The Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World: An Essay in Comparative History 9780773574526

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface to the English Translation
Translators’ Note
Preface
1 The Comparative History of New Collectivities and Founding Cultures
2 Why Compare Oneself?
3 A New Old Country? The Formation and Transformations of Culture and Nation in Quebec
4 The Growth of National Consciousness in Mexico and Latin America
5 Political Emancipation and National Identity in Australia
6 Other Pathways: Canada, New Zealand, and the United States
7 Collective Paths, Discursive Strategies: A Model
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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B
C
D
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Citation preview

the making of the nations and cultures of the new world

carleton library series The Carleton Library Series, funded by Carleton University under the general editorship of the dean of the School of Graduate Studies and Research, publishes books about Canadian economics, geography, history, politics, society, and related subjects. It includes important new works as well as reprints of classics in the fields. The editorial committee welcomes manuscripts and suggestions, which should be sent to the dean of the School of Graduate Studies and Research, Carleton University. 192 The Blacks in Canada: A History (second edition) Robin Winks

203 The Canadian Quandary Harry Johnson (New edition)

193 A Disciplined Intelligence Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian Era A.B. McKillop

204 Canada and the Cost of World War II The International Operation of the Department of Finance, 1939-1947 Robert B. Bryce Edited by Mathew Bellamy

194 Land, Power, and Economics on the Frontier of Upper Canada John Clarke 195

The Children of Aataentsic A History of the Huron People to 1660 Bruce G. Trigger

196 Silent Surrender The Multinational Corporation in Canada Kari Levitt 197 Cree Narrative Expressing the Personal Meanings of Events Richard J. Preston 198 The Dream of Nation A Social and Intellectual History of Quebec Susan Mann 199 A Great Duty Canadian Responses to Modern Life and Mass Culture, 1939-1967 L.B. Kuffert 200 The Politics of Development Forests, Mines, and Hydro-Electric Power in Ontario, 1849-1941 H.V. Nelles 201 Watching Quebec Selected Essays Ramsay Cook 202 Land of the Midnight Sun A History of the Yukon Ken S. Coates and William R. Morrison

205 Lament for a Nation George Grant (Anniversary edition) 206 Confederation Debates in the Province of Canada, 1865 P.B. Waite (New edition) 207 The History of Canadian Business, 1867-1914 R.T. Naylor 208 Lord Durham’s Report Based on the Abridgement by Gerald M. Craig (New edition) 209 The Fighting Newfoundlander A History of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment G.W.L. Nicholson 210 Staples and Beyond Selected Writings of Mel Watkins Edited by Hugh Grant and David Wolfe 211 The Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World An Essay in Comparative History Gérard Bouchard

The Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World An Essay in Comparative History gérard bouchard translated by michelle weinroth and paul leduc browne

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2008 isbn 978-0-7735-3213-7 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-3294-6 (paper) Legal deposit first quarter 2008 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. First published in 2000 under the title Genèse des nations et cultures du Nouveau Monde: Essai d’histoire comparée by Les Éditions du Boréal. Translation of this work was made possible by a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Bouchard, Gérard, 1943– The making of the nations and cultures of the New World: an essay in comparative history / Gérard Bouchard ; translated by Michelle Weinroth and Paul Leduc Browne. Translation of: Genèse des nations et cultures du nouveau monde. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-3213-7 (bound) – isbn 978-0-7735-3294-6 (pbk.) 1. Nationalism. 2. Nationalism – Québec (Province) – History. 3. Ethnicity. 4. Europe – Colonies. 5. National state. i. Title. fc2926.9.n3b68313 2008 320.54 c2007-904773-4 Typeset in New Baskerville 10.5/13 by Infoscan Collette, Quebec City

Contents

Preface to the English Translation vii Translators’ Note xi Preface xv 1 The Comparative History of New Collectivities and Founding Cultures 3 2 Why Compare Oneself? 25 3 A New Old Country? The Formation and Transformations of Culture and Nation in Quebec 58 4 The Growth of National Consciousness in Mexico and Latin America 148 5 Political Emancipation and National Identity in Australia 182 6 Other Pathways: Canada, New Zealand, and the United States 261 7 Collective Paths, Discursive Strategies: A Model 307 Conclusion 332 Notes 339 Bibliography 369 Index 417

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Preface to the English Translation

Eight years have passed since I finished writing the original version of this book on the making of nations and cultures in the New World. In hindsight, I now perceive its shortcomings more clearly; rich, original, and diversified scholarship on national identities in this huge region of the world has surfaced over the past decade, revealing the limits of my initial endeavour. This book was my first attempt at such a wideranging comparative analysis. It sought to tackle a host of difficult issues and to cover various scientific areas. I should have felt daunted by it; I should perhaps have settled for a more manageable agenda. Still, the value of comparative macro-history was so attractive that, finally, the large-scale project prevailed. Although I could have done much better, I do not regret my choice. First, it proved to be particularly relevant in the context of Quebec culture. A few decades after the 1960s Quiet Revolution, a large part of this society was still mulling over its position between Europe and America. Its relationship with France, in particular, harboured an enduring tension, and its identity remained suffused with contradictory, if not false, representations inherited from its colonial past. My book, along with other intellectual writings of the 1990s, helped to shed new light on this by opening Quebec’s culture to its hemispheric environment and by reconsidering its past and present not only as a continuation of France on this side of the Atlantic but also as a “new” collectivity, a segment of the Americas and of the whole New World. By the same token, my analysis called for a redefinition of Quebec identity, including a new way to write Quebec’s past. Judging from the numerous, contrasting, and at times heated responses on the part of

