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Katia Malausséna
Goldsmiths, University of London
This paper will present a short aspect of the doctoral research I have
just completed on the construction of national memories in France, England
and Quebec[1]. I could start with a general fact I observed in each of
those three areas, regarding the periods of important political changes
and upheaval: most of the time, they also correspond with a frenetic
literary production.
I will here focus on the case of mid-XIXth century Quebec. I intend to
show how, in this province then called “Lower Canada” the period
of reinforcement of British colonial domination in the middle of the XIXth
century corresponds both with the emergence of a “national”
literature and a strengthening of the sense of collective belonging. More
precisely, I will try and highlight how the process of inscription
of the collective experience in texts has played a very strong role in
the elaboration but also in the legitimisation of a “national”
memory and identity, which could adapt to the political constraints of the
time – the British colonial domination.
I will finally see to which extent this literature which first mainly
appears not as a polemical instrument but as a strong ideological tools to
calm down political rebellion, to create consensus in a colonial context,
really is that a-polemical.
Literature is here to be seen in the in broad sense of the term, as we
will come across many different types of texts which are all to be
considered as different “genres” of the French Canadian
collective narrative I propose to analyse here.
Before focusing directly on the historical and literary context, I will
first present very briefly two aspects of the theoretical background this
presentation is based on. The first important reference is Benedict
Anderson and his famous book on Imagined communities, which
demonstrates how communities need to create mythologies, abstract and
imaginary constructions to survive, to grow and politically and
economically develop. Anderson shows how the imaginary construction of the
community often precedes its actual political and territorial
legitimisation, how nations are not created ex-nihilo but are also
the product of a common cultural, religious, mythological background that
supports them. This can help us understand why, in the texts of the
mid-XIXth century we will talk about, the French Canadians refer to
themselves as a “nation”. The term goes beyond the old meaning
of the “nacyon” as a people. In this case the use of the
term "nation" celebrates and commemorates a common past,
affirms, vindicates a distinctive identity, and expresses the will to
perpetuate it in spite of the non-political achievement and of the
constitutional submission to the British crown.
The second important reference here is the work of Marthe Robert on the
Roman des origines et origines du roman [2]. In this book she
develops a psychoanalytical interpretation of the literary genre of the
novel, more broadly of the motivations at the basis of the process of
writing novels. She relates the process of writing or more widely of
creating “stories” to the Oedipus conflict and shows how every
individual has to invent stories, stories about the self, the relationship
with the others and mainly the parents, in order to come to terms with the
growing delusions of reality. Every one creates it own tale, its own “Family
romance”, “Novel of the origins”:
“Obliged to go forward and forego the benefits of
development, yet unable to give up the paradise in whose eternity he still
trusts against all odds, [the child] can avoid disaster only by taking
refuge in a more amenable imaginary world. That is why he starts to tell
himself stories; rather a story which, in fact, is a tendentious
version of his life, a biographical fantasy expressly conceived to account
for the unaccountable disgrace of being un-artistocratic, unlucky and
unloved; and in which [...] he can indulge in self pity, self comfort and
revenge through a single act of his imagination [...]."[3]
The other element to be recalled here is that in this family romance,
the parents are seen as "tutelary deities who dispense their loving
and care. [The child], in exchange, invests them not only with absolute
power, but with an inexhaustible store of love and an infallibility that
sets them apart from and above the rest of humanity".[4]
I propose to extend this statement on the individual psyche to the
history of the French Canadian community and appropriate it for my own
analysis of the cultural and literary history of Lower Canada and more
precisely of the period following the events of 1837-1838.
During the 1830's, thanks to the political rights given to the French
Canadian people by the British crown, a young and active political elite
had emerged in the capital of the province Quebec. At that time, the
province had indeed its own parliament and its assembly where the
parliamentarians could debate in French about the politics of the
province[5] and submit their opinion to the British governor.
