Every Tuesday, Duty offers a space to the creators of a periodical. This week, we offer you a text published in the Review of the history of French Americaflight. 77, No. 3 (Winter 2024).
On November 24, 1916, Thomas Chapais inaugurated a series of public courses given at Laval University on the history of Canada in front of a packed room, including important people. Chapais begins his course with the outcome of the War of the Conquest, from what he calls “the last hour of New France”, and he concludes it with the advent of confederation in 1867. This last date represents, according to him, the apogee of political autonomy and good understanding between the two founding peoples.
By publishing his Canadian history lessons in book form, Chapais turns resolutely towards what he calls great history. Well aware of the formal questions linked to the writing of history in a synthesis, he specifies that the course, unlike a work produced exclusively for reading, “must aim more at the overall picture and at a more vivid accent facts, characteristic moments.”
Analogously, the notion of “overall view” returns in the four forewords which punctuate the Canadian history lessons, just like that of “main lines” which we find in several places in the work. These “main lines” mark a change in the historian’s focus.
It is by means of these notions that Chapais analyzes the work of Bossuet and his famous Discourse on universal history which he ranks among the syntheses: “Bossuet has reached the end of the course he set for himself through the centuries and the evolution of humanity. And meditate for a moment, [il jette] his eagle’s gaze on this vast field of fluctuations and transformations of States and peoples…”
Narration
Thomas Chapais associates “the narrative voice with an eye, with a physical position”, here with the gaze of an eagle, an analogy which is reminiscent of Bossuet’s nickname “Eagle of Meaux”. This elevated position relates to Chapais’s conception of the great story and its synthetic framework.
The notion of “broad lines” and the idea of a common thread to be remade require a necessarily more distant perspective and a less narrow focus. This is even more true when it comes to a work of eight volumes covering more than two centuries of history.
It is the imagination which implements, which brings together and arranges, which colors and animates, which breathes new life into the characters lying in the tomb
This synthetic point of view differs from that adopted for the monograph, which generally addresses a specific element or, at least, a more restricted temporal or geographical space. To deal with the political evolution of French Canadians since the Conquest through a long series of lessons, Chapais specifies that, “in order not to overly tire the attention of a benevolent audience, it was appropriate to proceed above all from views of ‘together at the same time in clearly indicated stages’.
The division of the different parts of the synthesis therefore comes to acquire a didactic importance which makes it possible in particular to retain the attention of the audience and the reader. The approach which focuses on these paintings can be described as “poetic”, especially when we focus on the adjectives which accompany them: “sad painting”, “painting of a dark color”, “painting of a moving and terrifying beauty”, “dark picture”.
Emotion
The words used refer to a desire to create an emotion through an impression made possible by the double vocation that Chapais attributes to history, both science and art. He even goes so far as to affirm that imagination is a necessary quality of the “true historian”, because science and erudition only allow the work of reviewing facts and dates.
“It is the imagination,” writes Chapais, “which implements, which brings together and arranges, which colors and animates, which breathes new life into the characters lying in the tomb, and which gives back to the past the figure and the accent that he had a day before being obscured by the shadows of time. »
Despite everything, through this determination to create something beautiful without descending into the fabulous, a tension is perceptible between the desire to accentuate the facts and that of giving things their proper proportion. Can accentuation remain methodologically controlled thanks to sound historical criticism? At least this is the claim of Chapais, who takes “the merit of a constant and energetic effort to achieve accuracy and respect justice” with the aim of avoiding both exaggeration and attenuation.
By making the finality of the emphasis tend towards respect for a certain idea of justice, Chapais extends this proximity previously mentioned between the posture of the judge and that of the historian. This impartial, but not impassive, posture therefore gives, as we said, a certain latitude to the historian, master of his pen.
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