French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal will be visiting Quebec this week.
The event is not exceptional in itself: France and Quebec have always maintained a special relationship, for obvious reasons. To use a beautiful, out-of-fashion phrase, France is our motherland.
But it is certainly an important visit.
This relationship took a political turn from the 1960s, when it was taken over by General de Gaulle.
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We all remember his “Long live free Quebec” on July 24, 1967, at the end of his crossing of Chemin du Roy. France therefore presented itself as Quebec’s great ally.
In 1980, and even more so, in 1995, she was ready to accompany us on the path to independence. Whatever anyone says, it remains so to this day. The Sarkozy parenthesis, from 2007 to 2012, is well closed.
That said, the relationship between Quebec and France has transformed over time.
Since the end of the 1990s, and during the first two decades of the 2000s, many have wanted to rebuild it on an economic basis, even to the point of refocusing it on a commercial basis.
But if France and Quebec are good partners in this area, their bond is much deeper. It is existential. There is between us a community of destiny, a community of civilization.
We have rediscovered it in recent years.
France is seen as the Gallic village of globalization.
It refuses to comply with the ideological norms supported by American imperialism. She resists wokism. She opposes multiculturalism in the name of the nation, in the name of what is called “republican universalism” there. She carries the standard of secularism, which remains essential in our time, and which the Anglo-Saxons do not really understand. She stands up to a conquering Islamism which multiplies the strikes against her.
- Listen to the meeting Mathieu Bock-Côté and Richard Martineau via QUB :
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Quebec is in a similar existential situation. In Canada as in North America, it embodies an irreducible, essential difference. He generally rejects wokism. Through a journey of its own, it has come to place secularism at the heart of its collective identity – the Canadian regime is doing everything to dynamite it, especially since it is inseparable from communitarian logic.
And of course, both French and Quebecers share the French language. We refuse to see it reduced to the status of a folk language. We believe, rightly, that it embodies a certain idea of culture, a certain idea of human diversity, and a certain idea of the universal as well.
We believe, rightly, that each people will develop to the extent that it can anchor itself in its own genius – and not by becoming a cultural province of the American empire.
Free Quebec and free France respond naturally to each other. The destinies of our two peoples are linked. The next few years will bring us closer than ever.