Jean-François Lisée

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Portrait of Jean-François Lisée.

Jean-François Lisée (born in 1958, in Thetford Mines, Quebec) is a Quebecois political analyst, journalist, author, intellectual and well-known sovereigntist thinker. He has been special advisor to Parti Québécois Premiers of Quebec Jacques Parizeau and Lucien Bouchard. He is presently Executive Director of the Centre d'études et de recherches internationales de l'Université de Montréal. His work centers on Quebec sovereignty, the sociological phenomena affecting the latter's support, as well as the Quebec Model and social democracy in an era of globalization.

1 Biography
2 Bibliography
3 Awards
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Biography

Jean-François Lisée holds degrees in Law, Journalism and Communications. He was, in the 1980s, a reporter in Paris and Washington for Quebec and French media. During that decade, he began a vast research on 30 years of American political, diplomatic, financial and media attention toward Quebec and its independence movement, resulting in the book In the Eye of the Eagle, published in 1990. It won the Governor General's Award for non-fiction. Two books that followed were Le Tricheur and Le Naufrageur, two devastating volumes about Premier of Quebec Robert Bourassa at a time when his refusal to achieve sovereignty, in the context of the Meech Lake Accord demise, left many Quebec nationalists feeling betrayed.

In 1994, he became a "special advisor" to Parti Québécois Premier Jacques Parizeau and an important strategist for the 1995 Quebec referendum campaign. After the plebiscite and the resignation of Parizeau, Lisée became advisor to his successor, Lucien Bouchard. He resigned from this post in late 1999 because of disagreements with the sovereignty strategy of the PQ government. He exposed his own ideas about his favoured strategy in 2000's Emergency Exit: How to avert Québec’s decline.

Lisée was Guest scholar from 2001 to 2003 at the Centre d'études et de recherches internationales (CERI) in Paris and at the Political sciences department of the Université de Montréal. He is currently the Executive Director of the International Studies Center of the Université de Montréal (CERIUM). He is also a member of the Centre de recherche en politiques et développement social (CPDS). He is behind the creation of the international politics website PolitiquesSociales.net. He periodically writes articles published in the current affairs magazine L'actualité.