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You have to have an idea, before all, of the group: nation, race, sex, etc. — the idea that what really matters about people, deep down, is not what makes them unique as individuals, or what they have in common as human beings, but what makes them members of the same group. And not just any group — for we are all members of any number of different demographic or sociological groups — but only one particular group, the sole demarcation line of identity that it occurs to its advocates to draw around themselves.

Hence the significance of the Parizeau “nous.” The “money and the ethnic vote” crack on referendum night in 1995 may have been the id escaping, under the pressure of drink and disappointment, but that “nous” — the notion, as he urged upon his fellow francophone Quebecers, that when speaking of Quebec, as when speaking of themselves, “on va parler de nous,” coterminously, the one a substitute for the other — was his soberest self talking.

He had had enough of attempts to turn Quebec nationalism into something broad and inclusive — the notion, then being espoused by some sovereigntists, that “a Quebecer was anyone who wanted to be,” as if it were just another species of civic nationalism. He could see the danger in this. For if Quebec were just another liberal society made up of rights-bearing citizens, English and French, old stock and immigrant, how was it to be distinguished in that regard from Canada?

But the dilemma, for the movement if not for Parizeau, remained. For Quebec is, in at least half its mind, a liberal, pluralistic, North American society, and as such inclined to recoil at any attempt to issue too crude an “appel del la race” — as, for example, in the matter of the values charter. On the other hand, downplay it, as Parizeau understood, and the whole thing fizzles. Sovereignty? Why?