Chronique sportive ou politique? Le Canadien de Montréal et la crise constitutionnelle canadienne dans La Presse, Le Devoir et la Gazette (1976-1995)

The author examines how the Montreal Canadiens hockey team, and its ethnolinguistic composition, were debated in three Montreal newspapers (La Presse, Le Devoir and The Gazette) from the election of René Lévesque's Parti Québécois in 1976 until the second referendum on Quebec sovereignty in 1995, and whether the hockey club became a political issue during this period of Canadian constitutional crisis. The author asks whether, given the symbolic importance of the Canadiens in Quebec, could the discussions in these newspapers surrounding the team's declining Francophone roster have had a political dimension? Conversely, he asks, could the political debates of the constitutional crisis have interfered in these sports debates about the Canadiens? He argues that during this period of Canada's constitutional crisis, the Montreal Canadiens became a "place of memory," and that many of the newspaper sports columnists studied (both French and English) sought in their writings to freeze the past and historical identity of the team (as they saw it) that they considered to be threatened at the time, so that the memory of this club could continue to exist within the constitutional future of Quebec society. The author concludes that understanding this phenomenon deepens our understanding of the role of the press as a vehicle for the transmission of political ideas and as a political relay between the elites and the masses.

Master's Thesis

Université d'Ottawa

Ottawa, ON

2020

vii-186p.

fr