In 1834, the members of the assembly adopted and sent to London a series
of "resolutions" (92) in which they claimed more political
power. Three years later, the response finally arrived: the British
government rejected most of the queries of the deputies of Lower Canada. A
group of men, remembered as the "patriotes", then
refused to accept this official decision and decided to create a small
army to resist the British forces. They were violently repressed, most of
them were arrested and then shot or hanged. It is a total failure for the
French Canadian people.
In 1838, Lord Durham is appointed general governor of British North
America, and he is asked by the young queen Victoria to report on the
causes of the rebellions and to find a solution to the situation. In a few
months, he writes his famous Report on the Affairs of British North
America in which he declares:
"It would be vain for me to expect that any description I can give
will impress on Your Majesty such a view of the animosity of these races
as my personal experience in Lower Canada has forced on me. Our happy
immunity from any feelings of national hostility, renders it difficult for
us to comprehend the intensity of the hatred which the difference of
language, of laws, and of manners, creates between those two races
who inhabit the same village, and are citizens of the same state."[6]
Therefore, from the British point of view, the rebellions are first of
all interpreted as the "incompatibility of the French and British
races", as the non-capacity of the French Canadian to politically
behave, as a proof of their indomitable nature and the need to use more
repressive measures. The Durham report will lead to a major constitutional
amendment in 1840 and eventually to the creation of the Canadian
confederation in 1867. But here, the most important element to underline
in the report is the following statement:
"There can hardly be conceived a nationality, wrote
Durham, more destitute of all that can invigorate and elevate a people,
than that which is exhibited by the descendants of the French in Lower
Canada…they are a people with no history and no literature
[...]. In these circumstances, I should be indeed surprised if the more
reflecting part of the French-Canadians entertained at present any hope of
continuing to preserve their nationality."
To this radical and definite judgement the French Canadian seem to have
opposed, not the army – which they did not have anyway -, not
physical violence, but the force of literary creation, the symbolical
violence of words.
I will therefore now give a few possible axes of analysis of the
literature of the period. As mentioned in the introduction, my literary
sources are diverse and I will very briefly focus on 3 types of texts to
illustrate my point: historiography, novels, and religious writings.
It seems to me that the common thread of these three "genres"
is precisely the attempt to find an answer to the miserable political
situation of the French Canadian minority through the re-foundation of the
collective romance, the invention of a new "novel of the origins",
a new national genealogy and memory.
Indeed, in 1837, in the height of the crisis, F. X Garneau, the man who
was later to become the most emblematic historian of the XIXth century,
wrote a poem which takes the form of a desperate appeal to his
peers to preserve their collective memory:
"Peuple, pas un seul nom n'a surgi de ta cendre;
Pas un, pour conserver tes souvenirs, tes chants,
S'il existait depuis des siècles ou des ans.
Non! Tout dort avec lui, langue, exploit, nom, histoire ;
Ses sages, ses héros, ses bardes, sa mémoire,
Tout est enseveli dans ses riches vallons,
Où l'on voit se courber, se dresser les moissons.
Rien n'atteste au passant même son existence ;
S'il fut, l'oubli le sait et garde le silence."[7]
Garneau would soon "convert" himself and stop writing poems to
become a historian. His own answer to the precarious situation will be the
publication of the four volumes of his Histoire du Canada between
1845 and 1852 which contributed to reinforce French Canadian patriotism
and settled the frame of the forthcoming cultural production. This history
is a testimony, a monument dedicated to posterity. In his correspondence
he wrote: "Je veux, si mon livre survit, qu'il soit l'expression
patente des actes et des sentiments intimes d'un peuple dont la nationalité
est livrée au hasard. Je veux empreindre cette nationalité
d'un caractère qui la fasse respecter par l'avenir"[8].