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Quebec intellectuals, one can confidently say that these efforts have not been wasted. Second, beyond the Quebec landscape, and by way of comparison, I wanted to bring to light large cultural diachronic patterns unfolding at the scale of the New World. These were driven by a common context of constraints, dreams, and challenges, all somehow related to the settlement experience of European immigrants, both under colonial rule and in contact with Indigenous Peoples. I was especially interested in the contradictions that every incipient nation faced and the discursive strategies that the emerging elites devised in order to articulate or transcend the conundrums posed by conflicting interests, goals, principles, ideals, and projects. To take only a few examples: how can a settler society assign itself a long memory? How can it forcibly appropriate the so-called “empty land,” while claiming in the face of “barbarism” to embody “civilization”? How can it implement the model of a homogeneous, tightly knit nation amid striking diversity and sundry cleavages? In order to overcome these obstacles, New World elites mobilized a large array of myths, which shaped original collective imaginaries, while demonstrating the inventiveness of the new nation. I devoted a large segment of this book to identifying and comparing these myths and tried to discern their underlying discursive patterns. In another respect, my analysis also remains relevant at a very practical level insofar as most of it has as a backdrop the evolution of the relationship between the new collectivities and their European mother country. Indeed, in almost every part of the New World, sooner or later, this bond came to be experienced as a smothering dependency, as a source of impoverishment and alienation, a feeling that prompted a yearning for emancipation. At the same time, breaking away (politically and culturally) from the prestigious European legacy incurred hesitation, anguish, and guilt. Finally, even today, not that many nations of the New World have completely dispelled this malaise. I pursued another goal with this book. For various reasons (e.g., the colonial past, the old subdued relationship with France, the keen sense of being a small, fragile cultural minority in America, etc.), Quebec Francophone elites have tended to view their society through an exceptionalist lens of sorts. Overly absorbed by the traumas and idiosyncrasies of their history, they somewhat lost view of its universal dimension, such that they proved unable to tell their story to an international audience. Here is but one example: despite a long history of intense “luttes nationales,” Quebec Francophone intellectuals did not significantly contribute

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to the international scientific debate about nation and nationalism prior to the 1990s (conversely, Quebec has been largely ignored by the major theorists in the field). I would even say that, overall, this nation failed to express its experience in terms that would have received international attention and that would have established a rich dialogue with other kindred nations. I see therein a consequence of powerful conservative elites who, between the middle of the nineteenth century and the 1950s, succeeded in producing and reproducing a collective imaginary (including a national distinctiveness) poorly linked to the praxis of this new collectivity and at odds with Quebec’s continental environment (its “américanité”). By critically scrutinizing this collective imaginary and its residual elements up to the present, I hoped to implement a more open framework that would free Quebec’s culture from the remnants of a false exceptionalism. This is the unofficial, far-reaching, ambitious goal of this book: to set an intellectual stage from which Quebec can speak, and from which it can be heard and understood by other former colonizing or colonized nations. In other words, from which it can narrate to the world its own itinerary in the Americas. Gérard Bouchard 5 February 2007

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Translators’ Note

Gérard Bouchard’s discussion of the making of the nations and cultures of the New World centres on the fraught relationship between new collectivities and their respective motherlands. Perpetually under the shadow of colonial powers, the new collectivities studied in this book (with the exception of the United States) are ambivalent in their search for autonomy; they yearn for liberation from the European yoke, yet they are also bonded to the mother country through reverence and filial dependency. Not only divided in stance towards the Old World, they are also fractured internally. Split into two broad groups – the elites and the common people – these severed collectivities attain, on the whole, only a compromised independence. This phenomenon assumes a paradigmatic status in chapter 3, where Bouchard studies the aporiai besetting the French-Canadian elites. For these cultivated men, the quest for collective legitimacy in the New World is stymied by their inability to achieve full emancipation from tradition and the institutions of the past. The New World of America affords these elites utopian dreams of autonomy, yet its heterogeneous and earthy popular culture rankles with their refined sensibility. Unlike their lower-class counterparts, the elites are unable to immerse themselves fully in the new continent, and this for reasons of social taste and class distinction; it is their conflicted attitude towards the “enviable” superiority of the Old World, as well as their ambivalence towards the modernity of the New, that forms the hub of Bouchard’s theoretical considerations. In developing his conceptual apparatus, Bouchard adopts a specific terminology to advance his argument. Four expressions – rupture et continuité, culture savante, classes populaires, and américanité – feature

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repeatedly, yet they are not always easily rendered in English. Some preliminary explanation will be necessary to clarify the choices we have made in translating these terms. CULTURE SAVANTE

Although the expression culture savante appears throughout the whole book, its fullest range of meanings surfaces in chapter 3, where Bouchard discusses the cleavage between the elites and the common people. Articulated most saliently in terms of cultural literacy, this social division separates the educated ruling class – (les lettrés), linked to nonmanual (and often discursive) work – from the unlettered (uneducated) common people – (les illettrés), who are associated with physical labour and oral culture. Bouchard deploys culture savante to refer to a dynamic social agency within the new collectivity – a class of men, who, thanks to their education, occupy positions of political leadership and govern society’s discourse but who also embody the tensions of building New World nations under the shadow of colonial powers seated in Europe. In qualifying the term “culture,” the adjective savante connotes: (1) scientific, (2) clever, (3) erudite or learned, (4) scholarly, and (5) highbrow. However, there is no equivalent expression in English that embraces all the resonances of culture savante in one thrust. Conversely, each resonance translated separately would be too strong to render the meaning of culture savante adequately. The term “savant” cannot be reduced to “scientific,” “clever,” “erudite,” “scholarly,” or “highbrow”: it is context-specific. Indeed, in this book, the meaning of culture savante is at least fourfold. We have thus translated the expression in accordance with its multiple nuances. 1 For purposes of general discussion, we have rendered culture savante as elite culture (i.e., a class of educated men whose cultural literacy affords them specific roles and positions of power within society); 2 In the early section of chapter 3, where Bouchard focuses on FrenchCanadian society prior to the mid-twentieth century (i.e., prior to the spread of literacy and education), a clear distinction is made between men of letters and the unlettered masses; here, we have translated culture savante as the culture of the educated; 3 In the last section of chapter 3, we have rendered Bouchard’s references to the mid- to late twentieth-century culture of Bohemian and avant-garde intellectuals in Quebec as high culture;

