The duty of August 11, 1945 announced in a front page “The end of the war expected shortly”, citing the effects of the use of atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few days earlier.
On page eight, a text by Father Paul-Aimé Martin refers to the project of the School of Librarians to establish a Catholic network of libraries in Quebec in this new world soon to be at peace. “We do not want neutral teaching,” says the director of the Fides publishing house. Let us remember that we must fear, for the same reasons, neutral libraries. »
The School of Librarians was founded in 1937 to compete in French with the training provided by McGill University for decades. The establishment will be completely restructured in 1961 by becoming an integral part of the University of Montreal (UdeM) under the name of School of Library Science. The centuries-old idea of the librarian as censor will then quickly be abandoned.
“The Librarian School taught until the early 1960s how to apply censorship and respect the books in the index to ensure that only “good” books, in quotation marks, were on the shelves,” explains Michèle Lefebvre, librarian for heritage collections at Bibliothèque et Archives nationaux du Québec (BAnQ), herself a graduate of this specialized school at UdeM.
In 1883, the bishop of Quebec affirmed in a conference that “there is more madness and crime in reading a bad book than in burning one’s brains.” A bad book was therefore a poison, and the Church offered the antidote.
Mme Lefebvre takes advantage of Public Library Week, which runs until October 21, to exhibit documents related to the concrete practice of censorship. The book historian also publishes on her institution’s website an analysis entitled Libraries facing censorship. From the index to free choice.
“I wanted to show how librarians of the past thought about censorship and applied it in their work. Book collections were very much controlled by the ultramontane clergy and conservative elite,” she explains.
Blacklisted
The heavy burden will weigh on access to printed matter following the appearance of the first French-speaking and Catholic public library in the mid-19th century.e century (the Work of the Good Books of the Sulpicians, in 1844) until the Quiet Revolution. Cinema will suffer the same prohibitions from its invention until the great liberation of the 1960s.
To censor, you obviously have to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. The famous Index librorum prohibitorum of Rome is used to determine the sulfurous publications. A copy from the National Library written in Latin, the common language of the globalized Church, cites pell-mell the works of Rousseau, Voltaire, Hugo, Zola and Flaubert.
The mention the reference ” omnes fabulae samatoriae » indicates the ban on the complete work of an author. This is the case for the Dumas, “ pater and filius “. The first — and possibly the only — Quebec work to appear in this index is theDirectory of the Canadian Institute of Montrealan organization of free thinkers which closed its doors in 1880.
“A scrupulous selection of acquisitions constitutes the main mechanism for controlling library readings,” writes Mme Lefebvre in his short essay. “Over time, the selection criteria for censors are refined and the tools to guide librarians multiply. »
Father Paul-Aimé Martin, of Maison Fides, founded the magazine Readings in 1946, a year after his text of Duty which called for the creation of a professional school of librarians. Ten ratings classify the works, ranging from TB (for all) to D (dangerous) and M (bad). The B ? (with the question mark) designates a “book calling for more or less serious reservations, ie to be prohibited in a general way to people not trained” intellectually or morally.
From dunce to champion
Without forgetting that Quebec has long been the North American dunce in terms of its library network, ultimately one of the best ways to prevent the spread of books with illiteracy. Significant efforts have made it possible to correct the delays in recent decades. Montreal now even serves as national champion.
The current socio-political context also sheds light on the choice of this thematic exploration: censorship is resuming in public and school libraries south of the border. According to a PEN America survey, in the United States, between 1er July 2021 and March 31, 2022, nearly 1,600 books were targeted for bans in 86 school districts covering nearly 2,900 schools. “It’s scary when you know the past,” says Mme Lefebvre.
His institution does not ban books — at least, not according to ancient religious logic. BAnQ acquires two copies of everything published in Quebec, period. The loan collection is built according to guidelines that reject overly specialized works or downright pornographic publications, for example.
One of the last delicate cases concerned the French author Gabriel Matzneff, reputed to be a pedophile, whom even his publishers dumped. Finally, after a temporary withdrawal, his books are still available on the shelves.