Quebec and Its Historians: The Twentieth Century

Contents

Contents Introduction 1 I Historians and the Quiet Revolution: a Look at the Debates of the Mid-Sixties. 5 II Changing Views of the Canadian Sixteenth Century: from Narcisse-Eutrope Dionne (1891) to Marcel Trudel (1963). 31 III The Historiography of New France, 19601974 : Jean Hamelin to Louise Dechene. 53 IV The Relationship Between Ideology and Method: Fernand Ouellet in Economic and Social History of Quebec (1966) and Lower Canada (1976). 81 V Ideology and Quantitative Method: the Rural World of Fernand Ouellet. 118 Conclusion 164 Notes 167 Index 201 This page intentionally left blank Foreword Over the past twentyyears I have often remarked that history is the child of its time, as the French historian Lucien Febvre pointed out. I have taken as my creed Croce's dictum that all history is contemporary. Some of my colleagues, however,have had misgivings about my opinions concerning the inevitable subjectivity of the historian's thinking, be he layman or scholar. "Is not history a science like sociology or economics?" they ask. My fellow historians deserve a few words of explanation. I should point out that I have never denied the scientific nature of the study of history. I have merely emphasized its social and ideological dimensions. In many cases my remarks could have applied equally well to other disciplines. Certain parallels obviously exist between the development of the oldest of human sciences and the progress in method of younger, synchronological sciences. We have borrowed many techniques from the latter, notably the structuralist approach. It is therefore unfortunate that historians should have developed a sort of inferiority complex vis-a-vis scholars in other fields. Modern-day historicaldissertationsare no more subjective than those of the sociologist or psychoanalyst. A competent historian produces work that is as well-informed as that of any good political analyst.Errors in calculating the outcome of elections, for example, put the reliability of the expert's calculations into question. Such errors, however, can always be attributed to some unforeseen but decisiveevent within the forty-eight hours preceding election day. In a more general way, the predictions of opinion polls are the product of an "inexorable" array of figures,combined with wishful thinking and convictionsof a prophetic or mythical nature that closely resemble the outpourings of soothsayers and astrologers, past and present. Even economists are continually consulting curves and graphs in order to predict the future, a process that reminds one uncannily of the seer and his crystal ball. Who is to say that the results are any more reliable? Quebec and its Historians It istime we read more critical studies of man the sociologist. The urge to know and to question is not characterized by indifference, either in the social sciences or the humanities. This is as true of historians as of other scholars. Results in the human sciences tend to be unreliable, as the failures of various advertising campaigns based on opinion polls make all too evident. In medicine, to take another example, the swing between progress and setback proves that even the less "human" sciences are merely groping their wayforward. Unlike the botanist who classifies varieties of leaves from clover to maple, the student of human relations is dealing with a being who is free to choose. History, along with philosophy, is one of the oldest forms of critical discussion of the human race. Long after Herodotus and Livy, Renaissance humanists conceived the idea of studying the past scientifically. The Age of Enlightenment and the positivist era sawthe first revolution in knowledge of our discipline : the use of historical criticism to establish facts. Frenchspeaking Quebec historians assimilated the positivist revolution some fifty to a hundred years after their colleagues in France, Germany, Great Britain, the United States, and English Canada. During the 1930s, the theology of history still dominated Quebec historiography. Before then, the few renegades who suggested a secular approach to the past, only marginally related to the Christian, Roman Catholic credo, had their knuckles rapped. The application of methodical doubt in Quebec history was pioneered by scholars like Marcel Trudel and Guy Fregault who, between 1940 and 1950, inaugurated a fully scientific history. And yet, despite its underlying positivism , we now realize that modern critical history contains a perceptible strain of subjectivity. I remember a discussion with Trudel, my professor at Laval University,following one of his brilliant lectures on the seigneurial regime. Before the lecture I had read a piece...