There are two things in a building: its use and its beauty. Its use belongs to the owner, its beauty to everyone, to you, to me, to all of us. So to destroy him is to exceed his right1.
Victor-Hugo
It seems that not a week goes by without learning that a heritage building is under threat. And it’s been going on for a long time.
In Berthierville, a developer continues to want to raze one of the few monasteries of contemplative nuns built outside the big cities2. In Gatineau, another developer is doing everything in his power to demolish one of the match houses in old Hull3. In Anticosti, the Quebec Ministry of Forests itself wants to demolish one of the oldest vestiges of the island4. The argument is always the same: the building is old, renovating it will be expensive. Obviously, it would be easier if the heritage buildings were new!
Allow me to cite two other cases that come to us from above.
In Ottawa
24 Sussex, the residence of the Prime Minister of Canada, is not even habitable anymore. For decades, federal elected officials have been too cowardly to support its renovation5. For all prime ministers since at least Jean Chrétien, the fear of managing the media crisis that would necessarily follow an investment in the Prime Minister’s residence weighs more heavily than the building’s significance for Canada. Misery…
In Quebec
In the National Assembly, the decision has not yet been taken, but The duty taught us6 that it is possible that the last elements of the Assembly’s original furniture, the black walnut desks, will be replaced by modern tables. Outside, Honoré Mercier’s desk (“Riel, our brother, is dead”). Outside, that of the great Henri Bourassa (“We are only a handful, it’s true; but we count for what we are, and we have the right to live”), and outside, that of René Lévesque, a a man who, as his epitaph says, “is part of the short list of people’s liberators”. The decision has not been made, but the very idea of removing these desks from the National Assembly is unworthy.
In the face of such slippages, we can speak of the overly permissive legal framework, the scarcity of funds devoted to heritage preservation, the greed of developers or the wavering will of cities and other governments in this area. We could improve all that, but if mentalities don’t change, it would be a waste of time. I would therefore rather insist on what is hidden behind heritage.
The objects and buildings frequented by our predecessors can be used to show us the way forward. To respect heritage is to honor those who have gone before us, but the reverse is also true, to demolish it is to disrespect them.
When you enter the National Assembly, what impresses is the weight of history. This weight forces us to become aware of the heritage we bear.
In some of the harshest climatic conditions in the world, our ancestors, Europeans and Aboriginals, suffered in their bodies, they were exploited, they defended their rights, they built a better society, a Quebec of which we are proud. I know we have many faults, but globally we are an envied society, and we owe it to them.
To celebrate and explain the past, some countries have castles to showcase, mansions and even entire cities, real open-air museums. We don’t have that. We have immense forests, churches, bourgeois houses, some old quarters, archaeological sites, monasteries, matchstick houses, old prisons, deputies’ desks.
We don’t have castles because we were among the poorest in North America. But thanks to those who came before us, Quebec is today the most egalitarian society on the continent and our economy is among the thirty strongest in the world. The source of this success is hidden somewhere in our past, somewhere in the stones of all these threatened buildings. Let’s preserve them.
1. Victor Hugo, “War on the wreckers”, in the Review of the Two Worlds1832