On October 2, 1936, The duty announced the publication of the first issue of Notebooks of the Ten. This season, 86 years later, the magazine, which is the oldest historical publication in Quebec, publishes its 75and number. The event deserves to be underlined.
Founded in 1935, the Société des Dix brought together friends who had a “common love of national history”, as the librarian Aegidius Fauteux, one of its founders, wrote in 1940. These men – an accountant, a notary, an architect, archivists as well as priest-teachers — want to share “culture in joy” by publishing, each year if possible, a historical review that is both scholarly and accessible, rigorous and elegant. They are lively self-taught scholars, notes the sociologist Fernand Harvey in the 75and number, by an “ideal of scientific fraternity”.
Over the years, with departures and deaths, members, co-opted, will succeed, and the self-taught will give way to specialists. The historian Mireille Barrière will be, in 1998, the first woman welcomed into the group.
Today’s Ten — five men and five women — are the historians Christian Blais, Dominique Deslandres, Louis-Georges Harvey and Laurier Lacroix; sociologists Denys Delâge and Simon Langlois; archaeologist Louise Pothier; ethnologist Jocelyne Mathieu; and literature professor Lucie Robert. Sociologist Andrée Fortin, who sadly passed away at the start of the year, completed the team. His last text, published in this 75and issue, is precisely about the original spirit of the Ten.
In the first issue of the review, Fauteux announces that the goal of this “association of comrades” is to explore little-known aspects “of the great or the small story”. The magazine concentrates above all, moreover, on the second, that, explains Fortin, which “attaches to anecdotes, to institutions as well as to characters ‘passed without noise in the world'”. history,” Fortin concludes, announces what will later be called social history. In The Notebooks of the Tenwe practice it with erudition, but always with a concern for readability.
Women of New France, the article by Dominique Deslandres published in this anniversary issue, provides a fine example of the style of the Ten. According to the historian, we do not know enough “how tightly woven the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal female worlds were at the time of the colony of New France” and to what extent “the men of the 17and and XVIIIand centuries cannot be thought of without women.
When we talk about the women of New France, we generally only remember a few stars, such as Marie de l’Incarnation, Jeanne Mance and the King’s Daughters, forgetting the women of the First Nations, “essential to the development of our country”. , underlines the historian, and the many “women of action”, hailed by Charlevoix, in 1744.
Deslandres shows that social conditions in New France lead to “accommodations to Euro-Christian prescriptions” which broaden the power of women. She also insists on the little-known fact that “in this clash of sovereignties, it is the First Nations who impose their conditions on the French newcomers and their descendants”, who must adapt to them in order to survive.
The sharing of a “community of misery” between the majority of one and the other forces rapprochements. Contacts between French women and First Nations women at the time were daily. From 1644 to 1760, there will be 180 official marriages between colonists and members of the First Nations, and many more unofficial ones between French and native women. In passing, Deslandres also notes the presence of slavery in New France, both among the settlers and among their First Nations allies. “Without indigenous and non-native women, free and slaves, there is no New France,” concludes Deslandres.
In issue 74 of Notebooks of the Tenthe ethnologist Jocelyn Mathieu devotes a very beautiful study to the journalist Georgina Lefaivre, who signed her chronicles of the Sunfrom 1902 to 1922, under the pseudonyms Ginevra or Geneviève.
Mathieu carefully rereads the journalist’s chronicles to bring out his conception of the role of women. Although it is obvious, the conservatism of Lefaivre’s remarks nevertheless conceals small treasures of wisdom, in particular that which consists in telling women that the search for “complete happiness” is an illusion and that it is better to count on a “discreet and modest happiness imbued with realism”.
“Happiness, wrote Lefaivre, is this ‘puzzle’ of which we have never managed to put the last piece. Reserving this message for women was conservatism: transmitting it to everyone was wisdom.