Every Tuesday, The duty offers a space to the creators of a periodical. This week, we offer you a text published in the magazine Mensvolume 23, number 2 (Spring 2023), which has just been published.
In the press of the first decades of the 20th centurye century in Quebec, the reader was most often unaware of the identity of the authors of the texts. A majority of articles bore no byline, and many opinion pieces were presented under a false identity.
The use of such fictitious signatures in Quebec has been addressed in Quebec historical research mainly for other genres of writing, in the context of literary production or the emergence of feminine writing. However, each of these genres commands its own regime of signatures.
If for the poet, the novelist, the historian and the journalist, some of the motivations for using assumed names may be similar, those which more specifically affect the world of the press are studied here.
For women, the pseudonym made it possible to venture into territories of action otherwise reserved for men. Public speaking by women did not fit well with the modesty expected of them and therefore constituted a transgression of the morals of the time.
Many other transgressions have been associated with the use of false signatures. Some perpetrators hid their identities for fear of reprisals from civil or religious authorities. For a member of the clergy, the deception could be aimed at deceiving the hierarchical superior. The priest and historian Lionel Groulx happened to do this to avoid the disapproval of a bishop.
But the false signature could also hide the identity of the priest from the population rather than from the superior, the objective then being to keep secret the intrusion of a member of the clergy into a debate or a field of interest where the authority of the Church was not recognized.
Still other motivations can be mentioned. For example, the same Lionel Groulx sometimes published laudatory reviews of his own works under a pseudonym in order to increase sales. Or again, using false signatures, writers exercising another profession compartmentalized their two professional lives in order to prevent one from harming the other, this type of strategy fading when one or the other another writing practice gained social recognition.
Pen names
What about newspapers, where anonymity and pseudonymity have been particularly frequent? It is known that certain journalists often signed their articles under false names, such as Jean-Charles Harvey to criticize the Catholic clergy and their control over education.
We will understand the interest in using pseudonyms in light of his dismissal as editor-in-chief of the newspaper The sun immediately after Cardinal Villeneuve of Quebec condemned a novel he had published under his legal name in 1934. But on the whole, while the newspapers were examined for the signatures of columns and women’s pages, they have for the rest largely escaped research.
However, each type of writing or publication space imposes specific conditions regarding the signature regime, which also vary depending on the era. Periodical publications, reaching the widest audiences with quickly consumed texts, did not enjoy the 19th century.e century only of weak recognition, gradually enhanced during the first half of the 20th centurye. These particularities were suitable for generating specific strategies for the press regarding signatures.
Such strategies must also be examined in the light of the effect that the fictitious signature can have on the reader, whether it is that produced directly by the invented name, or by the reader’s awareness of reading a false signature.
The creation of a journalistic signature, clearly revealing itself as false or, on the contrary, simulating a real name, obeys not only the personal considerations of the authors, but also those of the management and the editorial staff. Always in search of readers, the latter took into account the expected reactions of the readership when deciding whether or not to affix a signature, and if necessary when choosing it.
The same goes for the construction of the named character, to whom personality traits and areas of expertise can be attributed: the patriot, the joker who makes fun of politicians, the defender of strict morality, etc.
This is what is explored in the publications of André Laliberté and Eugène L’Heureux, two journalists who worked between 1918 and 1943 as editors and directors of the main newspaper in Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean, The Progress of Saguenay.
Their signing practices are examined in order to trace the strategies at work at the time of signing, whether individual, editorial or institutional. These journalists, one a priest and the other a layman, have distinct career goals and are not subject to the same constraints, which is reflected in their use of invented bylines. The precarious situation of the newspaper as well as the propaganda objectives of the diocesan Church also played a role in this regard.
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