Once a month, The duty launches to enthusiastsof history the challenge of deciphering a current topic from a comparison with a historical event or figure.
On December 15, 1977, Prime Minister René Lévesque rose in the House to offer his condolences to those close to Guy Frégault, “one of the most original and most striking, surely, of our contemporary historians”; there is no doubt, according to him, that D’Iberville the Conqueror (1944) and The War of Conquest (1955) “will remain classics”. The sovereignist leader deplores this “brutal and unexpected disappearance” of “someone important in Quebec”.
This man, who was said to be austere, had had a brilliant career. Along with Marcel Trudel and a handful of other academics, he belonged to the first generation of professional historians who completed a doctorate in this discipline.
A graduate of Loyola University in Chicago, he was a professor at the University of Montreal (1944-1959), then at the University of Ottawa (1959-1961). He marked a generation of students: “With Frégault, I went from a nationalist history to a national history”, René Dionne later recalled.
Recruited by Georges-Émile LaPalme, he was subsequently appointed Deputy Minister of Cultural Affairs. “A racy and productive intellectual”, he first subscribed to the positivist tradition, then came under the influence of the social sciences. All these history works will be devoted to the French Regime.
Nationalist synthesis
Frégault’s death came a few weeks after Premier Lévesque made a landmark trip to France. Beneath the glittering chandeliers of the Hôtel de Lassay, René Lévesque was to recall the beginnings of New France. “Ours was an incredible beginning. For 150 years, warriors and missionaries, settlers and woodsmen wrote many of the most extraordinary, if not the best known, pages of the 17and and XVIIIand centuries. »
For a century and a half, recalled the Prime Minister, our ancestors had been the actors in a story that ended in an unfortunate event. “I remember that arriving at the last chapter, the one that ends in defeat and conquest, we lost the desire to know the rest; and we kept coming back rather tirelessly to the beginning. »
The Prime Minister immediately insisted on this: “It is not a question here of nostalgically idealizing this very small society of a few tens of thousands of poor people”, but of recalling that this colony could have, a few decades later, Like other American colonies, stand on its own two feet and exist on its own. But the fate of arms had decided otherwise.
This New France of René Lévesque was also that of Guy Frégault, two men of the same generation, products of a new nationalist synthesis, made up of fidelity and ruptures, of reverence for the elders and of a transforming ardor quite remarkable.
In his Chronicle of the lost years (1976) — a bitter account of his experience as a senior civil servant — Guy Frégault presented the Quiet Revolution as a moment of greatness when, “with our heads a little higher and our hearts beating a little stronger, we offered ourselves the luxury of to take a step forward, to innovate to our extent, to create”. The creation, as we know, was not only artistic. Quebecers were going to give themselves the means for their economic, social and political emancipation, as shown by the triumphal visit of a sovereignist leader to Paris.
Lucid relationship to origins
New France has fascinated generations of religious and traditionalists who saw in it a great mystical epic, the vibrant testimony of our apostolic vocation in America. During the centenary of our survival, several notables and clerics celebrated the exploits and the virtues of the missionaries and the holy martyrs; others erected mausoleums to saints like Marie de l’Incarnation or Marguerite Bourgeoys, who had carried the good word to the ends of the continent, if not of the world.
For these traditionalists, New France was a “great adventure” peopled with heroes and a breeding ground for virtues; on pain of betraying our origins, we had to remain faithful to all those pioneers for whom America had first been a land of mission. This “compensatory messianism” was a way of consoling oneself in the face of the pangs of the present, but also, it must be admitted, of legitimizing a certain social and clerical order.
However, today we have forgotten that New France also inspired several builders of modern Quebec.
Born in 1918, Guy Frégault experienced his intellectual awakening during the Depression years. A brilliant student, he published a few texts inspired by Charles Péguy, personalist thinkers and “nonconformist” essayists (Daniel-Rops, Arnaud Dandieu, Alexandre Marc).
Like many others, he harshly criticizes the heritage of the elders, seeks a third way between the liberal, bourgeois and individualist laissez-faire and the totalitarianisms of right and left which crush human beings. If he presents himself as a revolutionary and dreams of a “new order”, he is an extremely lucid young man who rejects, from previous generations, the “massive amounts of whining rhetoric about their master the past”.
Even if Guy Frégault’s political ideas will evolve over time, even if his work as a historian and his commitment as deputy minister show a continuous commitment to Quebec and its political emancipation, this lucid relationship to the origins remains a constant of his thought.
“Those who approach a work of history with a view to finding shivers of pride in it would show as much good sense as good taste by going elsewhere to seek the sensations they prefer”, he writes in his magnum opus on the War of Conquest. Above all, he explained in a posthumous book devoted to Lionel Groulx, never take “our molehills for mountains”, avoid wallowing in a past-refuge, a “form of easy patriotism” which, if it suits “the minds that the evolution of the contemporary world is running out of steam”, remains “common to colonized peoples”.
Why study New France then? Why devote his summer vacation to it, with his wife Liliane, running through archives in the four corners of the American continent? Because it was necessary to understand the first times of a unique collective experience, to methodically explain the emergence of a new “civilization”, with its power struggles, its institutions of the Ancien Régime, its economic shortcomings.
New France was the genesis of a people facing a thousand challenges, “the time when our country was both normal and interesting”. Normal because there was a bourgeoisie there, that its social structure had not yet been decapitated; interesting because this nascent people could have had a completely different destiny if it had known a development similar to that of the other societies of the New World. A colony, certainly, but which “was not part of a foreign empire”, because with its metropolis, it was part of the “same French world”. Between Canadian society before the Conquest and France, “there was not only a community of culture, but a community of life”.
great darkness
Far from the bloated hagiographies and the edifications supposed to make young people vibrate, thanks to documented works, often erudite, devoted to characters and situations, Guy Frégault made us discover a New France “at human height”, rich of all virtualities.
Understanding history differently, he explained in a lecture delivered in 1963 – the year of the founding of Left taken and the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) — it was to run the risk of one day suffering the anger of young people who would soon have understood that the images of Épinal had first and foremost an ideological function, that by teaching the In New France, the generations before had sought less to educate than to recruit, to regiment.
Such an awareness, Frégault feared not without prescience, risked diverting the young Quebecer of the 1960s from this distant past. “To have, through no fault of his own, misunderstood the story, he can go so far as to deny the story. Isn’t this exactly what happened later with the generation of a Gérard Bouchard, who recently reduced New France to the throes of colonialism, slavery and reaction (Gérard Bouchard, “Myths founders of Quebec: an orphan memory”, Of thesee, January 8, 2022)? Isn’t this the essence of a thought that makes today’s Quebecers orphans for whom it would be necessary to construct myths from scratch, as if inherited memory were only a game of mechanics or a technocrat’s fantasy?
Born at the turn of the 1970s, I come from a generation that grew up mythologizing the Quiet Revolution; a generation exposed to the taunts and anger of baby boomers completely exasperated by this epic and clerical New France. Orphans are those who have been deprived of a national narrative that deserved to be transmitted with more rigor and empathy. The orphans are those who firmly believe that New France was nothing but a “great darkness” without interest.
“Let us therefore recognize that those who made the Canada of the 18and century were neither larger nor smaller than life, believed Guy Frégault. They have built a society in their image, a society at human height. It is already very beautiful. All I wish is that our descendants can say the same about us. »
To propose a text or to make comments and suggestions, write to Dave Noël at [email protected].