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4 Culture savante also refers to late twentieth-century Quebec intellectual culture. RUPTURE

and

CONTINUITÉ

Gérard Bouchard’s couplet rupture et continuité is part of a theoretical model that defines two possible ways in which new nations and cultures assert their identity in the face of the Old World. These collectivities either defy colonial authority and break with the institutions of the past (rupture) or strive to achieve autonomy and legitimacy in more gradualist ways, reproducing the mother country on new turf, and struggling all the while with their perennial sense of inferiority before established tradition (continuité). Bouchard makes it clear throughout his book that this model is not categorical: continuité never represents slavish submission or absolute adherence to the mother country, and rupture not only refers to a radical divorce from the old country but also to a protracted unravelling of the colonial tie. As in English, rupture in French suggests some sudden, violent inner tear or significant cleavage. But while rupture means “to break” in both languages, the English word especially evokes the idea of bursting, while the French word also denotes a break in a relationship. For example, rupture conjugale means divorce or separation; rompre les pourparlers means to break off talks. Given these differences, we have translated rupture in the following ways. When Bouchard uses the terms rupture and continuité together, as part of a conceptual paradigm, we have adopted the closest equivalent expression (frequently invoked in social science discourse): “rupture and continuity.” Yet, when rupture (Fr.) is used independently of “continuity,” and when it suggests a radical splitting off from the European colonial powers through a variety of rebellious acts, we have used the term “break” since “break” is closer in meaning to the French word rupture than is the English term “rupture.” There are exceptions to this choice, particularly when the word “break” has jarred with the style or grammatical structure of its sentence. In such cases, we have retained the word “rupture.” See expressions such as “impossibility of rupture,” “cause of rupture,” and “two attempts at rupture.” Occasionally, we have also adopted “cultural rupture” and “political rupture.” Finally, we have retained the term “rupture” when Bouchard abstractly defines a collectivity’s mode of self-differentiation (e.g., “reproduction through difference, or rupture,” and “utopia of rupture”) since the word evokes

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Bouchard’s theoretical vocabulary and the conceptual apparatus to which it belongs. CLASSES POPULAIRES

Throughout the book, Gérard Bouchard frequently counterposes the elite and les classes populaires (i.e., the social strata that are the lower end of the social hierarchy). The term classes populaires is notoriously difficult to translate. Although it is sometimes rendered as “popular classes” in scholarly work published in English, this is not really accurate because the English word “popular” does not, as a rule, have the connotation “of the people,” as it does in French. We have eschewed possible translations such as “labouring classes” or “working classes” since they are less encompassing than classes populaires. Instead, we decided to take inspiration from G.D.H. Cole and Raymond Postgate, whose book on England’s classes populaires is titled The Common People, 1746–1946, 4th ed. (London: Methuen, 1949). AMÉRICANITÉ

In comparing Quebec’s history to the making of the other nations and cultures of the New World, the book highlights the extent to which Quebec has broken with its European forebears and taken root in the North American continent. For Bouchard, Quebec is characterized by a fundamental americanité, in the sense of belonging to the Americas, of being imbued with their specificity. Literally, américanité means Americanness, the quality of being American. However, because “America” and “American” have become synonymous in the English language with belonging or pertaining to the United States, we have chosen to retain the term américanité, whose resonances are specific to Quebec, and have avoided rendering it in English, where its distinct meaning is likely to be lost.

Preface

This is a comparative history of the making of the nations and cultures of the New World. (Henceforward, I shall refer to these as new collectivities or founding cultures.) It does not, strictly speaking, present new data, since it relies on much previous scholarship. Besides its extremely ambitious, perhaps even reckless objective, the book’s originality is to be found in its comparative approach as well as in the type of question it addresses to the past and present of these collectivities. My aim has been not only to cover almost the entire chronological and spatial field open to study but also to raise the most fundamental questions pertaining to the growth and history of these collectivities: how is a culture, a collective imaginary, born? How is the symbolic appropriation of territory, of Self and of the Other, produced and reproduced? How do founding myths appear? What aporiai and contradictions does an elite culture face as it establishes itself in a context that only the European discoverer construes as a new beginning? How does the colonial tie impinge on new continental identities and how does it evolve as they come into their own? What can be gleaned from a study that compares the routes along which founding cultures travelled and the patterns that they each developed? And what useful lesson does one draw from the state of crisis in which many of these cultures seem to be today? Clearly, my inquiry adopts a twofold logic: routes and representations. In other words, I address both the historical paths of these new collectivities and the discourses that they generated to fuel their imaginary. The sheer scale of such a project would normally have required gargantuan erudition and a perfect mastery of the intellectual traditions underlying the collectivities considered. Meeting neither one nor the other of these criteria, I nonetheless felt unable to resist the huge

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temptation posed by such an enormous intellectual endeavour. Fully aware of my limits, I embarked on it, attempting with apt questions and hypotheses to understand that which even a whole lifetime of work could not satisfy. I only hope that I have successfully sketched out an approach and opened up avenues for others who, one day, will write the complete synthesis that I knew was beyond my scope. In the course of my work, I have received help from countless people; I cannot possibly mention them all here. Still, I would particularly like to underscore my debt to the many colleagues and interlocutors I met during the dozens of presentations that I delivered during conferences, seminars, and colloquia in the countries that I was studying. These exchanges were invaluable opportunities to submit ideas and research conclusions for appraisal by wide-ranging specialists. I have both profited intellectually from these occasions and won encouragement to pursue my project. I am equally indebted to my assistants and students (notably Maria Térésa Perez-Hudon, Susanna Iuliano, Josée Gauthier, and Carole Roy), who collaborated in one section or other of my research; to the numerous correspondents on the World Wide Web who replied, patiently and at length, to my requests; to colleagues (in particular Yvan Lamonde, Bernard Andrès, Josée Igartua, and Ronald Rudin) with whom I have for some years conducted the Forum d’histoire des imaginaires collectifs (of the Institut inter-universitaire de recherches sur les populations); and finally to the staff of Les Éditions du Boréal and McGill-Queen’s University Press, who handled my book with their usual courtesy and professionalism. I have enjoyed the benefits of research grants from the University of Québec in Chicoutimi, the Fondation de l’Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, the Fonds FCAR, and the Quebec Ministry of Education.

