History of Maple Syrup

In the Globe and Mail, Maura Forrest reports on how the mayor of Plessisville, QC. (pop. 9000), the until now undisputed "Capitale mondiale de l’Érable" is responding to the adoption by the Montreal suburb of Mirabel of the title "Capitale internationale de l’Érable."

The depth of Mr. Morin’s displeasure is not easy to translate. “J’étais en tabarnak,” he said.

Which is a good hook on which to hang a mention of journalist Peter Kuitenbrouwer's recent history of the industry, Maple Syrup: A Short History of Canada's Sweetest Obsession. and particularly its chapter on Plessisville's own Cyrille Vaillancourt, who in the 1920s organized Quebec maple syrup producers into a cooperative that  helped put an end to the reign of the "Maple King," an American commercial monopoly that for a time had been able to offer "take it or leave it" offers to unorganized producers across New England and Quebec. (That chapter was excerpted in The Walrus last winter.)

Matthew Thomas, the maple sugar historian (who knew!) and biographer of Viallancourt'sNew England rival Thomas Cary, has written an amused and sympathetic review of Kuitenbrouwer's book for the Maple Syrup Digest (again, who knew!), while expressing some observations about the limited amount of history in Kuitenbrouwer's mostly contemporary history.  

Worth Reading: Jean-François Nadeau on secularism

On his Substack, Paul Wells reprints in translation Jean-François Nadeau's recent column on Quebec's secularism law, currently at the Supreme Court of Canada, now leading to hundreds of firings, all Muslims, all women, mostly in child care centres:

We show the door to women who have broken no law, harmed no one, and failed in no professional duty. Their veil becomes a pretext for fantasies and suspicions, in contempt of the essential work they perform every day for children.

In a school system already grappling with challenges like dropout rates, overcrowded classrooms, special needs, and lack of resources, was it really so urgent this spring to fire appreciated, qualified, well-integrated women? Is this truly how the injustices within this leaking-from-every-seam education system will be corrected?

Quick trip to Quebec et la Nouvelle-France

We were briefly in Montreal last week  -- colder and snowier than Toronto, but still a pleasure to visit.  

While we were there, the debate about Quebec's Bill 21, the one about secularism that mostly bans various clothing items for Muslims, Jews, and others, was in the Supreme Court of Canada and in the news.

As it happened we were staying on Rue Saint-Paul, and the streets around us were called Francois-Xavier, Notre-Dame, and Saint-Sulpice, and so on.  When we took the subway we noted stations with names like Pie IX, and l'Assomption, and Sainte-Catherine. Way above us the cross atop Mont-Royal shone bright.

Either the movement for official secularism has a long way to go, or maybe the critics are right to say it is mostly cover for an effort to keep the visible minorities in their place.

Meanwhile, I have been reading People, State, and War Under the French Regime in Canada by Louise Dechêne, translated by Peter Feldstein. The original French-language edition was published (posthumously) in 2008 and the translation in 2021. I regret having to admit I had not been aware of either until very recently.

Because Louise Dechêne really was a terrific historian, and this, like all else she wrote, is most original, deeply source-based, deeply thought-out, and frequently takes no prisoners in what she says of other scholars of New France.  I admire her immensely, and may have more on this book when I'm done with it.

Heaman on Quebec tuition

I imagine a lot of my friends in academia or in Quebec, or both, are caught up in the Legault government's plan to discourage students from outside Quebec from attending the province's anglophone universities. 

If you are taking an interest, take a lot at Elspeth Heaman's very historical exploration of that matter at the website Borealia. There is a reason why the piece is headed by this 1840 election poster for Louis-Hyppolite LaFontaine.

Fernand Ouellet used to say that the really profound confrontation in Quebec is not between anglophones and francophones, but between Montreal and the rest of the province. And that in the long run, Montreal usually prevails. Legault's CAQ is definitely thinking the way it imagines the rest of the province does.  It is good to see so much of Montreal is on the other side on this issue -- though not yet prevailing.

Also at Borealia recently, two long collections of reminiscences and appreciations of the recently deceased University of New Brunswick scholar Elizabeth Mancke, who seems to have been what a professor and teacher should be.  

