At the start of the Quiet Revolution, Hubert Aquin rightly pointed out that colonized peoples tended to overvalue culture or symbolic productions to compensate for their inability to master political and economic reality. He attributed this phenomenon to colonial domination, which stripped the conquered peoples of their capacity to act for themselves, with the exception of the domain of culture, which was left to them in compensation. Unable to promote themselves in other fields of human activity, the colonized peoples were reduced to overinvesting in symbolic production which gave them the impression of existing while making them consent to their state of subordination.
He deepened his thinking in The cultural fatigue of French Canada, a text that proved to be prescient of the evolution of nationalist thought. Not sharing the fatalistic vision of history, he believed that only independence made it possible to reconstruct the totality of identity and to remedy this debilitating alienation which constitutionally manifested itself in the separation of fields of competence.
In this text of dazzling lucidity, Aquin enters into dialogue with the anti-separatists in order to thwart their sophisms and show that the search for independence is normal and legitimate. He first argues that there is no causal link between nationalism and war, as the anti-nationalists claimed. The tendency to conflict is a human phenomenon that is found in all types of societies, nationalism being only a scenario that does not obey any fate. Throughout history, other forms of social organization have practiced warfare, religious wars being a good example.
He also attacked the false premises of those who put nationalism and globalization in opposition, quoting Léopold Senghor who said: “we are invited to build the civilization of the universal by asking us to renounce our culture”. He argued that the particular could be part of the universal. Miron meanwhile used an image to illustrate this precept by saying that a Laurentian fir was as universal as a Mediterranean cypress.
Aquin also dismantled the inconsistencies of another thesis of the anti-separatists who associated nationalism and retrograde social thought. He explains that the nationalism of French Canadians is not destined to be socially right for all eternity. “Nothing forces me to believe that the reality of tomorrow will be that of yesterday and the day before yesterday. I don’t believe in the predetermined essence of peoples. Separatism is not a ferment of social regression and large groups or large multicultural empires are no more in line with history since they have all collapsed and split into several small groups.
Aquin also contradicts Trudeau on the definition of the French-Canadian nation, because the latter confined it to its ethnic character in order to devalue it in the eyes of history and accuse the nationalists of committing a sin against humanity. He maintains that the French-Canadian nation is also “poly-ethnic” because it has integrated citizens of origins other than French-Canadian and who live in French in Quebec, such as the Johnsons, Mackays, Aquins, Molinaris, etc
If the nation is homogeneous on the linguistic level, it is not so on the level of the ethnic origin. “The characteristic of nationalism is to be the political expression of a culture” and the French-Canadian nation, by freeing itself from Canadian domination, could in turn become a political nation. It is in and through political affirmation that the nation can exist and not through the preservation of its culture, which is doomed to failure within the framework of political dependence. […]
Aquin is aware of the ambiguity of the concept of culture and of the trap which consists in enclosing national identity in its cultural expression. […] During the first half of the nineteenthe century, the demands of the Canadians were not of a cultural nature, but of a political nature: to establish a democratic government and to obtain independence from Great Britain. It was following the suppression of the rebellions of 1837-1838 and the establishment of the Union of Canadas in 1840 that Canadians defined themselves as French-speaking Canadians. Becoming a demographic and political minority, no longer able to control the centers of political and economic decision-making, they were forced to think of themselves through their cultural particularism and to center their identity on the defense of culture. […]
The overvaluation of the cultural inevitably leads us to collective impotence and the derealization of the nation. We now have to get to the root of the problem if we don’t want to wither away into political insignificance.