Journalist Christian Rioux underlines his 15 years of chronicles in the pages of To have to with the publication of a collection which brings together some of his most striking texts, even the most controversial. No, nothing at all, he regrets nothing: the correspondent in Paris assumes all of these rants, however often written in the hubbub of the news, but from which emerges an astonishing consistency.
Because in 15 years, Christian Rioux has not really changed. This is what is most striking when reading the dozens of handpicked texts for Chronicles of the world to come. The new cultural war, which will be released in bookstores on November 23.
Even before the words ” woke ” and ” cancel culture »Are on everyone’s lips, the star columnist of To have to He was already the slayer in a way, he who rose up in the late 2000s against the excesses of the newspeak or the rewriting of history for the benefit of minorities. “I experienced the episodes of Charlie hebdo and Bataclan, and that I can tell you that changes someone. But for the most part, it’s surprisingly true that I haven’t changed much. I even had the impression of rambling while rereading my texts, ”continues with a touch of humor the main interested party, joined since the gray of November in Paris.
Exceeded by the times
The City of Light is terribly depressing at this time of the year, in the opinion of a Christian Rioux animated by the nostalgia of the snowy winters of the country which saw it being born, but which is not one, to his dismay. A nationalist and sovereignist from a distance, the man who describes himself above all as a journalist has remained a keen observer of Quebec over the past 15 years, as many of the chronicles contained in the collection attest.
From his famous controversial chronicle in which he denounces the Frenglish of Quebec rappers to those in which he makes fun of the cancellation of plays Kanata and SLAV by Robert Lepage, we can sense all the pessimism that inhabits it, while Quebec is not moving in the direction it would have liked. No more than Europe or the United States, to which he also devotes several texts.
“Never in my life, I would have thought to encounter cases of censorship. This is true everywhere, from Roman Polanski to Robert Lepage, including Woody Allen and even Claude Meunier. It is a little for that which I made this book, to increase my astonishment, my naivety vis-a-vis this kind of things ”, he draws as a conclusion after having gone through the hundreds of chronicles that he has. published in The duty.
Of this number, he will have kept a little more than 80 for this collection. Some were automatically eliminated because the author no longer liked the style or because he found the subject too light. But none has been rejected because his opinion has since changed or because the facts subsequently proved him wrong, assures Christian Rioux.
On the contrary, certain chronicles present in the work have proved to be almost prophetic. In 2012, for example, he wrote a column entitled “The diverted history” in which he accuses the City of Montreal of lending itself to a well-meaning revisionism by presenting Jeanne Mance as the founder of the metropolis in the same way as Maisonneuve. .
“The interest of history is not to pin the values of today. Tomorrow, will we have to invent new co-founders of Montreal to make room for homosexuals, Aboriginals or even immigrants? I hardly ask the question that I already regret it, for fear that we do not understand the irony ”, he wrote in the edition of To have to of June 8, 2012, well before the controversial expression “unceded territory” became legion.
Good after the expiration date?
Other texts kept in the collection have however aged rather badly, one could blame him. In a text taken from February 19, 2016, he said he regretted everyone’s eagerness to erase director Claude Jutra from collective memory, when the first suspicions of pedophilia began to emerge. The next day, the uncovered testimony of an alleged victim was relayed by all the media.
“It’s true that my column may be dated. But I still think you can’t bring someone to trial in a week, even for a culprit. Today, I would surely write something else in the light of the new testimonies, but I decided to keep the chronicle as a matter of principle, because it still happens to put someone on trial in a few days, ”Christian defends fiercely. Rioux.
He assumes with the same vigor a column on Donald Trump that appeared during the 2016 presidential election in the United States, and some passages of which can be startling today. We can read there that the American billionaire is in no way a threat to democracy and that it is absurd to call him a fascist. It was four years before the events of the Capitol, last January …
“I still think he’s not a fascist. Words no longer have meaning. If he was a fascist, we would have wanted people like that in the 1930s. Trump was elected, and even though he contested, he ended up stepping down. I am delighted with his departure, but he is not a fascist, ”says the one who says he never thought of writing in the opinion pages before being offered it.
More than a decade later, columnists, analysts and other commentators of all stripes have proliferated in the media, here as in France. A trend often criticized by journalism purists, but that Christian Rioux tries to observe with a little height.
“Obviously, it’s tempting for the press to give too much room to opinion,” he admits. But at the same time, I think it’s also important to keep the debate going, because the single thought is still very present. I am happy to read different columnists who do not think like me. “