La pensee nationaliste de Lionel Groulx (review)

Judge La pensée nationaliste de Lionel Groulx by its cover. It features a black-and-white photograph that presents an unusual picture: the face of a smiling, indeed gleeful, Lionel Groulx. Since his death in 1967 history has not been kind to the man whom many saw as the spiritual father of modern Quebec. And the mental image one had of him was that of an embattled priest who ended his life in bitterness over the reforms of the Quiet Revolution that swept away the world of conservative, Catholic nationalism that he had devoted his life to. Since his death, Groulx's legacy has been a contentious one, to say the least. Esther Delisle's 1992 book The Jew and the Traitor managed to paint Groulx as a racist of the first order, if not a crypto-Nazi. At the same time, using many of Delisle's findings, Mordecai Richler launched Oh Canada! Oh Québec!, a critique of Quebec nationalism in which Groulx figured as a 'nascent fascist.' This fuelled debates over whether a Montreal street, Métro station, and CEGEP should be renamed, given Groulx's ambiguous views about race. But forty years after the start of the Quiet Revolution, Quebec's intellectuals have turned to a reevaluation of this priest-historian's contribution to the national life of Quebec and French Canada. Groulx was not particularly systematic in his thought and borrowed heavily from an ever-changing panoply of sources. And his thought evolved over time, such that in the 1920s he may have been heavily influenced by the right-wing Action française, while by the 1960s he was being swept up by the winds of liberation theology. Thus it is possible, as any gifted researcher will admit, to make Groulx appear to be what you want him to be. In this book, Frédéric Boily, a political scientist, takes on the daunting task of sorting out the intellectual sources of Groulx's nationalist thought. This has not been attempted since 1970, when Jean Pierre Gaboury published Le Nationalisme de Lionel Groulx: Aspects idéologiques. What makes Boily's work outstanding is how he traces the intellectual connections backward between Groulx and other, mainly French, thinkers of his epoch, but also forward to those between him and Quebec intellectuals of today. It is the central premise of this book that Groulx's legacy, far from being merely a source of shame or embarrassment, is a complex one that continues to be the starting point of any discussion of modern Québécois nationalism.

Boily rehabilitates the Groulx legacy by showing how complex his ideas were and by paying attention to provenance, nuance, and subtlety. In his first chapter he provides a sensitive analysis of the intellectual roots of Groulx's organic conception of nation and the racial logic that underpinned it. The point here is not simply to decide whether or not Groulx was an anti-Semite, but to provide some understanding of why and in what manner he espoused these ideas. And Boily puts an end to this debate when he states, simply, 'Though it was present, nonetheless anti-semitism did not govern his thought' (43). The second chapter deals with what is perhaps the most central element of Groulx's thought, and that is how his Catholicism contributed to his dream of nation. Here we learn that Groulx came up with an 'original synthesis,' culling ideas from Montalembert and other Catholic liberals. From Joseph de Maistre, he borrowed the pessimistic view of nations being in perpetual warfare, as well as a certain Catholic intransigence. Ultimately, Groulx came to reject political liberalism and modern democracy - in brief, the legacy of the French Revolution. For him, it was necessary that Catholicism be rooted in 'un terreau national particulier' (59). In his view, the nation needed Catholicism as much as Catholicism needed the nation. Boily demonstrates how, from this, Groulx came to conclude that French Canada had a...