Here is the Saint-Jean-Baptiste. Quebec flags are waving everywhere. Declarations of love to the nation are launched. But I am often surprised, even among my most nationalist compatriots, to discover how few of them know the history of the territory dear to their hearts. A gap maintained from generation to generation, for lack of an always glorious collective trajectory. Evil takes us.
Admittedly, this story was often badly taught at school. But finally… at full bookstores and libraries, works are dedicated to fill the annoying deficiency. Read about its origins, why not? Holiday project, life project.
Coming from Quebec, a cradle of memory where stones remember, I was passionate about our collective trajectories. With them, I grew up. Books have accompanied me on my identity walk through the streets of the capital, then in Montreal or through regional incursions, including many indigenous territories. Eyes open to people and places, but writings not far away.
The collection in two volumes of the historian Pierre-Georges Roy, Quebec City under the French Regime, full of captivating anecdotes, has long been one of my bedside books. Published in 1930 by the Archives Service of the Government of the Province of Quebec, the work, in a series of chronicles, sheds light on the daily life of the new occupants in this land of spruce trees and too long winters.
Following the rebellions of 1837-1838, John George Lambton, Earl of Durham, in his famous British North America Affairs Reporthad, as we know, described French Canadians as a people without literature and without history, whose assimilation he recommended.
History and literature, I found traces of it in New France by diving into Jesuit relationships and the writings of Marie de l’Incarnation, founder of the Ursulines, mystic and woman of action canonized in 2014. Clear-headed, the nun saw around her more French people “going wild” by adopting the life of the woods than Natives assimilate despite evangelistic efforts. She discussed the raids of the tough Iroquois, who were not so easily conquered, deplored the trade in alcohol between the French colonists and the First Peoples, bequeathed precious details on the early days of the colony.
Speaking of “wildness”, I warmly recommend reading the memoirs written in the XVIIe century by Pierre-Esprit Radisson under the current title The Extraordinary Adventures of a Coureur des Bois (Alias Editions). The physical courage, the polyglot talents and the intrepidity of this Frenchman, famous trapper, hunter, always interpreter over hill and dale with his brother-in-law Médard Chouart Des Groseilliers, never ceases to impress. Radisson, adopted in his youth by the Iroquois—he was to survive their torture stake—was also a model of felony. Sometimes deceived himself, he betrayed everyone: French, English, Aboriginals, a manipulator endowed with extraordinary gifts, a founding member of the Hudson’s Bay Company, banished from France after going over to the English. A bit of fiction is mixed with his stories, not for the trouble. But what a hectic existence! Tintin can go get dressed.
To better understand the period of transition after the English Conquest, Old Canadians (1863) and Memoirs (1866) by Philippe Aubert de Gaspé, constantly reissued, are a mine for those who know how to read between the lines. Born in 1786, this lord of Saint-Jean-Port-Joli will have been rocked by the stories of his aunts on the French Regime, the battle of the Plains of Abraham and the upheavals of the changes of reign, before studying at the Petit Séminaire of Quebec with the more progressive Louis-Joseph Papineau. The writer was torn between love for his people—whose stories, folklore and customs he wrote—his curiosity for the Aboriginal peoples and the interests of his wealthy caste who made a pact with the English regime in order to preserve their privileges. The contradictions of the French-speaking elites, displayed above all in Memoirs without the author being aware of it, help to decode the persistent resentment of the Quebec people towards the wealthy.
Many works by historians shed light on readers going back in time. The most accessible remain the five volumes ofPeople’s history of Quebec by Jacques Lacoursiere. Especially his first two, devoted to New France, wildly alive. Enough to open the door to more scholarly works, devoured in the same breath by those whom the adventure of our corner of America takes from page to page.
This column is interrupted for five weeks. Long live the holidays!