page_title: Maurice Duplessis
section_title: Political career
hierarchical_section_title: Maurice Duplessis / Political career
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Maurice Duplessis (1890-1959), député et chef de l'Union nationale, avant son accession au poste de Premier ministre du Québec. Pendant la campagne électorale de juillet et août 1936, cette photo fut la photographie utilisée dans le matériel publicitaire de l'Union nationale et distribuée aux médias (référence&#160;: Alain Lavigne, Duplessis, pièce manquante d'une légende - L'invention du marketing politique, Septentrion, 2012, ISBN 978-2-89448-688-7, pages 42 à 45). Elle fut aussi réutilisée lors de la campagne électorale de 1939. English: Maurice Duplessis, member of the Legislative Assembly of Quebec and leader of the National Union, before becoming Premier of Quebec. During the electoral campaign of July and August, 1936, this photograph was the photo distributed to the media and used in the electoral material of the National Union. It was also reused during the electoral campaign of 1939.
context_page_description: Maurice Le Noblet Duplessis served as the 16th Premier of the Canadian province of Quebec from 1936 to 1939 and 1944 to 1959. He rose to power after uniting his Conservative party and the breakaway Action liberale nationale progressive faction of the Liberal party of Premier Louis-Alexandre Taschereau, to form a new national-conservative party, the Union Nationale.
  His era was later labeled as La Grande Noirceur by its critics, but is also considered the greatest period of Quebec history by traditionalist conservatives who point out Duplessis government support of positive economic and social development based on strong family values in Catholic tradition, his support of private property rights vis-a-vis growing state and labour union challenges, and his strong opposition not only to Communism, but also to secularism, feminism, environmentalism, leftist separatism and other non-conservative political trends and movements that have changed and fragmented Quebec politics and society over the next 60 years, starting with the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s under his Liberal successor Jean Lesage.
context_section_description: Duplessis first won the seat as a Conservative Party of Quebec candidate in the 1927 Quebec election. In the 1931 election, he was reelected in his seat, but Conservative leader Camillien Houde lost both the election and his own seat. The Conservative caucus chose C. E. Gault to be interim Leader of the Opposition but, after Houde resigned as party leader in 1932, Duplessis won the leadership of the party during the 1933 convention over the only other candidate, Onésime Gagnon.
  Two weeks before the 1935 provincial election, he engineered a coalition with Paul Gouin's Action libérale nationale (ALN), a party of dissident reform Liberals and nationalists who had quit the governing Parti libéral du Québec. 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.
  Gouin withdrew his support from Duplessis on June 18, 1936, but the ALN caucus sided with Duplessis and joined with his Conservative caucus to formally merge into the Union Nationale party. Duplessis and the UN won the August 1936 election in a landslide, putting an end to thirty-nine consecutive years of Liberal rule. Duplessis's 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.
  Duplessis returned as premier in the 1944 election, and held power without serious opposition for the next fifteen years, until his death, winning elections in 1948, 1952 and 1956. He became known simply as le Chef ("the boss").
  He was elected to five terms of office in all, the last four of them consecutive. Duplessis remains the last Quebec premier to have won three or more consecutive majority governments. After him, no political party in Quebec elections at the provincial level had won more than two terms of office in a row until the December 2008 victory of Jean Charest's Liberal party, its third consecutive win.
caption: Duplessis in 1936
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