The story is firstly that of Francis Jaennedec, a collaborator wanted by the French authorities for war crimes. Taking advantage of a whole chain of complicity in his flight – religious, intellectual, political – he arrived in Quebec dressed as a priest and armed with false papers, before hiding in Bas-du-Fleuve under the identity of a certain Count Henri de Saint-Drouet.
Incredible? Wacky? Impossible ? Think again.
With In Laurentiaher third novel, Marie-Andrée Lamontagne ambitiously and freely appropriates a rather little-known part of our history called the “Bernonville affair”, named after Jacques Dugé de Bernonville (1897-1972). A French collaborator known for his participation in torture and for his active complicity with the Gestapo.
Both the character and the model were able to live peacefully among us thanks to a small nationalist elite who fueled the most conservative currents of French thought, who opened their arms at the end of the Second World War to a handful of war criminals on the run. whom they considered more or less as political refugees.
Bernonville – who was also referred to (falsely) as “count” – lived in Quebec between 1946 and 1951, before continuing his run to Brazil.
“I wanted, in all humility, to capture something of the French-Canadian psyche,” explains Marie-Andrée Lamontagne in an interview. Because it seems to me that through fiction, nourished by history, it is possible to approach a certain reality. »
The novelist, who recalls that overall, the province of Quebec was very conservative at the time, says she was struck by the way in which these French militiamen, “who had blood on their hands”, were able to be welcomed here , even when all light has been shed on their past.
The author of Green and of The man with the sleigh (Leméac, 1998 and 2012), journalist and translator born in 1958, who notably edited the Livres section of the newspaper Duty (from 1998 to 2003), reconnects here with his deep, “rather imaginative” nature, after having given us in 2019 the reference biography of the writer Anne Hébert (Anne Hébert. Live to writeBoreal).
“Regularly when I immersed myself in this era,” she says, “I came across eminently romantic scenes. And as I forbade myself from inventing to write the biography of Anne Hébert, I put under the bushel all these elements, which were attested historical events. From there, I allowed myself a lot of freedoms. »
Like this attempted putsch targeting Maurice Duplessis, the conservative prime minister, who, in the novel, appears lukewarm in the eyes of the ultras in the cause of a new kingdom of Laurentia, a fantasized space “at once geographical, historical, mental and spiritual”.
Make the shadows speak
We will also come across Jean Bruchési, Jean Le Moyne and even, lurking in the shadows, the silhouette of the poet Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau. As well as a certain Robert, a key figure in a French-Canadian Vichy nebula in whom many will not hesitate to recognize the historian Robert Rumilly, a former member of Action Française — the far-right royalist movement of Charles Maurras and Léon Daudet — who settled in Quebec in 1928. A sort of “smuggler”, convinced of the decline of France and who was convinced of having found here a “new France” more in line with his ideals.
In Laurentia takes us from Brittany to Quebec, from the streets of the Old Capital to Saint-Pacôme-de-Kamouraska, via Norway. In this novel, on which she worked for five years, Marie-Andrée Lamontagne tells us, making multiple trips back and forth, of the flight of this Jaennedec across Liberation France, from monastery to monastery, until his installation in the province of Quebec under its new identity.
The novelist adds to all this the affair of the treasure of the Polish castle of Wawel hidden in Quebec by Duplessis, obsessed with the idea of having to return it to communist power in Poland. An incredible story, partly true, assures the novelist.
She also wanted to explore, casually, our relationship with France. “While doing research for the biography of Anne Hébert, I saw in several interlocutors a painful feeling of being outside of History, away from the cultural life that counts, far from France. »
This is what the essayist Gilles Marcotte called, she recalls, the “French-Canadian spiritual drama” and these intellectuals torn between the cultural desert of the Saint-Laurent valley and the ancient glimmers of a motherland idealized and poorly understood.
In all cases we are swimming in complete ambiguity – historical, moral, political. It is a rich breeding ground for the novel, the literary genre that is perhaps best suited to exploring our contradictions. In her own way, Marie-Andrée Lamontagne exercises one of the prerogatives of the novel: making the shadows speak.
And one thing is certain, for her, it is a genre that does not bring clarity. “The subject remains chiaroscuro, but what the novel perhaps offers is a sort of ability to project oneself and enter the mental universe of others. It allows you to try to understand each other’s references. The novel, ultimately, might be a common space that is too often missing in life, and in today’s society more than anything. Because everyone is often stuck to their positions, this is what I observe around me more and more. »
An open window
Despite a story in which men seem to play the main roles – or believe they do – women play important roles. Wife, daughter, secretary or nuns, the many secondary female characters who evolve in this world of men, they are accomplices, observers, sometimes also rebellious under docile appearances, have a will of their own.
Starting with “the one who reports this story”, the narrator who materializes, discreet and slightly ironic, almost everywhere in the novel and who Marie-Andrée Lamontagne envisaged as “the very incarnation of freedom”.
By means of ample and tense prose, this great reader of Lewis Carroll has at times also imbued her novel with a layer of dreaminess and wonder. This is also where In Laurentia may bring to mind a little the books of the Polish Olga Tokarczuk, also capable of freely seizing History and making it waltz with the imagination. Also out of a taste for the play between reality and fiction, the author insisted on integrating a certain number of illustrations into the novel as if to reinforce the often misleading impression of truth.
A freedom, believes Marie-Andrée Lamontagne, which must however be exercised without moral overhang. “As a novelist, I don’t see why I should take a position. This is not the function of the novel as I understand it. Novels are windows open to life. This French-Canadian psyche took place, it was nourished in various ways. The historical events which served as the basis for the novel took place. »