In partnership with RetroNews, the press site of the National Library of France, The duty offers a series that goes back to the media sources of the France-Quebec relationship, from the War of the Conquest to the visit of General de Gaulle, including the tour of Sarah Bernhardt on the banks of the St. Lawrence. Sixth text.
On December 5, 1905, the newspaper The morning reveals to its readers that the Catholic clergy of Quebec City have asked their faithful to avoid “immoral representations” of the comedian Sarah Bernhardt, national and international glory. “Nevertheless, all the places have been taken in advance,” adds the French daily. At the same time, the newspaper boasts of publishing the “last telegrams of the night” received by “special wires”.
On December 7, the situation degenerates in Quebec, reports The public. “On the pretext that the plays produced by her were not only amoral, but immoral, these brave ecclesiastics, Protestants or Catholics, forbade anyone who believed in entering the city theater, during performances. […] of L’Aiglon. »The play by Edmond Rostand, already author of Cyrano de Bergerac, was staged for the first time in Paris by the great tragedian.
According to the rumor relayed by the French press, Bernhardt would have slandered the progress of art in Canada. “The good Canadians who, deep down, were not unhappy to hear anything other than sermons, even immoral dialogues, took the fly,” one reads.
In a sleigh with her friend and playing partner, Édouard de Max, the tragedian is awaited in Quebec by a compact crowd of young people. Are we getting ready to offer them a triumphant welcome, to cover them with flowers as has been seen elsewhere in America on the announcement of their arrival? Not at all. Rotten eggs rain down on the tragedy as the team accelerates to escape this inopportune assault.
“We enter covered with gold”, declares Édouard de Max once the danger has passed, and as everyone is plugging their noses, he hastens to add: “Gold has no odor! The French newspapers do not seem to note what will be locally, namely that he has also been shouted anti-Semitic insults: “Down with the Jewess!” Death to the Jewess! “
“Sarah Bernhardt stoned in Quebec”, headlines the newspaper The radical, from a dispatch relayed from New York. “The newspapers report that after a performance given by her last night in Quebec, Sarah Bernhardt was surrounded by a band of Apaches who riddled her with rotten eggs. Mme Sarah Bernhardt had recently, in an interview, made a disparaging remark about a certain class of the Canadian population. The term “Apache”, in the Parisian vocabulary of the time, is a common term used to designate gangs of young criminals who impose their law in certain neighborhoods.
As in Molière’s time
The daily newspaper with a large circulation Gil Blas, dated December 12, returns to the front page on the “painful surprise” caused by the “violent and brutal demonstrations” of Quebec against Sarah Bernhardt. The latter “contrast strangely with the rather delirious reception that the French Canadians had given him to this day”. Is the domination of an ultraconservative clergy more kneading the spirits on the side of the Old Capital?
From the pen of Frédéric Gerbié, Gil Blas recalls that in 1881, on the occasion of one of the tragedian’s previous visits to Quebec, a large “delegation of the principal notabilities of Montreal” came to receive the limelight at the American border, after a triumphant tour of New York, in Boston and Hartford. “Louis-Honoré Fréchette was so moved that Sarah Bernhardt had to take his hands and say herself, in the midst of laughter and tears of joy, the piece of verse dedicated to him. “
Another version of the story affirms rather that the Divine, consumed by the cold while waiting for Fréchette to deliver a speech in her honor, ends by interrupting her by saying: “Your verses are charming, dear master. please give them to me, I will teach you to read them! “
All the same, the Divine watered with a shower of rotten eggs! The affair never stops splashing Quebec in the French press. In this city, we live “as in the time of Molière”, title Humanity of February 4, 1906. “The situation of artists is not funny in Canada. […] The actors are refused any livelihood following the pastoral letters written by the bishop of Quebec, after the passage of Mr.me Sarah Bernhardt. Many artists have been fired. And the letters and sermons better listened to than Bossuet’s diatribes have ever been, forcing the French theater troupe in Quebec to cease their performances. What a sweet country! And to think that there are some of our good fellow citizens who offer us New France as an example, the France of our fathers! The theater, it is true, is not in the odor of sanctity on the banks of the St. Lawrence, where it is continually threatened by the clergy and the authorities.
The Quebec mystery?
In the pages of Gil Blas, Frédéric Gerbié wonders about this “Quebec mystery” before its time. “How could Quebec, the city of flirtation and good manners, the hospitable city par excellence, mainly to our compatriots, have forgotten itself to such an extent” and vilify Sarah Bernhardt? The journalist refuses to believe in the chauvinism of the inhabitants of the city founded by Champlain in 1608. “There is no other city where things in France can find more echoes. In a marvelous and incomparable setting, well done to elevate ideas and inspire a love of beauty, meditation and work, far from the noise of Cyclopean factories, in the middle of winding and climbing streets. “
After all, French Canadians are looking to France, says Gerbié. “It is above all our authors that they study and draw inspiration from, Canada not yet having provided sufficient models. […]. It is not therefore against French art and the genius of the one who interprets it so superiorly that the demonstrations of Quebecers have taken place. So, against whom, against what? The journalist accuses a “handful of fanatics” of the city. This is of course forgetting that in Montreal, when the joyful friends of Fréchette were welcoming the tragedian, Mr.gr Fabre had also struck his theatrical performances with a fierce interdict. It is the same in 1905, where Mgr Bruchési is sorry to see that the public does not fully obey his prohibitions. Also in Ottawa, Mr.gr Routhier will insist that we flee the places where the artist is.
What analysis should be drawn from the case being played out in Quebec against the Divine? The “mentality” of the settlers dispersed in the St. Lawrence Valley deserves to be explored, notes the journalist from Gil Blas. The French Canadian, he writes, unfortunately confuses three cults into one: the French language, the Catholic religion and French Canadian nationality. “These are three things that are most important to him, and we can only talk about them in front of him with the most tact and moderation possible, when we think we have to make some criticisms, because, for him, touching one is to touch the other. “If in the privacy, the French Canadian readily recognizes his faults,” his skin is very ticklish, if we pretend to forget all the efforts he makes to free himself from his imperfections. Whether an Englishman, an Irishman or an American allows himself all criticism, he disdains them, finding their assessment too questionable. It is quite different when a Frenchman in France formulates the same criticisms ”.
By ascribing to Sarah Bernhardt remarks which she moreover denies having made, newspapers in Quebec have aroused and exacerbated the sensibilities of French Canadians, offended their most intimate feelings. “In art and literature,” Sarah Bernhardt would have said, “French Canadians made no progress. These are but a mixture of English Canadians, Irish Canadians and Iroquois under the absolute domination of the Catholic clergy. “
Gerbié wants to believe that the tragic actress has not let this hard observation fall at the feet of her hosts. He notes, however, that “the progress of French Canadians in art and literature is undoubtedly slow.” Nothing astonishing besides, knowing “that there hardly forty years there was in each class only one French book, that of the professor, obliged to dictate to the pupils the lesson to be learned”. To a people who are struggling for their existence, in colonial soil, how can one reproach “for not having yet given birth to a Hugo, a Lamartine or a Michelet”?
The journalist concludes that the French can, in front of this people of the land of the maples, “only be grateful to them for their fidelity to our language”.