I admire Lise Bissonnette. The rigor of his analyzes and the elegance of his style, both orally and in writing, amaze me. I love his limpid, brilliant, direct words that are always imbued with gentleness, even in the hour of sharp judgments. I also share most of his ideas.
When I notice its absence in the nomenclature of the Dictionary of intellectuals in Quebec (PUM, 2017), I tell myself that there are academics who have missed some bits. For 40 years, in fact, Lise Bissonnette has been one of the most lucid voices of the Quebec intelligentsia.
It is this beautiful strong and luminous voice that we find in Lise Bissonnette (Boréal, 2023, 210 pages), a book of interviews conducted by historian Pascale Ryan. The latter, rightly, presents Bissonnette as a “committed intellectual”, as a “woman of ideas and action” driven by “the love of words, writing and reading”. Lise Bissonnette is a woman of culture in the strongest sense of the term, which explains the depth and accuracy of her thinking.
Born in 1945 in Abitibi into a lower-middle-class family, Bissonnette sadly recalls the “cultural desert” of her youth in an environment deprived of books and in which teaching, even for those lucky enough to surpass the primary school, is of a distressing cultural mediocrity. Quebec before the Quiet Revolution, this world without books and without music for the majority of the population, is characterized by “emptiness”, by “a life of boredom, flatness, closure”.
In sensitive pages, Bissonnette contests the historical revisionism which seeks to relativize the thesis of the Great Darkness. Of course, she acknowledges, in the privileged urban areas, culture sometimes broke through and a certain dissidence emerged, but the majority were condemned to “a life without relief for lack of knowing anything else” than the ordinary of days. “Everyone was living below their potential,” she sums up.
It was the Quiet Revolution which, by highlighting state intervention, particularly in education with the proliferation of public secondary schools, the creation of CEGEPs and that of the Université du Québec network, lit the lights of culture everywhere in Quebec. Bissonnette insists on the “huge break” that this blessed moment represents, while lamenting the fact that his momentum was broken by anti-state ideology.
Inhabited by an irrepressible “hunger to learn”, the young Abitibienne, in adversity, will obtain a teaching certificate and a license in pedagogical sciences from the University of Montreal before completing doctoral studies at the École Pratique of higher education in Paris. Throughout her life, however, and even with a doctorate in French letters obtained in 2015, she will retain the feeling of lacking culture. This is to say the height at which it sets the bar.
Bissonnette says her involvement in student journalism, at the age of 16, was eye-opening. Entrance to Duty in 1974 as a journalist, she then held several positions there before becoming its brilliant director from 1990 to 1998. It was she who presided over the paper’s sovereigntist turn, a position which she continues to defend, without partisanship. In terms of information, however, Bissonnette reiterates, against a fashionable trend, his attachment to the duty of objectivity.
For me, as for many others, I imagine, Lise Bissonnette is essentially this remarkable intellectual who knew how to embody a demanding conception of the Quebec national project. This perception almost makes us forget his commitments as a manager.
It is to her, in fact, that we owe the creation of the Grande Bibliothèque du Québec, a veritable cultural treasure aimed at combating the cultural vacuum that has too often marked our history. It was she, again, who chaired, in 2012, the Advisory Committee on the future of the Olympic Park, with the intention of making it a lively, classy and accessible sports and tourist venue.
President of the board of directors of UQAM from 2013 to 2018, she brilliantly defended the essential mission of public universities. She reiterates, in these interviews, her anger at the contempt reserved for them by elected officials of all parties.
Even as a manager, Bissonnette never forgets that culture, in the broad sense, is what gives meaning to institutions and human actions.
It is therefore not surprising that, in this spirit, Bissonnette currying a new militancy of American inspiration which seeks to “break the legitimacy of knowledge, of all the knowledge accumulated over centuries of research and teaching, even before having received or transmitted them”. I’ll let you guess which one.