We often take it for granted that our politicians navigate by sight. However, everything is written. We could have predicted the identity shift of the Parti Québécois, around 2007, by reading Mathieu Bock-Côté, Jacques Beauchemin and Jean-François Lisée in advance. The charter of Quebec values was not a surprise in 2013. And if we go back several decades earlier, even Duplessis was not doing anything: his autonomy in the face of the federal regime was largely borrowed from the historian and senator Thomas Chapais . And he could count on the historian Robert Rumilly to come and justify his enterprise.
In short, to predict where our government is likely to take us in the coming years, we will need to find the party’s intellectual. And François Legault holds him, his great writer. My God, thank you.
A whole detachment from the Legault government met on February 13 in a bistro on Grande Allée, in Quebec. It is rare to see so many ministers (Drainville, Jolin-Barrette, Lamontagne and Roberge) and a prime minister participating in the launch of a book, in this case The return of the Blues. The intellectual roots of nationalism Quebecois (Free). The author is the essayist Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard, who often participates in the barbecues of David Santarossa, Philippe Lorange and Mathieu Bock-Côté. He is also a speechwriter in the Prime Minister’s Office, which means he writes, literally, what François Legault says. His words and ideas therefore have a certain importance.
Beauregard does not multiply the distinctions in his work: since 1839, the Reds have been opposed to the Blues. The first, progressive, rationalist, individualist, proponents of multiculturalism while lecturing the people, confront the latter, conservative, empiricist, proud of their community, proponents of cultural convergence in order to better respect the aspirations of the people. The Blues assume “the history of Quebec, from New France to the present day, without looking down,” while the Reds want to make it disappear.
Among the Blues, there was Mercier (“from the Red Party”, but “philosophically blue”, we learn), Duplessis, Lévesque and now Legault. Among the Reds, there was Durham, Godbout (“a left-wing Red,” we also learn), Trudeau, Charest, Pratte, all of Quebec in solidarity and probably Satan. This opposition between the Blues and the Reds sometimes works well: it is true, for example, that there is a blue background in Lévesque.
In my research on Gérald Godin, I also proposed the idea that the deputy-poet, through his vision of politics that was less ideological than pragmatic, was a kind of Blue. But from there to see the Reds, who only seem to exist to be a foil, as those responsible for all the supposedly sins woke, there are a few steps that I cannot take. These Reds would even be guilty of “imposing a whole politically charged newspeak, from “racialized people” to “people with a uterus” to “non-natives””!
Beauregard says it well: the strength of the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) lies (or resided?) in its “post-sovereignist nationalism”. To resume its journey, the party must reaffirm its desire “to protect French by enshrining secularism in the law and by adapting immigration to Quebec’s capacity for integration.” Here is what can help explain the last few weeks in the National Assembly.
Should we be surprised that Minister Jean-François Roberge offered a little bit of identity anxiety about immigration during a press conference where we felt panic: “Yes, there are things that are threatened, there are services that are threatened, there is a way of living that is threatened when the numbers [de demandes d’asile] are too big. » We worry or pretend to worry about the deleterious influence of foreigners, just as we talked about communists at a certain time. They risk scrapper our beautiful identity story. In all likelihood, the CAQ wants to return to its old rock.
Weaknesses
The weaknesses of Beauregard’s essay will also be those of the CAQ, because they share the same historical narrative which is flawed. The transhistorical opposition between Reds and Blues, which Beauregard does not want to assimilate to that which exists between the Blue and Red parties in French-Canadian politics, is nevertheless constantly reduced to this second. Durham’s intentions, quickly dispatched (and poorly understood regarding ministerial responsibility), did not found the red tradition, to be found in particular on the side of Papineau, rather absent from the whole.
The association between republicanism and the Blues is not self-evident either. But these are just details since, you see, conservatives seem to have a monopoly on history. This is infuriating. It must be a hundred times that I quote the words of Fernand Dumont, written in 1958: “We must be given another history which does not only teach us that our fathers were defeated in 1760 and no longer made then that to defend their language; a history which shows us demanding political freedoms in 1775 and 1837; a history which no longer hides the birth of the proletariat at the end of the 19th centurye century with a chapter on separate schools. »
This is hardly new: cultural nationalism (our laws, our traditions, our conservatism), when it ends up taking over all the space, hides political nationalism and social issues. By reading Beauregard’s book and seeing the actions of his employer, summoning a grand conservative and one-dimensional Quebec narrative that obliterates social issues in particular (a housing crisis, for example), the task of this other narrative, as the sub- hears Fernand Dumont, is more compelling than ever. That said, establishing the Red history of Quebec must indeed be a Red task.