I recently attended the premiere of the film Eleven days in Februaryin which Jean-Claude Coulbois returns to the Jutra affair which broke out in 2016 and to these few days during which we witnessed the damnatio memoriae by the famous Quebec director.
In just 11 days, after his biographer Yves Lever revealed that he had committed pedophile crimes and the publication of the testimony of an anonymous victim in The Press, we renamed the prizes that bore his name, a screening room at the Cinémathèque and the few streets and squares that honored his memory throughout Quebec. The statue of Charles Daudelin Tribute to Claude Jutra was vandalized then covered with a tarpaulin, before being dismantled by the City of Montreal a few months later.
Let us make it clear from the outset (because when it comes to sexual crimes, conflations are too often the norm), the aim of this documentary film is not to rehabilitate Jutra. Coulbois only wonders – hence the title of his film – about the speed with which all this was done and the way in which it was done.
In the eyes of historians of the future, it is likely that this Jutra affair will appear as a textbook case of the strange excesses that liberal democracy will have experienced in the first decades of the 21st century.e century.
Indeed, as Professor Eve Seguin and Me Julius Gray in a text published in The dutythen in an essay published last January in the journal Argumentall the principles which are the foundation of liberalism have been blithely flouted, from the presumption of innocence to the separation of powers – since it is the executive, in the person of the Minister of Culture, who made the charge against Jutra, thus usurping a judicial power which did not belong to it and seizing in the process prerogatives which were those of Québec Cinéma.
Such a conviction handed down without any other evidence than anonymous testimonies is reminiscent of those which repeatedly strike public figures accused of having committed sexual assault and who are held guilty and socially sanctioned before a court has even ruled on their case.
We are thus witnessing the return of popular justice, which judges under the influence of emotion and condemns without hearing the accused, and often even without knowing the facts. Believing that this justice which is intended to be immanent, which does not bother with proof and which is exercised without delay represents progress constitutes one of those illusions in which our good, restless conscience bathes us. It is rather revealing of the old demons which haunt our time and which work on it secretly, and which we sometimes see resurface in broad daylight through these lynch panics which we believed to be confined to a distant past.
This punitive moralism, which manifests itself mainly on social networks, seems above all motivated by a religious feeling of exorcism, of expulsion of the black sheep, the one which risks contaminating the flock. It is more an act of self-satisfaction, by which we believe we are doing an act of kindness when we are doing little more than flattering our ego; it is obviously easier to publicly condemn Evil than to refrain from committing it yourself. The first option only asks us to play Panurge’s sheep; the second would require a minimum of introspection (this is the difference between “good” conscience, the result of bad faith, and conscience tout court, without which there is no true morality).
The most worrying thing in all this is not that these evil passions persist today, but that our political leaders are joining in with them and no longer hesitate to place themselves in the wake of these popular emotions instead of trying to calm them down. Why do they act like this, trampling on the principles of liberal democracy that they usually praise? The first plausible explanation is that they are afraid of being associated with Evil and of being in turn swept away by the turmoil. But we can also detect the manifestation of a dangerous political ulterior motive: the nostalgia for the unanimity of the People, who speak with one voice, vox populi mythical that these leaders shamelessly appropriate, finding it a pretext to increase their power.
Beyond the Jutra affair, Jean-Claude Coulbois’ film, which it must be emphasized is very beautiful, sometimes very poetic, invites us to question what we are as network users. social groups that the smell of blood imprudently invites to the cure, as citizens faced with these excesses of democracy, as belonging to a people so quick to get rid of their past artistic glories, and even of art , in the name of his own supposed moral purity.
In this regard, we must hear Denis Coderre again, when questioned about the Charles Daudelin monument that the City is preparing to demolish, affirm without the slightest doubt: “The statue represents Jutra, right? » Thus ignoring the creative work of the sculptor, the non-figurative character of the monument, and above all its nature as a work of art, which has the consequence that it is not just a representation of…
The lesson that emerges from this documentary is that we could certainly have acted differently, respecting the principles that are ours and without giving in to this feeling of panicked urgency which leads straight to unreason.