The son of a tailor, Thomas Jones had few clothes to put on his back. At the age of 14, he was living as best he could, pacing the streets of the capital of an empire where the sovereign, Queen Victoria, was most concerned about her immediate relationship with Lord Melbourne, her adored prime minister.
The young Jones, in this XIXand Victorian century, hit the headlines. The newspapers of the Empire spoke of him. He had succeeded in the unusual feat of repeatedly breaking into one of the most closely watched residences of power in the world: Buckingham Palace. Better: he had lived there, at least a few days, without being spotted. In other words, he had managed to live on the hooks of all this wealth accumulated by those who deprived the greatest number of them.
How had he done it? On one occasion he had scaled the garden wall, then slipped through an open window. His instinct had then guided him through the endless maze of apartments, even into those of the queen. Why settle for less?
Unlike Aline Chrétien, the wife of the Canadian Prime Minister who, one night, had surprised an intruder in their official colonial residence, no one noticed, in the time of Queen Victoria, the presence of the young Jones . Until the day when he was found curled up under a rich sofa. They pulled him out of there by the scruff of his neck, bluntly, the scene creating a lot of excitement.
The newspaper Times, flagship of the information of the time, became interested in the case. In fact, the newspaper talked more about the couch under which the young man had been found than anything else. the Times wrote that this chair “is one of the finest and most expensive that can be seen, as much for the richness of the materials as for the perfection of the workmanship”. It had “been commissioned expressly for the use of royal and illustrious visitors who come to pay their respects to Her Majesty”. It was, in a way, the sofa where the Empire sat with all its weight on its subjects.
Quickly judged, Jones was sent to a “labor house”. These houses harshly subjected the indigent to incredible disciplinary measures. The universe of these workhouses », these prisons for the poor, will long be part of the imperial landscape. In 1824, for a simple debt to the baker, John Dickens had been arrested and imprisoned in one of these houses. His young son Charles, aged 12, future author ofOliver Twist and of David Copperfield, will be incarcerated there at the same time. Charles Dickens will stick labels on shoe polish boxes all day long. Entire families, like the Dickens, were subjected to this regime which marked lives with a hot iron while in Buckingham they worried about the effect of a hem.
After three months of confinement, young Jones was released. What did he do? He found a way to sneak back into the royal palace! How was that even possible? They put their hands on his collar. Once again he suffered the life of one of these prison-houses.
When he left, a circus wanted to hire him to show himself to the curious who wanted to see up close the one who had dared to live at the expense of those who lived at the expense of all of society. The police got hold of Jones as he wandered around the palace again… He was sent on boats for madmen, the galleys of time. During a stopover in Portsmouth, he escaped. He tried to walk back to the castle. They caught him and sent him back to sea. Some say he died between Tunis and Algiers. He had taken himself, it is said, to jump into the water to reach, in the middle of the waves, an illuminated buoy. Had he confused it with royalty? Others claim that he was sent to end his days in a penal colony in Australia, in order to protect Buckingham Palace.
Canada has lived, for years, like this young Jones. He makes himself believe that he has a place near this monarchy to which he attaches himself like a buoy. In a few days, during a visit to his colony, Prince Charles will be invested in Ottawa with the title of Commander Extraordinary of the Order of Military Merit. It will be the representative of his own mother, the Governor General of Canada, who will invest him with this new additional pompous title. The very one that Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois refused to meet a few days ago, saying he had better things to do.
In Quebec, the population remains inhabited by a kind of anti-monarchist schizophrenia. This opposition to the monarchy is limited, in fact, to acting as if it were possible to escape this reality simply by looking away. Thus he found himself repeating, on the occasion of the election of Shirley Dorismond in the ranks of the deputies of cackistan, that this could be the last time that a deputy takes the oath to the crown. It was enough, it was learnedly explained, to use a few new pretenses.
We love make-believe. Every year, we make ourselves believe that we celebrate patriots on the Monday before May 25th. Originally a non-working day in honor of Queen Victoria’s birthday, this date wonderfully bears witness to our illusions. From the 1920s, in the name of narrow nationalism, people thought they could obliterate this colonial reality by genuflecting before Dollard des Ormeaux, this false hero of a fantasized New France. For this Dollard, which quickly took a nose dive in front of the poverty of the facts which kept it in the air, we substituted its opposite symbol, that of the patriots of 1837-1838. Nothing, however, associates the republican fights of the patriots with a day of May. Should another holiday be needed? In cackistan, the Prime Minister decided the question. He has already argued that we have enough days off. Poor Canada…