the making of the nations and cultures of the new world

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1 The Comparative History of New Collectivities and Founding Cultures collective paths in the new world The idea of this research on the comparative history of new collectivities arose in the course of a previous extensive study on the Saguenay, an area of settlement situated in northern Quebec and opened to colonization in the 1830s. This study in social history aimed to reconstitute the (demographic, economic, cultural, etc.) features of rural FrenchCanadian society as it developed in those remote places, recently carved out of the bush (Bouchard 1996b). Given their typical isolation, it was reasonable to assume that these settlement communities exhibited such features in a rather magnified form. The results of my work were thus received with a certain surprise: indeed, on several issues, the empirical data categorically contradicted the French-Canadian archetype, long conveyed in ideologies and common representations (the deep-rooted, gregarious, insular peasant, etc.). Even more remarkable, the comparison with English-Canadian provinces and with several American states revealed surprising similarities on the demographic, economic, social, and cultural levels, where one would have expected marked differences. These results drew my attention first to the ways in which collective representations and identities are produced and disseminated. In addition, they encouraged an approach to the study of Saguenay (and Québécois)1 society, no longer based exclusively on the narrow and slightly distorting perspective of a cultural minority and its French heritage but, rather, on the view of the whole continent, or what is consensually termed américanité. Other comparative surveys, this time of Latin America and Australasia, subsequently showed that this North American perspective itself needed to be extended to the whole of the

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New World – hence the general notion of “new collectivity” that has been central to my comparative work for ten years. Three key strands of my research come together here: (1) understanding Quebec society presupposes a knowledge of the formation and development of other collectivities in the New World, in the widest sense of the term – the Americas, Australasia, and Africa; (2) illusions of uniqueness must be countered through a comparative approach; and (3) significant distortions and contradictions that filter into a society’s sustained self-representation call for a critical scrutiny of the evolution of collective imaginaries, their conditions of production, and their types of discursive practices. My inquiry thus addresses all collectivities established since the sixteenth century as a result of the intercontinental migratory movements that emanated from Europe and travelled towards “virgin” lands, or, to be more precise, areas regarded and treated as such by the newcomers. Defined in this way, the new collectivity (some scholars use the term “settler society”) is distinct from the simple colonial enclave in that (1) its members sooner or later come to perceive themselves as forming another society, geographically and socially separate from the mother country (even if that society remains dependent on the mother country in a variety of ways, notably as a colony); (2) they henceforward share a distinct collective consciousness; (3) they assign themselves goals and draw up utopias for their society; and (4) in the new collectivity, it is usually the descendants of Europeans who sever the colonial tie, whereas in the enclave it is the indigenous population. Thus the concept covers so-called founding collectivities, such as Quebec and Canada, the United States, all the countries of Latin America, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, and the former Rhodesia (these last two countries, however, are only marginally considered in the present book). On the theoretical level, it is possible to extend the term to all the populations that were born out of a migratory transfer from Europe but that never attained a politically institutionalized status or power, even while they always displayed a strong sense of identity and sought emancipation. Witness the case of the Acadians in Canada, the blacks in the United States and in some Latin American countries (Brazil in particular), as well as other New World communities that survived as cultural minorities. Finally, my definition embraces some borderline cases, countries such as Israel that one could compare to the renaissance of an old nation or to the extension of a nation that previously existed in diasporic form.

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I am particularly interested in the moment when the first immigrants to the new collectivities or their descendants come to feel that they are another society, one removed from the mother country. Will this society wish to distinguish itself from the metropolitan society or will it wish to replicate it as exactly as possible? This important choice confronts all new collectivities, and I shall revisit it. Whatever the case, as settlement gradually occurs, a collective entity subsequently takes shape, striving to forge representations, definitions of itself, and ultimate goals. Soon, a sense of belonging emerges, which is fuelled by the experiences of the present, by utopias and memories. Gradually the collective entity gains an identity of its own. The newcomers recreate a civil society and a collective imaginary overseas. We shall see that, on the symbolic level, this process runs up against specific obstacles, and even deadlocks, that the elites strive to overcome as best they can. In resorting to this notion of population, or of new collectivity (or, again, of founding culture, depending on the dimension involved), I do not mean in any way to endorse the New World’s triumphalist mythology. I simply wish to underscore the perspective from which the analysis will be conducted, namely, that of European immigrants, defined as pioneers or founders. I am well aware that all these “virgin” spaces had in reality been occupied and exploited for a long time by aboriginal populations that had claimed them, both materially and culturally. This implies that my perspective will broaden progressively along the way to include the relationship with the original occupier. Similarly, the concept of new collectivity remains neutral with respect to the dominant trends that the new society subsequently favoured: the stuff of New and Old World myths; the extension of the mother country’s model and the preservation of the colonial tie; radical breaks and wholly new beginnings; the gradual, long-term emancipation of culture and the State; combinations of continuity and rupture; and so on. This methodological stance is entirely in keeping with the spirit of the investigation: a cultural macro-history that reconstitutes the dominant trends and collective paths blazed in the spaces of the New World as well as the processes intrinsic to the formation and transformation of identities and imaginaries. As construed here, this notion of a collective imaginary prompts us to explore the cultural appropriation of the continent; that is, the establishment of a symbolic relationship with the land, the development of representations of the self (past, present, and future) and of the other, the creation of a framework of societal integration. The collective imaginary

