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The land that is now Quebec was long inhabited by Indigenous nations, including the Huron-Wendat, Innu, Algonquin, and Mohawk, before European contact. French explorer Jacques Cartier claimed the territory for France in 1534, and Samuel de Champlain founded the settlement that would become Quebec City in 1608, establishing it as the capital of the colony of New France.
New France grew slowly under French rule, hemmed in by British colonies to the south, until British and French forces fought the decisive Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759, just outside Quebec City's walls. France ceded the colony to Britain under the Treaty of Paris (1763), but the Quebec Act of 1774 preserved French civil law, the Catholic Church's role, and the French language -- a compromise that let a distinct French-Canadian society persist under British, later Canadian, rule. Quebec became one of the four founding provinces of the Canadian Confederation in 1867. The most significant modern turning point came with the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, when the province rapidly secularized, modernized its institutions, and asserted a stronger Québécois national identity, followed by close sovereignty referendums in 1980 and 1995 -- the latter defeated by less than one percentage point.
Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec City and is generally regarded as the father of New France. René Lévesque, founder of the Parti Québécois and premier during the Quiet Revolution era, led the push for Quebec sovereignty and oversaw the 1980 referendum. Earlier, Maurice Duplessis, premier for most of the period from 1936 to 1959, presided over the conservative, church-aligned era that the Quiet Revolution was a direct reaction against.
Quebec shifted within a generation from a society where the Catholic Church controlled education, health care, and much of daily life -- an era Québécois historians call "La Grande Noirceur" ("the Great Darkness") -- to one of the most secular societies in North America. Language became, and remains, central to that identity: the provincial Charter of the French Language (Bill 101), passed in 1977, made French the official language of government, business, and education, and later language laws have continued to reinforce it.
Quebec today functions as a French-speaking society within a mostly English-speaking country, a distinction it continues to actively protect through language policy rather than treat as settled. No sovereignty referendum has been held since 1995, but the underlying questions about Quebec's status within Canada remain part of its political life, while its cities increasingly build their economies and tourism around the same French-Canadian identity that once made the province feel apart from the rest of the continent.