Éric Bédard outlines the debates among Quebec’s schools of history and their political import, especially vis à vis nationalism.
LORD DURHAM HAS A mostly positive reputation in English Canada, because, in his famous Report of 1839, he proposed granting responsible government to a United Canada. A British Reformer, he was for his time a “progressive.” The Whig Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, viewed Durham as a threat, a competitor with the potential to overshadow him. To send Durham to Canada would be to remove him from the English political stage. In French Canada, by contrast, the British envoy left a very bad memory. This is because he also proposed the assimilation of French Canadians who were a people, he said, “without history and without literature.” During his all-too-brief stay in Lower Canada, he did not meet a single Patriot or Reformist leader. Worse still, he relied heavily on Adam Thom of the Montreal Herald, a francophobic ideologue.
According to a persistent legend, François-Xavier Garneau’s Histoire du Canada, published in the mid-19th century, was a response to the Durham Report. By going back to the sources of the history of his people, Garneau wanted to invalidate the British emissary’s dark observation about French Canadian culture. To reclaim one’s history was to assure one’s standing; to recapitulate, take stock, and project oneself into the future. To survive and develop as a people, such was the purpose of Garneau’s historiographical project.
To be sure, a people’s identity, like that of an individual, is based on a historical narrative. This is what the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur called in his time “narrative identity.” But I often have the impression that in Quebec, memory and history occupy a greater place than elsewhere. A simple comparison of national mottos illustrates this. The English Canadians chose A Mari Usque Ad Mare (“from sea to sea,” from the Psalms) while the French Canadians opted, somewhat later, for Je me souviens, “I remember.” The former base their identity on a conquest of space, the latter on a desire to endure.
During his lifetime, Garneau became something of a national hero. In today’s Quebec, countless streets, parks or educational institutions honour his memory. To my knowledge, no historian of the 19th century in English Canada has occupied a similar place in the construction of an identity. Innis, Lower, Creighton, and others played an important role, but later, and from within a university setting.
In Quebec, Garneau had many heirs but two schools of thought soon emerged which were opposed on the national question. Interestingly, these two schools were very early associated with the two main cities of Quebec and Montreal.
Montreal vs. Quebec
The social makeup of the two cities helps to explain this opposition. Quebec has always been an ethnoculturally homogeneous city while Montreal, during the industrial revolution at the turn of the 20th century, became a crossroads where impoverished French Canadians, a prosperous English-speaking elite, descendants of Irish refugees, and Italians and Jews fleeing poverty or persecution. So in Montreal, the fight for French culture has always been more emotion and conviction.
During the first half of the 20th century, two historians stood out and attracted notable audiences during major public conferences. Thomas Chapais,* a Conservative senator from Quebec, offered a “loyalist” interpretation of the history of French Canada and left an imposing and influential body of work. It was his conviction that French Canadians had flourished thanks to British institutions. The Conquest, according to Chapais, far from being a catastrophe, had been salutary because it had preserved French Canadians from French revolutionary ideas.
Opposite him, a young priest from Montreal, equally traditionalist, took up a diametrically opposed view of the effects of the Conquest and Confederation on his people. The first holder of a chair in Canadian history at the Université de Montréal, Father (later Canon) Lionel Groulx denounced the way French-speakers living outside Quebec had been abandoned. He spoke of a “second Conquest” that would erase French Québec’s particularism. In addition to being a historian, he quickly became an effective intellectual who rallied a younger nationalist generation around him.
* D.C. Bélanger, “A Most Tory Historian,” The Dorchester Review, Vol. 8 No. 1, Autumn-Winter 2018, pp. 89-91.
BETWEEN THE END of the Second World War in 1945 and the start of the Quiet Revolution in 1960, two “schools” of history emerged, following in the trail blazed by their forerunners. The next generation were university professors with doctorates in history, marking the professionalization of the discipline. The great historical problem that this new generation tackled was to explain the causes of the economic inferiority of French Canadians by then apparent to all.
At the University of Montreal, Groulx’s successors were Maurice Séguin, Guy Frégault, and Michel Brunet. “The Montreal School,” influenced by the emerging interest in structuralism (looking at systems), radicalized Groulx’s perspectives on the Conquest. Their starting point was that in 1760, the young Canadien society saw its commercial elites and its most dynamic elements go into exile and its economy stagnate under British rule.
The change of Empire was therefore not only a military and political event but above all an event of economic, social and cultural (in the anthropological sense) importance. Baby boomers who paid attention during their lectures in the 1960s and 1970s were influenced by decolonization theory: the Conquest had made French Canadians a “conquered” and “colonized” people. That explained for a new generation the prominence that the Catholic Church subsequently had, its hostility to modernity and progress throughout the 19th century. The Montreal school’s materialistic and deterministic vision of history was therefore much more pessimistic and gloomy than Groulx’s had been.
The Montreal school, aligned with the new nationalism that emerged after the Second World War, provided much inspiration to the sovereignist movement and continues to be written about.
