In 1948, the young secularist from here Maurice Blain dared to send one of his student articles to his idol, the French writer André Gide, Nobel Prize for literature. Surprise! The latter replied: “The admirable thing is that your text appears in a review in Montreal. You know, even better than I, how French Canada remained closed to me and declared itself hostile to what it considered a very harmful influence; that of my writings … “
Montrealer Maurice Blain (1925-1996), little-known thinker of secularism, to whom historian Yvan Lamonde dedicates the essay Prune and save the’tree, has, explains the author, “pruned the tree of Quebec’s past quite radically”, but, he specifies, “without cutting it down”. For him, Blain’s approach sheds light on the intellectual evolution between the untimely manifesto Refusal global (1948), by Paul-Émile Borduas, and the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, more calm.
It shows that the Law on the secularism of the State, adopted by Quebec in 2019, remains the result of a slow and tortuous process. Blain, who has chosen the notarial profession as his profession, expresses in particular the method and the prudence of this path. According to him, Quebec Catholicism, sclerotic, remained foreign to the effort of research and to freedom of the mind. He writes: “After three centuries of fundamentalism, we have not started to make a secular history of ideas. “
Lamonde has the perspicacity to point out that, for Blain, Quebec is stuck between an overly easy admiration of France and an inexcusable literary ignorance of its own continent: America. The Montreal notary summed it up sharply in 1952: “Our extreme spiritual deprivation places us in the face of the formidable America, that is to say of ourselves. “
Secularism, because of cultural pluralism and the diversity of continental sensibilities that it implies, must, in its eyes, raise us above the particularism of a religion or a vision of the world. For him, it “is quite simply the consent of the citizen, believer or unbeliever, to the guaranteed and institutionalized arbitration, by the State, between the Church and the nation, of two inseparable freedoms, the interior freedom of the act. of faith and civil freedom of religion ”.
To make this concrete, the Mouvement laïque de langue française (1961-1969) was founded in Montreal, of which Blain was to be the first president before his resignation from the post in 1963 and his distance from the fight for secularism which he then found too radical. He rejects the socio-political enlargement that the writers Jacques Godbout and Pierre Maheu give to the struggle.
Lamonde notes, as with regret, Blain’s “determination” “not to follow in the footsteps of nationalism, including independence”. Secularism alone would not, alas, ensure total liberation!
Excerpt from “Pruning and Saving the Tree”