Every morning at 5:45 a.m., Gérard Bouchard begins his training routine. Strength training, cycling, stretching. Then the researcher, who co-chaired the famous Bouchard-Taylor commission, walks to his office in Chicoutimi and gets to work.
For a long time, he left, stopwatch in hand, to run at dawn up the mountains of Charlevoix – in particular the Acropole des Draveurs. At almost 80 years old, the doctor suggested that he moderate. He calculates that what he loses now in hours of fitness, he will recover in years of work.
There is so much to explore, so much to write…
“I can’t wait to get to the office and I’m quite angry when I see that it’s already 6 am! Lise shouldn’t [sa femme] know it, but I also work on the sly on weekends… I think she realized that,” says Quebec’s most prolific sociologist.
He has just published a 396-page work on the teaching of national history, for which he has read 103 Quebec textbooks from the last two centuries, in addition to consulting scholarly literature on the subject, of course.
How many books has he published? He stopped counting a long time ago. He thinks rather of the three other books in preparation. One on the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, a subject on which “a lot of nonsense has been written”. The other on the “Great Darkness” which supposedly preceded it.
But above all, for next fall, this book which promises to be his life’s work, on which he has been working for 50 years, which will bear a title of which he is proud: land of the humble.
Based on hundreds of interviews conducted since the 1960s with the last witnesses to the “colonization” of Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean, but also on the unpublished writings of the clergy, he draws up a social history of the region – which is also that of Quebec in many respects.
“Lucien told me that I work too hard,” he says with a burst of laughter. His famous brother, to whom he is very close, nevertheless still works 50 if not 60 hours a week in his law office at the age of 84, and is not himself known for his laziness.
The most beautiful moment is writing. In the first stage, you read a lot of things that don’t interest you all the time. Then you look for a formula. People talk about talent, but that’s not how it works. It’s work.
Gerard Bouchard
The major theme running through Gérard Bouchard’s work remains that of “national myths”. What he also calls values.
“It’s a personal concern. I wonder how myths are born in a nation. How they crumble. How does a democracy break down? It’s very sneaky. »
He gives the American example. “The central myth of the American imagination is the American Dream, which had a spectacular success until the early 1980s. It said: if you come to us and work hard enough, you will be reward. When things were going badly, no one said: it’s society’s fault; people said: it’s because you haven’t worked hard enough. »
Little by little, the myth was undermined. Wages have plateaued, jobs have moved offshore, communities have suffered, inequality has increased. “People started saying that the country was no longer fulfilling its part of the contract: even if you work hard, you can’t buy a house, send your children to university, etc. Polls show that we have gone from 80% of the population who adhered to the American Dream 60 years ago to 20-25% of people who believe in it now. »
land of the humble
More deeply, what makes Gérard Bouchard’s sociological fiber vibrate?
“It always comes from family experience. The word trauma is perhaps too strong, but I felt social inequalities very, very early on. My father, who had two jobs, had enough money to buy a car and one day he took us to visit the foremen’s district of La Price, the English district of Jonquière, Kénogami. I saw young people who weren’t dressed like the rest of us, who didn’t go to the same schools, who had new balls, playgrounds, and who lived in what looked like castles to us.
“I came home troubled and I can say that my whole itinerary has been marked by that. I have always worked for the weakest, the poorest. Lucien, he reacted by telling himself that he was going to get out of there, that he was going to succeed. I did not translate it into personal ambition, but into a research career. How come people get sick and die too young in working-class neighborhoods? Why are our parents worried all their lives? I felt sorry for my parents. That’s not a normal feeling.
One day, while he was studying law at Laval University, Lucien took me to meet the students he frequented. When I came back, I understood what I didn’t want to do! In sociology, we wonder why societies are badly screwed up. Why there are power relations.
Gerard Bouchard
He returns to this work to be published, which is the reverse side of the official and edifying history of the colonization of his native region.
” land of the humble : the title says it all! It’s not about the wealthy of Chicoutimi or the big names. But on those who crossed on foot the mountains of Charlevoix to come and clear land. They arrived with frozen feet, sometimes they had to be amputated. They ate potatoes, and when there were none left, they ate the peels, and afterwards, there was nothing left and they ate their dog. I can’t free myself from this…
“They arrived on wild lands not even surveyed. We had to protect the food from the bears. They would go to sleep with their animals to keep warm. The children died in large numbers, they had to be buried in the winter behind their camp. And when it came time to bury them, often they couldn’t even find them.
“I want to show that.