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is thus the product of all the symbolic initiatives through which a society secures its bearings in order to anchor itself in time and space, facilitate communication among its members, and situate itself in relation to other societies.2 Since it focuses on new societies, this type of analysis is particularly significant, insofar as the construction of imaginaries must occur in a colonial context, within a network of dependencies, the evolution of which closely conditions the shape of emerging cultural forms. Following the arguments outlined above, and relying on the comparative approach, I highlight the major differences and convergences that developed at the centre of socio-political and cultural paths3 blazed in the New World from the sixteenth century on. I then explore the discursive practices that generate collective imaginaries, drawing on social thought, science, literature, the arts, historiography, and religion in order to tease out the stratagems of discourse (or of collective consciousness) and, in particular, the latter’s ingenuity when confronted with contradictions and aporiai. Although this phenomenon is at times regarded as a mere distortion of reality, an arbitrary rhetoric serving a hidden agenda, there is nothing fundamentally pejorative about it. On this point, I take pains to highlight the way in which different collectivities devised a variety of solutions to deal with the common problems they faced. Such diversity aside, one can reasonably posit the existence of a sort of grammar, evident in the processes that govern the formation and reconfiguration of the imaginary. Finally, I intend to take advantage of this comparative journey to shed new light on Quebec society and perhaps to achieve a better understanding of that collectivity’s path in the New World. This approach promises to be particularly fruitful in relation to Quebec, since its historiography has traditionally given the conceptualization and vision of the New World short shrift (Bouchard 1990a, 1995b). An important social fact in its own right, this phenomenon stems from the coolness long exhibited towards américanité in the discourse of most French-Canadian cultural elites. More generally, the creation of new collectivities gave rise to conditions that opened up new perspectives for historical and sociological studies. Indeed, even when it did not entail an absolute break, the migratory transfer at least established a distance with regard to the country of origin and generated a context that was conducive to a mythology of (new) beginnings, to a (virtual and at times real) new dawn of social life. As we will see, this impression was illusory in more than one respect: the ”founding” population already displayed important hubs of sociability; it had

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brought with it models, shared cultural references; and, to a large extent, the new imaginary developed by drawing on the old, and so on. Finally, the spaces of the New World are a fertile ground for comparative analysis, since the collectivities examined here were compelled to think and sustain their development in highly similar contexts. Thus, following an intercontinental migratory transfer, they were all created at a distance; their formation was subject to a colonial framework that made them dependent on one or the other of four great European powers (Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal) from which, without exception, they subsequently wished to be emancipated; they confronted vast territories that lent themselves to discovery, to conquest, and to development; they experienced a painful encounter with aboriginal populations. Each of these collectivities, in its own fashion, generated mythologies that articulated the sense of being involved in a great, perhaps unprecedented, collective adventure, where space occupied a central role. From the point of view of Quebec studies, the comparative history of new collectivities presupposes an important theoretical and cultural shift. It requires a substantial broadening of a long-held prevalent view, which consists of studying Quebec in its historical relation to Paris and Europe (principally London and Rome). Henceforward, to this old, vertical perspective, an intercolonial horizontal dimension is now added. This broader field of comparative research seems so natural and familiar that one wonders how it could have been neglected for so long. One reason is the long, intensive, and almost exclusive dependency on France among French-Canadian cultural elites. The slackening and redefinition of this relationship since the 1950s made the shift I have just described possible. This shift is an intrinsic part of Quebec’s self-emancipation, which has compelled it to reconfigure its relationship with France. Witness the renewed interest in the United States and, more recently, in Latin America, which has been growing for several decades now. For Bernard Andrès (1992–93), for example, the inter-American perspective in literature (“collaterality,” as he has it) is the prerequisite for a truly symmetrical and fruitful comparison, free of any presupposed hierarchy. In a similar sense, Antoine Sirois (1994) has demonstrated how the comparison between emerging and metropolitan literatures has inevitably tended to slip into conceptualizations of backwardness that paralyze analysis. In Quebec, Yvan Lamonde (1997c), and others, including myself (1995b), have endorsed this line of thought. But, as usual, literary circles opened the way. In 1977, the

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Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World

Quebec journal Dérives published an issue on Chile, then on El Salvador (1981) and Brazil (1983). The journals Études littéraires, Liberté and Possibles followed in its footsteps.4 In keeping with the tradition launched by Louis Hartz (1964), this trend links up with comparable currents in Latin America (Bernd 1996) and in the United States (Fitz 1991, 1997). That being said, my approach clearly remains very ambitious, if not perilous. Comparative history of this kind normally requires such a command of facts that one might be tempted to give up before even starting. Still, it is precisely on this international, intercontinental, multidimensional scale that the theorization must be pursued if one wishes to discover a renewed and enriched perspective on national realities that have in some sense grown too familiar. This will, I hope, exonerate me for the gaps, the short cuts, and the necessarily exploratory character of the present essay. I wish to stress my differences with a number of precursors who have sought to explain New World imaginaries and collective paths. The historiography of founding cultures, and especially of their literature, is imbued with evolutionism. Recall, among others, the works of C. Hadgraft (1960) and of C.F. Klinck et al. (1965), who studied the literary history of Australia and of Canada, respectively, according to a quasi-linear model of development or, progress. In a slightly different vein, Louis Hartz’s mechanistic views on founding peoples and his concept of “fragments” are also well known. His main book, published in 1964, puts forward the idea that each new society constituted only a simplified version, a depleted fragment, detached from the rich ideological and political spectrum of the European society from which it had sprung. In this way, the creation of the New World engendered not only cultural impoverishment but also considerable conservatism: no longer subjected to the dialectic of forces that used to hold it in perpetual flux, the fragment tended to stabilize, to grow structurally rigid. In quantitative terms, the “fragment” nonetheless developed considerably in its new environment for it was no longer constrained by opposing forces, by competing “fragments.” For Hartz, one could portray and even predict the socio-political destiny of each new collectivity, since it unfolded according to a “purely mechanistic process”: witness variants of liberalism in the United States and in Canada, forms of feudalism in Quebec and in Latin America, a radical tradition in Australia, and so on. This model appears flawed to me for several reasons. First, due to its determinism, the characteristics and unfolding pattern of each society

