The historian Pierre Anctil looks back on the reluctance of certain circles with regard to non-Christian immigration to the shores of the St. Lawrence at a time when a Nazi influence was being felt.
How has the Catholic Church served as a messenger for certain corrosive ideas that continue, moreover, historian Pierre Anctil, to irrigate society from the depths of remote time? In a book that has just been published, Anti-Judaism and Nazi influence in Quebec, the professor at the University of Ottawa studied the case of the newspaper Catholic Action of the 1930s, one of the main disseminators of the teaching of the Roman Church in the land of the maples. The book provides a better understanding of the historical sources of the reluctance of certain circles with regard to non-Christian immigration to the shores of the St. Lawrence.
It is to help take a better measure of our world and its foundations that Pierre Anctil immersed himself in an analysis of the newspaper Catholic Action of the time. The untimely speeches of outrageous speakers, like those of Adrien Arcand, are known. But what do we know about theological discourse and the teachings of the Church, which constitute more refined platforms on which new hatreds are built that the scents of war will soon carry? “At the time, we saw the importance of Catholic ideas in a newspaper like The duty, but this is first and foremost a nationalist newspaper. I wanted to see at its source the expression of the Catholic ideas which irrigated all Catholics. “
Catholic Action proves to be an ideal ground for carrying out such historical excavations. Founded in 1907 in Quebec, Catholic Action is in the hands of the clergy. This journal sets the tone for the ideas that reign in force under the big top of faith, of which it claims to be the authorized messenger. “It’s a fairly austere, rigorous newspaper. He disseminates ultraconservative ideas, in the name of a doctrine, according to a certain idea of what Christendom is. He is hostile to immigration and to Jews. He is anti-modern and anti-Communist. The political and social teaching that it spreads is picked up by the conservative press as a whole. “
In the early 1930s, Catholic Action testifies to the isolationism of French-Canadian society. “She is not interested in Europe, with the exception of conservative France, the one on the far right, and Vatican affairs. The turn of international events will render obsolete, more than ever, the political positions defended by this newspaper.
“I wanted to better understand, beyond time, what had been able to link, around a thought, different people, but for whom religion was a common homeland, a homeland in itself. “
Blockages
Religion has motivated several socio-political blockages. In French Canada, says Anctil, anti-Jewish hostility, coming from the depths of conservative circles, has long been felt. This blockage is located all the same on the fringes of the main social concerns of the time: to survive in French in a British world, to resist material poverty on the pioneer front, to maintain one’s Catholic faith in the middle of a Protestant ocean. We must therefore avoid thinking that French Canada would have been marked as a whole by an active anti-Semitic impulse, explains this historian, whose work was recently recognized by the Gérard-Parizeau prize.
Sulfur-like rhetoric, held against Jews in particular and immigrants in general, nonetheless exist. They are nourished in part by a religious discourse which has long enjoyed a virtual monopoly of speech. We even find, in this breeding ground of ideas, the shoots left by European thinkers such as Édouard Drumont and Maurice Barrès, who grow fat with ignorance and ambient mistrust. In Quebec, a handful of Jews will pay the price. This is illustrated even in advertising. Catholic Action for example, will come to deprive itself of advertisements paid for by the merchant Maurice Pollack, in the name of ideological reasons. During the 1930s, foreign-sounding brands were singled out as being anti-French-Canadian from the start. Anti-Semitism plays a complementary role in this phenomenon of exclusion. The Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Québec, an echo chamber for Catholic nationalists, went so far as to recommend to French Canadians “the greatest circumspection in their relations with the Jews, and even the complete abstention from all relations with these people.” who are our enemies by racial animosity as well as by prescription of their religious code ”.
Before Nazi Germany led by Hitler also attacked Catholics, the French-Canadian clergy viewed rather favorably, at least until around 1937, its muscular action against the Jews.
Catholic Action, a subscriber to international news agencies, nevertheless offered honest coverage of what was happening in Germany, explains Anctil. But the newspaper’s management did not seem to take this into account in their editorial positions. So that Catholic Action believed, for a time, that Hitler and Mussolini were allies in his defense of a certain conservatism in the name of French-Canadian identity.
Decode our cultural relationships
“Despite the fact that times have changed, that secularism is now chanted everywhere, I think that we continue to decode our cultural and social relations, at least in part, according to religious symbols, beyond belonging. linguistics ”, as was the case for a long time in this French-Canadian society, argues Pierre Anctil in an interview with To have to on the occasion of the publication of his work in the Presses of the University of Montreal. In this imposing study of Catholic influences, illustrated through an analysis of the newspaper Catholic Action of the pre-war period, the historian wanted not only to shed light on the past, but also “to discover the origins of cultural resistance, which is still strong, around the wearing of non-Christian religious symbols, as shown in Bill 21, which is above all anti-Muslim ”.
The stiffening that gains a part of the social world when it comes to considering oneself in relation to others is very old, says Anctil. “He survives and floats” up to us, goes so far as to assert the historian, while questioning the way in which the question of national identity has been considered. For him, there is no doubt that the observations intended to magnify the difference “have remained affirmed by a discourse based on religious perceptions, even if we call ourselves secular”. Of course, times are changing. “It’s not the same thing anymore. There is a world between us and the 1930s. And it is no longer the Jews who are targeted in such discourse on identity, but rather the Muslims. “
Translator from Yiddish to French, connoisseur of Canadian Jewish history, Pierre Anctil seems to have a dynamo in his heart as he has published for thirty years on these subjects. In maintenance at To have to, he believes that his most recent work helps us “to rise to the height of our reality”, or at the very least that it equips us to better decode the foundations of our present. “Learning what happened is good for a historian. However, there is arguably more to be learned from this knowledge, ”he believes.
Well aware that “in history one cannot provide absolute proof”, Pierre Anctil nonetheless conceives that there is in our societies “an obsessive fear of what is not Christian, which comes to us from the past. », Which he is working to study. This obliterated past, left aside, nevertheless continues to crawl and point its nose on occasion. And beyond the passage of time, the historian considers that certain methods for apprehending reality do persist. “I think, yes, it stuck. There is a tunnel in WWII that takes ideas through to the other side, to this side of history. The Catholic right did not disappear because of the Quiet Revolution. We have paved over it, but it continues to grow, to pierce through the cracks in our society. Several signs are showing it to us right now. “