In France, I would perhaps wonder, as the writer Pierre Bayard did in a magnificent essay published in 2013, whether I would have been a resistance fighter or an executioner during the Second World War.
In Quebec, the question that arises, if we agree to engage in such a moral exercise, would rather be the following: would I have been a volunteer or a deserter? My answer is simple: neither, probably.
I don’t have the profile of a soldier. I have a protest streak, I’m not attracted to adventure when it flirts with danger and I don’t have the physique of an extreme fighter. So, volunteer soldier, no.
Deserter? No more. A Quebec nationalist, I would certainly have been anti-conscriptionist, but I would not have thought, I think, of hiding out for months to avoid enlistment. I could not live with the feeling of being constantly hunted in my own country. If I had been 20 during World War II, I would probably have been conscripted, sharing the fate, neither heroic nor shameful, of the majority of my peers.
Émilien Dufresne did not wait for the obligatory call to enlist in the Canadian army. In July 1941, when he was only 18 years old, the young Gaspé lumberjack, against the advice of his parents, decided to go and fight in Europe.
He recounts his experience in Notebook of hope (Septentrion, 2024, 132 pages), a testimony first published in 2003 and which is the subject of a new edition, commented by his daughter Danielle, on the occasion of the 80e anniversary of the Normandy landings, which occurred on June 6, 1944.
I admit that I have difficulty understanding the motivations for such a commitment. I know well today that it was necessary to fight Hitler to defend freedom, but I doubt that these great principles played a determining role in the decision of the young volunteer Quebecers. Now, I admire them and I want to understand them, so I look for what animated them.
Our literature says little about it. Azarius Lacasse, in Second-hand happiness, enlisted to allow his family to escape poverty. I can’t wait to read Wandering Canadians, en reissued at Boréal in May, a novel in which Jean Vaillancourt, himself a volunteer, recounted, in 1954, the Quebec experience of this war.
History books address the socio-economic dimension of the conflict in Quebec, but neglect its human dimension. I nevertheless find some elements of answer in volume II ofHistory of contemporary Quebec (Boréal, 1993), by Linteau, Durocher, Robert and Ricard. Quebecers, they write, “are little aware and poorly informed about the reasons for the conflict and the situation in Europe. »
Despite everything, and even if “the armed forces nevertheless remain unwelcoming for French-speakers”, many of them will enlist, “forming 19% of the workforce”. Their motivations? “The desire to escape unemployment and the taste for adventure”, as well as, historians add, the effect of official propaganda and, most savorily, “the songs of soldier Lebrun”.
In his excellent essay Left in the shadows. Quebecers committed volunteers from 39-45 (VLB, 2004), the historian Sébastien Vincent gave the floor to fourteen of the latter, who evoked, to explain their commitment, the same reasons.
Émilien Dufresne confirms these reasons by writing that his decision was motivated “by the ardor of [sa] youth and by [son] desire to work. His daughter summarizes her father’s story by speaking of a “war seen from the inside by a young man without visceral hatred which has accompanied him since the cradle, without ideology which replaces the bottle with a flag, without resentment or revenge for free the heart. It is, in other words, the story of a simple soldier, sincere and without pretense.
After almost three years of training in Quebec and Great Britain, Dufresne, with more than 150,000 allied soldiers, landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944. There he encountered true death for the first time in his life, in chaos. infernal. With around forty of his comrades, he succeeded in his mission of intercepting German guns, but he was finally taken prisoner the same evening.
During the following ten months, supported by a friend in misfortune from Gaspé and by “the good Saint Anne”, Dufresne crossed Germany on foot, hungry, condemned to forced labor – mainly the repair of railway tracks – by his jailers, increasingly in dire straits.
The Americans liberated him in Hanover on April 9, 1945. Demobilized upon his return to Quebec, Dufresne married, had six children, worked as a longshoreman and carpenter before dying in 2015 at the age of 92. Thank you sir.
Columnist (Presence Info, Game), essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature at college.