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9

are predictable, as though each were impervious to the influence of its new environment and its own history on the new continent (e.g., its experiences, collective choices, accidents, inventions, adaptations, etc.). This imperialism of the fragment thereby excludes all deepseated change. It also denies any possibility of a true break with the mother country: if there is differentiation, it is merely because the fragment reproduces only one part of the original society. Nor can one fully understand the reasons for which only one fragment is passed on, why two or three legacies could not combine, as happens in mother societies, or why other fragments could not crystallize in the development of new collectivities. On a more empirical level, several authors (some of them disciples of Hartz) have noted that this analysis oversimplifies the diversity and complexity exhibited by all of the new societies under investigation. Furthermore, Portugal and Spain, for example, were scarcely less conservative (or even less feudalistic) than several of their American colonies. I part company with Hartz on a few other points. A priori, my approach embraces not only political and social ideas but culture in its entirety. In addition, as I have shown, my approach in no way predicts which political trends will prevail across a range of societies or follow on from each other within a given society’s history. Hence it allows for the possibility of radical changes as well as for the possibility that rival tendencies (or “fragments”) could compete and combine. In the end, it is necessary to study the way these societies choose to deal with their heritage, either by preserving it, or by rejecting it in order to replace it, or, further still, by modifying it so as to combine it with something other. Clearly, the new collectivity may be the heir of its own history just as much as of its mother country. Based on his notion of frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner and his followers in the United States opened up another analytical route at the end of the nineteenth century.5 This model purports to be a sort of general theory of new populations that Turner’s many followers tried to apply to very diverse periods and places (including Medieval Europe and eastern societies). The original idea, articulated in relation to the history of the United States, claims that the settlement of the West and of the frontier served as a melting pot for a heterogeneous set of immigrants of mainly European origin. The resulting civilization was superior to those overseas and was characterized by ideals of equality, democracy, and progress. The notion of “frontier” thus refers not only to a territory but also to a particular process, to a collective experience. In my view, this analytical model fails on three counts. First, it

10

Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World

enshrines a geographical determinism with which it is difficult to come to terms: wherever it existed, the frontier is supposed to have had the same cathartic effect, blending differences and, mutatis mutandis, engendering similar characteristics. How, then, does one account for the great diversity of new collectivities? How does one explain the evidence of cleavage and exclusion that each displayed? Second, according to the model, a cultural break inevitably occurs between the new and the old society. Once again, this idea is unacceptable because it prejudges the course of history; indeed, we will see that this break is neither inevitable nor (when it arises) irrevocable. Moreover, Turner was particularly interested in the dependency of the Western frontier on the metropolitan centres of eastern North America. I am more interested in how new societies as a whole are dependent on their European mother countries. Finally, the model conveys more or less explicitly the idea that the frontier produced a superior culture and a superior society. Clearly, my analysis must eschew such a value judgement. Other syntheses, distinct from my own, have been put forward to account for the originality of the New World experience. In those cases, the distinction does not hinge on theoretical or methodological differences but on the simple fact that their authors seek to answer specific questions, which are sometimes complementary to my own. No need to engage here in an extensive overview; I consider but two examples. Pierre Nepveu (1998) has engaged in a very original reconstruction of the imaginaries of the New World, based on introspective literary narratives, which, in lieu of great stretches of wilderness, have covered the interior spaces, those of subjectivity, the construction of the ego, anguish, and even contemplation. Here, the object of study is not the experience that impels the newcomers to boisterously conquer a territory but, rather, that moment which, through silence and reclusion, opens up the discovery of a psychological continent: the inner frontier of the self. This approach gives rise to extremely rich analyses, which illuminate the multiplicity and complexity of experiences in the New World. But, once again, individual consciousness is at the heart of the inquiry, whereas my interests reside primarily in behaviour patterns and largescale collective representations. In a wholly other vein, this time under the banner of Marxism and revolution, Darcy Ribeiro (1970) has sketched an account of the disparities in the socio-political and economic development of various Latin American countries. On the theoretical level, this effort is worth noting, since it raises the issue of new

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collectivities within the framework of Marxist thought. Again, my approach is different. It deals primarily with the discursive underpinnings of emerging collective imaginaries within the constraints of dominating mother countries, and it devotes clear attention to contradictions and myths. All in all, it shares a lot with the works of scholars like A. Chanady (1994), Z. Bernd (2001, 1996), R. de Grandis, Z. Bernd (2000), and E. O’Gorman (1961). Another question needs to be clarified. My analytical approach would seem to postulate that the formation of New World collectivities represents a singular experience, distinct in all respects from the Old World. In response, one could object and argue that Europe (leave aside Asia and Africa, which do not concern us here) also experienced many new beginnings, renaissances, migratory events, and resettlements, following great traumas (wars, famines, epidemics) as well as numerous instances where states had to be reconstructed in the wake of revolutions, conquests, and the reshuffling of empires, particularly during the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. Did these episodes not present European societies with situations and challenges comparable to those of the New World: the establishment of institutions, the construction of identities, the creation of founding myths, new imaginaries, and so forth?6 One cannot deny here the existence of significant similarities, which, by the way, open the door to fascinating comparisons (to which I shall come back). This said, the circumstances in which the communities and the states of the New World were created differ in at least five ways from what can be discerned in the old. First, the intercontinental migratory transfers created a deep rift between the old and the new societies; in the latter, there emerged an acute feeling of separation and isolation visà-vis “civilization,” compounded with great uncertainty, a lasting impression of collective vulnerability. Second, from their inception, the New World communities were all constituted as colonies; they had to ensure their development in a context of deep economic, cultural, political, and military dependence on the European metropolitan centres. Third, their cultural relationship to space was very different. Almost everywhere, the new continents engendered a mythology of conquest: the colonization of vast, bounteous and savage lands, as well as a fear of the unknown, of unsuspected dangers. This dual perception helped to establish the epic dimension of settlement. Another important differentiating factor lies in the presence of indigenous peoples throughout the New World; this presented the new collectivities

