“It seems essential to me to bring to light the side of the identity of the English and French nations which were forged, through similarities and differences, on both sides of the Channel”, proclaims the anthropologist Gilles Bibeau in his latest work, A love-hate story. This essay, which reads like a travelogue, offers an original perspective through a return to sources, particularly in the writings of explorers, navigators or missionaries of the time.
The ambitious attempt to paint a historical fresco of this scale is a success. Before recounting the shock of the encounter on North American lands between the English and the French, Bibeau goes back very far in time, sometimes as far as Antiquity and the Middle Ages, long before England and France founded colonies in America.
The author emphasizes the importance of geography, which according to him played a crucial role in the formation of the identities and cultures of the descendants of the English and the French.
Because the anthropologist wants above all to tell a world built, according to him, on the greed of permanent conquests. The testimonies of Irish monks, the Norse epics, the Nordic sagas or the logbooks of ship captains expose the milestones of territorial domination. The 83-year-old essayist also recalls the many attempts to occupy the Scandinavian peoples in the North Atlantic regions. We know today that it was the Icelandic Vikings who were the first Europeans to explore North America, passing through Newfoundland and Labrador, which they then named Vinland.
The author of the essay Aboriginal. The erased part of Quebec (Mémoire d’encrier, 2020) also underlines the paradoxical nature of relations between England and France, the two historically rival European nations which conquered from the 16e century, in the name of their respective crowns, the same territory, Kanata, which would later become Canada. In order to capture the spirit of the Renaissance period, a period of territorial expansion towards the Americas, the Quebec essayist claims to have drawn on the archives of this period, in particular when he evokes with joyful narrative pleasure testimonials from sailors and merchants.
He emphasizes the importance of geography, which he believes played a crucial role in shaping the identities and cultures of the descendants of the English and the French, the former by the Arctic Ocean and the latter by the river. Saint-Laurent, often to the detriment of Aboriginal peoples. While Jacques Cartier’s fleet decided in 1534 to bypass Newfoundland to go up the river and enter the very heart of North America, English navigators attempted to cross the far north through the Northwest Passage. By invoking John Davis, Martin Frobisher, Roberval, John Cabot or John Rut, the anthropologist highlights the distinct routes, the Far North for some and the territory of the trappers for others, which fascinated the specific imagination of the two founding peoples.