Autarchy is in the meadow with Antoine Gérin-Lajoie

Once a month, from the pens of writers from Quebec, The duty of literature proposes to revisit in the light of current events works from the ancient and recent past of Quebec literature. Discoveries? Proofreadings? Different look? A choice. An initiative of the Académie des lettres du Québec in collaboration with The duty.

Cultivate your vegetable garden; have a chicken coop; eat fresh vegetables straight from the ground; eggs still warm, collected under the hens’ bottoms; make your own bread; sew and mend his clothes; knit. Who has not dreamed, at least for a moment, of living in self-sufficiency? Who wouldn’t want to turn their back on the consumer society, its polluting cars, its monstrous shopping centers, its hectic lifestyle, the dissatisfaction and the feeling of emptiness that often go hand in hand? All these ideas, today in the spirit of the times, a man of letters was already ruminating on them in the middle of the 19the century: Antoine Gérin-Lajoie.

Most people ignore it by humming the famous lament A wandering Canadian, but it was he who wrote the words. In 1842, an 18-year-old boy, then in a rhetoric class at the Nicolet seminary, sang poignantly of the pain of a patriot deported to Australia after the repression of the Troubles of 1837-1838. However, Antoine Gérin-Lajoie is also the author of Jean Rivard, the land clearer (1862) and Jean Rivard, economist (1864). First published in serials in magazines, these two novels deserve better than to sink into the oblivion of literary history despite their initial success, because they can be read today – and with pleasure – as a manual for learning to live independently, freed from the servitudes and false needs of post-industrial capitalism.

The action of Jean Rivard, the land clearer begins in 1843, at a time when new lands were opening up to colonization. At 19 years old, Jean Rivard was the eldest of a large family living on a farm in Grand-Pré, in the valley of Lake Saint-Pierre, on the north shore of the Saint-Laurent. When his father died, the young man’s future was compromised. His parents had made sacrifices to send him to college, but his mother, now a widow, with twelve mouths to feed, can no longer do so. The father left a small inheritance to his children, but, all things considered, it is very little (“a hundred piastres”), and Jean’s share, once the college has been paid, amounts to 50 louis – in the campaigns, specifies the novelist, we kept the habit of counting in francs and louis.

Jean Rivard decides to stop his law studies. He heard of new land to be cleared, in Bristol County, in the Eastern Townships, then populated by around fifty families, mainly American Loyalists. He was granted a plot of land and set to work.

Antoine Gérin-Lajoie denies having written a novel, a genre deemed frivolous by its detractors. The subtitle, Real life scenes, announces a realistic bias, but it is a novelist’s ruse. It is true that Jean Rivard, the land clearer has a factual, didactic, even practical aspect: how to build a log cabin, clear and uproot stumps, tap maple trees, cook bread in a cauldron due to lack of an oven, and manure the soil. These elements have retained all their interest today, because they refer to traditional know-how, practiced at a time when subsistence farming was the norm, whereas today they are associated with agriculture ecological.

Nevertheless, it is indeed a novel, which aims to please and entertain. The tone is cheerful. There is even something marvelous in the way this young man, full of enthusiasm, overcomes difficulties and carries out difficult work. But there is also gravity: here is an intelligent boy, who has studied and who, faced with existential questions – “How to live?” », “What to do with your life? » —, responds by building a destiny, literally and figuratively, on a new land, where everything has to be done.

Against prejudice

In passing, the novel wants to combat two prejudices, then widespread. The first is that only liberal professions go hand in hand with education, that as soon as a French Canadian studies, it is necessarily to become a lawyer, notary or doctor. However, at the time, these professions were very crowded, and many notaries and lawyers eked out a living in their offices in the city. This is also the fate reserved for Jean Rivard’s best friend, nicely named Gustave Charmenil.

They knew each other at college; they now exchange letters. But what a contrast between the city dweller Gustave, who must face expenses for clothing, housing or gifts for the chosen one of his heart, and Jean the countryman, master of his days on his estate, with carefully kept accounts, the increasing value as the land earns, as the buildings rise, as the animals come to enlarge the farm (first an ox to extract the stumps, then a cow, chickens), all while setting rules , such as leaving a strip of trees near the house or enriching the soil naturally, without external fertilizers.

