Political Parties in Quebec

[Linus Van Pelt]

The OP seems mostly right to me. I'm not sure Chaudiere-Appalaches is particularly more religious than any other area of rural Quebec, though.

Even if it is not a large portion of their overall votes, there is definitely a strong educated middle-class component to the traditional PQ activist base in the public and cultural sectors. It is, for example, something of a cliché that humanities professors or artists in francophone Montreal are sovereigntist. There is a strand of Quebec nationalism that has to do with the francophone cultural elite's desire to be their own national capital. This is connected to why the populist francophone right is often non-sovereigntist. A certain type of ADQ/CAQ voter views sovereignty as a kind of Montreal elite concern even while having little emotional connection to Canada outside Quebec.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Another thing to note is that when the British took over from the French in 1763, the population was mostly in the St. Lawrence valley, which is richly agricultural. The area along the Chaudière river extending south from Quebec City up into the mountains in the Beauce was also settled, however, and had a distinct identity as a remote and hilly region. The Eastern Townships, by contrast, had basically no white population at this time; they were initially settled by English-speakers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which is why the towns there have English names, and only became majority Francophone in the late 19th Century after industrialization brought in many factory workers. Similarly, regions like the Saguenay or the Abitibi were settled due to industrial development.

The conservative area around the Beauce, thus, corresponds roughly to the area where French-speakers settled inland, away from the St. Lawrence, prior to industrialization and British rule.