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The literature on the Quiet Revolution tends to present this important moment in the history of contemporary Quebec as resulting from the actions of an enlightened class, the new middle class, who wished to make Quebec a modern society. The objective of this thesis is to criticise this elitist and essentialist interpretation of social change. It proposes a conceptual alternative that could take into consideration the profound mutation in state and society relations between 1944 and 1960, a mutation that facilitated the advent of the welfare state in Quebec. Based on a theory of civil society as a sphere of interaction between the state and the individual, the thesis demonstrates that the Quiet Revolution was the result of the development of a new ethos that favoured the values of social justice, participation and equality which contributed to undermining the foundations of the Duplessis regime.

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Recent research has shown the Canadian peasantry of the eighteenth century to be less homogeneous than was once thought. Beyond the ebb and flow of the family cycle, the striking differences in productive resources from one household to the next can only have furthered accumulation among the peasants. Set in Riviere-du-Sud, a seigneury fifty kilometres downstream from Quebec on the south shore of the St. Lawrence, the present study is concerned with the forms and limits of that process. By 1720, the seigneury had entered what might be called the second phase of colonization; the population had taken root, but throughout the period land for the children who departed would continue to be available farther afield. In this setting, it is suggested, both production and markets were too uncertain to permit even the largest producers to lose their subsistence orientation and break through the traditional limits to scale. At the same time, such peasants had no choice but to invest most of their appreciable surplus in land, which they eventually distributed to their children. A muted differentiation process, in which the most prosperous continually pushed the vulnerable off their valuable land to inferior holdings elsewhere, resulted.