In its most recent issue (summer 2022), the excellent magazine Disadvantage looks at “contested history”. The formula, we agree, is almost a pleonasm. This discipline is still contested because, despite its scientific pretensions, it is dependent on its interpretative nature.
Raw, objective facts—the Parti Québécois was founded in 1968, for example—are a matter of chronology. History is something else. It consists, explained Professor Georges Langlois in To what is the use of history? (Bellarmin, 1999), to highlight important events and place them in a sequence to bring out the meaning.
“To make this selection, Langlois specified, the historian cannot avoid, whatever he says, having recourse to criteria which do not come from history, but from politics, philosophy, morality. , even of religion and above all, above all, of the concerns of the present. »
The historian, moreover, explores an object, the past, which has left traces, but which no longer exists and which is therefore not reproducible. Difficult to test, historical knowledge is therefore inevitably contested.
There was indeed a conquest of the French colony of Canada by Great Britain in 1759-1760. The fact is indisputable. However, once we begin to explore the ins and outs of the case, controversy sets in.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the historic school of Montreal—the Frégaults, Brunets and Séguins—considered the Conquest to be an absolute catastrophe that put a brake on the normal development of French-Canadian society. At the Université Laval, at the same time, the Trudels, Hamelin and Ouellet saw something good in the event and attributed the subsequent failures of French-Canadians to faults specific to the conquered people.
The same event, therefore, and two radically different interpretations, offered by rigorous historians on both sides. In history, it must be accepted, the controversy is essential.
I read, as a summer entertainment, The Whys of History 2 (J’ai lu, 2022), by French history buff animator Stéphane Bern. When he seeks to shed light on the nickname “Big Apple” attributed to New York, the popularizer discovers three hypotheses. According to the first, the formula would come from the nickname given to the prostitutes of the city. Others affirm that it would have for origin the name given to the ball of anguish which felt the jazzmen New Yorkers of the 1930s before going on stage. A third hypothesis links the nickname to the equestrian world. In the 1920s, the prizes given to the winners of the races were called “Apple”. Winning in New York means getting the “Big Apple”. The term, then, will come to designate the city.
This amusing little example shows that there is nothing simple in history. If an anecdotal fact like that sparks controversy, imagine what can happen when it comes down to it.
In DisadvantageÉric Bédard recounts Jacques Parizeau’s indignation at the new high school history and citizenship education program concocted under the Liberal government of Jean Charest in 2006. This program, it should be remembered, was intended to be less political and insisted more on the economic and social modernization of Quebec than on its national course.
It had triggered an outcry in nationalist circles. “It’s because we have to come back from Marx and go back to Michelet!” Parizeau then confides to Bédard, in addition to criticizing a host of other elements of the program, in particular a dubious vision of Aboriginal people, reduced, for a good cause, to the status of victims, “whereas in the beginning, they were real actors in their history”, according to Parizeau.
To counterbalance this nationalist point of view, Disadvantage welcomes in its pages the contribution of the historian Pierre Anctil, who proposes a radical questioning of the concept of national history, prejudicial, according to him, “to the disadvantaged groups within the dominant nation”.
It would therefore be necessary to break “the monopoly that national history assumes” and abandon the idea of nation as the common thread of historical reflection in favor of the idea of ”territory” welcoming “multiple projects of society more or less contradictory”.
Regulars of this column will not be surprised to learn that I prefer the point of view of Bédard and Parizeau to that of Anctil. I consider, that said, that there is a way to maintain, in history, an essential national framework, while cultivating the concern to bring out its plural nature.
All Quebecers are Quebecers. They must therefore share a story, accepting the healthy challenge that comes with it.