Québec’s new national mythology

Every nation has a sort of founding myth that everyone knows at some level isn’t exactly true, but which nonetheless defines in some way the common culture and the perception of history and one’s place in it. In France, schoolbooks once notoriously spoke of “nos ancêtres les gaulois” to a population that was, even at the time, a melting pot of all the cultures of Europe, the Mediterranean, and beyond. American schoolchildren still learn about how Columbus discovered America and the Pilgrims came to Plymouth Rock fleeing religious persecution and peacefully celebrated a Thanksgiving feast with the local indigenous people (who then conveniently disappeared). In Canada, we learn how the great John A. MacDonald founded a country and built a railroad to tie it together. Of course, this is mostly bullshit, even if some of the broad outline is grounded in historical fact.

Sometimes, the national myths are much, much darker. For Mexicans, the birth of their nation is thought of as a tragedy, and its founder is widely vilified as a traitor. And even though Zionism predates the Holocaust by decades, it’s assumed that Israel exists because of the genocide of the Jews of Europe, just as the Jewish people as a whole were mythically “forged in the flames” of a long series of Biblical tragedies, from Egypt to Babylon to Masada. On the other side of that coin is the Nakba, literally a “catastrophe”, that defines Palestinians as a nation and a diaspora.

Ironically, although we’ve come to think of the British conquest of 1759 as a defining moment in the history of Québec, the prevailing attitude towards it was one of indifference for much of this history. It was not long ago that the idea of a “nation of Québec” simply did not exist. There was a Province of Québec, which was largely inhabited by a nation of “French-Canadians”, a term with profound historical implications that are almost completely ignored by people in the Rest of Canada and the USA. To put it crudely, Canadien-Français means white, ultra-Catholic, poor, uneducated, and consumed by nostalgia for the mythical land of La Nouvelle France, where robust country folk lived simple, pious lives in the shadow of church steeples and the service of the wise saint-kings of the Ancien Régime. Because of the French Revolution, which guillotined priests and princesses alike with reckless abandon, and the surprisingly accommodating posture taken by the British towards Catholicism in Québec after the conquest, the national myth of French Canada was as much about abandonment and betrayal by France as it was about conquest and oppression by Britain.

This, of course, started to change with the Quiet Revolution. Québec was now going to be the land of the Québécois, an urban, secular people, “proud of their traditions but open to the world”. The Patriote rebellion of 1837–38 was rediscovered, and the ideals of the République du Bas-Canada were (somewhat selectively) adopted as guiding principles. French movies were no longer censored and people, ideas, and investments started to flow again across the Atlantic, as the modern Fifth Republic, rather than the old royal-clerical regime, became a source of inspiration for the new generation of nationalists. But nostalgia for La Nouvelle France dies hard, because, of course, je me souviens.

What we have come to realize, though, is that the myth of the religious, agrarian, and racially homogenous French colony is a lie on the same order as the happy story of the American Pilgrims. Most of the French came here seeking to escape the Ancien Régime, not to perpetuate it, and they intermarried with and adopted the local aboriginal culture to a much greater degree than anyone wants to admit. One of the most telling signs of this is how the mixed-race Métis people of western Canada do not exist in Québec… because, in essence, the Québécois are exactly those people, who in French colonial times were simply called Canadiens (as opposed to Français). Through songs like La Paix des Braves, and films like last year’s Québékoisie and this year’s L’Empreinte, the popular culture has started to warm up to this new history.

Will one day Québécois schoolchildren open their textbooks to read “nos ancêtres, les Abénakis”?