A Nation Beyond Borders: Lionel Groulx on French-Canadian Minorities

Introduction

1 Introduction “The dominant fact about French life in America, during the past century, is without a doubt that it became dispersed. French Canada can no longer be defined as a geographical expression limited by the borders of Québec.”1 Those were the parameters used by Lionel Groulx in 1935 to describe the FrenchCanadian nation. This small excerpt from his vast study on the French minority schools, written while he was at the peak of his influence, alone reveals a major aspect of Abbé Groulx’s nationalist doctrine. The priest, who later became Canon Groulx, was the nationalist school’s intellectual leader from the 1920s to the 1950s. Throughout his long career as a professor, historian, lecturer, publisher, intellectual and polemicist, he became one of the chief advocates of the survivance of the French minorities in Canada. However, this element of his thought remains largely unknown. Since the sixties , historiography has tended to give the French minorities little coverage and to present Groulx as a “Québécois” nationalist, sometimes a “separatist” nationalist , who cared only about obtaining greater political autonomy for Québec— inside or outside of Confederation. Similarly, the great political and ideological debates that Québec has experienced since the Quiet Revolution are reflected in the writings of its historians and intellectuals, with primacy commonly given to the “Québécois” nation and the French minorities receiving a certain indifference . In fact, during the 1960s, relations between the French Canadians of Québec and those of the other provinces underwent a dramatic shift. In Québec, the upheavals of the Quiet Revolution transformed traditional French-Canadian nationalism and recast the discourse about identity in terms of the territory of Québec alone. This metamorphosis provoked a serious political, ideological and institutional break with the French minorities. From René Lévesque’s “dead ducks” to Yves Beauchemin’s “still warm corpses,” this break stood in singular contrast to the intense feeling of national solidarity which, for a century, had generally characterized relations between nationalist groups in Québec and the French minorities in the other provinces.2 1. Lionel Groulx, L’Enseignement français au Canada: Tome II: Les Écoles des minorités (Montréal: Librairie Granger Frères, 1935), p. 71. 2. On the “break” with French Canada, see Marcel Martel, Le Deuil d’un pays imaginé: Rêve, luttes et déroutes du Canada français (Ottawa: Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1997), 203 p.; Gaétan Gervais, Des gens de résolution: Le passage du Canada français à l’Ontario français (Sudbury: Prise de parole, 2003), 230 p. 2 A Nation Beyond Borders With a great number of historians subscribing to the paradigm of the Québécois nation, however, a large portion of the history of the French-Canadian nation, as conceived by Abbé Groulx, was overlooked. A study of the place Canada’s French minorities held in his ideology constitutes an excellent means to better grasp the foundations of French-Canadian nationalism in its most common form prior to the 1950s and 1960s. It would have been logically impossible for the dispersal of the French “race” in America to escape the preoccupations of a historian such as Groulx. In his view, the linguistic, cultural and religious “persecution” suffered by the French minorities represented not only a threat to them but a threat to the French-Canadian nation as a whole. Groulx presented the anti-French and anti-Catholic measures adopted by several provincial governments as a series of violent acts betraying the confidence that French Canadians had placed in the good faith and the spirit of fair play of their English-Canadian partners at the— solemn—moment of the signing of the Confederation “pact” of 1867. If he used this constitutional argument frequently to come to the defence of the French minorities , his reasoning was nevertheless not limited to it. Minority rights were not, in his mind, just the result of the deliberations and negotiations that had led to the adoption of the British North America Act, but rather of the historical experience of the French-Canadian nation since the arrival of the first French in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rather than considering Confederation as the source in which the rights of the French minorities were grounded, Groulx saw in it the political and constitutional recognition of their historical experience on the North American continent. Certainly, to deprive the minorities of their linguistic and religious rights represented for him...