History of Charlevoix and tourism

I'm just back from a brief holiday in Quebec and particularly the Charlevoix region. Happy to report, there is an excellent recent guidebook to that region, published by my friend David Mendel of Quebec City's Mendel Tours.

The Charlevoix district runs from Baie Ste-Paul to Tadoussac.  It is all spectacular and charming and full of places to visit or just gaze upon. The guidebook's focus, however, is on the town of Malbaie and -- since the Mendel Guide's interests always emphasize architecture -- the remarkable resort homes built around Malbaie in the nineteenth and early twentieth century by wealthy Americans and English-Canadians. One regular was the historian George Wrong, who wrote a big book nearly a century ago about the Scottish-Canadian seigneurs of the region.  

As it happened, the little auberge we stayed at stood in the midst of these stately mansions, and I learned a lot about them from the Mendel guide and its superb photography.

New at the DCB: Aegidius

This week's new entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography is Aegidius Fauteux, historian, librarian, lawyer, homme de lettres.  In my days as a student of New France, I came across many of his edited documents.  Longtime blog-followers might just recall the anonymous supply clerk's journal, a Fauteux publication I used copiously when I "liveblogged" the siege of Quebec in 1759/2009. 

But mostly the biography makes me want to celebrate the wonderful proliferation of given names in Quebec in the late 19th and early 20th century. Maybe it was the large families in need of new names, but ones like Jean-Baptiste and Francois that prevailed in New France gave way to many more colourful successors.

Aegidius, son of Hercule and Exilda, was raised in Sainte-Cunegonde, and among the uniquely named friends and colleagues named in the biography are Edouard-Zotique, Gonzague, Napoleon, Nazaire, and others. The habit has faded in modern Quebec -- Yannick is about as bold as it gets now.  The trend may have survived longer in Acadia, notably in the gloriously named poet, scholar, and former lieutenant governor of the province Herménégilde Chiasson (b.1946).

Histoire du nationalisme québécois, encore un fois

In La Presse, Yves Boisvert has an interesting examination as to whether Québec nationalism has taken a conservative ethno-cultural turn away from the progressive nationalism of the Parti Québécois of the late twentieth century.  He considers: 

un « réajustement », un retour à l’affirmation d’un « nous » canadien-français au centre du discours du Parti québécois – qui, pour lui, n’était pas hostile à « l’autre », mais qui n’avait plus peur de s’affirmer tel quel.

I'm inclined to think there was always a strong "pur-laine" strand in late twentieth-century nationalism. True, the PQ had a tremendously influential base among Montreal idea-makers who saw the Quebec state as essential to the building of a modern, progressive, open society in place of the old traditional one.  But the PQ really took off electorally when it captured the bas du fleuve and Saguenay-Lac St-Jean and all the most rural and traditional parts of the province, where a "nous autres" worldview and a "nous sommes opprimés" cry remained powerful. But Boisvert's interviewees -- also in a Francine Pelletier documentary on Radio-Canada -- argue that the more recent PQ and CAQ legislative campaigns to make visible minorities invisible, to reduce the sound of English (even in private conversations!), and to heighten language and identity tensions really are expressing a different culture from that of the previous nationalism. 

History of who's cancelling who

 Alex Usher at the HESA blog goes to town on the new "academic" "freedom" law proposed in Quebec:

Come. Let us speak together, honestly, about Loi 32, An Act Respecting Academic Freedom in the University Sector in Quebec. Because it sets a new standard both in government interference in universities and in all-around sheer holy-crap-this-is-what-public-policy-is being-reduced to.

No historians of Quebec in Quebec?

Mario Dumont, who used to be a populist force in Quebec politics and actually named a political party -- the Equipe Mario Dumont -- for himself, now writes for the nationalist tabloid Le Journal de Québec. He has a scandal to trumpet. If you believe him, there is no longer anyone teaching Quebec history at the Université de Montréal.

