The author is a professor of literature in Montreal, contributor to the journal Argument and essayist. He notably published These words that think for us (Liber, 2017) and Why do our children leave school ignorant? (Boreal, 2008).
I remember having slept, about thirty years ago, in one of the rooms of the Garneau house. In order to finance the maintenance of this heritage building, the former owner rented two or three rooms there to passing guests, curious or history buffs. He also visited the premises with admirable interpersonal skills and erudition. Thanks to the very well-preserved decoration and furnishings, and above all thanks to the magic of its words, we found ourselves immersed in the middle of the 19th century.e century ; the daily life of a bourgeois family of that time became palpable there.
These places of memory, even if they belong more to the small than to the great history, are important, because they make it possible to keep alive a link with the past. For many people, sharing, during a visit, the daily life of a 19th century familye century is often more evocative, more telling than reading an account of the battle of Saint-Denis or the debates surrounding the creation of United Canada.
When, in addition, the building and its interior are associated with the memory of the first historian of Quebec, François-Xavier Garneau, who was a tenant there during the last years of his life, the small story intersects with the big one and this enhances the importance of the place and the need to preserve it. The Garneau house keeps, among other things, the library of its famous tenant, and I remember having, during my visit, noted the titles of some of the works it contained. Having access to the readings of an intellectual of the past is a bit like entering into conversation with him; it is also, despite the decades and even centuries that separate us from it, to commune through a few common readings: Virgil, Plutarch, Bossuet.
This is one more reason to keep this Garneau house and, unlike the Minister of Culture and Communications, Mathieu Lacombe, I believe that it is the responsibility not of the government, but of the State to preserve the heritage of Quebec and Quebecers, a heritage that cannot be abandoned either at the expense of municipalities, for which it represents too heavy a financial burden, or at that of patrons who thus assume — we thank them — a charge that should be collective and public. The purchase by the State of this Garneau house would make it a place open to the public where the memory of one of the first historians of Quebec would be cultivated.
Oblivion
In terms of posthumous glory, François-Xavier Garneau is lucky, one might argue, to not already be too badly off: his statue sits proudly not far from the National Assembly; one of the main CEGEPs in Quebec bears his name, not to mention many streets across the province. Despite our motto “I remember”, the historical memory of Quebecers is so forgetful and so stunted that I am not sure that most students of the college in question know who this Garneau was who gave his name to the establishment qu they frequent. And they are certainly not the only ones.
Despite his imposing statue and his presence in toponymy, the historian Garneau is also the victim in contemporary Quebec of a more insidious forgetting. Even if the students of the college of the same name or the rare readers of the plaques affixed to the pedestal of his monument or to the wall of the house on rue Saint-Flavien vaguely remember who he was, they could not, if by chance the Curiosity pushed them there, to easily get to know his work. Today there is no current edition of his monumental Canadian history. From an editorial and historiographical point of view, this looks very much like an aberration. Or programmed amnesia.
More than 6,000 books are published each year in Quebec, but only a handful of old authors are preserved by republishing them. Of course, you can’t keep all the books printed in the last three centuries, and most of them don’t deserve it. But that the major work of François-Xavier Garneau (like that of several other important writers) is not regularly reprinted weighs on Quebec culture like an unconscious and depressing annoyance: contemporary authors know, even if they temporarily know a certain success, that they are inevitably doomed to oblivion.
What other censorship is worse than indifference?