By contrast, no rigorous study had been done about the opposing “Quebec school.” This gap has only just been filled by the historian François-Olivier Dorais,** professor at the Université de Québec at Chicoutimi. Taken from his doctoral thesis, his new book on the Quebec school covers the major contributions of three historians from Laval University: Marcel Trudel, Fernand Ouellet, and Jean Hamelin.
** François-Olivier Dorais, L’École historique de Québec. Une histoire intellectuelle, published by Boréal, 2022.
According to the Laval school, it was less the Conquest which had caused the economic inferiority of French Canadians than the poor choices — hostile to liberal and capitalist progress — of the political and clerical elites of the 19th century. The inferiority was therefore not to be blamed on factors external to French-Canadian society but internal ones. If French Canadians in the 1950s were less wealthy and less educated, it was less the fault of the English than of their own thinkers and leaders who imposed unsuitable thinking on them.
The oldest of the Quebec school, Marcel Trudel, strongly opposed the traditional Church and classical humanities which he believed confused history with literature. He was a positivist (applying a kind of scientific approach to history). His history of New France in several volumes, an unfinished work that reached only 1672, is very erudite. Compared to the old historians of New France who often offered romantic and edifying stories of mystics and explorers, Trudel’s iconoclastic take sometimes veered into the “deconstruction” of characters like Samuel de Champlain or Jean Talon. Co-founder in 1961 of a group called the Mouvement laïque de langue française (roughly the “Non-clerical Movement for the French Language”), Trudel sometimes opposed Quebec sovereignty but never became partisan.
The youngest member of the Quebec school, Jean Hamelin, was the least confrontational. During the 1970s, he drew closer to sovereignism but did not make a crusade of it. He is also the only member who spent his entire career at Laval, Trudel and Ouellet having migrated mid-career to Ontario universities. Hamelin’s masterpiece is a great critical synthesis of the history of the Catholic Church, the Histoire de l’Église catholique au Quebec (1608-1970), its doctrinal evolution, changing power relations (or influence in society), social work, and so on.
The great star of the Quebec school, however, was Fernand Ouellet whose thrust was both ambitious and polemical despite its scientific veneer. In 1966 he published his Economic and Social History of Quebec 1760-1850, translanted into English in 1980 and full of statistical data to show that development was slowed less by the Conquest than by the inward-looking nationalism of the Parti canadien. Ouellet was influenced by the Annales school in France which favoured the study of social structures over political figures and events.
In his new book, Professor Dorais shows the influence exercised by the French historian Robert Mandrou on Ouellet. This can be seen in Ouellet’s attempts to shed light on French Canadian “mentalités” (dominant mindsets) such as religion and the traditional rural society that Ouellet concluded were fundamentally opposed to progress and modernity.
HAVING DEALT WITH economic and social structures, the Annales historians turned to culture and social imaginaries (shared ideas that hold a society together). Ouellet also drew inspiration from Toronto and the Laurentian school. He took up Donald Creighton’s great story of valiant Scots and English merchants who, over a century (1760-1850), built a prosperous, dynamic forward-looking colony that laid the foundations of modern Canada. Of the three historians of the Quebec school, Ouellet was the most openly hostile to nationalism and sovereignism, and closest to the journal Cité libre of Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
This great quarrel between the schools of Montreal and Quebec ran out of steam in the 1970s when a new generation of historians expanded the profession, thanks to the opening of the “réseau public” or public network of the University of Quebec, in Montreal and in the regions.
The new generation dropped the whole question of why French Canadians were backward, together with the study of New France itself. Instead they turned to careful study of the contemporary era of industrialization and urbanization. The new Social History emphasized continuity over rupture and contributed to deconstructing the myth of a Quiet Revolution which would have radically transformed Quebec society in a few years.
However they did not succeed in deconstructing the myth of “la grande noirceur” or Great Darkness. Deeply entrenched in the historical memory of Quebecers, the myth refers to the memory of the comparatively authoritarian regime of Maurice Duplessis’ Union nationale and the apparent power of the Catholic Church.
Dorais’ study is most enlightening, and reflects a growing interest in historiography among the young generation of Quebec historians. Their academic theses, articles, and works are so numerous and so stimulating that it is safe to say we in Quebec are experiencing a “historiographic moment,” in the words of Dorais and one of his colleagues, Daniel Poitras.
Having co-edited, with Julien Goyette, a first anthology of reflections on history in Quebec, I can only rejoice at such a development because historiographical debates have much to say about present-day concerns. However, could this renewed interest in historiography be the “symptom of a history increasingly cut off from collective memory,” or even a case of navel-gazing — the “retreat into the ‘inner past’ of the discipline, for lack of assured visions of a shared future”? We lack the distance today to understand the deeper causes of this current renewal in historiography and history debates.
That said, it is quite possible that the failure of the project of fundamental political reform in Quebec has caused a crisis of meaning which is being felt among the historians of an emerging generation.
Éric Bédard is historian and professor at TÉLUQ University, and a member of the Académie des lettres du Québec. He has just published the first volume of a multi-author collection: Figures marquantes de notre histoire (VLB, 2023). This article was originally printed in the Spring 2024 print edition, pp. 35-38. Professor Bédard is a regular contributor to The Dorchester Review.