In the heart of the Marais, in Paris, the Hôtel de Soubise is a magnificent private mansion which housed from the 15the century personalities as famous as Prince Thomas of Lancaster, the Duke of Guise and the poet Malherbe. After the Revolution, Napoleon housed his imperial archives there before the National Archives occupied it until today. It was there that in 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy planned to create a large museum of national history.
But that was without taking into account this fashion for the “deconstruction” of history which was in full swing among historians. After long debates and as many controversies, the project was abandoned. The socialist candidate François Hollande even made it a campaign promise.
Does this mean nothing to you? Two decades later, the project for a National Museum of the History of Quebec was barely two weeks old when it had already seen a truckload of criticism fall on it. We have even gone so far as to criticize a historian for recalling the obvious fact that history begins with writing and that first we must rely on archeology and anthropology.
What is the deconstruction of history that reigns supreme in our universities today? It is an essentially political project intended, under the guise of “science”, to clear the way by establishing a new history, from which the nations would be excluded benefiting only ethnic, sexual and other minorities. It is an incriminating story intended to enumerate the horrors that would be the lot of the West while forgetting that, despite their dark hours, our countries are still the only ones to have invented democracy, equality between men and women. women, tolerance towards ethnic, racial and sexual minorities and abolished slavery. It is a story passed through the sieve of political correctness to remove certain names, like removing statues. Attacking the very words of Emmanuel Macron, who declared to CBS that we had to “deconstruct our own history”, the historian Emmanuel de Waresquiel described them as “ahistorical”.
Far be it from me to deny that serious historians can be associated with this movement nor to assert that history’s only function is to flatter the national novel. But its function is not to transform itself into a court of inquisition either, as if our past was only a heap of ignominies and that behind each nationalist there was an unaware racist.
It is this same ideology of the erasure of nations which recently pushed the European Parliament to ask member countries to “put European and world history before national history” in order to create from scratch “a feeling of ‘European belonging’. In the name of this ideology, we should put Henry IV, Bismarck and Garibaldi aside in favor of a globalized, sanitized, disembodied history, without emotion or heroes, intended to create a new man. A man without roots offered as food to the throes of globalization. All that would be missing is to ask him to speak English, something the European Union is not shy about.
Since when did “openness to the Other” become self-effacement? As if the people no longer had anything of their own and had not each contributed in their own measure to the history of humanity. As if it were no longer permitted to say “we” and to highlight what, over the centuries, has formed these distinct and original nations which make the world splendor.
With regard to Quebec, this story is all the more admirable because it is that of stubborn resistance, the least of which was not knowing how to establish relationships with the Indigenous people at certain times. Relations certainly imperfect, but so much more respectful than were the American relegation and the Latin American massacres. To the point of forming a mixed race nation immediately crushed by the Empire.
A House of French History like a National Museum of Quebec History cannot rely on anything other than the accumulated work of historians, starting with the most illustrious. As Pierre Nora wrote, “history is an object where everyone must be able to recognize themselves apart from their political and partisan opinions”. It must strive for “a common truth” and cannot be taken hostage by any political movement whatsoever.
Why does national history retain its relevance? Because it is the only one capable of filling this “symbolic void”, this “loss of soul” of which Gérard Bouchard spoke and which allows us to go beyond the immediacy and obsession with the present which characterizes postmodernity. It is the only one that can be shared with young people as well as newcomers in order to allow them to participate in our adventure instead of locking themselves up in these ethnic ghettos which are multiplying throughout the world. History indeed remains this essential instrument which allows us to “make a nation”. The nation being, until proven otherwise, the only true place for the exercise of democracy.