12

Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World

with a challenge that they have yet to overcome. Finally, in European history, it is primarily the states or the institutions that were new, being the products of changes in regimes and borders, but the populations and the cultures certainly were not. Bismarck’s greater Germany was a new country, just like Garibaldi’s Italy or France of 1789, but they embraced very ancient ethnic groups. We will see that it is precisely on this ground that the New World experienced one of its greatest difficulties. With some exceptions, the cultural elites were literally tormented by the idea of belonging to a make-shift society, of being culturally impoverished beside Europe, rootless and without tradition, bereft of the substance and prestige proffered by seniority. One could even say that they made a vocation of filling in this lack of civilization through literature and the arts, through the construction of memory and the development of social thought, so that, one day, the New World would finally be able to claim parity with the Old.7 The reader will have noted that my remarks are somewhat at odds with those of Alexis de Tocqueville. In his famous essay on democracy in America, the latter argued that the New World was simply the replica of the old and that the raw material of the allegedly new societies was furnished by the customs, ideas, and models of European civilization. This is hardly disputable; nonetheless, it does not change the fact that these societies subsequently distinguished themselves markedly and often in quite radical ways. Furthermore, the mythology of new spaces that arose with the first European settlers was, in itself, a highly important and specific cultural feature. Here now is a brief presentation of the questions that I put to each of the new collectivities considered in the following chapters.

models and modes of symbolic appropriation By appropriation, I mean a process of collective identification mediated by space. This definition recalls the concept of territoriality, which in the case of Claude Raffestin (1980) and some other geographers refers to the system of cultural, social, and material relations that inhabitants forge with each other and with the place they occupy. In this sense, one often speaks of américanité, Australianity, Africanity, Antillanity, and the like. In each case, one seeks to name the sum of actions and transactions through which the members of a population have organized, named, and dreamed of their habitat. Thus defined, the object is at once cultural, social, and geographical. Symbolically (and I confine

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my analysis to this level), the object of study is constructed in two ways, simultaneously within the sphere of custom and the sphere of discourse (or of elite culture). In the sphere of custom or ethnography, appropriation is typical of all social settings, popular, bourgeois, or other. Arising from what I call, for lack of a better term, non-written language, appropriation appears in and through toponymy, dialects, tales and legends, dance, music and song, material culture, and all practices of daily and seasonal life; added to these are important rituals of birth, marriage and death. Appropriation gives rise to identities, to a local sense of belonging, and to regionalisms. On the strictly empirical level, and in the absence of all normative or ideological intervention, this work of non-written culture, in the long run, brings about an initial differentiation between the mother society and the new society. As everyday needs dictate inventions and adaptations, the context of settlement turns out to be quite conducive to the emergence of new collective forms. In this initial experience of space (e.g., exploration, land-clearing, settlement, naming, etc.), a new mentalité takes root, which will structure social and cultural life for a long time. This phenomenon can be discerned in all new societies. Such is the custom-based and ethnographic type of appropriation that operates in all social settings (even though it is ordinarily associated with the common people). By contrast, discursive practices are especially characteristic of intellectual culture. This second form of appropriation is constructive in nature, shaping the Self, the Other, and territory through a rationalized and formal process.8 The written form is its main medium, even though it draws upon many other media. Indeed, this type of appropriation expresses itself in various areas of thought, religion and science, in arts and literature. It establishes meanings, promotes values and ideals, and articulates choices and orientations in the name of the society as a whole. It frequently draws upon the stuff of custom and sometimes even adds to it. Overall, therefore, the collective imaginary unfolds simultaneously within custom and discourse, and along paths that rarely converge. Finally, this distinction between the customary and the discursive does not coincide neatly with the split between the popular and the learned (or the popular and the elitist); custom-based practices are not exclusive to the common people. Nonetheless, I confine my analysis of customary life to this social milieu. As a reflexive practice, one of the functions of discourse is to develop choices, to secure important directions for collective life. In the case of new collectivities, one of the most pivotal and fundamental subjects

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Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World

that elites must tackle is the stance to be adopted towards the mother country. Here, the area of possible options covers a large spectrum, theoretically marked out by two positions, two extreme models that I present as ideal types. The first model is that of identical reproduction, or of continuity. In this case, the new collectivity sees itself as a clone of the mother country. It assigns itself a mission: to remain faithful to its original model and to its tradition. It draws upon, and perpetuates, institutions, ideas, norms, symbols, and even memory. The worship of its roots acts, in a sense, as its utopia. The other parameter is that of reproduction through difference, or rupture. Here the new community claims its autonomy and turns its back on the mother country, whose tradition it repudiates.9 Often, it even claims to be building a better society by taking advantage of the new continent’s riches. The move towards rupture occurs, and is expressed, through a critique of the mother country (deemed to be in decline, incapable of progress, despotic, corrupt, hence the need to withdraw from it), through the construction of utopias representing utterly new beginnings, and through political emancipation. The latter is the most spectacular and institutionalized expression of a new collectivity’s break with the European past. We will see that this disengagement from the metropolis, which culminates in the formation of a new state, can be achieved either in one thrust, through confrontation, or gradually, through a succession of slippages and ongoing pressure. This said, it is clear that these two models are likely to mix and to accommodate a large range of intermediary positions and configurations. Indeed, it is rare to find one or the other of the two types in its pure state; any dominant form in one direction or another involves some interaction and forces the analysis to assume a dialectical stance. Rather than think in terms of models, it would be just as appropriate to imagine two omnipresent and competing dynamics, which combine in ways that vary from one community to another and evolve over the long term. This conceptual flexibility allows us to explain more effectively the case of some new collectivities that constantly waver between continuity and rupture, between their distant history and their geography. A few additional qualifications are in order. First, the orientations determined by discourse and the tendencies that prevail in the sphere of custom do not necessarily coincide. It turns out, for example, that reproduction through difference may coexist with important elements of continuity within customary life (as it does in certain institutions, for that matter). Conversely, marked ethnographic differentiation does

