Posted at 12:00 p.m.
On the sidelines of the screening of Francine Pelletier’s film Battle for the soul of QuebecYves Boisvert examines “the conservative drift of Quebec nationalism”1. Since this documentary makes me one of the architects of the Parti Québécois identity shift during the 2000s and this shift is described as a “drift” or a “tragedy”, which the columnist of The PressI believe it is necessary to come back to certain aspects of this film.
I accepted in good faith to participate in this film, hoping that justice would be done to the point of view that I knew to be contrary to that of the director. Those who see it will find that unfortunately this did not happen. I don’t mind the director making her point of view prevail, but it seems to me that she should have allowed so-called conservative nationalism to assert its vision of Quebec other than in references to Lionel Groulx, Henri Bourassa, the Corpus Christi processions, or even the rise of the extreme right aimed at discrediting him, even ridiculing him.
The film makes me the apostle of a pastism that is as unrealistic from a sociological point of view as it is doubtful from the point of view of collective identity.
If the director had retained other passages from the interview that I gave her, the spectators would have noticed that it is in no way a question of rediscovering a mythified past in which old French Canada would appear as an ideal. and whose disappearance we should regret. Nobody in Quebec, it seems to me, wants the revival of the old French-Canadian world. No one misses Cardinal Léger, or even Lionel Groulx.
However, I do not reject the role attributed to me by Yves Boisvert following Francine Pelletier. In any case, the main thing is not due to the role that I was able to play, with others, in the inflection of the nationalist discourse at the end of a fairly long period marked by the sovereignist bad conscience after the failure of the referendum of 1995, when Quebec nationalism sought to evade accusations from all sides about its supposed closure to others and its fundamentally ethnicist character. The shift that occurred during the 2000s had the effect of restoring the legitimacy of the historical French-speaking majority as a political subject aspiring to a certain continuity in its historical journey. This, not, as the documentary suggests, to go back to the good old days, but quite simply, and as for all the other peoples of the world, to be able to look to the future by referring to the long history of community and see themselves as historical actors.
The Lévesques, Laurins, Marois and their traveling companions have never wanted anything other than the affirmation of a “we”, formed over the course of the long history of Quebec and whose inclusion of the “others” has always been one of the sizes. When René Lévesque titles the first chapter ofQuebec Option “Us others”, he designates the reality of a French-speaking community that recognizes itself as a historical actor, calling to him all those who want to write the history of Quebec by his side. In the same way, when Camille Laurin wants to make French the language of all Quebecers, he reflects the legitimate desire of this majority to see their language recognized but also to offer Quebec diversity a meeting place. It is not the language of French Canadians that he consecrates in this way, but that of the Quebec nation and all its components.
Yves Boisvert, following in this the thesis supported by Francine Pelletier, imputes to me the desire to have advocated a “readjustment”, that is to say a return to the affirmation of a “French-Canadian us”. We are here at the heart of a confusion skillfully maintained by the detractors of this so-called conservative nationalism.
The We in question is not French-Canadian but Quebecois. This distinction is crucial. A French-Canadian nation would indeed be an ethnic nation, while the Quebec nation forms a political community and designates the Quebec people in all its components.
That said, it would be wrong to force the dichotomy ethnic nation and civic nation. The Quebec nation would mean nothing if there did not exist at its heart a majority that history has forged over the centuries and to which many people from elsewhere have come to join. and who have made Quebec what it has become.
The battle for the soul of Quebec is not the one that opposes a fantasized right to the progressivism of good civic nationalists, but the one that takes place in the secrecy of the Quebec soul, where doubt settles as to the legitimacy to say “we”. René Lévesque saw an obviousness in this us. By a disturbing return of history, here it is incriminated under the pen of Yves Boisvert.
It is a very strange lawsuit that is brought against this small French-speaking nation in America whose fight has always been to convince itself that it has the right to exist. The right to say “we”.