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Maurice Le Noblet Duplessis (20 April, 1890 - 7 September, 1959) served as the Union Nationale Prime Minister of Quebec (1936 - 1939 & 1944 - 1959). He was a life-long bachelor.
Born in Trois-Rivieres, Duplessis first won a seat as a Conservative in the 1927 Quebec election. In the 1931 election, Duplessis was re-elected in his seat, but Conservative leader Camillien Houde lost both the election and his own seat. In 1932 the Conservative caucus chose Duplessis to be the leader of the Opposition, and he formally won the leadership of the Parti conservateur du Québec in 1933.
A conservative and strong supporter of provincial rights, he engineered a coalition with the Action libérale nationale (a party of disgruntled reform Liberals and nationalists who had quit the governing Parti libéral du Québec) two weeks before the 1935 provincial election. While he lost that election, Duplessis was soon able to exploit a patronage scandal involving the family of Premier Louis-Alexandre Taschereau to force Taschereau's resignation. The ALN and Conservatives had by now formally merged into a single party, the Union Nationale, which won the August 1936 election in a landslide, putting an end to 39 consecutive years of Liberal rule.
Duplessis' first government was defeated in the 1939 election, a snap election called by the Premier in hopes of exploiting the issue of Canadian participation in World War II, but he managed to return as Premier in the 1944 election and held on to power without serious opposition for the next fifteen years until his death. He became known simply as le Chef (the chief, the boss). He was elected to five terms of office in all, the last four of them consecutive; after him, no political party in Quebec elections at the provincial level has ever managed to win more than two terms of office in a row.
The Duplessis governments were characterized by the lavish use of patronage, anti-communism and strong-arm methods against labour unions, and effective electoral campaigning, often involving the Roman Catholic Church. A slogan commonly heard from the pulpit was Le ciel est bleu; l'enfer est rouge: The sky/heaven is blue (Union Nationale); Hell is red (Parti libéral du Quebec). The period of his rule is sometimes referred to as La grande noirceur (The Great Darkness).
On January 21, 1948 he made one of his most enduring contributions to Quebec with the adoption of an official Flag of Quebec, the fleur-de-lysé, which replaced Britain's Union Jack at the top of the National Assembly.
Although history has not been kind to Duplessis, some point out that he presided over a period of strong economic growth and 15 consecutive balanced budgets. Although his government ran a legendary patronage system, this perhaps did not differ very much from a similar patronage system under Taschereau's Liberals in earlier decades, and in any case he never personally enriched himself and died in debt.
After his death, Quebec society was caught up in a swift socio-cultural change away from his conservative, church-oriented policies towards a highly secular, socially liberal welfare state. This was called the Quiet Revolution (Révolution tranquille).
Interestingly, the future newspaper baron Conrad Black lived in Quebec as a young man and wrote a well-regarded and definitive biography, entitled simply Duplessis (ISBN 0771015305), now out of print.
He won the 1936 election, lost the 1939 election, won the 1944 election, 1948 election, 1952 election, and 1956 election and died in office in 1959.
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