“The 14-year-old girls who no one had told about menstruation, who thought they were sick and went to wash their clothes on the sly. They arrived at the wedding without knowing anything, scared. Some have been told that the embryo feeds on ejaculations, and that it is absolutely necessary to continue having sexual relations throughout the pregnancy. It was 80-year-old women who told me that while crying 60 years ago.
“How do you want to love the clergy? Except the lower clergy; I make a difference. The sisters and brothers were also despised by the hierarchy. »
I anticipate his publications. For the time being, his new work is a plea for the teaching of a history of Quebec which would develop “an emotional bond with the nation”. He rejects an “assimilationist” history, which would only be the narrative of the majority. He is also against a relativist history “which excludes the construction of a common culture and a formula for integration on the pretext that all cultures are equal”.
He advocates a national history that integrates minorities into the majority narrative. How ? By emphasizing a common denominator: the values recognized in the Quebec Charter of Human Rights.
“In any functioning social relationship, there are values to support them,” he says between two sips of black tea. Whether it is friendship, family, ethnic groups, the workforce of a large company.
“Before the Quiet Revolution, the sources of values were the family, religion, the media, political discourse, literature, song… But all these vectors have weakened or completely disappeared. School remains. »
Before the 1960s, or let’s say before the Parent report, which laid the foundations of secular public schools in Quebec, the clergy had assigned a very specific function to national history. Young French Canadians were taught that they came from a pure race, from a chosen people with a mission in the world.
“The locals were also told that they should get as close to sainthood as possible, and all kinds of crazy stuff like that. For sixty years, the programs have insisted rather on universal values, but by sinking into chronological platitude, to the point generally of carefully evacuating the word “nation”, which seems almost toxic. »
However, national history can open up to globalization without denying itself, says the sociologist.
History is meant to shed light on events of the present. This is inappropriate. For example, we could approach tolerance by talking about the prohibition of Protestants in New France. The relationship with the native to talk about racism. The deportation of Acadians to talk about colonialism.
Gerard Bouchard
A little as if the history taught were afraid to evoke a shameful or glorious past, to settle into a cold description of successive events.
“When I talk about common values, some people tell me: these are the values of the UN, they don’t speak to our history, they are only universal platitudes. However, they are there everywhere in our past, it is enough to excavate them. The women’s movement, the fight against the clergy, trade unionism, the Rebellion… We have always wanted to see our history as very special, belonging only to us, to think that we are very different from others. We are not, however, alone in having fought against colonialism. As if it took something away from us, as if it trivialized our history by trying to compare it with others. On the contrary, they must be compared. Wondering why the rebellions failed here and succeeded elsewhere. The comparative which is a vein of infinite richness.
“In textbooks, they introduced comparisons, but ridiculous. You have 25 pages on the history of Quebec, then half a page on Ethiopia, or a page on Hungary, which summarizes the a b c of these countries. They could have taken examples from the countries where most minorities come from and explained them. There is nothing ! It sucks to death! »
Because Gérard Bouchard’s plea is also for a story that vibrates in schools as it vibrates in him.
For national history
Gerard Bouchard
boreal
396 pages
Questionnaire without filter
- coffee and me : No coffee in my cup. What black tea!
- My ideal Sunday: Work more quietly – without fear of a visit.
- People, living or dead, that I would like to gather to discuss: Gaston Miron, Blaise Cendrars, Guy Rocher, Jean Moulin. And my brother Lucien, a man of that caliber… No, in fact it’s because I know he would be interested and I wouldn’t need to tell him everything afterwards.
- On his bedside table: After 11 p.m., the biography of Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, a politician who led Austria in a difficult context. But an old biography, full of anecdotes (written by Constantin de Grundwald in the middle of the XXe century), because it’s for fun. I finished that of Talleyrand (French diplomat, 1754-1838), as corrupt as he was, and just before, that of Adolphe Thiers (French president, 1871-1873).
Who is Gerard Bouchard?
- Born in Jonquière in 1943. Trained in sociology at Laval University, then in Paris for his doctorate. Professor at the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi, he has also taught in Paris and Harvard.
- Gérard Bouchard first became known through the BALSAC project, a computerized genealogical database of the population of Quebec, which is used in population genetics studies all over the world. This project resulted in a vast research project on genetic diseases and their prevention.
- His work has focused in particular on social history and the construction of “national myths”. His main work is Genesis of the Nations and Cultures of the New World.
- In 2007, he co-signed with the philosopher Charles Taylor the famous report that bears their name on “accommodation practices related to cultural differences”.