The Quebec government, after the costly collapse of its Blue Spaces project, has just announced the creation of a National Museum of the History of Quebec. Is it permissible to ask who and what purpose such a matter serves?
Between the wars, Prime Minister Taschereau, son of a lord, launched a museum capable of imposing his reign on memory. In the midst of an economic crisis, the Museum of the Province of Quebec was built on the battlefield of the Plains of Abraham. The building is inspired by the grandeur that we attribute to a fantasized Antiquity. The architect claims, in his correspondence, to have been inspired by the temple of Aesculapius on the island of Tiberina and those, in Rome, of Jupiter Stator and Virile Fortune, as well as the villa Almerico Capra Valmarana. The resulting building will be used, for decades, to display numerous stuffed animals. It will be converted into what will become the National Museum of Fine Arts.
Fourteen bas-reliefs, works of the sculptor Émile Brunet, were cast to decorate the facade. They account, in part, for the exploitation of the country’s wealth. The Indigenous people are placed in a position of inferiority compared to the settlers. They are subject to the cross of the Church as much as to the iron of war. These human beings, presented almost naked despite the reign of winter, only appear sovereign before nature. These frescoes illustrate a national romance according to which the elites of two colonizing nations, apparently opposed, in truth joined hands with the intention of seizing natural resources and triumphing over the First Nations, in the name of civilization.
Having failed to find material to furnish this museum, the first curator of the premises, the archivist Pierre-Georges Roy, asked for money to make an immense wooden reproduction of the Wolfe-Montcalm monument, symbol of this fabricated colonizing alliance. He wants to place it in the entrance. This imitation monument will make us forget, he wrote in 1932, “that we are missing many things”.
On this building is also engraved, jumbled together, a series of 36 names of historical figures: La Fontaine, Baldwin, Cardinal Taschereau, Champlain, Papineau, Cartier, Montcalm, Wolfe, Lord Dufferin… We are here before a history of the great men, in the name of celebrating a power that these individuals come to reinforce, in the feeling of continuity. History presents itself marked by the names of this elite, in an inexorable sequence. In such a national novel, what is seen is the history of the dominant. The rest, the history of the majority, is left aside.
This way of looking at history, from an angle which reinforces power, continues to make its way to us, under a barely renewed exterior. The deception remains. It consists of making people believe that history must be transmitted and learned as in a school textbook, like a subject to be swallowed passively rather than a means of exercising critical thinking.
François Legault’s new museum, announced for 2026 at a cost of $92 million, will find its anchor point at Samuel de Champlain, assures the Prime Minister. He insistently stares at this zero moment of the identity myth which smiles upon him. His commissioner in this affair, the historian Éric Bédard, saw fit to indicate that “history begins with writing, and before history, there is prehistory”. A way for him to justify, by this convenient reduction, a sidelining of Indigenous people. When Lord Durham, full of affronts, said that French Canadians had neither history nor literature to deny them a place in society, would it have been more delicate on his part to speak of “prehistory” on their subject?
Faced with the outcry this caused, the Prime Minister had to mend his ways. He paid lip service to it, changing nothing in substance. The fact remains that its National History Museum will serve as a framework to highlight an old conservative conception of history, which is entirely in its image. Understanding the improvisation that governs this operation also requires situating it in the saga of the costly failure of the Blue Spaces. In 2021, this government announced, point blank, that it was going to provide Quebec with a network of parallel museums. These Blue Spaces have appeared in the news in the name of the need, according to this government of shopkeepers, to trumpet its pride in identity. In Percé, where this project was most advanced, millions were spent to reconfigure into a “Blue Space” a place which nevertheless only needed to be preserved in its integrity. Cost of the operation to date: more than 25 million dollars, without yet knowing what its use will be. Meanwhile, the network of Quebec museums, this very real one, continues to suffocate for lack of funding. To the point that the Musée de la Gaspésie is now considering closing.
The mix-ups linked to these museum improvisations have continued to multiply. In the fall of 2021, the government sold one of its most important jewels in Quebec for $2.2 million: the former Maison Chevalier museum. That’s less than it cost to restore it. A few months later, François Legault announced the construction, a stone’s throw away, of a copy of the Champlain Public Market, as it could be seen in the 19th century.e century. The duty had requested, in vain, the documents which justified the construction of such a pastiche.
In Old Quebec, should we emphasize that it is not the museums that are lacking, but the inhabitants? This district of the upper town continues to become a museum as tourists colonize it. By dint of having transformed these places into postcards, all these curators of official history have forgotten that life, that of those below and of ordinary people, has been transported elsewhere than in their dreams of a frozen nation. .