He admires René Lévesque among all prime ministers, but is no longer a sovereignist. The word “federalist” does not pass in his throat, unlike a Robert Bourassa or a Jean Lesage.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
How to define the nationalism of François Legault, which explains part of his success?
A few months after Maurice Duplessis was elected for the fourth time in 1952, his friend Camillien Houde wrote to him. “The countryside loves your politics, and the cities less,” opines the mayor of Montreal diplomatically.
For even when he swept across Quebec, Duplessis encountered strongholds of resistance in Montreal and Quebec.
Seventy years later, François Legault could recognize himself in this analysis. The regions like his policy, Montreal and the center of Quebec, less. Why ?
A general election cannot be reduced to the national question alone, and people do not vote unanimously, neither in Montreal nor in Alma. The CAQ has become the party of economy and stability, like the Liberal Party in the past. Nevertheless: François Legault has tinkered with a kind of nationalism that sticks to the spirit of the times and has dispossessed the two “old parties” of their strongholds, often winning more than half of the votes in the constituencies.
You could call it a neoconservative nationalism, a kind of reworking of that of the Union Nationale, precisely, which governed Quebec from 1936 to 1939, and from 1944 until the death of Duplessis in 1959; then from 1966 to 1970, before quietly disappearing.
No, François Legault is not a “Duplessist”. The adjective, pejorative, has become a real insult. It evokes a backward-looking Catholic authoritarianism and political corruption.
I’m not talking about that.
Let’s say instead that the current prime minister is… duplessian. François Legault is a new kind of “autonomist”: he does not want to smash the federal framework, but demands more powers from Ottawa for what he presents as existential issues for the Quebec nation.
The cultural references have changed, but Legault draws from the same conservative nationalist fund. In the literal sense: he wants blue houses to preserve the culture (the soul?) of Quebec, as if he feared to see it being diluted in a cosmopolitan, uprooted world.
Its identity nationalism provides answers to ambient “national” concerns: linguistic threats, immigration, minority religions…
But when we delve into Duplessis’ political manual, we are struck by the correspondence between the two prime ministers.
Duplessis did not govern for so long for nothing; his Catholic nationalism was in step with that of the majority—very different from that of Lesage who was to succeed him.
The words have changed, the adversaries too. But the autonomist battles of Duplessis look like a canvas for François Legault and Simon Jolin-Barrette.
Maurice Duplessis had no problem with ostentatious religious signs, since the Catholic Church was everywhere in the schools, with its teachers equipped with cassocks, robes and cornets.
His fight was against Jehovah’s Witnesses, who were campaigning aggressively against the Catholic Church. To prevent them from distributing their propaganda, they were required to obtain a permit — which they were refused. Several were arrested and imprisoned.
A restaurant owner on Crescent Street, Frank Roncarelli, systematically bailed defendants in municipal court, which enraged the clergy and Duplessis. He had Roncarelli’s liquor license revoked, the police seized his bottles, and he was ruined.
English-language newspapers in Montreal and Toronto denounced these acts as those of a premier of a “clerical” and “fascist” province. Already, Duplessis was compared in certain newspapers to a “Nazi”. He had promulgated the “law of the padlock”, to fight communism, which made it possible to seize housing and to search without a warrant places suspected of propaganda.
It looks like what is being said about CAQ policies in certain circles to denounce law 21 on religious symbols and law 96 on the French language…
Then as now, civil liberties groups have organized rallies to denounce these policies. Resounding legal actions have been taken.
The Supreme Court declared the padlock law unconstitutional and ruled in favor of Jehovah’s Witnesses on several occasions, in decisions that have become classics. Freedom of speech and the right to criticize religious or judicial institutions were affirmed — long before there was a bill of rights.
The most famous of these was Roncarelli’s victory: Duplessis was personally ordered to pay him $43,000 for abuse of power—unheard of.
If I recall all this, it is not to compare the policies of the CAQ to these repressive measures. What interests me here is the nationalist use that was made of it at the time.
Duplessis denounced the Supreme Court which, “like the tower of Pisa, always leans on the same side”. From a personal defeat, the leader of the National Union made a national plea to take advantage of it:
“It is indisputable that the province of Quebec has no lessons to take from anyone as to the way it treats its minorities,” replied Duplessis after the Roncarelli judgment.
Words that one would think came out very recently from the National Assembly to defend laws 21 or 96 in the face of criticism.
Faced with these unfavorable decisions of the Supreme Court, Duplessis relied on the “great tribunal of public opinion”, as the CAQ invokes the will of the majority in the face of judicial decisions.
The abusive accusations of “fascism” and “Nazism” pronounced against the Duplessis government were recycled by the Union Nationale to its advantage: it is Quebec itself that is being attacked in the English-language media! Or let’s say, to use the terms of the time, “the Catholic French Canadians”.
Similarly, the exaggerated attacks on laws 21, on religious symbols, and 96, on language, are used by the CAQ as attacks not on its policies, but on the Nation. François Legault, at the end of the campaign, was indignant at the fact that unidentified “commentators” associate him with racism because of his remarks on immigration, when in his eyes, he is only defending the integrity of the nation and the survival of French.
As in the Duplessis years, the denunciations “from the outside” serve to demonstrate even better the need to protect the Nation, misunderstood, even despised, attacked even in its identity.
As for the courts, in the eyes of Duplessis, these supreme arbiters chosen by Ottawa “lean” on the same side, that is to say against the government of the Union Nationale, therefore against Quebec itself.
Simon Jolin-Barrette, Attorney General, does not reason otherwise by exempting these bills from the application of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in advance, thanks to the notwithstanding provision. These matters relate to national identity and are the sole responsibility of the National Assembly, in any case of the majority of deputies, not of “unelected judges”.
As an ironic echo of history, lawyers these days challenging Bills 21 and 96 are using Supreme Court decisions from the 1940s and 1950s against Duplessis, when the Charter of Rights did not exist…
Duplessis’ great independence battle was fiscal. Hard to believe today, but there was a time when income tax was purely federal. It was Duplessis who led the fight to take a portion, but at the cost of epic struggles. He fought against the centralizing power of Ottawa, defending a “confederal” vision of Canada: “a federation of autonomous provinces”, and wanted this to be reflected in the new constitution then under discussion. Autonomy is meaningless without fiscal powers.
The question has in principle been settled since, although of course the requests for funding from the provinces remain. But the idea of “repatriating” powers to exist as an autonomous entity—as a nation—is still relevant.
It is not around the Quebec tax that François Legault wants to mobilize public opinion today; it is on the question of immigration, so that it is entirely managed by Quebec. It is just beginning…
The conservative writer-historian Robert Rumilly said of his idol Duplessis that by defending “autonomy as a dogma”, he had embodied after the liberals Honoré Mercier, Lomer Gouin and Alexandre Taschereau “the obscure will of Quebec to constitute a nation without falling into a fatal isolation”.
François Legault changed the themes, but his success finds its foundations in the same genealogical branch of defensive nationalism, and in the same attempt at constitutional judo.
In this sense, he is a Duplessian.