It had been ages since Quebec and France had found themselves on the same ground. For a decade, continental drift has accelerated. Never after the great reunion of the 1960s, relations between Quebec and Paris had gone through such an arid period. This is due to the time, but also to men. A fervent globalist first turned towards Europe, Emmanuel Macron has never had any hooks with Quebec. As for his opposite, François Legault, he finds it difficult to see anything abroad other than a market to be conquered.
We can therefore only be delighted to see the French and Quebec ministers of education reconnect, for the time of a declaration, with the warmth of the relations of the past. In a column published on both sides of the ocean, Jean-Michel Blanquer and Jean-François Roberge pledged to fight this ” cancel culture »Coming from American campuses which seeks to liquidate the humanist heritage of the West. For her, our history would indeed be an accumulation of villainy, from racism to sexism through homophobia and colonialism.
Basically, this joint declaration is part of the fight that Quebec and France have been waging for several decades in defense of cultural exception and their respective cultures. Because what is attacking this new culture of the gag if not the cultural heritage which makes the specificity of our respective peoples?
As Jean-Michel Blanquer aptly named, this “new obscurantism” is not an illusion. It is not a question either of simple “slippages” as believed by those who, turning a blind eye to the XXe century, imagine that totalitarian thought can never come from the left.
Nothing better to fight an idea with which one does not agree than to declare that the reality which it describes does not exist. From books being burned in Ontario to canceled lectures at universities, from repeated victimization delusions to racialist discourse, a new avatar of contemporary racism, from canceled plays to “white” musicians fired in a London orchestra, all of this. would only be pure fantasy. Worse, a right-wing fantasy. Move along, there’s nothing to see !
This surge is however only the most extreme manifestation of this globalist ideology intended to crush national cultures. What can we find there if not this dream of a new man adapted to the great machine for crushing and manufacturing the identical that globalization has become? A man finally naked and “free”, in the sense in which Marx understood him, freed from the bulky baggage of his culture, his identity, his family, his roots and henceforth even his sex.
It is no coincidence that, after having conquered the United States and the Anglo-Saxon world, this globalist ideology arouses more resistance in France and Quebec. In these two old Catholic societies, resistant to the “communities” so cherished by Protestants, this identity fragmentation collides head-on with the conviviality of mores. This puritanism of ideas mixed with self-censorship also offends the freedom of speech dearly won during the Revolution in France and during the Quiet Revolution in Quebec. Neither Quebec nor France got rid of the Church to impose the morals and the index of a new globalized elite.
If the French and Quebecers each represent islands of resistance in their own way, it is also because they come together around secularism. Admittedly, the history and the methods are different, but they both chose to protect their public space by a common rule applying to all, rather than to deliver it as food for the accommodations, that is to say the “Communities” so that they can share it.
Despite the distance, Quebec and France remain united by the same idea of the nation perceived not only as a precious heritage, but also as a space of freedom. The only one which allows the citizen to free himself from the tribes which are now in full resurgence, and to defend themselves against the empires which are back on the geopolitical scene.
However, it is this new ideology that the Ethics and Religious Culture course introduced in 2008 was the forerunner. Its designers had taken the abysmal religious lack of culture of the new generations as a pretext to impose not history lessons that could have filled this void, but the learning of a new diverse morality. A morality in which the “Other” had become the new god and “respect” for all beliefs the new liturgy. Unlike the “community” which cultivates consensus, a democratic society owes respect only to citizens. As for God, “he will defend himself well,” said Clémenceau. Living in a democracy means accepting that all ideas without exception, from philosophical doctrines to religions – even that of “diversity” – can be criticized, denounced, caricatured, even blasphemed.
It is this simple idea that the new censors imbued with their moral superiority over a people who have remained faithful, in Quebec as in France, to the idea of nation, no longer support.