Did the Quebec "habitant" of the nineteenth century speak "Parisian French" or "French-Canadian patois?" And does this matter? And is the joual of the 1960s a language or a sub-standard version of French? And does this matter? Since the early nineteenth-century French-Canadians have been harangued to speak good French, improve their language, and demonstrate pride in their heritage and the history of their culture through their language. The intellectual "elite" of the province - writers, journalists, academics and clergy - maintained a steady flow of critical and educational texts on the quality of French in Quebec, not only in order to improve the language but also to fend off arguments from English Canada that Quebec French was a "patois" that did not merit the status of "official language." Chantal Bouchard traces the main lines of these harangues, and contextualizes them in the social history of the province from 1820 to 1970. She explores the intimate links between Quebec's "obsession with language" and the social practices of the French-speaking population of the province: their education, and the lack thereof, the romanticized images of the past presented by the clergy, their struggles for cultural power, the threat of assimilation for economic reasons, urbanization and proletarization between the wars, and finally post-World War II Americanization. She shows how political rather than personal solutions to the deterioration of the language offered the only remedy.