Beside historiography it also clearly appears that the years following
the defeat of the patriots were also the period during which were written
the first French Canadian novels[9], as if the writers had heard Garneau's
appeal. For the novelists who spoke in the name of their community, the
literary creation, or more widely the refuge into books was the best way
to exorcise an unspeakable and unbearable reality…exactly like what
happens in the book considered as the first French Canadian novel: written
by Philippe Aubert de Gaspé fils in 1837, the year of the Patriots'
rebellions, L'influence d'un livre or Le chercheur de trésor
is a fantastic tale about a man who hopes to become rich by the means of
alchemy. He will finally get the solution in a library where he finds the
magical book that will give him all the power and happiness he had been
longing for.
L'influence d'un livre will be followed by the publication of
many novels about French Canadian history and culture. La Terre
paternelle by Patrice Lacombe (1846), Charles Guérin by
Chauveau (1846) and most importantly Les Anciens Canadiens by
Philippe Aubert de Gaspé (1846) etc…which are all stories
about the French Canadian community, mainly set in the early times of the
province.
The reason why it is possible to call them "novels of the origins"
is that as I just said, first of all many of those texts literally and
metaphorically engraved the founding moments of the community, give it its
first mythical memory. It is no coincidence that a leitmotiv is the
comparison of the French Canadian people to an abandoned child. In this
sad family romance, France plays the role of the cruel motherland, who has
abandoned her children since the 1763 Treaty of Paris:
"Un voile sombre couvrait toute la surface de la
Nouvelle-France, car la mère patrie, en vraie marâtre, avait
abandonné ses enfants canadiens." (Philippe Aubert de Gaspé
père, Les Anciens Canadiens, 1863).
But the general mythification process is then, not only elaborated
through the narration of the first hours of the province, the history of
the first settlers, but also through the assimilation of the French
Canadian people to an “elect nation”, especially in the
religious texts of the second half of the XIXth century which I will
lastly focus on.
This point is again to be related to the political history of the
province: after the defeat of the patriots, the power of the clerical
institution considerably increased and it became the main instrument of
social and ideological control. Indeed, the British administration allowed
the Church to keep hold of the culture, the religion and the education of
the French Canadian people. The Church mainly developed an ideology which
could at the same time fit in the colonial political frame and give the
French Canadian a sense of history, a distinctive culture and destiny
based on the new exegesis developed by the ultramontanist clergy. The term
ultramontanism was used to affirm the supreme allegiance to the pope.
The ultramontanist literature is vast and constitutes a rich research
source for the study of the construction of French Canadian mythology. In
order to re-invent the history of the community it instituted –
through sermons, pamphlets, booklets, essays – a new French Canadian
genealogy in which, abandoned by a heretic France, the French Canadian
found themselves to be an elect people. The abandoned child could find a
new paternity through God and the Christ.
More than giving them a new genealogy, this exegesis also provided the
French Canadian with a mythical temporality since the roots of the
community were to be searched not in the Nouvelle-France, not in Europe
but in the Biblical temporality and spatiality which transcended the real
geographical boundaries. There are evocations of a “new Jerusalem”,
the Saint-Laurent is described as “le Jourdain des sauvages”.
Moreover, this last quotation shows how the experience of the French
Canadian found a meaning and a future through ultramontanism: they were a
people of missionaries, whose duty was to educate the barbaric Indians but
also to stay humble and accept their poor but blessed situation. It is no
coincidence in this novel of the origins, that the alter ego of
the French Canadian is Saint John the Baptist, the saint who poorly lived
in the Judean desert, spreading the words of God. Saint John the Baptist
was soon to become the official patron saint of the French Canadian and
Saint John's day on June 24th, was then one of the most celebrated
religious feast in Lower Canada[10].
It finally appears that the origins of the novel and the novel of the
origins are to be related, in French Canada, to a historical and
existential necessity. They can be read as a response to the critical
political situation, which endangered the collective identity and
threatened the French Canadian history and memory. Literature can be seen
as the main protection against oblivion and therefore as an affirmation of
the collective identity against Durham's statement. Literature, in the
case of the religious texts, can also be interpreted as a way to accept
the colonial situation.
