In the introduction to his Memories of war, Charles de Gaulle said in a phrase that has become famous that he had always had “a certain idea of France”. This idea, he wrote, “feeling inspires me as well as reason.” In these few words, he summed up the passion aroused in him as much by the carnal character of his landscapes, his steeples and his villages as by the grandeur of his history and of what he called his destiny. The one he called “the France person” was for him a being of flesh and emotions as much as of intelligence.
All those who have tried to understand the liberator of France have been struck by this fusional love of his country which allowed him to embody it at the most difficult times in its history as only a few rare historical figures had done before him. In “carnal”, as in “incarnate”, there is the word “flesh”. Because to embody is to represent something abstract in a material form. Politics being an art and not a science – and even less a technique as the technocrats would like us to believe -, it needs to be embodied in beings of flesh and blood.
As we celebrate René Lévesque’s 100th birthday this year, it’s no exaggeration to say that he embodied Quebec like few men before him. Because he embodied this Quebec not only in his ideas, but also and perhaps above all in his flesh.
Faced with the arrogant and casual aristocrat that Trudeau always was, this small, bald and almost puny man personified the reserve and the humility of the low-income earner even in the way he moved and spoke. Even in his gestures, he was this humiliated Quebec which suddenly awakened and which, before our eyes, gained self-confidence. Twisting his tongue, multiplying convolutions and incises, he was not able to express an idea without injecting into it a small part of doubt in which each of us recognized himself. Where de Gaulle would have said that France was great from all eternity, he will say that “we are something like a great people”. To utter these words that would leave most of the great nations of this world indifferent, you had to feel Quebec right down to your guts.
This closeness to the people is also what is called political instinct. It is in this light that we must examine the controversy which continues to surround, 40 years later, this period when, after the lost referendum of 1980, Lévesque proposed the “beautiful risk”, immediately provoking a series of resignations at his ministers.
Just as absolute respect for the sovereignty of the people led de Gaulle to resign on the very evening of April 27, 1969 after the loss of a referendum, the same respect led Lévesque to accept without batting an eyelid the verdict of the 1980 referendum. that followed that of 1995, Lévesque immediately and almost miraculously got Quebec moving again. Because, after the “great risk”, Robert Bourassa had to take up the torch until the Meech Lake accord and its final repudiation. Without that, there would never have been a referendum in 1995. It is therefore also to the person who said “see you next time” that the sovereignists owe this almost victory. Even dead and despite their heartbreaking separation, it was a bit like René Lévesque who passed the baton to Parizeau.
“Pulling flowers doesn’t make them grow faster,” he told the magazine. Point in 1984. It was this same attachment to the people that led him to be wary of left-wing ideologues like the plague. To suggest that Lévesque would be “woke” today is to forget his congenital allergy to ideologies and to all chapels. This is to forget that this social democrat at heart preferred to found the Parti Québécois with the former Créditiste Gilles Grégoire of the National Rally rather than with the flamboyant Pierre Bourgault of the RIN, of whom he always mistrusted.
All this to say that it will always be vain to oppose nationalism to sovereignty. Moreover, one cannot survive without the other. What is sovereignty without nationalism, if not a simple slogan emptied of its substance? A buttonhole flower. What is nationalism without a sovereigntist horizon, if not a provincialism that refuses the call of the open sea and ultimately condemns itself to that “mediocrity” so aptly described by the historian Maurice Séguin.
In his latest book on de Gaulle (The start), the journalist Franz-Olivier Giesbert recounts how many detours and even lies were necessary for de Gaulle to achieve what he had always wanted to do: give Algeria its independence. “What madness is needed for the fulfillment of a great destiny, and what is needed at the same time for submission to reality”, wrote Mauriac about Malraux and de Gaulle. Qualities rarely united in a single man, but which Lévesque handled like no other.