There were artists who were discovered too late, or who disappeared too quickly for us to be able to see with our own eyes the development of their work. Pierre Falardeau is one of them, a man who, unfortunately, had already disappeared when I was able to really discover him, read his writings and watch his films.
My first memory was of my grandparents, sitting in front of the television, crying with laughter at the irreverent antics of Elvis Gratton. In my defense, I was too young to understand the biting irony of this character and the political symbols hidden under the ribald jokes of this colonized buffoon, but I saw through their bursts of laughter the comic and subversive force of the work by Falardeau. It was only as I grew up that I realized to what extent this caustic humor hid a deep political commitment.
Pierre Falardeau was not just a filmmaker or an intellectual, he embodied an ideal. For him, the cause of Quebec independence was much more than a question of politics, it became an existential question. Judging whether or not Quebec should be free was to answer the fundamental question, because the destiny of the Quebec people was at stake.
Hammer
It is often said that an artist tries to redo the same work over and over again. Pierre Falardeau was an artist of this genre, who hammered out the same themes and the same ideas in his cinematographic work and in his writings. October, February 15, 1839, The party, Elvis Graton, The time of the jesters : colonial exploitation returned again and again under his pen and in his images, as if to shout the importance of the freedom of peoples.
For Falardeau, freedom did not need to be justified by economic or ecological considerations as many try to do today. It was, it is and it will always be in itself a supreme value, a necessity for every people and every human being.
Falardeau conceived the struggle for the independence of Quebec as a fight for life, a fight which would never stop until freedom was won. The sharp-looking pamphleteer often liked to compare politics to a boxing match; “it is an unfair, difficult, long, dirty and exhausting struggle, but if one gives up, he gives victory to the other.” He saw in this struggle a mission, an obligation to never bow down in the face of subjugation, to remain upright and never betray himself, nor the deepest aspirations of his people.
A moving passage from the famous Discourse of voluntary servitude by Étienne de La Boétie, a text to which Falardeau often referred, well illustrated this existential struggle for freedom. During a discussion between a Persian and two Greeks, the first, not having known freedom, did not understand why the Greeks would not want to become subjects of the king of Persia in exchange for wealth and power.
One of the Greeks said: “You have experienced the king’s favor; but about freedom, what taste it has, how sweet it is, you know nothing. Now, if you had tried it, you yourself would advise us to defend it, not with the spear and the shield, but with the teeth and the nails. » This quote embodies, in my eyes, a synthesis of Pierre Falardeau’s fight: a fight for the survival of a people who refuse to allow themselves to be reduced to silence, a people who, as Richard Séguin sings, day after day and despite everything, stay standing.
Alarm cry
His angry art, his boundless indignation and his impactful works contrast with the cautious or apolitical positions of contemporary artists. We live in a time where dissenting voices, or the disturbing words of freedom watchdogs like him, are rare.
Quebec is sorely lacking intellectuals like Pierre Falardeau, who, through his films, his books and his rants, carried on his shoulders the weight of the struggle for the independence of the Quebec people. In La Boétie’s text it is described how the acceptance of servitude is worse than servitude itself.
Consequently, Pierre Falardeau’s thoughts resonate like a cry of alarm, a call to never stop fighting for what we believe is right. His work is crossed by the conviction that freedom cannot be negotiated, that it is not subordinated to secondary, superfluous, ephemeral questions.
Fifteen years after his death, Pierre Falardeau reminds us that the fight for the independence of Quebec is far from over. Ultimately, each of us harbors a sleeping Falardeau, nestled in a corner of our lost mind, ready to emerge at the opportune moment, when the fruits of our country’s orchards are ripe.