The very first local voice to be heard in 1929, through cinema, was not that of Prime Minister Louis-Alexandre Taschereau, but that of an army officer. When the horse-drawn sleigh of the lieutenant governor of the province arrives, it is this soldier who we hear shouting his orders in English, with a French accent, in the first talking film which has just been digitized .
His Majesty’s soldiers present the steel of their weapons, while brass instruments play the God Save the King. It was only after this royal arrival that the jerky voice of Prime Minister Taschereau was heard, this lawyer who had been slapped, in this same parliament, by the journalist Olivar Asselin.
Continuously elected since 1900, Taschereau is dressed in an elegant coat with a lustrous mink collar. He is wearing a wide-brimmed felt hat. In front of the camera, his lips topped with a thin mustache articulate his words in English. He talks about the thousands of French Canadians who left to live in the United States. He talks about it without saying what misery these people were fleeing.
These images, shot in the winter of 1929, narrowly anticipated the terrible economic downturn that occurred a few months later. This crisis will plunge the majority of the population even deeper into poverty.
Among the Taschereaus, however, a family that took advantage of the inequalities of feudalism, everything continues as before. The family sees its immemorial privileges as the fruit of an objective selection process. The Taschereaus generate deputies, lawyers, judges, cardinals, in a constantly renewed form of nepotism.
In 1936, when this man with a long, gaunt face like death finally ceded power to the conservatives led by Maurice Duplessis, the Liberals ruled Quebec for more than 15 years. Duplessis will end up governing almost as long, using the same corrupt techniques, sharing roughly the same economic thinking: the State bows its head to private enterprise, this path to take, we repeat, to taste “true progress”.
The Taschereau family had a feast. When his reign faltered, the public accounts committee noted that 46 members of this brotherhood, a clan of the rich and the idle, were paid by the state coffers. The most egregious case of abuse is that of the prime minister’s brother. Accountant of the assembly, he transfers public funds to private accounts, in an institution where his son is manager.
What does the money matter, pleads Prime Minister Taschereau. The important thing for his compatriots is to stick to the countryside, to a traditional way of life, he says. That’s all that matters in order to preserve French, the religion. In 1934, Taschereau stated this: “The English have more money than us, but we hold our campaigns well. The future of French in this province is assured. » The good joke! And Taschereau affirms, without laughing, that he only has hope thanks to the countryside, to colonization, he who lives so well in the city, in the comfortable neighborhood of a small society of well-off people never deprived of Nothing.
When it was pointed out to him, during an interview, that he had reigned longer than the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, he understood it as a compliment. Taschereau says: “I believe so, if it is permissible to compare large things to small ones, large countries to small ones, and big men to small ones. »
From the end of the 19th centurye century, the power of the nouveau riche in Canada, products of the industrial revolution, tended to supplant the capital enjoyed until then by the old families from the upper class of the nobility, such as the Taschereaus. The nouveau riche suddenly accumulate fortunes that quickly exceed those of old families loaded with accumulated titles.
This new power of money is being established in Canada exactly as in Europe and the United States. The exploitation of steel, oil, electricity, railways, mines and factories allows incredible profits everywhere, concentrated in the hands of a few. We now know the power of these new fortunes, their arrogance and omnipotence in politics. In recent days, we learned that politicians and business people, who imagine themselves floating above society, have benefited from generous tax credits on the purchase of shares in mining companies. Nothing changes, or very little, in our societies subservient to the omnipotence of money. Dressed in other outfits, the new barons of techno-feudalism continue to control our lives.
In 1922, Prime Minister Louis-Alexandre Taschereau, visiting Toronto, did not forget that it was the aristocracy that had governed for a long time. He, who is an heir to a family of lords, explains, in English, the power that the order inherited from feudalism maintains over French-Canadian society. “If you doubt the survival of noble families […], I will show you them continually mixed with the significant events of our national life until recent years, and always at the forefront despite the push made by the nouveau riche in our country as in the old countries of Europe . »
However, this ancient aristocracy, because it intends to maintain its rank and its world, finds itself obliged to associate with the “new rich”. The old power that Taschereau still represents will mutate to remain firmly in the saddle, whipping as always its mount, the people, in order to continue to ride as it pleases.
The name Taschereau was not given for nothing to one of the ugliest boulevards in Quebec. It is in places like this that we hear best, in the midst of ugliness, the screaming voice of this money which has made the new aristocracy of power deaf to everything else, from yesterday until today. today.