In interviews that appear in bookstores on Tuesday, the former director of To have to, Lise Bissonnette, shows that she has lost none of her passion for the present, even when it comes to recounting her past. “I’ve always refused to tell my life story,” she explains from the outset. “There was no question of getting into this. This interview project was completely foreign to me. It is entirely due to an idea of the historian Pascale Ryan. »
In the rich pages that result, Lise Bissonnette explains and tells her story. She does not hide her distress at the gradual abandonment of a certain idea of Quebec that remains dear to her. Today, “the Quebec government is recreating the welfare state, but for businesses! she observes, saddened. This appears to her to be far from the lights of a horizon that she had hoped would be brighter, more consistent. “It’s not very stimulating,” she drops.
“It will be understood that I am attached to the immense rupture that was the Quiet Revolution and that I am sorry to find it often denied. But I’m just as troubled by the fact that it’s unfinished, left hanging. In her view, the public universities, BAnQ and the Olympic Park, three institutions to which she has been linked, constitute “unfulfilled promises”. “I could also mention the Museum of Contemporary Art,” she says.
On the education side, more had to be done for the network of universities, she underlines. “The University of Quebec, a network of public universities present throughout the territory, could have raised education in Quebec, assumed a powerful leadership, if it had been given the means to respect its primary mission instead of instrumentalize it as a simple addition to a system that we have refused to rethink,” writes Lise Bissonnette.
The fate of BAnQ, one of the few public institutions created in recent decades, also worries her deeply. “It’s starting to crumble. If free access had not been enshrined in law […], the guardians of the Treasury would have succeeded in pricing the subscriptions. To reduce the budgets of an institution loved by the public, we proceed with more discretion. Lesser-known specialized services, exhibitions, research programs, the availability of heritage resources are terminated, and assignments are contracted out. »
For her, this institution cannot be reduced to a simple service organization renouncing to radiate as it should. On the contrary, it would be better than ever to make it grow, like the great crossroads of research and education that it intended to be, for the benefit of all.
A field of action
The regulars of To have to remember his editorials. Some have marked history like a hot iron. “ The duty was in my eyes an ultimate place, just like the university”, affirms the one who directed it from 1990 to 1998. Lise Bissonnette also recalls in these tonic interviews the requirements of a profession that she loved.
Under his direction, The duty asserts itself as a sovereignist. This political option emerges, logically, from the consistent analysis of the ins and outs of the Quebec reality, at the time of its modernity. This momentum “had nothing to do with identity,” she writes. “We made sure that we had no sympathy for the theses of the historian Lionel Groulx or the economist François-Albert Angers, whose closeness to the Church particularly put us off. The fleurdelysé hardly moved us. In a way, reason itself imposed a real turning point.
The duty was in my eyes an ultimate place, just like the university.
She cuts through a historical ambiguity where one of her predecessors, Claude Ryan, had allowed himself to be squeezed to the point of suffocating, she notes. The return of the status quo today, that is to say this cul-de-sac in which Claude Ryan found himself stuck like others, explains Lise Bissonnette, leads to the promotion of historical landmarks in the public square. which comfort us in this debilitating immobility.
“It’s not for nothing that the autonomist vision of Duplessis is suddenly valued, that we are trying to redeem this sad period in our eyes. From now on, the question consists in asking at most if the position of Duplessis was sufficiently autonomist or not, according to a narrow grid of analysis, essentially economic, nothing more. And it is in this context that Mr. Legault proposes, as the main project for Quebec, to catch up with Ontario. “It’s not very stimulating either! »
The Great Darkness, symbolized by Duplessis, Lise Bissonnette lingers there. “Looking closely at it, we tend to think today, the Darkness was not so tragic, pioneers resisted it, scratched or even broke the frames. Yes, they existed. But it is not because a wall allows a sliver of sun to pass through a breach that we can draw a conclusion about the good weather. Until the Quiet Revolution, the lights were breaches, and they took a comforting place in our reading of the past. This era suffered from the emptiness in which the majority of lives here revolved. The Great Darkness, she argues, was above all a form of whiteness, taking on the “pale tint of ignorance”.
The cultural vacuum
She returns to Rouyn, the capital of a childhood spent in Abitibi. Even today, she deplores the cultural void she experienced as a child, even though she had a great appetite for things of the mind. “This beginning of a natural interest in less silly knowledge took a long time to turn into an active desire to access demanding content; the environment simply did not lend itself to it. I thus lost years of intellectual development that I spent my life trying to catch up. »
“Most of my intellectual initiation at the time was linked to Latin Quarter », the student newspaper of the University of Montreal. “That’s where I discovered contemporary culture that had eluded me until then. On several occasions, she praises in these interviews the importance of this unique school that constitutes the student press. “The student newspaper saved me from the mediocrity of the study programs”, she goes so far as to advance.
While valuing a concern for objectivity in the practice of her profession, she has never ceased to affirm that personal writing is an ingredient of quality journalism. Lise Bissonnette has published novels, short stories, essays. “I don’t belong to any literary school,” says the woman who will become the first president and director general of the Grande Bibliothèque du Québec. “Writing is for me a main line of life. From my first little school compositions to my doctoral thesis in French-language literature, passing through journalism and fiction, everything is just the continuous variation of a relationship to this essential form of expression, magnificent present that reading gave me. »
In these interviews are several strong pages devoted to literature, on the way in which even this world is now invested by commercial processes against which it registers in false.
In 2009, during her reception speech for the Fleury-Mesplet prize, given on the sidelines of the Montreal Book Fair, she went so far as to say — I was there to hear it — that the expression of unconditional love between her companion and her had manifested itself to the highest degree the day the two had agreed to merge their library.
Godefroy-M. Cardinal, the man of her life, to whom this book of interviews is dedicated, has just died. Lise Bissonnette is inconsolable. But his private life is completely set aside here. She deliberately avoids the pitfall of personal moods. “I take care of my dog, who remains a difficult being, to help me get through it,” she simply tells me.
In the lively and stimulating pages of this book, almost all the space is given to the ideas of Lise Bissonnette, delicately intertwined with the trajectory of her public life. “I have known, contentment at work or at study, more than my share, alone in my offices on a daily basis or on the auspicious days that punctuate the life of institutions. The best remains that of a library at home, a book in hand, and a sleeping dog at my feet. »