Québec (New France)

The oldest European society in Canada, and the one that survived being conquered. Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec in 1608, and New France grew along the St Lawrence as a fur-trading colony with a seigneurial land system, a Catholic church with wide civil authority, and a small population that nonetheless spread claims across the continent. Britain took it in 1759 at the Plains of Abraham and kept it by the Treaty of Paris in 1763. What happened next is the reason Quebec still exists as a distinct society: rather than assimilate the sixty thousand French inhabitants, Britain passed the Quebec Act of 1774, restoring French civil law, guaranteeing Catholic practice and abandoning any attempt at anglicisation - largely because the American colonies were about to rebel and London needed the province quiet. The church filled the political vacuum for two centuries, running schools, hospitals and much of rural life while an anglophone minority in Montreal ran the economy. The rebellion of 1837 and Lord Durham's report recommending assimilation failed to change either. The Quiet Revolution of the 1960s dismantled the church's role in a single decade, built a modern secular state, nationalised hydroelectricity and made language policy the central question. Two referendums on sovereignty, in 1980 and 1995, were lost - the second by about one per cent. Bill 101 made French the language of work and schooling in 1977. Montreal remains the largest francophone city in the Americas. Quebec City's old town is the only walled city north of Mexico. The province produces most of the world's maple syrup. The James Bay hydroelectric complex is among the largest on earth. The October Crisis of 1970 brought troops onto Montreal's streets.

• Existed: 1608 CE – present
• Type: Entity