Quebec and Its Historians: The Twentieth Century

Introduction

Introduction These collected essays show recent developments in Quebec's historiography without necessarily attempting to be exhaustive . Whatever the field, encyclopedic inventories of intellectual works inevitably result in lists of authors and titles—information that can be found in the many and varied reference sources available. Some other procedure is needed to recognize underlying currents of thought and to take note of tendencies that presage far-reaching change. The books under consideration deal with the pre-1850 period, and some readers may be surprised to find such authors as Claude Galarneau orJacques Monet omitted, although they have written major works in this area.1 Despite their importance, however, these and many other historians have had less impact than those featured in the present study. I sincerely hope that the considerable number who are not included will forgive the necessity for their exclusion. The interested reader can learn more by consulting the forty-odd bio-bibliographies in the Dictionnaire pratique des auteurs quebecois (Montreal: Fides, 1976) by Reginald Hamel, John Hare, and Paul Wyczynski. The scholarly production that has come to the fore in French Canada was not spontaneously generated. Here as elsewhere, the use of modern methods in historical research had its precursors. The debt owed by such historians asJean Hamelin and Fernand Ouellet to their predecessors is difficult to estimate . We do know,however, that they were influenced by the works of archivist Ivanhoe Caron (1875-1941) and journalist Aegidius Fauteux (1888-1957), as well as Herald Innis and Donald Creighton; moreover they were profoundly affected by European thinking, which marks every aspect of their work.2 It is a significantbut perhaps little known fact that between the wars four French Canadians received doctorates in history from a French universityand published their theses.3 Nevertheless , until the 1940s, scholars came to the field of history in a variety of ways. Leon Gerin entered the field of scholarly 1 2 Quebec and its Historians historical research equipped as a sociologist, but this was an exception. The more usual route to history was through the neighboring discipline of literary studies. Marcel Trudel, for example, one of the founders of the Institute of History at Laval University, received his doctorate in literature during the 1940s. What distinguished postwar historiography in Quebec from earlier periods wasthe emergence of a handfulof professional historians who no longer earned their living as journalists, curators, archivists, teachers in classical colleges, or civil servants of some kind; nor were they notaries, lawyers, doctors, or priests merely indulging in a retirement hobby. The universities' initiative in setting up history programs gave professors and researchers the means and the time to write scholarly books on a professional basis. Furthermore, this phenomenon was not limited to historians, but was indicative of the developing importance of the humanitiesand the social sciences in Quebec French-language universities. The methods initially adopted by these scholars reflected the ideological ferment of what one might call the "Quiet Modernization." In the mid-1960s even works concerning the French colonial period were somehow linked to modernizing Quebec. The Quiet Revolution cannot be understood without emphasizing the historians' contribution, and indeed the first chapter of this book demonstrates the politicizationof historical discourse in the 1960s. This was the period when historians were invited to round table radio and televisiondiscussions in whichthey thrashed out Quebec's future. EvenMarcel Trudel, the most positivist historian of his generation and a highly disciplined scholar, succumbed to a present-minded interpretation of the discovery of America, and we find Trudel's Jacques Carder abandoning the evangelicalmission attributed to him by earlier historians. Mid-twentieth-century, secular Quebec turned its back on the theological view of history in order to construct a collective , materialist view of the past, in keeping with the prevailing economism. Sixteenth-century explorers were portrayed as eager for knowledge and anxious to discover new resources. Jean Hamelin moved historiography away from classical Introduction 3 historical analysis to the New History—the term used in France then and since for a reconstruction of the past that rejects the importance once accorded great men and events. HisEconomie et societe en Nouvelle-France actually initiated the use of serial, quantitative methods in Quebec historiography. Subsequent historical debate has tended to be methodological rather than ideological. With Louise Dechene's Habitants et marchands de Montreal au XVII siecle (Paris: Plon, 1974), French historical methods became firmly embedded in French-Canadian historiography . The...