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When Theodore H. White wrote The Making of the President 1960, he set a template for election books in the English-speaking world that has lasted for decades. The form involves a narrative constructed around the public campaigns and the backroom dramas, the personalities of the leaders and other major figures in the parties, the debate preparations, the rise and fall of key advisers, and the various responses to the inevitable crises that emerge. The model has been followed in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and much of Canada. I plead guilty to having written one myself.

But with the minor exception of a quickie volume produced after the Parti Québécois victory in 1976, the genre does not exist in Quebec. That is not to say that there are no books written about the province’s elections; there is a substantial literature. Une décennie de turbulences électorales au Québec (A decade of electoral turmoil in Quebec) cites dozens of...