Depuis quelques années, des gens du monde des sciences sociales se questionnent sur le fait que l’Université de Montréal n’ait plus de professeur spécialiste de l’histoire du Québec. Rien sur le parcours d’un peuple parlant français contre vents et marées, des plaines d’Abraham jusqu’au rapport Durham, de la Confédération jusqu’à aujourd’hui.

La plus grande université francophone en Amérique embauche des experts de l’histoire qui étudient tous les thèmes populaires dans le mouvement woke, des spécialistes de l’histoire de tous les coins de la planète, mais aucun historien nationaliste passionné de l’histoire du Québec.

I'm pretty sure there are quite a few historians of Quebec there -- I can think of a few offhand. Even if we follow Mario Dumont's terms, by which "historian of Quebec" seems to equal "nationalist-crusader," there's probably more than one. 

Dumont is probably misled by, or misinterpreting, a cross-cultural trend among academic historians (noted in two long-ago posts of mine, here and here) to drop national labels  (e.g., "Canadianist,") in favour of "social historian," "historian of women," "labour historian," and so on.  The Quebec historians presumably prefer one of those labels.  And if that's what they believe, Dumont is happy to pretend they don't exist.    

Bill 21 on the International Day of Human Rights

Today, December 10, the anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations in 1948, is the International Day of Human Rights. Which seems like the time to say something about Quebec's Bill 21. That's the "laicity" law that  

... proposes to prohibit certain persons from wearing religious symbols while exercising their functions.

.... Under the bill, personnel members of a body must exercise their functions with their face uncovered, and persons who present themselves to receive a service from such a personnel member must have their face uncovered when doing so is necessary to allow their identity to be verified or for security reasons.

It cannot be got around: the bill constitutes discrimination, and given the practices it actually prohibits, discriminates against ethnic and racial minorities and faith communities for following customs they should entitled to follow if they choose.  

I don't think support in Quebec for this bill is going to last, notwithstanding the notwithstanding clauses, and even though at the moment any non-Quebecker who criticizes it risks being accused of being anti-Quebec by those who see nationalism as a wedge for creating divisions. 

A bill that drives a Grade Three teacher out of the classroom because she wears a hijab will not be saved by blather about the separation of church and state. Quebec has progressive and conservative communities, but it's not a racist society more than other parts of Canada. The decent, anti-racist, and tolerant traits of Quebec will eventually come to the fore on this issue, and eventually those on the other side of the issue will grow ashamed of defending it. 

International Human Rights logo: By Predrag Stakić

 

Fernand Ouellet 1926-2021 RIP UPDATED

Fernand Ouellet, one of the most respected and most controversial of twentieth-century Canadian historians, died the other day. His books included the Histoire économique et sociale du Québec, 1760-1850 and his honours the Order of Canada, the presidency of the Canadian Historical Society, and the Governor General's Literary Award.

Ouellet was respected for having led the introduction of quantititative histoire economique et sociale, on the model of the French Ecole des Annales, into Canadian history and particularly the history of Quebec's late eighteenth and nineteenth century. An enormously hard worker and productive writer, he dug out masses of archival data on any subject he touched, and filled his books with quantitative evidence.

He was controversial because his analyses dismissed traditional clerical versions of Quebec history that essentially blamed everything on the Conquest and the English -- and because he also rejected all the new nationalist interpretations that arose in and helped to shape the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. "The social, not the national," drove history in Ouellet's world. The social explanations he found for Quebec's nineteenth century difficulties in modernizing its economy and its society squarely placed the causes in francophone society, not conquest. Not, shall we say, a popular position in the new Quebec.

Le Devoir's obituary article, by Jean-Louis Bordeleau, cites the work of Ouellet and his critics and offers memories and reflections from several historians of 19th century Quebec. It notes he was one of the scholars who moved to Ontario universities to escape pressures on their scholarship from the academic establishment of the time. He died in Toronto, having concluded his career at York University. 

A long time ago in Ottawa, Fernand Ouellet supervised my master's thesis, which was indeed quantatitive and economique et sociale. He was a supportive supervisor, though very preoccupied with his own work and therefore inclined to advise by example. He actually found the thesis worth publishing, but we were both stymied by the traditional establishment at Les Presses de l'Universite d'Ottawa, where even Fernand Ouellet's support could not overcome the refusal to even consider a master's thesis for publication. Eh bien.

