This article reviews the development of francophone philosophy in Canada with regards to a twofold identity crisis (social and philosophical). Fernand Dumont appears as one philosopher who diagnosed a condition and proposed a solution. Before him, Thomists such as Hertel or De Koninck had aimed respectively at a cultural and a religious nationalism. But philosophers of the following generation, such as Dumont, criticized these two positions. They developed a cultural conception of collective identity, calling at the same time for a political nationalism that would become characteristic of the political elites of their generation and the philosophers of the next. Bypassing Thomism and setting themselves to the task of defining an identity for Quebec, Dumont and his contemporaries allowed philosophy, by means of new traditions, to regain its place in the centre of social debates.