With this series, the editorial team goes back to the sources of a Quebec model that is struggling in the hope of rekindling its first sparks, those that allowed our nation to distinguish itself from others. Today: cultural policies.
Quebec culture is young. Its first novels are not two centuries old. There was even a time not so long ago when Quebecers were absent from their own scenes. They sang hits from elsewhere that had been hastily translated; they recited classics in a slurred manner. And then the dam gave way, thanks to Michel Tremblay, Gilles Vigneault, Denise Boucher, Pierre Perrault, Clémence DesRochers and all the others, from FouKi to Mani Soleymanlou, Kev Lambert and Monia Chokri, who have made our voices heard powerfully ever since.
The emergence of a Quebec culture that takes responsibility for itself, that speaks and thinks like us, for us, will have been fundamental in the construction of a common cultural industry whose vital signs have gone into a tailspin. Creators admit to being out of breath, broadcasters go through one crisis after another, the concrete crumbles, icons fade away, festivals and places die. All this while audiences abandon themselves to the roar of a globalized culture that makes them increasingly deaf and blind to what is happening here.
This common culture that galvanized us even became a source of tension between us. Do we remember it? Yet we have already dared to dream it together, and on a grand scale! Let us recall the inspired transports of Athanase David. His professions of faith in favor of the arts allowed him to implement a cultural policy before the letter. A supporter of a resolutely philanthropic State, David believed that every people had the duty “to make room for art and lasting works.” Pretty, isn’t it?
Above all, we forget that our model of cultural policy has atoms in common with that defined in France by none other than André Malraux in 1959. Under de Gaulle, the great intellectual made culture a matter administered by the State and a national treasure to be cherished, culture constituting in his opinion “the heritage of the nobility of the world”. This is what we call solid foundations.
At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, the lawyer and politician Georges-Émile Lapalme was nourishing the hope of a similar revolution by also drawing on the writings of Edmond de Nevers and Édouard Montpetit. He would gather his thoughts in For a policya document of more than 200 handwritten pages which Lesage’s “thunder team” would use to break with the British model which then prevailed in terms of cultural policy.
Made the first holder of the Ministry of Culture in 1961, Lapalme imagined a series of actions that he wanted to structure the cultural field, but also those of education and the economy. The future of Quebec and the national question being in his mind closely linked to the taking control of a culture, he conceived it as inseparable from a distinct art of living, in French. His wish? That Quebecers could draw the multiple sides of this same coin in their image and likeness.
The cultural revolution that he would lay the foundations for would unfortunately not take place. Believing that “his powers had been reduced to zero” by the actions of a government that “rejected the usefulness of the arts and culture in Quebec society,” Lapalme, bitter, would resign with a bang in 1964. He would nevertheless leave behind some vigorous shoots.
In a few decades, fundamental milestones will come to design tutors for these young shoots in order to allow them to take root everywhere on the territory. At the turn of the 1990s, we finally embrace their economic strength, figures to support it. We even design tailor-made wings for them so that they can spread abroad.
Despite this, our culture is struggling badly these days, weighed down by the gigantic weight of the combined action of GAFAM, algorithms, social networks and artificial intelligence. Those who don’t give a damn about it don’t realize how unconscious they are. A culture in free fall is synonymous with a people who, deprived of their ability to project themselves and dream in their language, threaten to fall with it.
However, the building that allowed our national culture to flourish is now displaying a cruel lack of light and oxygen. It is urgent to tackle it before it suffocates for good. In a Canada that no longer even cares about ensuring a facade of bilingualism, Quebec would be better served with full powers over its cultural destiny if it really wants to completely overhaul its architecture. Our posterity is at stake.
In 1968, in a key speech, Malraux already made culture “the self-defense of the community”. Its enemies at the time? “Great means of mass communication” put at the service of instincts thanks to “powerful techniques of satisfaction”. It’s hard to be more current in a world where national cultures are measured against a global ecosystem made predatory by the changes of recent years.