In his clearing pack, the young man slipped a few companion books: Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoea Popular history of Napoleon and theImitation of Jesus Christ, where to get ideas. Gérin-Lajoie’s novel is also a Robinsonade. Jean Rivard on his piece of land is like Robinson on his island, where everything must be built and civilization established. But not just any kind and not just any way. Moreover, the main thing is philosophical. By opting for this way of life, Jean Rivard wants to be a complete man, both manual and intellectual – a “square man”, he writes, borrowing the expression from Napoleon, who wanted a man “also capable of arms than head” and being able to “do anything”. Physical work thus prepares the work of the mind.

The second prejudice to combat is that a farmer does not need education. Nothing could be further from the truth. For Jean Rivard, education is essential, including for farmers who must acquire scientific knowledge and not just inherit from the elders. “Think,” he said to his friend Gustave, “of the influence that a class of educated farmers would exert on the future of Canada. »

Jean Rivard sets up beehives, an orchard, a henhouse, a vegetable garden, and the whole becomes a farm school for the surrounding farmers. In addition, at the county level, Jean Rivard pleads for teachers to be better paid and more valued for their role in society. Readers of this article will remember that one of Antoine Gérin-Lajoie’s descendants, Paul Gérin-Lajoie, Minister of Education in Quebec from 1964 to 1966, also believed in the benefits of education.

The novels of the ancestor Gérin-Lajoie have a political dimension. In Jean Rivard, economist, other settlers joined Jean Rivard and little by little, in addition to the parish, a type of republic was established where direct democracy was practiced, which encouraged the population to participate in decisions concerning them. Rivardville is the name that the inhabitants gave to this model of ideal society. It goes without saying that, since its creation, Rivardville has had a municipal library…

Of chimeras and letters

Didn’t Antoine Gérin-Lajoie put a lot of himself into the character of Jean Rivard? One may ask. Born in 1824 in Yamachiche, the eldest of 16 children, he was also the son of a farmer. At college, at the time when he mourned the wanderer “banished from his homes”, he was a fanciful boy, who dreamed of studying journalism and literature in Paris. In 1844, he left with a friend for the United States, where he intended to make his fortune. The adventure ends after seventeen days.

He gets hired at The Minerva, a liberal newspaper, where he is a proofreader, translator and sometimes editor. He founded the Canadian Institute of Montreal, a literary society with progressive ideas. In 1847, he gave up journalism, studied law, became interested in politics (he was a supporter of Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine), and became a lawyer in 1848. But, by his own admission, he “hated chicanery” and trials bore him. He will therefore be a civil servant, copyist at the Public Works Office. He wants to become an “educated farmer”. He dreams of Paris (bis). He returns to the United States. He comes back after six months.

He was hired as a translator for the government, which was then headquartered in Toronto. There he met the journalist Étienne Parent, whose eldest daughter he married. And when the seat of government returned to Quebec, it played an important role in the literary life of the city, whose home was then the bookstore of the poet Octave Crémazie, rue de la Fabrique, frequented by various men of letters, notably by the historian François-Xavier Garneau. The group founded the journals Canadian Evenings And The Canadian Homewhere the two novels that we know appeared before being reproduced in volume in 1877. He died in 1882, at the age of 58.

THE Jean Rivard are they thesis novels? Yes and no. Many novels published in the 19th centurye century fall into the category known as local novels, where the destiny of French Canadians is to cultivate the land while remaining faithful to the French language and the Catholic religion — the three aspects being linked. Most of these novels have aged poorly. It is different from Jean Rivard, the land clearer and of Jean Rivard, economist.

Of course, the demonstration on the comparative merits of rural and urban lifestyles is supported, and the ideology of the time is felt. But through a detour whose reality has the secret, these two novels also have several aspects that bring them closer to our time. I mentioned several of them. Here are two more. A Jean Rivard elected one day to the Legislative Assembly was unhappy among the “talkers,” as he called them. And the description he gives of the fire of the Parliament Building in Montreal in 1849, by Orange rioters, is reminiscent of the assault on January 6 on the Capitol in Washington. The story, yes, stutters.

Jean Rivard, the land clearer (1862), followed by Jean Rivard, economist (1864)

Antoine Gérin-Lajoie, republished in paperback in a single volume, in Bibliothèque québécoise (1993; preface by Jean-Pierre Issenhuth) and in Boréal compact (2008; expanded edition, presentation by Yannick Roy).

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