Anne-Marie Sicotte is both a historian and literary creator. She is trying to bring together, she says, a “biographical survey that began almost 15 years ago in the history of the 19the century of Quebec and its archival sources”, to the talent of recounting it in a lively way, a rare thing, a gift that she no doubt inherited from her grandfather, Gratien Gélinas. She does so in the first complete biography of Louis-Joseph Papineau.
Title Papineau the incorruptible, the monumental work is divided into two volumes: “The flame of the patriot (1786-1832)” and “The rebel president (1833-1871)”. Each has no less than 640 pages. Overflowing with erudite references, they above all allow Anne-Marie Sicotte to bring Papineau back to life “in all his humanity”, she points out to me, recalling that, “unknown and still controversial”, he “is nevertheless one of the Quebec’s most important historical figures”.
The historian Georges Aubin, a specialist in Papineau and his time, as evidenced by the multitude of books he has devoted to them, tells me that the biographer reveals to us “a politician more subtle in general than the governors sent by London to We. Even, he specifies, Durham, a refined British liberal who wanted the disappearance of popular French as a measure of civilization for our people, considered backward, does not reach his cultural level”.
Anne-Marie Sicotte dares to describe her work as “an update of the history of Quebec after the Conquest of 1760, described as it really is, insists the biographer: a collective, legal and parliamentary struggle against oppression, corruption and military terror”, against the despotism “of an oligarchy which controlled” the colonial government. The historian has the great merit of linking the resistance of Canadians to the foreign yoke and the international awakening of the subjugated peoples of the time.
According to Anne-Marie Sicotte, “the tricolor with horizontal or vertical stripes, whose proportions and colors symbolize the relational equality” of peoples, spread in the 19e century, in European countries, such as Italy, Belgium, Ireland, and even in overseas countries. According to the patriot press, Daniel Tracey, an illustrious militant of Irish origin, who died here in 1832, worked “to support our rights, and above all to attach to them” our English-speaking fellow citizens.
The movement led by Papineau went far beyond the ethnic struggle to reach the demands of human beings of all origins, lovers of modernity, democracy and freedom. It will always remain luminously topical, no offense to those who like to call it the very dubious word “nationalist”. This is what Anne-Marie Sicotte teaches us by not sacrificing beauty to truth.