Quebec sovereignty, we have been hearing for a few years now, is a project of the past because young people no longer believe in it. The most recent polls on the issue allow us to qualify this observation. In 2020, according to the firm Léger, 36% of Quebecers supported sovereignty against 54% who rejected it. Among 18-24 year olds, 31% said they were sovereignists against 54%.
An idea defended by a third of the population, when it is not even discussed in the news, is not a dead idea, otherwise we would have to bury, along with the Parti Québécois (PQ), all Quebec political parties, with the exception of the Coalition avenir Québec, which won the 2018 election, it should be remembered, with 37.42% of the vote.
Sometimes I discuss politics with young people. I am then forced to note that sovereignty is not at the heart of their concerns. The subject doesn’t tell them much because they don’t know him well. Very often, after half an hour of discussion, they recognize that there is something essential there and are very open to exploring this path. It still needs to be presented to them.
A recent announcement by the PQ shows that the sovereignist idea is still alive in the committed fringe of young people. Five young women aged 20 to 37, proud activists for an independent and French-speaking Quebec, will campaign under the PQ banner next October.
In the intellectual world, a new sovereignist boiling is occurring. I welcomed, a few weeks ago, the publication of the Identity schism (Boréal), a brilliant nationalist essay by young Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard. The teacher David Santarossa, graduate in philosophy, also publishes frequently in this sense in various media.
Doctoral student in sociology at UQAM, Alexis Tétreault, 27, continues in the same vein by publishing The nation that was wrong self (VLB, 2022, 256 pages), a remarkable essay on Quebec national consciousness. These intellectuals of the new generation openly claim to be conservative nationalists and claim the influence of Jacques Beauchemin and Mathieu Bock-Côté.
In his essay, Tétreault studies our national imagination in order to find the “invariants that found the Quebec condition”. He postulates that the main idea that runs through our history is that of vulnerability, that is to say “the irreducible feeling that one day, suddenly or surreptitiously, the Quebec nation will disappear”. This “awareness of our fragility”, he explains, has not, contrary to what the anti-nationalists repeat, paralyzed our action, but has been “at the origin of our most fruitful political projects”. It is the recent forgetting of this fragility, by which the idea of normality replaces that of vulnerability, which exposes the Quebec nation to the danger of its obliteration.
For Lionel Groulx, a “giant of our intellectual history” victim of “unjust denigration” according to Tétreault, French-Canadian political vulnerability was born at the time of the Conquest of 1760 since, from then on, “the French presence in America was threatened sums up Tétreault. The latter, however, places the foundation of the imaginary of vulnerability more precisely at the time of the failure of the patriot movement and the publication of the Durham report that followed.
This document, as we know, prescribed the minorityization of the French-Canadian nation and its gradual and painless disappearance. Once French becomes useless or folkloric, French Canadians will slowly but surely become anglicized, as in Louisiana, and voila. To believe that this logic is no longer current in today’s Canada, one must, it seems to me, be seriously blind.
The French Canadians of 1840, explains Tétreault, refused this destiny and opposed “to the minorization-assimilation dyad […] the couple majority-conservation”. The reply of historian François-Xavier Garneau in Durham, the political career of Honoré Mercier, the work of Groulx as well as that of Maurice Séguin, the Quiet Revolution as well as the adoption of the Charter of the French language and of the Act respecting the secularism of the State are all driven by this idea of our vulnerability, which must be averted by providing the Quebec nation, open to people from everywhere, with a majority space necessary for its preservation and to its development. As long as national independence is not acquired, we can only be, despite some progress, “a little less not free[s] at home, as Maurice Séguin wrote.
The Quebec nation of today, concludes Tétreault, remains a fragile “minority majority” which would approach the abyss if it thought itself normal and saved from the waters before it was.