French-Canadian Letters

LETTERS IN CANADA: 1945 Edited by A. S. P. WoooHousE PART ll IV. FRENCH-CANADIAN LETTERS I sv. E. -coLLIN Fran~ois Hertel, in his latest book, Nousferons Pdvenir, draws a picture of the French Canada that is to be. He sees it expanding northwards. Perhaps it is destined to become the Norway of America. A: t the same time he sees signs of the United States, breaking up into independent and rival nations. French Canada will then be able to stand up to those southern nations, who will not dream of laying hands on her northern habitation. He~tel wants his country to shake off defeatism, cultivate a self-assertive spirit, and acquire prestige. Setting out from what we are, he says, towards what we are destined to become, our language, qur habits, our aspirations must tend toward a kind of life which is completely French. Let us make Montreal a miniature Paris. We must have interior sovereignty, leaving exterior sovereignty to Ottawa. Then ~e shaU be masters in our own house; we shall ha~e the organizations we like, the education we like, and we shall have closer relations with whom we like-with the Latin countries of South America, for example. The federal government will be something like a ''diet," confederation something like the largely dec~ntralized Swiss cantons, and our members of parliament wiJl be ambassadors of the sovereign state of Ql,.lebec at Ottawa.. Our role. in America .is to ~onstruct a solid and balanced economy m.odelled on French economy·, which ought to serve as a living example to the world·. It will be an application~ adapted to our country," of the principles of Catholic sociology. ~To shine abroad, our culture must produce something other than writers of "action, and journalists. I_t must produce creative writers. Our l_iterature will be "pure, literature, born of the Canadian soil, a form of regionalism which seeks its . realization on the plane of the eternal. · Most of this Hertel has told us before; perhaps the ton·e is a little more aggressive than usual: we shall make the future. . Father Georges Simard, in his Pour I'Education dans un Canada souverain , discusses a problem overlooked by Hertel: education in a sovereign·state. The key to Father Simard's picture is his conception of the nat~re of man. It is the orthodox picture of.the old Adam and the new Adam and the possibility of man's salvation through grace·. To make ourselves whole, we need to associate two orders of 1\nowledge, anthropocentrism with theocentrism, to progress through science, philosophy, theo]ogy, towards mystic experience. Aspirati~m towards divine charity must be the spirit of all our knowledge. For directing principles we must go to St. Thomas A.quinas. In the pursuit of this ideal of integral humanism Father Simard 397 398 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY offers a living model: the philosopher and mystic, Jacques Maritain. Incidentally Father Simard follows the history of education from Greece, through the scholastic philosophers, to the nineteenth-century Oratorians on the banks of the Ottawa. As concrete proposals he suggests that our colleges should provide training which would suit young people preparing themselves for civil life; that selected philosophers, not destined for the priesthood, should drink in a deeper knowledge of Catholic theol~gy by frequenting the Catholic universities; that to achieve a real civilization our universities should teach letters, science, sociology, diplom~cy, ~onsti­ tutional and international law: more than that, illumination and impregnation of the Divine. - "Integral humanism goes as ·far as that, or it fails.'' There are reflections, of a different tenor, on education in Pierre Baillargeon 's Les Medfsanc~s de Claud~ Perrin. This is an autobiogr.aphy of a .fictitious character, Perrin: a book of confessions. Baillargeon has devised a narrative form for the moral reflections and epigrams he published in his review Amerique frant;aise. Of his school days, of bitter memory, Perrin remarks: ' The school boy must not speak (forif he.speaks, herepeats; it is still the mistress speaking) or stand up, or look at his neighbour. But he can quite easily do nothing. In default of discipline by work, his work is...