I found him a private man, perhaps shy (though not in historical controversies), and more easily animated by his own researches than almost any other topic. We did not remain in touch after I graduated, and I rarely saw him at historical events in Toronto. Sad to say, I was not even sure he was still alive until I saw an obituary in a Toronto paper. 

I have often found useful an interpretation of Quebec politics I once heard from Ouellet. In Quebec, he suggested, the really interesting struggles are usually not between English and French but between Montreal and the rest of the province. And in the long run, whatever the argument, Montreal's view generally prevails. On that line, I would guess that Montreal will not long support the anti-hijab and anti-human-rights movement that is trending currently, and that eventually the province will follow Montreal.

Update, July 12, 2021

Le Devoir follows up its obit for Fernand Ouellet with a long appreciation by his colleagues Yves Frenette and Martin Paquet. It's hard to imagine any English-Canadian publication being interested in providing this kind of consideration of the ideas of any Canadian historian.

The seigneurial regime in the twentieth century

At the Borealia site for early Canadian history, Olivier Guimond offers a fascinating review of Benoît Grenier (dir.) (coll. Alain Laberge et Stéphanie Lanthier), Le régime seigneurial au Québec: fragments d’histoire et de mémoire (Sherbrooke, Les Éditions de l’Université de Sherbrooke, 2020). The book, by a seigneurial scholar and a group of his students, explores the survival of seigneurial influences in Quebec long after the abolition of the seigneurial regime in 1854 and down into the present.

The abolition of seigneurial tenure in Lower Canada came with significant compensation for the seigneurs for the loss of their landholdings and rents.  (As with slavery in British possessions, where owners were compensated for the loss of their "property" at the time of abolition.) In some cases, the continuation of payments by former seigneurial tenants continued into the late twentieth century.

Apart from the ongoing payments, the book's exploration of survivals and memories seem perhaps to emphasize positive and sentimental memories of seigneurial society.  But the whole study seems to be a remarkable report on the depth of history in Quebec.     

History of Solitudes

J'ai serai candidate.

I don't follow French language media as much as, well, I'd like to, but even I have been struck by the differing treatment of Peter Mackay's French in English and French media. In English a lot of the coverage is "Well, it may or may not be an problem," and "He has been very busy in the private sector lately," and "He's taking courses now," and "In Quebec they criticize Justin Trudeau's French, just because he's in Ottawa."

Compare Michel David:

En fin de semaine dernière, Peter MacKay a démontré de façon éloquente que les rumeurs concernant ses progrès en français n’avaient aucun fondement. À côté de lui, Andrew Scheer passerait presque pour un académicien.*

Note that David does not write for Québecor, usually identified in English Canada by its separatist-minded owners, the Peladeau family. David's with Le Devoir.

David suggests it's a question of respect. But he does weakens his point by an allusion to the Meech Lake Accord

Ce qui avait le plus choqué les Québécois dans l’échec de l’accord du lac Meech, c’était l’absence de respect qu’il traduisait.

I have lots of respect for Quebec, but it doesn't mean I had or have to support that constitutional botch. 

Update, January 30:  From Tom Morton:

When I listened to a discussion on CBC radio this morning by anglophones, I was appalled. Panel members discussing Mackay had no idea how much effort and time it takes for an adult to achieve fluency in a second language. Moreover, I would argue that Mackay's lack of competence in French after so many years in Parliament reflects a lack of interest in not just the language but the culture and people as well.

_____
* Usage note: I'm pretty sure "académicien" here doesn't translate as "academic." He's thinking of the linguistic masters who form the Académie Française.

History of build that wall: Francophones in New England

19th century New Englanders torch a Catholic church in Bath, Maine

Franco-American historian David Vermette has a notable piece on the Smithsonian History website about the time when the invasion of French-Canadians from Quebec was seen as a dangerous threat to New England.

