In 1964, a revolution took place at the University of Montreal: Cardinal Paul-Émile Léger, chancellor of the still Catholic establishment reporting to Rome, chose a lay rector, and no longer ecclesiastical, to lead it. As the sociologist Guy Rocher has just illustrated himself on the Parent commission, responsible for modernizing education in Quebec, teachers and students want him to get the job. Wasted effort ! Democracy will be absent.
“Monsieur Rocher, I will tell you right away, I will not appoint you rector… You are too young,” Léger told him, summoning him. Then the Archbishop of Montreal, who judges that the decision rests only with him and Rome, smiles and adds: “This is not the real reason. In fact, the cardinal preferred the chemist Roger Gaudry. “He’s a great Catholic,” he pleads, forgetting that Rocher was national president of the Catholic Student Youth and that he still attends church.
All the same, a rumor circulates: Rocher insisted, at the Parent commission, that religion occupy less place in the education system. More than 50 years later, in May 2019, the man who will be 97 years old in 2021, asks the National Assembly to finally adopt the Law on the secularism of the State. On the strength of his experience of 1964, he recalls, with a touch of exasperation, the extreme visibility of Catholicism in the Quebec of the past “by the cassocks, by the cornets, by the crucifixes, by all!” “
But we shouldn’t think that Rocher holds a grudge against anyone. He preferred teaching and research to several important positions offered to him, as the journalist Pierre Duchesne underlines in volume 2 (1963-2021) of the biography he devotes to him by titling him with to -about The sociologist of Quebec. This volume, like the first, is based in particular on the numerous confidences made by Rocher to the author.
The sociologist maintains that it was in the name of intellectual autonomy that he refused the post of vice-rector offered by Rector Gaudry, the temptation that René Lévesque suggested to him, after the founding of the PQ, to one day become a minister. of Education, the candidacy for a star Liberal MP proposed to him by Robert Bourassa in 1970. Shocked by the repression of the Quebec left by Ottawa during the October crisis, that year, he congratulated himself on having stayed away from politics.
The 1970 crisis shook Rocher’s confidence in Confederation. The sociologist then understands, he recalls in 1989, “that when it came to subduing French Canadians, particularly those in Quebec, Anglophone liberalism was disappearing”. Later, he considers that the multiculturalism of the government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau is a treacherous “atomization”.
“Multicultural Canada,” Rocher wrote in 1972, “now offers too few chances for the survival and development of French-Canadian culture. The creation of an independent French-speaking Quebec will then appear as the last chance for a French-speaking North American nation whose future is in any case uncertain. To try to reduce this uncertainty, the sociologist will have to make an exception to the rule he has set for himself: stay distant from power.
The electoral victory of the PQ in 1976 provided him with the opportunity. Having become a PQ minister, his old friend Camille Laurin convinced him to participate with him in the birth of a charter, Bill 101, to make the influence of French the only way to save Quebec’s identity from disappearance. To prevent the massive anglicization of the children of immigrants, Rocher innovates by proposing to limit access to English schools to children of parents who have themselves studied here in English.
Despite the serious weakening that opponents of ideal francization will inflict upon it by resorting to the courts, this principle will remain the fundamental tendency of Bill 101. But, even within the PQ government, the radical nature of this law does not always arouse l ‘enthusiasm.
As Duchesne explains so well, it will take the intervention of Jacques Parizeau, then Minister of Finance, for the Charter of the French language to prevail despite the apprehensions of Premier Lévesque. In September 2021, Rocher, in Quebec before a parliamentary committee, admitted: “In 1977, we made a mistake. We should have extended Bill 101 to CEGEP and even, I would say, to the baccalaureate. “
Once a fervent Catholic, Rocher said in 2021 that he had become an agnostic. But a mystification, infinitely more deceptive than a religion, the mystification of the English language, remains. It can be summed up in one word, curiously derived from French: “money”. In Quebec, this deception would hide a verb: to disappear.
Extract from “Guy Rocher, tome 2”