Quebec Nationalism in a Nutshell
by Roland Barphe, director of media studies at the Polyvalente de St-Tite, founder of l'Organisation Uni du Film Original Québécois (l'OUFOq), and editor of Excressences
(translation by Proinsias O'Boyle)
For people who profess a great devotion to their French heritage, Quebec nationalists seem astoundingly ignorant of their French intellectual heritage. In particular, they seem wilfully unaware of the great French intellectual heritage of semiology.
I am sure that the readers of NEW IMPROVED HEAD are familiar with semiology and semiotics, but for any Quebec nationalists who have stumbled across this piece I will note that semiology is the study of symbols (known as signs to the semiologist), and especially of the misapprehension of values as facts. The misapprehension of values as facts creates a myth. So, what is the myth of Quebec nationalism?
Quebec nationalists believe in a myth of purity. The underlying theme of Quebec nationalism is that the purity of the Quebec nation is being sullied by contact with anglophones.
The quest for linguistic purity in Quebec is obvious. English commercial signs were once banned from the streets on the grounds that they marred the French ambiance. These days the crime is putting up a sign which dares to make English as prominent as French. Bloc Québécois riding associations have been known to organize groups to go out looking for offending signs, but of course, the French do know how to party.
Concern for the purity of the French language in Quebec goes to the length of maintaining a government office to protect linguistic purity, and there is also the annual ritual of the wringing of the hands over the latest report of the language commissioner. As always, French is endangered by the incursion of the dreaded English. The fact that English has become the dominant language in the world even though its vocabulary is heavily "contaminated" with French words gets overlooked.
Concern with purity goes beyond language. Lucien Bouchard's famous observation that the Québécois are a white race demonstrates the nationalists' concern for racial purity. Apparently all those Haitians who have settled in Quebec are not Québécois, and neither are their Quebec-born children. No, a Québécois is descended from the original settlers. He or she is, in a revealing phrase, pure laine.
And then there are the dreaded Anglo-Saxon values. Quebec nationalists stand foursquare for the primacy of collective rights over individual rights. Denying people the right to use the official language of their choice (as in denying them the choice of attending English schools) is justified by the "right" of the Quebec people to protect their culture.
What nationalists fail to mention is that this right is not exercised by the Quebec people. There is no official institution representing the Quebec people, as defined by nationalists, which can exercise this right. This right must be exercised by the government, which supposedly represents all Quebeckers, even the evil anglophones. Anglo-Saxon rights at least have the advantage of being vested in an entity which can have a legal existence – the individual. Of course, perhaps a sovereign Quebec will restrict the franchise to the pure laine.
At bottom the myth of Quebec nationalism is a myth of a world without the English. It is a continuing theme of Quebec nationalism that English Canada is not real, and that Canada is not a real country. The Quebec media do not maintain correspondents in English Canada, apart from Ottawa, because English Canada does not exist.
Doubtless these ideas go back to ultramontanism. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century French Quebeckers were taught that they practised the purest form of Roman Catholicism, that the greatest threat to this pure religion of theirs was English protestantism, and that the next greatest threat was everything else that came from outside Quebec. Only Quebec had the true religion; the rest of the world was false.
Fear of the English was justified. The main reason Quebec was united with Upper Canada was that the Colonial Office wanted the French to be assimilated by the English. But, you know, times change. Over the nearly 56 years since the end of the Second World War, the government of Canada has been led for 32 years by a French prime minister from Quebec (and for another 9 by an Irish-Canadian prime minister from Quebec who catered to Quebec nationalists). The current state of Canadian government and civil rights is largely due to the influence of the Québécois who surrounded Pierre Trudeau. All this, though, just makes it all the more important for nationalists to assert that Canada is not a real country.
Why does the Quebec nationalist myth persist? The answer is obvious. It persists because it's the best myth going. As ill-founded and misleading as it is, it's a far better myth than what the competition is offering. We'll look at the competing myth next week.
Quebec Nationalism in a Nutshell © Coolth, 2001
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