In 1892, the New York Times suggested that emigration from Québec was “part of a priestly scheme now fervently fostered in Canada for the purpose of bringing New-England under the control of the Roman Catholic faith. … This is the avowed purpose of the secret society to which every adult French Canadian belongs.”

The New York Times reported in 1881 that French-Canadian immigrants were “ignorant and unenterprising, subservient to the most bigoted class of Catholic priests in the world. … They care nothing for our free institutions, have no desire for civil or religious liberty or the benefits of education.”

In Canadian and Quebec historiography, the movement of some million francophones out of Quebec and into New England to rebuild the textile industry workforce after its Civil War collapse has mostly been recorded as a crisis for Quebec -- with the Catholic clergy being prime movers in colonization projects in the Saguenay, the Laurentians and other areas intended to prevent the draining away of francophones from Quebec.  Perspective is everything, I guess.

Vermette is the author of A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans. published by the Quebec (English-language) publisher Baraka Books.

Image: US National Gallery of Art, via Smithsonian History

Book Notes: Jenish on the October Crisis, 1970

I've occasionally puzzled about the scarcity of histories of the October Crisis of 1970, even mused about writing one myself. Where did that bright idea go?

Anyway, now there is a new one. D'Arcy Jenish, former Maclean's journalist and more recently biographer of David Thompson and historian of the Plains Cree, has written The Making of the October Crisis.

It's an odd title --surely the crisis itself is more deserving of attention than the "making" of it -- and the subtitle is worse. Canada's Long Nightmare of Terrorism at the Hands of the FLQ  reflects the mindset of our foreign owned publishers: that even the most Canadian of works must now be marketed to foreign audiences who will never read it. D'Arcy Jenish should not be held responsible for that.  I have not seen the book, and hope it is true that it cannot be judged by its cover.

Historians, do we have a problem?

I've been browsing in a new book of essays: Legacy: How French Canadians Shaped North America, edited by longtime Montreal journalist André Pratte, recently appointed to the Senate, and Montreal-born Toronto journalist Jonathan Kay, editor of The Walrus.

The idea of the book is to dispel the notion that Quebeckers have always been an insular people by offering a series of short lively essays on French Canadians whose influence has been continent-wide, from Pierre de La Vérendrye to Jack Kerouac. There are some fairly obvious choices --  George-Etienne Cartier, Henri Bourassa -- but others who are relatively little known -- Paul David, Prudent Beaudry -- or surprising (Jeanne Benoit).

What I really note right now are the contributors, and their backgrounds.  Journalist Philip Marchand, novelist Daniel Poliquin, politician Jean Charest, politician Lucien Bouchard, soldier Roméo Dallaire, diplomat Jeremy Kinsman, novelist and physician Vania Jimenez, novelist and foodie Chrystine Brouillet, activist Samantha Nutt, novelist Margaret Atwood, athlete and politician Ken Dryden, novelist Deni Béchard, businessman Gaétan Frigon.

See what I'm seeing?  No historians. Okay, Serge Bernier worked with Roméo Dallaire for this volume -- military historians have long been well integrated with the regular military -- but that's about it.  When a well-connected book packager and two equally well connected newsmen assemble a book of essays about historic Canadians, their first decision for their contributors is: no historians. It was pretty much the same, I might say, with Extraordinary Canadians, another historically-oriented series, assembled by the packager Michael Levine and general editor John Ralston Saul. Lots of interesting writers among the contributors, that is. Pretty thin on historians.

And are they wrong?  If you were putting together a group of essayists aiming for a broad readership of Canadians on some subject of cultural, political and historical interest, how many historians would leap to your mind as plausible contributors?

You would want people with some public standing if possible, but also writers with broad cultural awareness able to write engaging, wide-ranging pieces without expecting specialist knowledge and able to mesh historical information with current interests and concerns. Many historians coming to mind?  Michael Bliss is mostly retired from the field, and the death of Ramsay Cook removes one of the last of the 'sixties generation of historian-commentators.

