Like many, we were amazed to learn of the sale of Maison Chevalier, a heritage building at the gates of Place Royale, in Quebec City. We would like to add, to the concert of concerns raised, a few observations which, for us, make this transaction even more shocking, regardless of the legal protection that may possibly control the appearance of the building under the Heritage Act. cultural.
As has been mentioned, Maison Chevalier was acquired in 1956 by the Quebec government, more precisely by the Commission des monuments et sites historique, then represented before the notary by its president, Paul Gouin. This episode is not trivial: the government of Maurice Duplessis had indeed expressly, a few months earlier, amended the Act respecting historic monuments in order to allow the State to acquire, including by expropriation, buildings deemed to be exceptional heritage value. It was Gérard Morisset, then secretary of the Historical Monuments Commission, who drew attention to the building: “built in the most brilliant period of our architecture”, the Chevalier hotel, as he wrote. , “Is so quintessentially French that it would be perfectly in its place, even that it would be noticed in one of the cities of France”.
In Morisset’s mind, this Chevalier hotel was – hence the name it gave to the building – the equivalent in Quebec of the mansions of this famous Parisian district of the Marais, which the French state was preparing. to be restored from top to bottom, under the leadership of André Malraux. He certainly played an equally important role in the history of heritage in Quebec as Malraux’s intervention in that of French heritage. Acquired by extraordinary means and restored with great care by the architect André Robitaille, the Hôtel Chevalier inaugurated and made possible, in public opinion and for the Quebec State, the immense restoration project of Place Royale – which, moreover, was similarly based on a series of expropriations. Quebecers were so proud of their hotel Chevalier, this French building whose restoration “à la française” confirmed the French fact on this side of the Atlantic, that they invited none other than André Malraux to visit it in 1963. , even before making the official inauguration.
A beacon of French America
Over the years, the Chevalier hotel and the district whose heritage it sealed have become school sites, so to speak: it is there that we learned to restore heritage, that we learned to to protect it, that we have learned to value it, that we have opened up a new field of knowledge and the role of the State. It is certainly not an exaggeration to suggest that this lighthouse in the cradle of French America created the heritage institution of Quebec, in addition to having forever transformed the landscape which is delighted today, every year, by hundreds of thousands of visitors. Without the Chevalier hotel, there probably would not have been Old Quebec, or at least not the same. And probably no UNESCO World Heritage listing.
The weight of this symbol is worth much more than the approximately $ 2.2 million of its sale price, which is also little compared to the tens of millions of dollars invested in the building by the Quebec government, including these very recent years, since the Musée de la civilization has been in charge of it. This dubious transaction is not, however, a simple ” flip ” went wrong. If the heritage importance established in the 1950s justified such radical measures as expropriation, one would have expected them to be irreversible, that is to say that the Maison Chevalier and the Place Royale, with which it forms an indivisible whole, be forever the property of the State. At the very least, it seems grossly unfair that the State can one day rob a private owner and, a few years later and having valued the building in the way we know, cede its rights to another private owner. The argument of the building’s redundancy in relation to exhibition venues that would better suit museum standards is therefore, at best, inappropriate. A symbol is not measured in square meters.
We are not opposed to the possession by private owners of heritage, quite the contrary. But there are things that cannot be privatized. Here, it is the heart that is sold out; it is this heritage that gives meaning to all the others. After Maison Chevalier, why not sell the houses in Place Royale? And what to think of the fate that awaits the Ursuline monastery (Quebec) and the seminary of Saint-Sulpice (Montreal), if the state manages to send its message of disengagement?
This crisis, which recalls the lack of confidence Quebecers have in their past, highlights our chronic inability to renew what gives meaning to heritage. The recklessness of the government, which insists that the building will be protected “anyway”, also reflects a structural, cultural and political problem which risks rather worsening the abdication. The role of the State is not to put under cover, but to make common the heritage. In this way, the public character of a building is a lever of choice in its heritage development, and even more in its possibility of imposing itself in a collective imagination much more kaleidoscopic than it once was. This is what animated the legislator in 1956, and which still looms in our Cultural Heritage Act, although those who administer it do not seem to have grasped it, to abandon it with such flippancy. It is the public status of heritage that is being renounced today. Hence the risk for everything else. Or at least for everything that, until today, we called heritage.