Le Québec: Entre son passé et ses passages (review)

Jocelyn Létoureau, or more precisely his work, is well known to historians of Quebec. Létourneau, the Canada Research Chair in the Contemporary History of Quebec and a professor of history at Université Laval, has been interested in the study of identity formation among modern Quebeckers since the 1990s, especially as this identity draws on Quebec’s particular history and memory. Respectful of the works of Quebec’s leading historians, past and present, Létourneau nevertheless recognizes that popular historical consciousness is not built on painstaking archival research and analysis. His investigations, then, turn more to discussions of the popular understanding of history. This latest book, Le Québec: Entre son passé et ses passages, offers a sampling of that work. The book consists of thirteen essays, published between 1998 and the present. Only three of the essays are new, but they are all linked by their attempts to reach an accommodation between the past and contemporary society’s uses and misuses of various interpretations of the past.

Létourneau does not offer us a history of memory or of popular historiography. There is little in the way of historical argument in the essays he presents. Instead, Létourneau posits a sort of sociology of historical consciousness, an examination of contemporary views about Quebec’s past that teases out its place in twenty-first-century society. He not only offers us insights into the current state of historical understanding but also suggests alternative ways for making use of the past. In a sense, he tackles the question of how to remember and forget at the same time. Understood in these terms, Létourneau’s arguments take on a significance far greater than the study of one small nation’s struggle with its histories. It is a study of which history will guide the future. As Létourneau writes, ‘Cette question est l’une des plus pressantes et difficiles qui s’offrent présentement à la pensée québécoise’ (121).

Two of the three new essays deal specifically with Quebec’s dealing with, or failure to deal with, the recent 250th anniversary of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. That battle, popularly seen as the moment of Britain’s conquest of New France, is of singular significance. Globally, it affected the outcome of one of the most important conflicts of the eighteenth century, and its repercussions influenced world events through the second half of the century. Yet, as the anniversary approached, neither the federal government nor the Government of Quebec took an official position on its commemoration. This is indeed curious, given the fundamental place that 1759 has played in the construction of identity in Quebec, especially since the 1960s and the Quiet Revolution. But, as Létourneau notes, it reflects Quebec’s continuing struggle to reconcile its past to newer visions of an inclusive, post-nationalist identity in which the old tropes of Québécois identity have become something of a hot potato for public officials.

The Conquest is one of those places where popular myth does not simply overwhelm scholarly historical research, but ignores it completely. Yet even in this myth complex built around 1759 there is dissonance, nuance, and contradiction. This recognition of the complexity of Quebec’s ‘passages’ is what makes reading Létourneau so intriguing. In some ways, Létourneau’s reading of the Conquest, as tumultuous but not ruinous, as a passage in which the interloper became in its own turn a founder, is reminiscent of earlier anglophone interpretations of the results of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. But Létourneau goes further in writing that, in the second half of the eighteenth century, Canadian society became an assemblage of French culture and British institutions, yet North American and indigenous in outlook and inspiration. This constraining interdependence of peoples and cultures, a ‘liaison paradoxale,’ is indeed the very foundation of coming to terms with the past and the perennial ‘national question.’ It is through...