François Legault is an enthusiastic reader. This has been part of his political character since he became prime minister: a businessman to lead the state as it should, a man who above all speaks the language of the economy (this is the most important), but also, at times, and in the shadow of the spotlight, a man of letters. “Reading is full of happiness! “he launched in 2020 in a capsule produced by the Association of public libraries of Quebec.
It is no coincidence that the population of Quebec is regularly rewarded with reading suggestions from François Legault on social networks: from a communication point of view, portraying François Legault as a friend of literature works.
His electorate seems to adore the contrast between the prime minister’s executive efficiency and the expression of his literary sensibilities. The media also love this detail. We often mention, at the turn of a political analysis: you know, François Legault is also a reader, as if that revealed something of the deep nature of the character, something moving, human.
This is how, last Saturday, François Legault launched a new reading comment on Facebook, about the novel May our joy remain, by Kevin Lambert. “An internationally renowned architect is accused of neighborhood gentrification,” he wrote, calling the novel a “nuanced critique of the Quebec bourgeoisie” and summarizing the point thus: “Pressure groups and journalists are looking for scapegoats for the housing crisis in Montreal. The difficulty of debates in our society. Well researched novel on architecture. Editorial comment: “Long breathless sentences. A 30 year old author with a lot of talent. »
A sign of the slowness of the summer, the case has made headlines. The author reacted, describing as “shabby” – a term chosen and assumed – the attitude of the Prime Minister, who, from the height of his belonging to the economic elite and his complete control of housing policies, dares to portray as scapegoats the class responsible for the housing crisis.
The exchange on Facebook between the writer and the prime minister brushed Legault’s voters — and all that the Quebec media has of reactionary voices — in the wrong direction. Flood of insults in order, all revolving around the theme of the ingratitude of this young nobody — omitting that Lambert was a finalist for the Prix Médicis and winner of the Prix Sade before he was thirty.
A fairly accurate measure, Kevin Lambert pointed out to me over the phone, of social expectations of artists: “to be the mouthpiece of power” or “to be a kind of acrobat” who accepts praise and returns to his work table. “I don’t think I would have answered if it hadn’t been so topical,” he told me.
Here, an evidence: certainly that the communications team of Legault did not think of the affront that it represented to write these words, about this novel, two weeks after that 500 tenant households in Quebec found themselves on the street, at the end of the day of the moves.
No one in the CAQ bubble seemed to realize that, in a summary of barely fifty words, the prime minister reveals his government’s implicit affiliation with the landlord class, with those who profit from residential precariousness and the destruction of working-class neighborhoods. The novel’s criticism of the bourgeoisie is “nuanced,” says François Legault, no doubt wanting to look like a good player. Above all, it betrays his posture asinsider ; he indicates that he understands that the criticism is (notably) addressed to him.
Curiously, his response to Kevin Lambert, on Facebook, adopts the posture of the disinterested third party. This is all fiction, it must be a reading conflict, keep up the good work, we’ll continue ours. We sail somewhere between hypocrisy and the instrumentalization of literature.
“You have to see what François Legault says about the novels he reads,” Kevin Lambert pointed out to me again: sentences without verbs, lists, sometimes a commentary on the writing. “Very well written,” he said last year of the novel morel by Maxime Raymond Bock, after having listed the factories and major construction sites that displaced the families of Montreal workers in the last century. Not a word about the arc traced by the novel between the past and the present, not a word about the deliberate reproduction of social misery. He reads this novel like a collection of ephemerides.
The Prime Minister presents himself as an innocent reader, who likes to read great stories that stimulate his imagination. But above all, he likes to pretend that the books say nothing about reality, social relations or the violence of the world. He sums it up perfectly himself: “Reading is full of happiness. Don’t get politics into this.
It has been said a lot that this episode shows that the Prime Minister does not understand what he is reading. On the contrary, I think that François Legault perfectly understands the political charge of the novels that pass through his hands, and that the staging of his readings aims precisely to keep this charge at bay, to neutralize it, by sweeping everything away under the guise of fiction and the pleasure of reading. Strictly speaking, it’s about presenting books as Quebec products like any other.
The electorate likes to know that the Prime Minister likes to read. That does not make the Prime Minister a friend of literature.
Columnist specializing in environmental justice issuesmental health, Aurélie Lanctôt is a doctoral candidate in law at McGill University.