Historian Jocelyn Létourneau is an optimistic “bon-ententiste”. The rose-colored glasses with which he interprets our history inspire him with an irenic vision of the Quebecois journey and almost make him sing “everything is going very well, Madame la Marquise” on the ruins of the Conquest of 1760, in which he sees only a simple “Bifurcation”. As a motivational historian, Létourneau refuses drama and finds only happiness everywhere, except in Quebec nationalism. His enthusiasm is so great that he makes him take the colonized he meets for uninhibited citizens of the world.
In “Towards a decolonization of collective identity? », His contribution to the trial Quebec and its others significant (Quebec America, 2021, 448 pages), Létourneau pushes the cork of jovialism so far that one comes to wonder in what world he lives. I wouldn’t have said anything about this puzzling text if it had been signed by someone else. If I mention it, it is because I consider Létourneau to be a brilliant mind coupled with an elegant prose writer. This time, however, I do not manage to temper my criticisms as to his theses, as his speech borders on Newspeak.
Létourneau, whose work bears less on history as such than on the historical consciousness of Quebecers, that is to say on the general idea they have of their history, first of all goes back to findings, in many cases undeniable. For the most part, he notes, French-speaking Quebecers under 45 no longer worry about the national question, to which they prefer social and environmental issues. For them, English “is not the language of the alienating Other”, but “a different language which they also make their own.”
The national narrative codified by François-Xavier Garneau, in the 19th centurye century, which made survival our collective duty, and that of the Quiet Revolution, which demanded equality or independence from the Other, that is to say in English Canada, no longer resonate with them. . These young Quebecers, interculturalists and pluralists, notes Létourneau, are elsewhere.
For them, he continues, “independence is no longer a project, it is an instituted and lived reality, although it is not a constitutionalized and agreed reality”. They think of the world in terms of “interdependence, dispersed sovereignty” and the present, without however, insists Létourneau in an apparent contradiction, “dehistoricizing” their identity.
Let us assume that the picture is generally fair. But should we be delighted and refuse to question the content of this new vision of the world? This is the choice of Létourneau, visibly delighted with this turn.
This “silent revolution” of collective identity would testify, according to him, to the “confidence of young people”, who, finally freed from the weight of the old story sadly presenting Quebec as a nation prevented from flourishing, would no longer perceive themselves. like the vanquished, “but [comme] winners in their own way ”. These young people, according to Létourneau, would not indulge in comfort and indifference, but rather advance “between optimism and openness”. For the historian, hence my reference to Newspeak, to decolonize is simply no longer to perceive oneself as a colonized.
Now, what about the real? Does he justify this new historical awareness full of candor? Last December, Bob Rae, Canadian Ambassador to the UN, called Bill 21 discriminatory and deemed it incompatible with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, Quebec does not have its own voice at the UN to defend itself. This is addiction.
In a host of crucial areas, Quebec depends on Canada, while the reverse is not true. To defend French, Quebec depends on the Canadian Constitution, which it has not signed. To organize a referendum on sovereignty, it must submit to a federal law characterized by the arbitrariness of its rules.
All nations, of course, are interdependent, but none of those with state sovereignty would agree to give it up to become the province of another. Quebecers may well be deluded and content themselves, with Létourneau, with having a “small, almost sovereign nation-state”, they will not change, by an operation of the mind, their reality of nation “provincialized, annexed to the dominant nation ”, as the sociologist Jean Lamarre writes in Know the history of Quebec, a brochure summarizing the essential thought of historian Maurice Séguin, published by the foundation of the same name.
For Jocelyn Létourneau, decolonizing is forgetting that you are colonized, pretending nothing has happened, being a happy cuckold. Such carelessness, on the part of a historian of this caliber, disappoints.