The Hero and the Historians: Historiography and the Uses of Jacques Cartier (review)

With this book, Alan Gordon adds another study to the growing collection of works that explore the presentation of Canadian heroes to the larger public. Following such authors as Colin Coates and Cecilia Morgan (Madeleine de Verchères and Laura Secord) and Patrice Groulx (Dollard des Ormeaux), Gordon sets out to chart the representation of Jacques Cartier through such public acts as the construction of monuments as well as through the production of historical texts. On the basis of this analysis, Gordon concludes that there was a period that lasted for nearly a century, roughly between the tercentenary and quadricentenary of Cartier’s voyages to Canada in the 1530s and 1540s, during which there was evidence of a certain ‘Cartiermania,’ largely – although not exclusively – among French Canadians.

Gordon describes the arc of this reverence for Cartier, which rose throughout much of the nineteenth century and reached its peak in 1889, when a monument to both Cartier and the martyred Jesuit Jean de Brébeuf was unveiled in Quebec City. There was, by the end of the nineteenth century, a certain ‘common sense knowledge concerning Cartier’; it was generally understood ‘that he was discoverer of French Canada, that he was the first French Canadian, and that he was deeply religious’ (110).

Into the twentieth century, while Cartier remained a source of inspiration for many, his stock began to decline. While English Canadians started to show interest in Cartier, their focus was on his role as founder of a bicultural nation, in the process diluting the uncomplicated French-Canadian narrative about Cartier that had previously existed. And even within French-speaking Quebec, Cartier’s stature faded as other heroes started to take centre stage, in particular Samuel de Champlain (whose concrete achievements were preferred over Cartier’s more ephemeral accomplishments) and Dollard des Ormeaux (whose image as a fighter for the French-Canadian nation was more in line with twentieth-century insecurities). By the time of the Quiet Revolution, ‘the facts and firsts of [Cartier’s] voyages were still routinely cited, but they were stripped of moral, religious, and historical meaning’ (179).

Since Gordon’s treatment of Cartier parallels the large number of works on the representation of heroes in Canada and across the Atlantic world, he has responded in this volume to some of the issues that have emerged in the literature. In particular, Gordon responds to the work of authors such as Eric Hobsbawm, who have argued that a wide variety of traditions (including veneration of heroes from the past) were invented by leaders eager to foster harmony in the face of unsettling social and economic circumstances during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From this perspective, Cartier was simply foisted upon an unsuspecting public. There has been a retreat from Hobsbawm’s top-down approach in recent studies, and indeed Gordon notes that a tradition such as Cartiermania may ‘well have sprung from the authentic sentiments of a people.’ From this perspective, ordinary people chose to put Cartier on a pedestal for their own reasons, and the resulting consensus constituted a ‘common sense’ understanding of the past. Accordingly, Gordon wanted ‘to discover how certain “facts” about the past are discovered and presented to the public, and how they enter into common sense knowledge’ (27).

In spite of this claim, Gordon does not really tell us very much about the perspective of ordinary people, and so we see the views of Cartier that were offered by leaders, but much less about how these views were assimilated by the masses. Hobsbawm would have us believe that these traditions were forced on the population, a view that Gordon understandably resists. However, his use of the notion of ‘common sense’ implies that there was some active role by ordinary people who assimilated reverence for Cartier for their own reasons. But if this were the case, Gordon doesn’t offer much evidence. Indeed, one of the challenges...