It’s not every day that we witness the birth of an essayist in the strong sense of the term. The drum roll is therefore necessary to greet the publication of the work The identity schism (Boréal, 2022, 282 pages), a remarkable first essay by Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard.
A student of philosophy and political science at Laval University, Beauregard offers a brilliant interpretation of the political evolution of Quebec since 1960. His very fine understanding of the debates on Quebec identity, which he skillfully analyzes in a style both mature and inhabited, impresses. To write, at the age of 21, an essay of such strength is a feat.
Beauregard does not hide his political convictions. Son of a sovereignist father and reader, in his adolescence, of the books of René Lévesque, Pierre Bourgault and Claude Morin, the young man claims to be a center-right nationalist independence movement. Such beliefs should have led him to the Parti Québécois (PQ), but he chose instead to support the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) because he found there what he no longer found in the PQ, that is- that is to say the will to assume without embarrassment the “cultural burden” of Quebec.
His analysis is based on the concepts of cultural hegemony and war, respectively borrowed from the Italian Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) and the American sociologist James Davison Hunter (born in 1955). For Gramsci, the real power lies first in the ideological influence, in the capacity of a group to impose on the majority its vision of the nation, of history and of justice. There are therefore, in any society, ideological struggles to obtain this hegemony, as we see in the United States with the fierce cultural war between conservatives and progressives, theorized in 1991 by James Davison Hunter.
In Quebec, explains Beauregard, this war for hegemony pits nationalists against postnationalists. The former are in favor of a conception of Quebec as a French-speaking nation-state serving a “unitary Quebec political subject” including all citizens and carried by an “ethics of loyalty” summarized by the formula “Quebec of ‘on board “. The latter adhere to the multiculturalist ideology and see “Quebec as a fragmented political subject which must obey an ethic of otherness”. Today, the PQ and the CAQ represent the nationalist camp, while the Liberal Party of Quebec (PLQ) and Quebec solidaire (QS) embody the post-nationalist camp.
The presence of François Legault in power could lead us to conclude that the nationalists now hold the hegemony. Beauregard, however, says of Legault that he “always finds himself ideologically in opposition”. How to understand such a counter-intuitive statement?
From 1960 to 1995, explains the essayist, neo-nationalist ideology dominated the imagination to the point that even federalists had to partially adhere to its logic to avoid discredit. Even the PLQ is playing the nationalist card. Hegemony, then, presents Quebec as a legitimate nation in search of autonomy and as the rallying point for all citizens who recognize themselves in a common national identity.
The second referendum defeat and Parizeau’s unfortunate sentence on ethnic votes mark a reversal of perspective. The post-national ideology takes over and federalism imposes itself as a form of progressivism by putting forward the multiculturalist ideology, which refuses the common national identity, perceived as an instrument of oppression, in favor of the idea of a Quebec considered as an assembly of communities. The PQ and the Bloc Québécois, at the time, took refuge in a weak sovereignism, more progressive than nationalist.
The crisis of reasonable accommodations in 2006-2007 shook the postnationalist hegemony and revived the cultural war. The nationalist revival, centered on a defense of secularism, of the French language as well as on a proposal of reduction (and not of refusal) of immigration, takes again hair of the beast, thanks to the assured nationalism of Legault. However, this discourse, according to Beauregard, remains counter-hegemonic, as evidenced by the indignant reception reserved for it by the PLQ, QS, as well as several media and intellectuals.
As a CAQ independentist intellectual with a Republican leaning—a rarity—Beauregard concludes that the greatest legacy Legault could leave “would be a cultural victory for nationalism, a condition for the future flourishing of French Quebec.” Even those who disagree with this conclusion will have to recognize that an elite essayist has been born.