I’ve never been to France and I don’t think I’ll ever go there. I love the country of Molière, but a long-distance relationship is more than enough for me. Gastronomy does not interest me and places, even beautiful ones, speak to me only after years of taming.
From France, I like its literature, its history, its cinema, its music and its ideas. No need to go to Paris for that; from my living room, I have access to these riches in the most pleasant of ways, almost without polluting the planet any more. It is the culture that counts; the rest is tourism.
I do not spit, however, on the travel reports that my most informed compatriots give me when they go for a tour of the mother country. I enjoyed seeing France up close, with Quebec eyes, by proxy, thanks to the books by Louis-Bernard Robitaille on the subject and those by the couple Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoît Nadeau. Each year, my colleague Christian Rioux also brings me fresh news from the spirit of the place. There are too many travelers, that’s for sure. Some, however, are more useful than others.
Journalist and political scientist Jocelyn Coulon belongs to this category. In My France (La Presse, 2023, 204 pages), a collection of unpublished texts borrowing as much from the chronicle as from the reportage, he paints in a friendly atmosphere a portrait of both love and criticism of the country of his ancestors.
In the case of Coulon, moreover, this last expression takes on a direct meaning since his father, Jacques, was born in Paris in 1929 and immigrated to Montreal in 1953 before marrying a daughter from Shawinigan. Coulon, therefore, does not go to France only as a tourist, but as a real cousin, since he finds members of his family there. In Paris as in Pau, in the south-west of the country, he is almost at home.
He has observed, for 40 years, “that the distinction between Canadians and Quebecers takes time to establish itself in France”. The French know Quebec, but continue to refer to us as Canadians, as if the two terms were synonymous for them. The phenomenon, according to Coulon, is explained in particular by the fact that Quebec is not a country, it is Canada which remains “the obligatory reference at school in geography or history lessons”. It marks.
During his first visit to France, in May 1980, when he was a young separatist in his twenties, Coulon was offended by this confusion. Today, having become a federalist, he puts up with it by even saying that “we should be proud” of the favorable idea that the French have of Canada. It’s me who doesn’t understand it anymore.
Even if he can sometimes be firm in his positions, notably in his criticism of the Trudeau government’s foreign policy, Coulon remains first and foremost a courteous and delicate intellectual. In this French walk, these qualities never leave him.
Whether he talks about the phenomenon of yellow vests or the debate on wind turbines that agitates France – are they ecological or not? — he always does so with the concern to understand the opposing camps and to do them justice. Coulon never speaks directly about his French political leanings, but Emmanuel Macron, obviously, does quite well under his pen.
France, observes the essayist, is still the country of the book, which “is everywhere” in France, particularly in the major written media and in the political world. However, here too, the popularity of cellphones threatens the future of reading. “For a brain enslaved to this daily discipline, writes the novelist Abel Quentin quoted by Coulon, reading a book becomes an ever more discouraging Everest. »
First tourist destination in the world, France is certainly desirable, but it is not without flaws. Its health system “is one of the best in the world”, recognizes Coulon, but the “medical deserts”, these regions deprived of access to a health professional, are multiplying there in rural areas. The French passion for English, for its part, has something distressing, seen from Quebec. “English is everywhere”, notes Coulon with regret. Fatherland of human rights, France is also, less brilliantly, the third largest arms exporter in the world.
Since the beginning of the century, the thesis of national decline has flourished in France. According to some popular thinkers, the country lacks courage on the international scene, abandons its sovereignty to Europe, loses its identity because of immigration or is threatened with economic collapse.
Coulon, in conclusion, refutes these alarmist speeches. France, he writes, on the military, economic and cultural levels, still shines in the world and remains “a great country and a great power”.
He loves her, and so do I.