Quebec parliamentarians closely followed the French Prime Minister’s speech on Thursday. The words chosen were strong, giving Franco-Quebec ties a color of eternity, of eternally renewed youth. Something happened when the guest of honor declared the following: “Some people undoubtedly thought that French was destined to disappear from the map of North America. They didn’t know the Quebecers…”
He could not finish his sentence as the parliamentarians spontaneously and loudly expressed their agreement. We never talk about it, but lurking deep in the Quebec consciousness is the deep feeling of being survivors of history, escapees from disappearance, survivors. All it takes is for someone to remind us of this for a sense of pride from the depths of time to spring forth.
De Gaulle had raised a crowd of 10,000 people gathered in the main square of Expo 67 by using similar words, on the risk of definitive defeat faced by the inhabitants of New France, once the English conquest was over. “One might believe that this past having been marked by such pain, Montreal would have lost its French soul in doubt and erasure,” he said. Miracle ! It has not happened. »
The friendship of France, the fraternity, the trade and all that, it’s good, it’s good. But there is better. Much better. Before de Gaulle, no foreign head of state had shown as much respect towards the representatives of French Canadians — Jean Lesage, Daniel Johnson — as he did. His arrival in Quebec in 1967 represented for Francophones, with a patent inferiority complex, economically dominated, linguistically oppressed, politically marginalized, the unprecedented recognition, by a giant of history, of their value.
In Quebec, then all along the Chemin du Roy, in each speech he praised French-Canadian resilience — “unbelievable perseverance,” he said — through two centuries of isolation. De Gaulle came to tell Quebecers that he recognized not only the strength they had demonstrated in history, but the brilliance of their rebirth, since the beginning of the 1960s. He went so far as to tell them that, if the France wanted to stand alongside this new Quebec; it also needed it, its modernity, its youth, its energy, to build together a common French-speaking future. In short, the general offered Quebecers what they were most thirsty for: respect.
Gabriel Attal’s speech took up these themes, praising in particular Quebec youth, the blood of young soldiers, notably of the 32e Regiment, paid to contribute, twice, to saving France. Respect and recognition. Here again, for the Quebecers of 2024, rare commodities.
That would already be a lot. But there is also, even rarer, contrition. When with “Long live free Quebec!” », de Gaulle committed, from the balcony of Montreal city hall, one of the greatest interferences in the life of an allied country in the history of democracies, he was on his third visit. He first came after the liberation, in 1944, then in 1960, just before the election which would bring the quiet revolutionaries to power.
This stay took him in front of the monument on the Plains of Abraham which commemorates the fight of 1759, the one which will mean that New France will no longer be spoken of except in the past tense. While the great Charles was holding a pose during the usual speeches, returning to the story of the battles, his aide-de-camp, François Flohic, heard the aide-de-camp of the Lieutenant Governor of Quebec, Colonel Martin, slip to him ear: “That’s when you cursed French people abandoned us!” » Flohic, stunned, shortly after related the anecdote to his president.
He doesn’t take it badly, because he shares this opinion. “Louis give in to the derision of the Court, which mocked, like Voltaire, “a few acres of snow towards Canada”. He abandoned our sixty thousand settlers to their fate. It was a dishonorable action, it had to be erased. »
Gabriel Attal began his speech by mentioning Cartier and Champlain. Prisoner of the timeline, he could not avoid this painful moment. He did so by quoting René Lévesque, who spoke of “two centuries where a gap of ignorance and misunderstanding was built.” Attal continued: “An eclipse, of two centuries. A guilty eclipse. » The beauty of this guilt-taking is that it was neither expected nor necessary. So, generous. An old quarrel, an old resentment, forgotten in 2024, but still alive in 1967. Mayor Jean Drapeau had shown superhuman courage by responding to de Gaulle, two days after his flight from the balcony: “We have learned to live alone for two hundred years of abandonment. » He recalled that, among the French elite, the fate of the Quebec people “has never been, until you, Mr. President, the subject of any particular interest”. Therefore, “there is no gratitude to be expressed towards successive French governments”. Hard.
The truths were therefore all told almost 60 years ago. The youngest prime minister in the history of the French Republic – his advisors and his scribes – needed a depth of vision, a desire to get to the bottom of things, a fine knowledge, perhaps, of the psyche Quebecois, to choose to insert into an otherwise very modern discourse these historical markers which have little to do with transactions, contracts or good manners, and everything to do with the historical anchoring which means that two nations have forged together, through drama, heartbreaks and repairs, a relationship of such depth that it allows Mr. Attal to announce that “nothing and no one will be able to break it”, because this ancient eclipse, “I believe very deeply, will never will happen again.” The General would be proud of him.