Windows accompany our lives, punctuate them, bright or shady, depending on the light, the seasons and our moods. Mediation between interior and exterior, they embody openness or confinement, escape or refusal.ge. At Thanks to her recent paths, our collaborator Monique Durand opens a few windows overlooking here or elsewhere, very contemporary or rappeeling history. Fourth article of seven in our Windows series.
I asked for a table facing the window. Before my eyes, the bay of Baie-Comeau is reflected in my glass of sparkling wine. And the north shore of the river, still speckled with patches of snow, stretches eastward in a long steep arm.
A lot has happened in this bay. Transhumance of men from the “south” who landed there for decades to come and burn in the north, up to 30,000 in certain years, real annual migrations at the same time as those of snow geese. Swarms of men from the Gaspé, in particular. My old friend Walter was one of them. He left in the fall with his boots and his axe, the batteries fully charged. And returned to Gaspésie late in the spring to find his wife and nine children.
I see him distinctly with his thick beard like a porcupine’s fleece. He came home with lice, his feet on fire, his shoulders bruised from having struggled so much with the spruce trunks, and a meager paycheck. Day after day he had repeated his exploits, equal to his reputation as the best lumberjack in the camp, piling up ropes and ropes of the flesh of the trees. He left a little of his own flesh there every year. In a life where victories were rare, this was his triumph. He had won on something. He returned home proud as a pope.
I see him in a dream too, not a pope, but a bishop, Mrs.gr Napoleon-Alexandre Labrie. Her Letter on the forest of 1948, little known, has remained in the annals of the history of Quebec as the manifesto of a visionary being, a punchy epistle that disturbed the political authorities (Maurice Duplessis was then Premier of Quebec), economic and nuns of the time, not to say who stole their feathers. A writing that still resonates strongly today, 74 years later.
This pastoral letter deplores the conditions in which men work. “We treated the forest worker like a machine. And openly criticizes the unbridled and chaotic exploitation, in the name of corporate profit, of the North Shore forest. “We pushed it back like an enemy,” he grumbles, urging Quebec to model itself on the management of forest cover in Scandinavia. Without a concern for regeneration, he warns, the forest will be peeled, mowed, razed. “The ax that vibrates on the knots takes on the resonance of a tocsin,” says the bishop. We are in 1948! Before The boreal error by Richard Desjardins. Even before the words “ecology” and “sustainable development” were popularized.
Small rigid autocracies
In the bay, the tide recedes, clearing the bottom of the river one meter at a time. The sun sinks under the clouds. Everything becomes bronze. Delight of the palate with this smoked salmon that Lynn, the owner, is serving me at the moment. Enchantment of the eyes glued to the window. “We need to develop a culture of looking at the landscape,” declared landscape architect Philippe Poullaouec-Gonidec in an interview with the To have to last summer, the landscape contributed to happiness. ” Yes !
Back to our man. Napoléon-Alexandre Labrie, born in 1893 in Godbout, a small forest town located further east, between Baie-Comeau and Sept-Îles, also rose up in his Letter on the forest, against so-called “closed” cities. “We have created rigid little autocracies in our country. »
Baie-Comeau was then one of them, belonging to Quebec North Shore (QNS) and its owner, Colonel Robert McCormick, who came to set up a paper mill there in 1937 to feed the pages of the newspaper. Chicago Grandstand, and establish a village there where the workers he employs would live. “Industry sought happy servants, continued the prelate, who would lack nothing but who would remain servants, totally at the disposal and at the mercy of their masters. ” And wham !
Under the nose and beard of the QNS, the indomitable bishop is planning a big coup: to found a new town, a little west of Baie-Comeau, on the banks of the Manicouagan River. This new city will be called Hauterive and will be administered by civil authorities, like a normal municipality. Under the leadership of M.gr Labrie, Hauterive will have a hospital, a normal school and a college from which the first graduates trained on the North Shore will graduate. The clergyman will also encourage the creation of cooperatives.
You have to see this little visual gem that has survived from history, where the man Labrie proceeded, on April 17, 1948, to cut down the first trees on the site of the future Hauterive. Dressed as a bishop, large red belt at the waist, rolling up his sleeves, he logs at full speed, the Holy Cross at his neck swinging to right and left. Then he goes from the ax to the godendard. The forest, monseigneur knows!
Move the capital of the diocese
The lights in the windows of Baie-Comeau are starting to light up like small, pale fires in each house. Evening is approaching. The back of salmon in chef’s sauce is a delight.
The hero did not just bequeath a new city. It changed the destiny of this Quebec region called Côte-Nord, the first land where Europeans landed on this side of the Atlantic. A large part of the destiny of North America was played out there. By making Hauterive the seat of the new diocese he had just inherited, which extended from Tadoussac to Natashquan, he dethroned Havre-Saint-Pierre of this title and reversed the poles of this immense region, transplanting his heart there 500 km West. Hauterive, he thought, would be closer than Havre-Saint-Pierre to the nerve centers of the rest of Quebec.
Today, the population of the greater Baie-Comeau region is around 20,000 inhabitants, that of Havre-Saint-Pierre, 3,500. Note that Quebec forced the merger of Baie-Comeau and Hauterive in 1982 , which was realized in pain.
Almost no light now, except for a low orange-pink spot in the horizon. “Companies will get rich and leave without knowing our misery, but we will stay,” wrote our man in his famous letter.
My Gaspesian Walter continued to cross the river with an ax between his teeth to go, half dead to come back. He loved the forest more than himself.
Napoleon-Alexandre Labrie did not stay. He resigned in 1956 “for personal reasons”. He went to live in Quebec, where he died in 1973, at age 79. He never wanted to return to the North Shore again. A documentary by Robert Tremblay underlines that seeing the coast again would have been too painful for him. Strange character, a hyperactive at the same time as a romantic. Was he afraid of dying? To die seeing his coast, his forest, his life, his work? Will this withdrawal have made life easier for him? There are sometimes shattering ruptures, which have meaning only for oneself, to others incomprehensible.
My window is now as black as Lynn’s coffee. It is dark in Baie-Comeau.