The issue of toponymic heritage is currently at a crossroads. The Commission municipale du Québec is conducting a public consultation on the renaming of the Estrie region, which some tourism stakeholders want to rename to the Eastern Townships, for “reasons of attractiveness”.
More than an anecdote of local interest, this debate actually concerns the general question of our collective relationship to memory. Beyond economic imperatives, toponymy sometimes offers the opportunity to stop and say “I remember”.
For nearly three quarters of a century, the two positions have clashed in a waltz-hesitation that resurfaces sporadically: is it Eastern Townships or Estrie that better serves the identification of the region in French?
It seems appropriate to recall the history of the toponym Estrie, in order to highlight what it symbolizes in sociolinguistic terms: a collective attachment to the French language and to the affirmation of the French fact in Quebec.
The toponym Estrie was created in 1946 by Maurice O’Bready with the stated aim of replacing Cantons-de-l’Est. The historian saw in the Eastern Townships a clumsy adaptation of the English Eastern Townships and he therefore invited his fellow citizens to consider adopting a more French form of assonance.
Practical and objective reasons as well as aesthetic and subjective considerations led O’Bready to want to abandon the name copied from English. In one of his many reviews of the Eastern Townships, he asserts that “the length of this makeshift paraphrase annoys our need for conciseness, just as its heaviness repels the inspiration of the best-intentioned poet.” We will not be surprised to learn that a particular attachment to the French language and to the culture of the people who spoke it marked this judgment.
During the years that followed, O’Bready’s proposal aroused lively discussions in intellectual circles and among the population. The debate continued for more than a decade, but the democratic conversation ended up leading to a majority in favor of Estrie. This new denomination then availed itself of considerable support from specialized circles interested in questions of toponymy, language and geography. The support given by the Académie canadienne-française to Estrie in 1951 undoubtedly contributed greatly to rallying general opinion.
Estrie supporters find it advantageous for many reasons. At the time, it was judged, like O’Bready, that the word was more “expressive”, “poetic” or “elegant”, and it was pointed out that it was shorter than Cantons-de- ballast. We also find that the name of Estrie harmonizes well with that of other Quebec regions such as Gaspésie and Mauricie, names that were created precisely to avoid or to replace periphrases such as the Gaspé Peninsula and the Saint Valley -Mauritius. The word therefore fits well into the toponymic landscape.
Finally, and arguably more than anything else, the French-sounding Estrie appeals to O’Bready’s compatriots. At the very moment when he proposed this toponym, a powerful refrancization movement animated Quebec. The word Estrie symbolizes for the French speakers of the time a reappropriation of the territory and the cultural space, which they reinvest with French names.
Having the good fortune to please a majority, the name Estrie settled in use quite quickly. In the 1970s, the toponym was so well established that it was used without hesitation, even if it was still only unofficial, in the names of many major businesses. It was adopted, for example, in 1972, to name the new shopping center in the region, the Carrefour de l’Estrie. It even serves as the title of the magazine Eastern Townships, founded in 1978 to cement regional identity. The following decade, the Commission de toponymie officially adopted Estrie to replace Cantons-de-l’Est and, it was believed, sealed the issue.
Today, the toponym Estrie recalls part of the history of French in Quebec. As such, one could without exaggeration consider that it carries an intangible heritage value. It symbolizes a fight, evokes an era, and resonates with questions of identity that are still topical. Moreover, it is not a pure morphological whim that the inhabitants of the region call themselves Estriens and not Cantonniers: the Estrie appellation has a stronger distinctive value, rooted in its past.
Abandoning Estrie would therefore not be a trivial act on the symbolic level. That would be thumbing your nose at the historical affirmation of the French fact in Quebec. This would erase all of a sudden the efforts made by previous generations to promote their language through a word that represented them. It would favor the fashion of the hour against decades of anchoring.