On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of French-language radio in North America, The duty explores this medium in transformation.
Even once gone, the subversive André Arthur continues to divide. Described as an odious being by some and as a Robin Hood by others, the former king of Quebec radio, who prided himself on speaking on behalf of ordinary people, was unquestionably one of the best communicators of his generation. . A talent that will even lead him to be elected to the House of Commons after having spent most of his media career calling politicians names. Portrait of a man with paradoxical positions who, long before Trump, understood that the populism card could pay off.
In the economic gloom that spanned the 1970s to the early 1990s, the Quebec City region was fertile ground for André Arthur, who took malicious pleasure in pitting the interests of honest consumers against those of corrupt elites. At his microphone, politicians took it for their cold, but also intellectuals, senior civil servants, police officers, certain businessmen… At the time, the national capital had the feeling of being downgraded to the benefit of Montreal and found in André Arthur the voice she needed to do herself justice.
“He was not the catalyst of this anger, he was the mirror. There were many humiliations in Quebec in its radio years, such as the failure of Quebec 84 or the Olympic Games. There has since been a very strong skepticism towards the elites, towards people who claim to want our good. Arthur, he hated all establishments, while he trusted the intelligence of the listeners, ”says Myriam Ségal, who was the researcher for the polemicist who died on Sunday at 78 years old.
“King Arthur”, as he was nicknamed, took her under his wing. Subsequently becoming a radio star in Saguenay, Myriam Ségal had fallen out in recent years with her mentor with an untimely character.
But otherwise, Myriam Ségal still dedicates her undeniable professional qualities. “It was the formula 1 for communicators. The people of Montreal wanted to limit him to his controversial remarks, but he was much more than that. Besides, he was never fired by the auditors. It was the bosses who fired him, ”notes the now retired radio host, also known for her strong right-wing opinions.
The best and the worst
The radio man Claude Thibodeau, who rubbed shoulders with André Arthur during his career, paints a completely different picture. For him, the polemicist embodied “intellectual dishonesty” better than anyone else, even if it meant taking certain liberties with the truth on the air in the name of the sacrosanct ratings.
“He was far from a fool. He was very cultured, he had a phenomenal memory. You don’t go where he went without being extremely smart. That’s why I don’t forgive him for his excesses, ”says Claude Thibodeau, who has always detected a certain hypocrisy in André Arthur, this son of a bourgeois who became a destroyer of the elites of the upper town.
The mathematician Jean-Marie De Koninck, who knew the legendary host well when Operation Red Nose was launched, also underlines several contradictions between the radio character and the private man. “At the time, he took a dislike to Mayor Jean-Paul L’Allier. It was not pretty! But one day, in private, I spoke to him about Jean-Paul L’Allier, and he told me that he was a smart guy. I could tell many like that! It was full of contradictions, ”says the founding president of Opération Nez rouge.
The fact remains that without André Arthur’s flair, the popular ride-hailing service would never have seen the light of day in 1984. At the height of his glory, the charismatic host had such influence over his audience that he was able to mobilize crowds for a good cause. Thirty years before the #MeToo movement, he will have been one of the first to publicly denounce sexual assaults committed under the aegis of the Catholic Church, another of his Turkish heads.
However, André Arthur was also capable of the worst. With his flowery, often filthy language, he could go after public figures until they were plague victims. MNA Catherine Dorion did not fail to recall Monday on social networks that her father, lawyer Louis Dorion, had to go into exile from Quebec after suffering the wrath of the host. While he was Prime Minister, René Lévesque even went so far as to qualify André Arthur as a “social termite”.
Caught up by the times
King Arthur will finally strike his Waterloo in the mid-1990s, when the courts began to privilege the right to dignity at the expense of the most absolute freedom of expression. A long decline followed, until his election as independent MP for Portneuf–Jacques-Cartier in 2006. After politics, he tried to return to the airwaves, but he ended up losing his last microphone in 2018 when he used the expression “boulevard sida” to refer to an area where the few gay bars in Quebec City are concentrated.
“He never evolved. It was very Hello Police, and that’s why, I think, he never managed to break through in Montreal. Even if he was very cultured, he persisted in speaking only to the lumpenproletariat. He never managed to expand his audience. That’s probably why he no longer had a microphone at the end and that I still have one, ”says Gilles Proulx, who is not however controversial.
A passionate independentist, Gilles Proulx has long been at open war with his great rival in Quebec, a fierce opponent of the sovereignist project. He even goes so far as to attribute part of the defeat in the 1995 referendum to André Arthur, given the weaker support for the “yes” in the outskirts of Quebec than in the other French-speaking regions.
This shows the influence attributed to André Arthur. “He had great qualities and great flaws,” concluded host Marie-Claude Savard, to whom he also gave his first chance.