Fifteen years ago, the Bouchard-Taylor commission ruled on reasonable accommodation, religious symbols in the public service, the crucifix and municipal prayers. Since then, the recent law on the secularism of the state (law 21) is threatened with legal proceedings in Quebec as in Canada in the name of “religious freedom”. What distance should we take to calmly approach the debates on secularism about this law democratically voted by the majority of the Chamber?
The legal actions relate essentially to the marks of religion in national education and, more broadly, to the modes of “living together” in a changing country. Are these questions specific to our time, or do they not deserve to be put into perspective over a longer period? As a historian of literature and as a citizen, I believe that secularism must still and always be better understood and defended in its principles, in its application, but also in its historicity.
The idea that these tensions between the State and the religions would be of the most recent in Quebec and completely cyclical, that they would be linked to new questions of immigration, cultural and religious diversity, is widespread, but the history tells us just the opposite. It reminds us that, from the outset, Quebec has experienced debates on the religious neutrality of the state, on the relationship between schools and religions, on civic equality, on freedom of religion, but also on freedom of conscience.
For my part, I situate the sources of free thought at the end of the 18e century, the time when the first French-speaking scholars of the colony recently ceded by France to the British were speaking. Here we are at the very origin of the province of Quebec. It was then that, thanks to the new printing press (1764), strong opinions on state affairs and religion appeared in the public sphere. A form of proto-secularism is emerging there.
Literary and philosophical controversies erupt in the Montreal Literary Gazette (1778). There are favorable comments on the works of Voltaire. The students of the College of Montreal deliver there under pseudonyms freed texts which irritate their Sulpician masters, to the point that the latter will obtain the closing of the newspaper and the imprisonment of its animators. Pierre du Calvet calls for the creation of an elective assembly chamber; he promotes a higher education not reserved for the training of priests and which would be addressed to “all classes of Citizens of the State”. Vast program that will inspire the first Canadian constitution of 1791.
This concern for non-clerical public education is in tune with the times. A survey was launched in 1789 on “effective means to prevent the progress of ignorance”. The education system would be neutral, free from any religious denomination and managed by a board made up of as many Canadians as English. The Bishop of Quebec, M.gr Hubert opposed it, unlike his own coadjutor, Charles-François Bailly de Messein.
Professor of rhetoric and man of the Enlightenment, this Montrealer deplores the absence of an institution of higher learning in Quebec. Bailly de Messein advocated the establishment of a Quebec university whose professors would be recruited from among “men without prejudice.” It also thunders against the “proto-defenders of ignorance in the 18e century “. No theology in the curriculum of this public university open to both denominations, but whose neutrality would be guaranteed by the government. As for religious practice in the City, the wise professor restricts it to private space or places of worship.
What is striking in the approach of the tempestuous coadjutor is the care he took to publish his opinion from February to October 1790. Meanwhile, he again publicly attacked his bishop in an open letter to the Quebec Gazette. This is then another taboo subject in the Church: the question of religious holidays (already castigated by Voltaire). The following fall, a petition in support of the establishment of a “University of the Province of Quebec” appeared in the Quebec Gazette.
Still on the subject of education, a former student of the Sulpicians, Henry Mézière, admirer of the French Revolution and author of The Northern Bastille (1791), will say of his alma mater : “a College entrusted to ignorant Ecclesiastics was the tomb of my young years; I drew from it a few Latin words, and a perfect contempt for my teachers”.
We are a long way, with the current Bill 21, from the anticlericalism of the very first Quebec intellectuals. It is because the Catholic Church is no longer as “conquering” as it once was. The deconfessionalization of the school and social services is acquired, with (in principle!) the primacy of the civil over the religious. But here it is: other denominations, other religious fervour, other intransigence appear today, which relaunch the question of the expression of faith in public services, especially at school.
Do these anti-secular upheavals take into account the historical evolution of secularism in Quebec and the principle—conquered after a hard fight—of the State’s religious neutrality? Without the latter, how can freedom of conscience and freedom of religion be guaranteed in Quebec in the face of Canada’s multiculturalism?