Je suis revenu, je ne voulais pas.
Arrivé à Montréal début août, reparti de San Francisco fin septembre : un mois et demi loin de tout, un mois seul sur la route, c’est largement suffisant pour oublier la vie de tous les jours, et elle ne m’a pas manqué un instant. Ça ne s’est pas passé exactement comme c’était prévu : ça s’est passé mieux.
Comparative early-twenty-first-century sociological surveys have found that New France is the most postmodern nation in North America. It is the region with the lowest proportion of people who believe in the devil (29 percent) and hell (26 percent). Asked if they agreed that the “father of the family must be master in his own house,” only 15 percent of Québécois said yes, compared with 21 percent of Far Western Canadians, 29 percent of New Englanders, and 71 percent of respondents in Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Another academic pollster found them to be more tolerant of homosexuality, extramarital affairs, prostitution, abortion, divorce, and having neighbors with AIDS, large families, drug problems, or emotional instability. Québec, one scholar found, was the region of North America with the highest degree of enlightened individualism and the least respect for traditional forms of authority. […] Montréal, New France’s metropolis, reflects many of these attitudes, combining
the tolerance of Amsterdam, the élan of Paris, and the fine dining of the San Francisco Baywith a large bohemian quarter (the Plateau) reminiscent of the Greenwich Village of old.
Colin Woodard,
American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America