Bernard Landry was proud of his Acadian ancestry. When Roméo LeBlanc, whom he knew, became the first governor general from Acadie, Landry had this quip: “Méo, now that you are the queen, you could apologize! Apologize, everyone understands, for the deportation of an entire people by His Majesty’s army. An act that can be debated, with today’s concepts, to determine whether it meets the criteria of a war crime, a crime against humanity or attempted genocide.
This Acadian “Great Upheaval” of 1755 is well inscribed in our culture. We highlight the event every year, Antonine Maillet told us a version of it in her Pelagie-la-Charrette (Goncourt Prize 1979), any visit to the beaches of New Brunswick supposes a stop in places of memory, the song of Michel Conte Evangeline, constantly taken up by our most beautiful female voices, brings us to tears. We therefore have in mind images of soldiers of the English king, dressed in red, pushing the peasants towards the boats, separating them from their wives and children.
For our Conquest to us, our imagination can evoke some scene seen in such television reconstruction of the armies of Wolfe and Montcalm, on the plains of poor Abraham. Nothing, however, neither place, nor song, nor poem, reminds us of what the English army did after the victory, in the name of the king.
Torches in hand, the soldiers marched from L’Ange-Gardien to Baie-Saint-Paul, burning down every house in every village, every barn and every stable. The soldiers confiscated the cattle. Similarly, on the South Shore, 19 villages were almost reduced to nothing. In Saint-François-du-Lac, in Portneuf, in Saint-Joachim, the fire was not enough: scalps were taken and massacres took place. “A cloud of blood veils our homeland,” wrote a witness in Trois-Rivières. “Throughout the autumn of 1759,” says Lionel Groulx ins Aftermaths of conquest (Stanké), parade along the river these caravans of starving people who find nowhere to stop, so rare are the dwellings, the excessively expensive rents and the misery, the common evil. Back on their land, the inhabitants no longer even have the tools to work the land, cut the wood, transform the wheat into flour and bread. They eat it boiled.
It does not take a century for the nation to recover and, with the patriots, to claim its rights. This episode is present in the collective memory: Papineau haranguing the crowd, the smell of muskets, the hanging and the exile of the leaders. an old song, A wandering Canadian, a place, at Pied-du-Courant, a holiday party, a film by Falardeau. But for what happened right after, it’s still a memory void. However, it is worth looking into. Once the patriots were defeated at Saint-Eustache, writes historian Gérard Filteau in his indispensable History of the Patriots (Septentrion), “all acts of vandalism and cruelty were committed. After looting a house and having emptied it of all its contents, seizing cattle and provisions, the inhabitants, men, women and children, were forced to undress, leaving them barely enough to cover their nudity. We mistreated the men, we raped the women, we brutalized the children, we didn’t respect anything”.
The body of patriot leader Jean-Olivier Chénier, who died during the battle, lay on the counter of an inn, his head beaten up, his body disembowelled and his heart out of his chest. The English teased passers-by: “Come and see your Chénier, how rotten his heart was. »
Part of the region passed through it. “Within a radius of 15 miles, there is not a building which has not been ransacked and looted by these new vandals”, writes a witness. The inhabitants are so terrified that in Sainte-Scholastique, five or six hundred people go to meet the English soldiers shouting “Vive la Reine!” (Victoria just crowned) to show their submission and thus save their lives and property.
In the Montreal daily Heraldthe editor Adam Thom is over the moon: “Sunday evening, the whole country behind Laprairie presented the horrible spectacle of a vast sheet of livid flames […] God knows what will become of the Canadians who did not perish, their wives and their families, during the approaching winter, since they have before their eyes only the horrors of hunger and cold. To have tranquility, we must do solitude, sweep the Canadians off the face of the earth. »
That’s what happened here in the name of the king and queen. As for the Acadian deportation, we can debate. Are we in the presence of war crimes or crimes against humanity? Followed, it is certain, by a real attempt at cultural genocide, at assimilation, on the recommendation of a lord and with the consent of the crown.
She never expressed the slightest remorse, never made the slightest apology. All in all, it’s better that way. What would remorse or apologies be worth after all this time? And would we really want to accept them, absolve the unforgivable? The evocation of these episodes which do not appear in our school curriculum or in popular culture allows us to draw two lessons today. The first was formulated in 1920 by Lionel Groulx: “Those among us who are growing impatient, who would like to see us already all the powers of the adult nations, could perhaps not forget this starting point. »
The second refers to the oath of “fidelity and sincere allegiance” to the crown that we always want to impose on our elected officials. If they feared for their lives and property, like villagers in 1838, one could understand. But if they have the slightest spark of historical memory and their hearts still firmly planted in their chests, why don’t they put an end, en bloc, to what is, at best, hypocrisy; certainly, a perjury either towards the king, or towards the people; at worst, the expression of a colonized condition.
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