I know smart, articulate, concerned professors, scholars, writers of history who could qualify.  But few of much prominence.  And fewer, I think, who could overcome the widespread cultural meme that exists in Canada:  not that Canadian history is dull (this book is one of a zillion proving that is not the problem) but that historians aren't the people to write it: dull, insular, narrow and specialized and closed off, too likely to preach, too....

Gee. Canadians think of historians the way the writers here think we used to think of French-Canadians!

Update, December 22:  Molly Ungar comments:

I think we definitely do have a problem, (many may not agree) and it's similar to the long standing problem that artists have, when they encounter the differentiation between "illustration", "commercial art", or "popular art", and "art", "fine art", or "high art".

Canadian historians have arrived at the same crossroads -- the differentiation between "popular history", or "narrative history" and "history" or "academic history".

These differences were not created by the public, but by the people practicing history and art. However, by the time the practitioners of anything "high" realize that they've totally fallen off the public's radar, it's too late.

Book Notes: Heaman on Poutanen on Montreal Prostitution

As part of our occasional series of book reviews contributed by friends of this blog, today we offer a notice by Elsbeth Heaman of McGill University on Mary-Anne Poutanen's recent study of prostitution in Montreal.  In appreciation (see how this might work?), we will shortly have a note on Professor Heaman's own Short History of the State in Canada. 

Mary Anne Poutanen, Beyond Brutal Passions: Prostitution in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal 
(Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015). Pp. xviii, 414. Cloth $100, ISBN 978077354533-5. Paper $34.95, ISBN 978077354534-2. 

Anyone who has visited the Musée d’Orsay lately must be struck by the binary. The museum proper displays what comes to seem a relentless onslaught of romanticized female flesh. The temporary exhibition, on prostitution, just as relentlessly deromanticizes it—a rebuke that was inaugurated and remains best represented by the centrepiece of the show: Edouard Manet’s wholly self-possessed “Olympia.” I found the exhibition a wonderful rejoinder to the rest of the museum (although next time I probably wouldn’t bring my children).

That tension between ideal and real women is fully on display in Mary Anne Poutanen’s new book on prostitution in early nineteenth century Montreal. The period saw a huge change in the status and experiences of women. Their world narrowed in many ways: they were being pushed out of work, out of ownership of land, out of public space, and out of political debates. Separate spheres was never fully enforced of course, but the change was huge nonetheless. Prostitution was at the centre of those changes: it breached public and private, street and household, work and non-work, and above all respectability and its opposite. Poutanen sees a huge paradox at the centre: women tended to take up prostitution because they were poor: widowed, abandoned, newly emigrated, etc. It was work (and relatively lucrative work at that) but it was deemed the opposite of work: legally it was classified as idleness and vagrancy, a breach of the peace. It kept households together, children with mothers, but was seen to destroy households because there was so much immoral sex involved. Nothing better conveys the contradictions of a Victorianizing Canada than the tortured ideas about and practices of prostitutes: they embodied (sorry) the impossibility of reconciling ideal and real worlds, moral and economic identities, loving and mercenary motives.  Poutanen brings enormous work and extraordinary detail to characterize what she describes as a “shift from a local moral economy to a more repressive local state apparatus” (317).

Poutanen teases through judicial and police records to find out what these women were doing, what they said they were doing, and how they did it. It begins with a discussion of space: the household versus the street as places of prostitution, embedded (sorry) in overlapping but still very different social relationships. She establishes very clearly that household prostitution was often a family affair. Prostitution on the streets was more associated with immigrants, increasingly Irish, who often worked in groups. Both had their dangers: violence, theft, exposure above all. Both had their moments of push-back against the very male world: violence, theft, and some wonderful examples of provocation of middle-class respectability. Subsequent chapters walk us through the legal framework, the policing, judging, and punishment of prostitutes. Police and prostitutes had particularly interesting relationships because they “shared a common workspace” (247). Bawdy houses were illegal, as a breach of the peace (on grounds of lewdness and idleness) but they paid higher rents so even a chief constable and a sheriff were caught investing in them.

