Alexandre Taschereau and the Negro King Hypothesis

Alexandre Taschereau and the Negro King Hypothesis B. L. VIGOD In 1958, following the unprovoked expulsion of one of his reporters from a Maurice Duplessis press conference, Andre Laurendeau wrote an editorial in Le Devoir called "La theorie du roi negre." Laurendeau saw nothing remarkable in the incident itself, since it was merely another exhibition of Duplessis' arbitrary use of political power to reward his friends and punish his enemies. What particularly irked Le Devoir's editor was the passive acceptance of Duplessis' contempt for press freedom by Anglo-Quebec newspapers. Two years earlier, he recalled, these papers had joined a nationwide protest against the federal government's arrogant use of closure during the Pipeline Debate. What accounted for this double standard, he charged, was that ''les journaux anglophones du Quebec se comportent comme les Britanniques au sein d'une colonie d'Afrique." As long as the negro king protected the economic interests of the British business elite, there was no interference with the political customs of the tribe. It would hardly be reasonable , after all, to expect a primitive ruler to observe the highly developed democratic norms of the colonial power.1 In this case, Laurendeau was using the Negro .·King Hypothesis to describe an Anglo-Quebec attitude, rather than to analyze Duplessis himself. He even took care not to ascribe this attitude to the English minority of Quebec as a whole. It was the anglophone business elite, together with their spokesmen at the Star and Gazette, whom he wished to criticize. As for his opinion of Duplessis, we know from Laurendeau's other pronouncements that "negro king" was a barely adequate metaphor, rather than a literal description . For taken literally, the idea of a negro king suggests that the ruler does not really appreciate the effects of his collusion, or at least that he would not be permitted to act otherwise. Laurendeau would 'never have excused Duplessis that Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 13, No. 2 (Ete 1978 Summer) easily from responsibility for his political record. Despite Laurendeau's intentions on that single occasion however, the negro king metaphor clearly implies a much broader concept, the "colonial" model of French-English relations in Canada. One might say that it is the personal or biographical corollary of the theory that Canadian history is primarily a record of exploitation by one people of another. And of course this is a model much older than Marxist thought or . Third World analogies in French Ganada, and has been used explicitly by nationalist historians and journalists as well as by politicians. The term "negro king" itself dates only from the late Duplessis period, and it was novel in the way it focused criticism on a single individual. Earlier epithets, like "vendu" and "chouayen" were applied to any collaborator; there was nothing to connote "le vendu en chef." But it has become common to label Duplessis' predecessors as negro kings retroactively - according to Peter Desbarats, it was a staple of Quiet Revolution vocabulary in the early 1960s.2 And perhaps coincidentally, we find Eugene L'Heureux, Rene Levesque's future father-in-law, using all but the term itself as early as 1929. "Vraiment, nous avons \m gouvernement qui gouverne bien des petites gens, mais qui est plus gouverne qu'ecoute par les gros interets capitalistes [etrangers] ....Que ce regime dure encore quelques annees, et on nous considera comme les negres blancs de l'Amerique; nous serons des serviteurs partout et en tout."3 He was echoed by Mason Wade, who wrote that the Gouin and Taschereau regimes were guided by the ''prevailing principle that Quebec's commercial exploitation should be conducted on the basis of as much return as possible for master-race management and as little as possible for subject people labour. "4 That potent blend of nationalist and socialist rhetoric nearly conjures up an image of real negro kings of earlier centuries, selling members of their tribe to Europeans as slaves. Contrary to the impression I may have created so far, this is not an etymological analysis of French-Canadian nationalism. But I do wish to add one other preliminary observation about the use of "colonized people" and "negro king" as serious...