On November 2, 1987, the day after the announcement of René Lévesque’s death, the words of Félix Leclerc pay homage to the deceased statesman. We still remember today with emotion these words, engraved in the stone of a cemetery in Quebec, as an epitaph on the funeral monument of René Lévesque: “The first page of the true beautiful history of Quebec comes from to end… From now on, he is part of the short list of the liberators of the people. »
Thanks to archive footage, we can see and hear Félix Leclerc reading the full version of his tribute to René Lévesque.
By a coincidence of which history has the secret, the roles had been in some way reversed at the beginning of the career of the two men.
In 1949, René Lévesque was still a young journalist at the Bugle of Saint-Hyacinthe. On March 11, he signed a review entitled “Sing now”, with an obvious allusion to the style of Jean de La Fontaine, one of the great artistic influences of Félix Leclerc. With this title, René Lévesque also wishes to draw more attention to the musician than to the writer, already known to a wide audience.
Let us simply read the words of René Lévesque: “The other Tuesday, at the TSF [la radio de Radio-Canada]I made a discovery […] The Félix Leclerc whom I was delighted to have heard the other evening is a completely different man. A chansonnier, first of all, a real one — and the only one, I believe, who is currently living within our walls. A singer too: a strange voice, which is sometimes muffled and seems to come out of a fog, and sometimes full and resonant, clearly detaching small, unadorned words which make very pretty falls. […] Mr. Leclerc gave us only one of his songs that evening, Bozo. Words, where one finds this naturalness, this flowing, this familiar poetry to which the author works without much success in his spoken or printed texts. A melody that marvelously marries the chorus, molding it (the lyrics must have been born first) and punctuated by discreet guitar chords…”
René Lévesque was then 26 years old. He certainly remains in his text a severe critic of the writer, author of tales and of the novel Barefoot in the dawn. But as we can see, he is extremely complimentary of the musician, this chansonnier author-composer-performer, of a completely new genre in Quebec.
Although Félix Leclerc had a remarkable literary success with his first writings and he had already worked for ten years at Radio-Canada, thanks to Guy Mauffette, history writes that it was his passage in Paris, on December 22, 1950 , which consecrates the musician everyone remembers today, with the Félix de l’ADISQ trophies.
Before Paris, therefore, René Lévesque is part of a short list of rave reviews by singer Félix Leclerc!
On this symbolic day, tribute to the young visionary critic.