famously slippery term in Quebec nationalist discourse, this was cause for both alarm and revelry. The political death is paid off with a cultural rebirth. Cultural and, more importantly, digital. The border-leveling power thought to be the one boon of the internet proves, once again, to be mythical. YouTube and TikTok have made capable incubators of renewed nationalist feeling among young people. Later millennial and Gen Z Quebecois have shaken off the self-conscious entanglements with mass culture of previous generations and instead have embraced it. Lou-Adriane Cassidy performs moody techno-pop amid fog-strewn crops and hay bales. Kinji00, the teenage rapper credited with (blamed for?) spearheading the renaissance appears on television with a blue fleur-de-lis grill in his teeth. Quebec identity assimilates comfortably into the memescape.
If this outcome is surprising more generally it is owing to our underestimation of the brand power of national symbols in an aspirant “post-national” age. It is perhaps surprising even to the earlier generations of sovereigntists. The oui campaign of the 1995 referendum adopted a consciously multicolored aesthetic to show its nationalism was in keeping with the inclusive tenets of triangulation and neoliberalism. It withstood Lucien Bouchard’s bemoaning of declining white birthrates, less so Jacques Parizeau’s seething at foreign-born voters. But in 2026, Quebec’s young have appropriated fleur-de-lis flag in ways its originator, the ultra-reactionary premier Maurice Duplessis, would have found unthinkable. It’s waved at rallies, brandished on concert stages, and printed onto merchandise. It is the ideal foil to the younger maple leaf flag. It is also proof of the astonishing malleability and resilience of Quebec nationalism itself.
Quebec nationalism has less a history of its own than a protracted war with it. With every power shift from without it has changed its clothing while retaining its internal purpose. It was the Lost Cause myth of a defeated colonial power, an outlet for the rural Catholic margins, a weapon for both federal defiance and union-busting, the hope of exiled avant-gardists, the tool of reformist intellectuals and their opportunist politicians, the cause of militant radicals, and the lost cause renewed, twice over, for social democrats. In all cases Quebec is the nation, French is the language, and Canada is in the way.
This revived, largely cultural nationalism seems to keep this history at a distance. Its adherents understandably want to get beyond the xenophobic aura it could sometimes exude even at its most liberal moments. As proof, Kinji00 was born in Portugal. And “Cassidy” hardly seems a Gallic name. But then neither was “Aquin,” and neither is “Johnson.” Overall, however, the revival inhabits a vibe space where politics struggles to get a foothold. It’s an aesthetic, communal experience; the place to be and the people to be with—provided you belong or aspire to. Where it is political it differs little from other nationalist movements in Wales, Scotland, and Catalonia, that adopt academic leftist and anti-colonial frameworks and rhetoric. It seems even more anti-American than perhaps even the FLQ was. This gives it a space in the market, but it has no bearing on its aesthetic consequences and lacks a long term objective.
Nationalisms by their very spirit should never take into account opinions of anyone outside of the nation-states. But spirit has a way of dissolving under the heat of reality. Whether right-wingers in America looking in emulation toward Hungary, left-wingers in Canada looking in resentment toward America, or Ireland looking for validation from Gaza, nationalisms will sacrifice self-determination for virtuous inter-dependency in a heartbeat. It is a psychological phenomenon that I don’t see being scrutinized very deeply. Perhaps because nationalism qua nationalism is simply too nauseating on its own. Quebec nationalism finds itself presently at this crossroads, if it is serious. But it has an important advantage that the others lack: the near-total indifference of the entire world.
Quebec, even at the peak of the 1960s fervor, holds no real symbolic value for most radical idealists. Here the world is in agreement with America. Their uniqueness is that they are the awkward cousins of several different countries. They are hicks who speak French. And not even the exciting kind as in Louisiana. They are the freeloading eccentrics of the developed world. With no one bothering to look, they have only themselves as standard-bearers. And it is not without substantial results. Like the class nerd who, having removed her glasses, is utterly transformed into conventional beauty, Quebec expands and sophisticates its canon of cultural exports on its own terms. Red Rooms is a thriller masterpiece. Where the Land Ends, Loïc Darses’s lyrical sovereigntist manifesto, has revitalized the NFB documentary form. Who by Fire? and Falcon Lake enter the coming-of-age canon as peers with Lady Bird and Dinner in America. The late Gaétan Soucy picked up where novelists Marie-Claire Blais and Hubert Aquin left off. This is to say nothing of the sudden ascendency of Angine de Poitrine.
To move beyond a revival, let alone a poll result that could prove bogus in months, the young new nationalists must grow into something newer still based upon these cultural foundations. Up from being incidentally “French-Canadian” to being consciously and effortlessly Quebecois. Which means not relying on language alone, but a kind of cultural coding that is unmistakable and aggressively differentiated from the surrounding world, to the point that past terms of democratic hesitation—“sovereignty-association,” “distinct society,” and other bullshit—are quaint archaisms of a darker (yet less twilit) age. It must be taken seriously from within, because the consequences from without, if taken to the furthest ideal extent, will be seismic. Meaning everyone without would risk delusion in not taking it seriously.
North America is economically and symbolically three nations: Mexico, Canada, and the United States. It is a laughing matter to even suggest that a crack be made in that arrangement. All the more so when suggested by an American, who risks as much if not more frivolity and eccentricity as Quebec nationalism itself. I don’t see why that should be. Assuming America has enough imperial status left, my attention should lend currency rather than cost me. Especially knowing, as I do, that that status is running out. The United States is entering a twilight period that will soon be so lightless as to be a void on the globe. In that context, Quebec nationalism is no romanticist lark or flight of cultural catharsis. Quebec, not Canada, is the model of the global future: the return of the nation-state with a vengeance. So while the majority of this essay’s readers can scoff at the quirk I am parading, an astute minority (quite a minuscule one, I suspect) will receive the message I am sending, if not the threat I am making.