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

Chapter Three

Chapter Three Québec and Its Relationship to the French Minorities: The Ties That Bind 97 Lionel Groulx regarded the French-Canadian nation as an organic entity or a “being” whose emergence, willed by Providence, dated back to the era of New France. As such, the national organism continued to evolve, grow and develop . Groulx’s view was that the English Protestant majority had not been able to contain it, despite their repeated offensives against the two key foundations of the French “race” in America, namely, the Catholic faith and French culture. The schools crises in Acadia, in the Canadian West and in Ontario were eloquent testimonies to this. However, in the mind of Abbé Groulx, the legislative, juridical and institutional weaponry that had been unleashed against the FrenchCanadian people to thwart its expansion could never trump its apostolic mission or the designs of Providence. In his view, the French minorities had succeeded in overcoming their adversaries and surviving, more or less. But that didn’t mean he believed their future was necessarily assured. He attributed the survivance of the minorities to their activism, certainly, but also to the support they received from Québec, in particular, from the clergy. On the other hand, Groulx often blamed Québec, and especially its political class, when the obstacles threatening the survivance of the minorities seemed to loom excessively large. Some might think that this dualistic attitude, which both reprimanded and congratulated Québec for its behaviour towards the minorities, stemmed from a certain ambiguity in Groulx’s thought. This is, however, not so. He was pleased about the contribution of the clergy historically to the cultural and institutional development of the French minorities. But it was his analysis of the damage done by partisan politics in French Canada since 1867 that led him to criticize the shortcomings of Québec politics. Let us be clear: although Groulx was sometimes wary of the principle of popular sovereignty, he did not reject the parliamentary system in effect in Canada as such. In fact, in his studies of the British government, the historian set out to show that the beginnings of parliamentary democracy in 1791 had ushered in a period of national “emancipation” that would culminate in 1867 with the adoption of the British North America Act, the only threat having been posed by the Union. But Groulx considered that the misdeeds of the regime of 1841 had been quickly overturned by the French-Canadian political class, led by the great Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine, his all-time political hero, who had won for his people the restoration of French-language rights in the Assembly as well 98 A Nation Beyond Borders as responsible government. To Groulx, parliamentary democracy could therefore represent a powerful tool of national liberation. It is thus difficult to qualify his thought as “apolitical.”1 What did sadden him, however, were the partisan divides which he felt had come to dominate French-Canadian political life after 1867. Partisan politics is often presented in his work as a pestilence or a fratricidal tug-of-war. Groulx had great difficulty accepting the idea of the political party as a place of compromise allowing for the integration of different ideological trends. His “organic” concept of nation ruled out any analysis that endorsed such a view and kept him from backing a system whose fundamental principle involved the division of the French-Canadian people. How can a person legitimately turn against himself, he was wont to repeat, without running the risk of the worst kind of psychological calamity? Nevertheless, this was exactly what Groulx believed he saw happening when he analyzed French-Canadian public life: forgetting its sense of duty and putting party loyalty ahead of national solidarity, the political class had drifted into a profound cultural anaemia, and, repeatedly, the nation lost out to the party, whether red or blue. Groulx devoted much time to developing the theme of the “decline” of the French-Canadian political class during his career as a historian and polemicist. He also sought to demonstrate how the partisan mentality permeating a good part of Québec officialdom had resulted in a form of national paralysis that prevented it from supporting the French minorities in their numerous battles. As he understood it, this constituted a grave neglect of responsibilities that were incumbent upon Québec as the “ancestral home” of the French-Canadian nation. The minorities and...