Next week, two events will highlight the importance of relations between France and Quebec. The first will be held in Quebec, where, after passing through Ottawa, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal will go to deliver a speech to the National Assembly. The second is the Paris Book Festival, whose guest of honor this year is Quebec and where around forty Quebec authors are preparing to arrive.
Should we talk about “reunion”? In the first case, the prime ministers seem to be reviving the tradition of meetings which must normally be held every two years alternately in Quebec and Paris. However, the last meeting was held in France in 2018. We will be told that this delay is due to COVID; However, we do not know that the epidemic lasted six years. The arrival of Quebec writers in Paris only occurred around twenty years after the defunct Paris Book Fair had invited Quebec. Which, all things considered, would lead us to believe that writers are more loyal to the body than politicians.
The last representative of France to address the National Assembly of Quebec was François Hollande in 2014. Emmanuel Macron, for his part, canceled his speech at the last minute in 2018. The chosen words and chiseled sentences we regulars Gabriel Attal, the youngest prime minister of the Ve Republic, should not, however, hide the dip that these relations have gone through in recent years.
Rarely a president of the Ve République had little interest in the French-speaking world in general. It is an understatement to say that the man of start-up nation ” and of ” Choose France » is hardly focused on the Francophonie: we know this since his first presidential campaign, where he insisted on trumpeting that “there is not a French culture; there is a culture in France.”
Its economic tropism would moreover tend to lead it towards Canada and its attractive markets. There would also be a question of the upcoming holding of a Franco-Canadian Council of Ministers, as the two countries committed to in 2018, in order to take stock of cooperation and develop joint actions.
We know that Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron — who both studied with the Jesuits and had a passion for theater — have a few chemistry. Starting with this idyllic and outdated vision of “happy globalization”.
Coincidentally, this visit comes as the French Senate has just refused to ratify CETA, the free trade agreement between the European Union and Canada. An agreement that has been fully implemented since 2017, even if it is claimed that it is “provisional”. Let us rest assured: this treaty may require the unanimity of the 27 member countries, but President Macron could choose, contrary to what the procedure would dictate, never to send it back to the National Assembly, where it would very likely be rejected. . And otherwise, it might never notify the European Union. So he would remain in limbo forever. It would not be the first time that in Brussels, the opinion of French elected officials counts for nothing.
Among the subjects on the agenda, Emmanuel Macron and François Legault will not be able to turn a blind eye to the worrying state of the International Organization of La Francophonie (OIF), not only in terms of administration, but also on the political plan. In Africa, Emmanuel Macron has never stopped wanting to get out of the French-speaking area, to the point of appointing as head of the OIF a secretary general, Louise Mushikiwabo, from a country — Rwanda — which replaced in 2008 French through English as a compulsory language of education from primary to university. While still a student at the National School of Administration, hadn’t the future president preferred to do an internship in Nigeria, the most populous (English-speaking) country in Africa, rather than in a French-speaking country?
If it was a question of moving away from French-speaking Africa, we can say that it is mission accomplished. Not only has sub-Saharan Africa never counted so little in the French economy (0.6%), but never has France been as hated there as since the putsches in Mali, Niger and in Burkina Faso. All this for the benefit of China and Russia, who have little qualms.
The state of the French language in the world should also not offer François Legault and Gabriel Attal the opportunity to celebrate. Of course, demographic growth alone in Africa automatically causes an increase in the number of speakers, but these figures are only an illusion. Everywhere, politically and culturally, French is in decline. Starting with the European Union, where French leaders are blissfully witnessing the sinking of their language, when they are not contributing to it themselves.
France and Quebec have too many common interests to allow themselves not to feel united in these troubled times. Isn’t Quebec the only place in North America where people are fighting hard and hard to ensure that a certain secularism is respected in public administration and in schools? A secularism increasingly undermined, even in France, by Islamist and Anglo-American communitarianism.
For all these reasons, this is a great opportunity to give some substance to a relationship that has been, to say the least, neglected for several years. A relationship that the master of “at the same time” had himself described as “affective” and at the same time “strategic”.