However, despite its consensual dimension and its acceptation of the
political structures of the time, it is possible to see something else
lying under this apparently compliant literature and this will be my
conclusion. Indeed, by claiming the right to preserve the French Canadian
culture and have control over the education of their people, the clergy
also preserved the main instrument of polemics that was soon to be used by
the first French Canadians polemists, and much later by the partisans of
Quebec's sovereignty: language, more precisely French, "franco-quebecois"
which still constitutes today, several decades after the secularisation of
Quebec's institution, one of the main pillars of Quebec's fight for the
independence of the province, one of the main way, for Quebec's writers to
express their distinctive sense of belonging.
Bibliography
ANDERSON, Benedict, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin
and spread of nationalism, Londres, Verso, 1983.
ANDRES, Bernard, Ecrire le Québec, de la contrainte à
la contrariété. Essai sur la constitution des lettres,
Montréal, Etudes et Documents, 1990.
AUBERT DE GASPÉ fils, Philippe, L'influence d'un livre or
Le chercheur de trésor, préface du Pr L. LeBlanc,
Montréal: Nouvelles éditions de poche, 1980 (1st ed. 1837).
AUBERT DE GASPÉ, Philippe, Les Anciens Canadiens, Montréal,
Beauchemin, 1957 (1st ed. 1846).
CASGRAIN, H. R in Œuvres complètes, 3 vol,
Québec, 1873-1875
CHAUVEAU, Pierre J. Olivier, Charles Guérin, roman de moeurs
canadiennes / Montréal, Fides, 1978 (1st ed. 1846).
DUMONT, Fernand, Genèse de la société québécoise,
Québec, Boréal, 1996, 393 p.
DURHAM, Lord, Report on the Affairs of British North America (1839),
NY, 1970 (1st ed. 1912) Augustus M. Kelley Publishers.
GARNEAU, F.X, Histoire du Canada, Montréal, Les éditions
de l'arbre, 1944.
GROULX, Lionel, La confédération canadienne : ses
origines, Montréal, Imprimé au Devoir, 1918.
GROULX, Lionel, La découverte du Canada. Jacques Cartier,
Montréal, Granger Frères, 1934.
GROULX, Lionel, La naissance d'une race, Montréal,
Librairie d'Action française, 1930.
HAMELIN, Jean, Histoire du catholicisme québécois, le
XXème siècle, tome 2, Montréal, Boréal
Express, 1984.
LACOMBE Patrice, La Terre paternelle, Montréal, Fides,
1981 (1st ed. 1846).
MALIJAY (de), Paul, Saint-Jean-Baptiste, l'Évangile et le
Canada : Souvenir de la fête nationale du 24 juin 1874, Montréal,
Montréal, La Minerve, 1874.
ROBERT, Marthe, Roman des origines et origines du roman, Paris,
Grasset, 1972.
WEINMANN, Heinz, Du Canada au Québec, généalogie
d'une histoire, Montréal, L'Hexagone, 1987.
[1] The thesis, entitled "Pour une archéologie comparée
des commémorations nationales contemporaines en Angleterre, en
France et au Québec (1980-2000)" was presented at Paris 13
University in January 2002.
[2] Marthe Robert, Roman des origines et origines du roman,
Paris, Grasset, 1972.
[3] Cf. Origins of the Novel, translated by Sacha Rabinovitch,
Brighton, Harvester, 1980. p. 24.
[4] Ibid. p. 23.
[5] Cf. Acte constitutionnel de 1791.
[6] Durham, Lord, Report on the Affairs of British North America
(1839), NY, 1970 (first edition, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1912)
Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 339 p., p. 17.
[7] Cf. F. Dumont, op. cit. p. 282.
[8] Cf. H. R Casgrain in Œuvres complètes, 3
vol, Québec, 1873-1875, p. 115.
[9] Before this there was of course a literary creation but it was
constituted of travel logs, missionary writings, tales etc…Cf. For
more details on the question cf. Bernard Andres, Ecrire le Québec,
de la contrainte à la contrariété. Essai sur la
constitution des lettres, Montréal, Etudes et Documents, 1990.
[10] It is today the national day of the province of Québec.
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