Article

Laurentia

Published Online February 7, 2006

Last Edited July 17, 2015

 Laurentia, the name given by geologists to a landmass that, between 600 and 500 million years ago, embraced eastern North America, most of Europe and much of Asia. Writers have also used the word "Laurentia" as their name for a utopian Québec.
Groulx, Lionel
Groulx kept posing the worrisome question of French and Catholic survival in an urban, industrial, Anglo-Saxon environment (courtesy Library and Archives Canada/C-16657).

Laurentia, the name given by geologists to a landmass that, between 600 and 500 million years ago, embraced eastern North America, most of Europe and much of Asia. Writers have also used the word "Laurentia" as their name for a utopian Québec. Jules-Paul Tardivel set his futuristic novel Pour la patrie (1895; trans For My Country, 1975) in the "Laurentian Empire," a state separate from Canada. Lionel Groulx in 1937 defined his "Laurentia" as a separate French, Catholic state. The Latin name is that of Saint Lawrence, the Christian martyr burned to death by the Romans in AD 258. It was on St Lawrence's feast day, August 10, that Jacques Cartier in 1535 named after the saint a bay he discovered; the name was later applied to the river.