The records convey much more than just prostitution because accusations of prostitution (“You whore!”) were and remain common coinage. We see prostitution but we also see sex-inflected disputes within households and among neighbours more generally. Sometimes it can be hard to distinguish the sex-worker from the insulted non-sex-worker. But mostly, a gritty reality, a grass-roots social history, rings through—as, for example, when Ann Connor accuses Samuel Stevens of committing a breach of the peace: “he knocked at the door of the widow Mary Robinson on Commissioner’s Street and shouted out, ‘let the sailors in to the whores.’” (197). If you like a gritty, grass-roots social history, you’ll like this book. 

Elsbeth Heaman teaches history at McGill University. Mary-Anne Poutanen teaches history at Concordia.

Fall books watch: Hebert/Lapierre on the referendum

The Morning After builds on a pretty terrific premise:  talk to (first, secure access to!) all the principals in the 1995 Quebec referendum, and ask them what they would have done if the result had been Yes instead of No.

I am a little disappointed that this is actually not a real oral history. What Chantal Hébert and Jean Lapierre provide is a collection of journalists' pieces based on lots of quotes from the interviewees, but with the first person quotes surrounded by a great deal of context, interpretation and analysis by the authors. It's eighteen short magazine profiles.

That is still pretty interesting. Lots of lessons, though my main takeaway so far is that Lucien Bouchard seems to have been the dumbest person in the history of Canadian politics, entertaining the most implausible post-referendum plans and having not the slightest clue what was really happening all around him.

There does not seem to be any mention in the book of what has become of the actual interview transcripts.  I hope Hébert and Lapierre are going to archive them where they will be widely available. Good as the book is, there must be lodes of gold in there, and it will only get more valuable.

History of "the national"

This old post, about the PQ shifting from the "social" to the "national," still seems to describe what is happening in Quebec politics. Spare a thought for all those old socialist stalwarts who have been saying "On veut un pays" for forty years, now realizing if they ever got one, it would be Pierre-Karl Peladeau's country.

Sadly that would be good enough for quite a few.

History of the national and the social

In his thinking about Quebec history from New France to recent decades, my old professor Fernand Ouellet used to come back to what he referred to as "the social" and "the national."

The social, broadly speaking, referred to the tensions and conflicts between various socio-economic groups in Quebec: the seigneurs versus the peasants, the merchants and professionals versus the workers and farmers, and so on.  The national, broadly speaking, was French versus English.  Ouellet thought the social was the important conflict, but often obscured by the national.  So in the tensions running up to the rebellions of 1837-38, the profound grievances were social: peasants oppressed by overcrowding, declining yields, high rents, obsolescent practices... but the political leadership, mostly professionals and seigneurs none too keen to address those problems, focussed attention on the national:  the maudit anglais.

The Parti Québécois has had a long run balancing the social and the national, keeping progressives and conservatives behind it by an emphasis on both. With some notable lapses:  Lucien Bouchard's demogogic nous sommes opprimés, nous sommes humiliés. Successful enough, however, that until recently, despite the progressive side of Quebec politics, it never had a social democratic party other than the PQ/BQ.

Premier Marois's new Charter of Values seems like the triumph of the national within the PQ ("We cannot have a country if there are all sorts of Québécois." one of her aides is quoted as saying).  But it is fascinating to see the profound and principled opposition coming from the progressive elements that survive in the PQ and the BQ, from old separatists who don't want to live in Pauline Marois's country.

Update, September 16:  Molly Ungar recalls more of the Ouellet analysis, from his time teaching at York in Toronto:

His observation that “Montreal was and is where all the action is” has proved to be accurate many times over the years, and is just as correct today in the wake of the Charter of Values as it was in the mid-19^th century. The Quebec Catholic Church was unable to neutralize the continually modernizing culture of Montreal, and the PQ has never been able to neutralize the continuing diversification of Montreal’s culture. As Montreal goes, so goes the province, and what we’re seeing unfold in Quebec is yet another attempt to reverse this process.
 Professor Ouellet’s fascination with the economic implication of food culture also led to months of confusion, as his discussion of “politos” remained a mystery to me until I realized that he was explaining one of his favourite historical paradoxes – the habitants’ aversion to eating potatoes.