Rimouski, curious people lined up to see, as best they could, through the dirty window of a mausoleum in the poor local cemetery, the embalmed body of Dr Gaudreau. In 1875, Elzéar Gaudreau was wrong to die in exile in California. His own had quickly put his body into the hands of excellent American embalmers. His remains, prepared with the greatest care, had been brought back by train.
Should we wonder why, in his will, this expatriate doctor feared so much “the good people of Rimouski”, begging them to grant him, as he wrote, forgiveness “for wrongs and scandals? [qu’il aurait] could give them ”? Was it just a time-honored formula, in the name of the all-powerful oversight exercised by religion?
Wasn’t he reproached, like others besides, for having taken his legs around his neck, for having fled his country, for having committed himself to a bias, that of living his life, even in the distance, while putting his hand, along the way, on the heart of an American? Because after all, by virtue of what if not, did he need so much to rehabilitate his image by such contritions in front of his own?
The great fire in Rimouski, in the spring of 1950, led to the destruction of the mausoleum of Dr Gaudreau. Had it not been for that, his body might have remained frozen there, unchanged. At the end of the war, this mummified remains still offered itself to the contemplation of multitudes, without showing signs of withering.
Why, on the banks of the river, would one have been tempted to take an interest in Moscow, in Lenin’s mausoleum, while an equally morbid curiosity, imbued with the same fascination for a frozen social order, was also exercised close to home? The Soviet political system, which was not without reason to distrust, could not stand to be called into question any more than ours. He deployed, to a certain degree, the same flood of holy images and sanctifications to convince of its unsurpassable character, of its supreme value. We often throw the same illusions onto others as those that keep us from despairing of ourselves.
Stalin, red master of this black regime, sees himself as an engineer of souls, those of the living as well as the dead. Under his influence, as in Catholicism, novels were censored. Literature is considered as a simple lever capable of raising the vision that this system intends to give of itself, while annihilating its opponents. The illusion, put forward in the name of a cult of “Soviet realism”, is supposed to shield the reality of the executions, the ill-treatment, the camps, the famines, the mental restrictions, the inequalities camouflaged in a series of false pretenses. The idea that this is one of the deadliest regimes in history usually satisfies those who otherwise celebrate with closed eyes the cult of borders as much as the humanism of the IMF and financial capitalism, which do not need camps or executions, it is true, to impose misery and impoverishment.
In 1936, in the Soviet Union, Nikolai Yezhov became People’s Commissar, supreme chief of the political police. In a famous photograph, Stalin stands beside him, as does Molotov, Minister of Foreign Affairs. When Yejov is arrested and then shot, this image is no longer tolerable for the authorities. The photograph is redacted from the presence of Yezhov. A photograph retouched in this way is a political gesture. Basically, it is less a question of bending reality than of transmitting an unambiguous message: even the light must bend in front of political aspirations stated as the only possible horizon, under the almighty star of power. In other words, it is not admitted that history can know imperfections. Isn’t there something there that joins our time?
It has been a long time now that, in today’s society, digital applications of all kinds have allowed us to remove or magnify, without difficulty, substantial portions of images to replace them with others, more consistent with ideas we have of life in the almighty realm of consumption. These manipulations are now available thanks to a multitude of simplified applications, purposes which no one discusses. Engaged more than ever in a society that cultivates the cult of the image, we make visible the surface of our existence, smoothed by digital brushes. Anything that violates this idealization is discarded and languished in oblivion.
The launch of a new phone, announced in large numbers by the giant Google, put as much as possible on this trivialization of image transformations, thanks in particular to a “magic eraser”. The giant of algorithms, these new masters of realism, can predetermine what you want to erase or highlight, in the name of bringing it into line with the ambient order. Everyone now carries a portable People’s Commissar with them.
Consider travel photographs as an example. This genre is a perfect testament to our desire to consume the world. The tourist industry created, before the pandemic at least, incredible traffic jams on the same sites. With a digital application, you can now suggest that you were alone in the Louvre contemplating The Mona Lisa, which normally attracts 30,000 people per day. However, no one will be fooled by the deception, each having access to the same digital artillery. But it does not matter: your representation will be in conformity with the smooth, the altered and the transfigured, henceforth held to be the only reality entitled to citizenship.
Each era has its scarecrows, its interchangeable Stalin, its mummified visions of the world and the accompanying genuflections, in the name of the agenda.