When I investigated the salads of chef Giovanni Apollo in 2017, his former collaborators told me that he sometimes put wildebeest meat on the menu of his restaurants. In reality, it was horse. His American bison? Very ordinary beef. Its crab imported from Africa? On frozen sale at Club Price…
Notice, his customers found it very good the same. Succulent, even. That was not the point.
The anecdote came to mind when reading about the debacle of the popular historian Laurent Turcot, accused of plagiarism in a series of damning reports broadcast for almost a year by THE Montreal Journal1.
Many people – and institutions – have come to the defense of Laurent Turcot. True, the historian communicates well. Also true, he is enthusiastic and friendly. In short, he is a talented popularizer, who knew how to give a taste of history to many Quebecers. It’s not nothing.
Unfortunately, that’s not the point.
Since April 2022, THE Montreal Journal has listed nearly 150 cases of plagiarism in the books of Laurent Turcot, in the video clips broadcast on his popular YouTube channel and in the podcast he hosts on Radio-Canada. Sentences, even entire paragraphs, taken from elsewhere, then reproduced word for word, without credit being given to the authors of the original works.
Among them, Monique Tremblay Giroux, an amateur historian who spent three years documenting the ravages of the Spanish flu in Quebec. Part of the fruit of his research ended up in a video clip by Laurent Turcot, without his name being mentioned.
“The reference was lost in the transfer of the text written by the collaborator to the technical platform of YouTube”, defended the historian, Monday, on his Facebook page.
It’s the modern version of she got lost in the trunk…
Note that we ended up finding the reference and displaying it at the bottom of the capsule. Mr. Turcot contacted Mr.me Tremblay Giroux to apologize to her, which she accepted. But, reference or not, it is above all the very liberal use of copy-paste, in this capsule and elsewhere, which causes discomfort.
In an interview on Tuesday, Laurent Turcot offered me a host of explanations. Like this one, which he had given the day before on Facebook: “Anti-plagiarism software is made with artificial intelligence and does not always take into account the nuances necessary to understand the type of work that is carried out”.
“My goal is to popularize,” he told me. I tell as many people as possible what the researchers have done. I cannot appropriate ideas because, in essence, it is those of others that I gather to give something intelligible. »
I want to believe it, but that does not excuse the copy-paste. Popularizing does not give a license to take over the work of others.
It does not automatically make articles royalty free. Nor interchangeable ideas.
What surprises me in this sad affair is the eagerness of the institutions to defend Laurent Turcot. Institutions for which intellectual property nevertheless constitutes the goodwill: the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières (UQTR), the publishing houses Gallimard and Hurtubise, Radio-Canada.
For scholars, writers and journalists, plagiarism is a deadly sin. But, faced with the deluge of cases exposed by THE Montreal Journal, we minimize. We temper. We look for excuses. If we skipped the quotation marks in the books, say the publishers, it is to facilitate reading. If we omitted the references in the podcast, argues Radio-Canada, it is so as not to harm listening…
The UQTR, for its part, concluded that there was a “breach of responsible conduct in research”, but did not sanction Laurent Turcot, considering that the plagiarism had not been used “in a deliberate and malicious way ”, according to an investigation report filed in October 2021.
It was six months before Antoine Robitaille published his first report in THE Montreal Journal. The columnist swore to me on Tuesday that he had never tried to find out where the brown envelope at the origin of his investigation came from.
The UQTR was more curious.
She embarked on a hunt for sources. She gave the mandate to her director of the labor relations department to find the origin of the leak. And she found it: Thierry Nootens, a colleague of Laurent Turcot.
On May 5, 2022, UQTR summoned Mr. Nootens, arguing in a letter that it had “reason to believe [qu’il aurait] transmitted to third parties allegations against a colleague in a malicious manner”.
The next day, she suspended him.
The UQTR teachers’ union contests the suspension of Thierry Nootens. He claims that the University should never have led this hunt for whistleblowers, in principle protected by law. The grievance will be heard in December.
For UQTR, Thierry Nootens rather violated the rules of confidentiality and good faith.
Without concluding on the merits, the arbitrator André G. Lavoie considered, in an interlocutory decision rendered in July, that the suspension of Thierry Nootens was not exaggerated. (The professor has since returned to his duties.)
The arbitrator wrote that “the allegations of malice and bad faith” on the part of Mr. Nootens with regard to Mr. Turcot were “serious” and deserved that the UQTR shed full light on this subject.
All the more serious, noted the arbitrator, as the internal investigation suggested that Mr. Nootens “would have behaved in ways that could be assimilated to psychological harassment” towards his colleague.
UQTR spokesperson Thierry Nootens and Laurent Turcot declined to comment, saying they were bound by confidentiality rules.
Without going into details, Laurent Turcot denounces from the beginning a vindictive and relentless campaign to destroy it.
This, history will tell. Or, more specifically, the arbitration tribunal hearing. We will know more, in December, about the roots of this conflict which has been rotting for years in Trois-Rivières.
In the meantime, difficult not to feel any sympathy for Laurent Turcot. “I have my children, my girlfriend, my parents… it has been very, very hard. At some point, when there is a campaign against us, it gets into us, ”he told me on Tuesday, his voice breaking with emotion.
I submitted to him that he was perhaps a victim of his popularity. That by wanting to do too much, books, videos, podcasts, TV shows, lark, he had perhaps started cutting corners…
He did not deny making “honest mistakes”, but refused to admit plagiarism.
The problem is that it’s starting to make a lot of very involuntary omissions on his part.
Lots of quotes that jump by mistake, anti-plagiarism software ill-suited to modern ways of doing things, dazed collaborators, jealous colleagues, journalers looking for clicks…
Far too many for a historian who has earned the trust of such a vast public.