The reassessment of the great questions of the past generates stimulating debates. These correspond to the evolution of historiography. They fascinate Dave Noël, born in Alma in 1981, journalist for The duty since 2009 and historian. Noël edited Le Devoir d’histoire. These “crossed views on Quebec” hide, since the creation of the section in 2017, an unprecedented look that upsets the past and prepares for the future.
The collection of 24 noteworthy texts, which appeared in our journal during the first five years, announces the meeting of two phenomena, long disputed but which have become unavoidable and interrelated: “the recognition of the rights and aspirations of indigenous peoples” as well as their example in the effort to avoid global warming which threatens the planet. Nature, so dear to the Aboriginal people, is, thanks to them, “at the center of attention”.
This innovative analysis, entitled “The Quebec forest, between science and political power”, is by Maude Flamand-Hubert. The researcher is one of the fifty or so authors who have collaborated on Le Devoir d’histoire. His interpretation, based both on the seriousness of Aboriginal people and on that of non-Aboriginal ecologists, remains unaffected by the suspicion that sometimes touches historians who scrutinize the mentality of European explorers in the 17th century.e century.
So, Michel De Waele and Paul Cohen question the veracity of “Champlain’s dream”: to create in America a society united by “tolerance of diversity and mutual respect for differences”. For them, it is a “commercial and non-humanist” project, despite the vision of the American historian David Hackett Fischer (born in 1935). But why think that the commercial spirit and humanism would necessarily be incompatible?
Mathilde Jutras shares the progressiveness of her colleague Maude Flamand-Hubert by ceasing to sanctify the explorers James Cook (1728-1779) and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (1729-1811). She dares to write: “Today, scientists rather travel the planet to describe human damage, in the hope of awakening the will to repair it. Gone are the days of the candid wonders of the Age of Enlightenment. »
Less daring, Éric Bédard (born in 1969) celebrates muted conservatism, “at the height of a man”, he argues, from Quebec historian Guy Fregault (1918-1977). But he forgets that Frégault, suddenly daring, declared, when presenting the David Prize in 1973 to the writer Hubert Aquin, that with works like those of the latter, “Quebec is no longer looking for a literature”.
Like the indigenous vision and environmentalism, the extreme independence of Aquin, who became, at the age of 47, in 1977, by his so desired suicide, the martyr of Quebec, formed a whole world. History cannot escape the meeting of these worlds.