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not always appear to preclude a discourse of continuity or of identical reproduction. My inquiry leads me to determine whether a given community, at a given point in its history, tends (more) towards continuity or rupture. To that end, I rely simultaneously on customary forms (more or less modelled on inheritance) and on the discourse articulated by the elites themselves (the orientations set forth, the support they enjoy, the place they occupy in the socio-cultural system through which they are spread, etc.). Indeed, it is important to identify both situations of convergence and of divergence between the two cultural arenas. However, for obvious reasons, scholarly works receive special attention as they explicitly articulate choices and tendencies, and enable a precise reconstruction of the collective path. Indeed, the elites’ function is to constitute and reconstitute continually the theory of a society’s experience and fate. The stakes in all this are high. By shaping national culture, the broad orientation chosen at the start can determine for some time the vision of the New World (and the Old) and, in particular, perceptions of the past. This can cause a community or a culture either to harmonize or to conflict with its everyday environment. Thus, depending on the pattern or the model that one adopts on the rupture/continuity scale, the symbolic relationship to the New World may assume very different forms, ranging from triumphalist mythology to an introverted and defeatist outlook. It can engender exceptionalisms spawned now by a somewhat arrogant collective confidence, the belief in great superiority, and now by doubt, by a sense of peril – an unfavourable fate, bound perhaps to failure. However, whatever option prevails within a collectivity at a given moment, various obstacles and contradictions must be overcome. The path of continuity, for example, raises the question of the extent to which cultural mimetism nonetheless gives rise (through amplification, distortion, rejection, etc.) to more or less conscious selections from the primary culture or society – and of the forms in which this occurs. Here one first thinks of ideologies or institutions, but also of language, beliefs, and various elements of custom. One also ponders the tensions that are likely to surface between borrowed culture and everyday life experienced in the new land. As a result of differentiating customs and the impact of inventions and adaptations intrinsic to the material appropriation of territory, an increasing amount of friction will probably develop between representations carried over from the original society and the imperatives of everyday life – or between inheritance

16

Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World

and common usage. It is foreseeable that, in the long run, an original local culture will take shape; it will slowly penetrate the borrowed culture and threaten to supplant it. Whatever transpires, these processes call for close scrutiny of the interactions, the kinds of dichotomy, and the imposed hierarchy between what might be called prescribed (metropolitan) culture and inscribed (continental) culture.10 As they deepen, the tensions noted above are normally felt in a particularly acute way by literary figures and artists in their search for authenticity; the latter are often the first to express or to denounce these tensions. The case of poets and novelists is quite remarkable in this respect. Indeed, it appears that their discourse is ordinarily ahead of ideologies and of the social sciences, serving as an invaluable portent of the cultural transformation of the New World, a mirror of its ambiguities, anxieties, and shifting directions. Now, in the case of rupture, it is important to stress that, in spite of the dictates imposed by ideology or philosophy, there is no guarantee that all the fields of discourse will instantly follow suit. Even when the colonial tie has been severed politically, it remains possible for cultural disengagement and continental adaptation to unfold along very uneven rhythms and timetables, depending on the field in question: literature, social sciences, or the various avenues of intellectual life and the arts. Literature, for example, seems to experience enormous difficulty in warding off dependency and a sense of being inferior to the mother country. This unpredictable pattern in the disengagement process, as well as the wide range of combinations on the scale of continuity and rupture, are fully evident in the building of national culture (as we shall see), where they give rise to the most diverse configurations. Finally, as to the colonial bond itself, it may be broken brutally in a spectacular founding event, but it may also unravel gradually, along a series of small uncouplings or foundational actions, a drifting away rather than a sudden break. The opposition between prescribed and inscribed culture presents a first type of dichotomy that may appear in the appropriation process. Largely associated with the continuity paradigm, this split takes on a social guise that needs to be specified. It can take the form of a division between elites, within elite culture, or a schism between the elites and the common people. In this latter case, one will note, for example, an antinomy between elites attached to the mother country and bred on European references, and lower classes immersed in the experience of the new continent and wholly involved in a new construction of identity.

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The collective imaginary thus develops at opposite poles and is pulled in opposite directions. A key question concerns the way in which this type of splitting and disarticulation can affect the evolving relationship between the mother country and the new collectivity’s capacity for selfaffirmation. In the course of their history, nations such as Quebec, New Zealand, and Australia have exhibited this type of antinomy between Europeanizing elites and popular masses well ensconced in the New World. In Argentina, a similar division emerged within the ranks of the elites after independence (Quattrocchi-Woisson 1992). Moreover, in Argentina and Australia, these divisions were compounded with a spatial divide between the city and the countryside (the pampa in Argentina, the bush or the outback in Australia). Finally, it is obvious that these socio-cultural splits were even more manifest where they were coupled with ethnic divisions. Another issue has to do with the relationships that develop between elite and popular culture: are these relationships defined in terms of interaction and osmosis, or of tension and division? Be that as it may, one should not preclude the possibility of a culturally monolithic class structure, a substantial consensus around a dominant paradigm, and syncretism in intercultural relations. Finally, beyond the spokespersons themselves, one must carefully identify the classes and social agents that hide behind discursive practices. Here, the concept of the imaginary harbours quite a few pitfalls. Intellectual culture ordinarily produces works that purport to reach beyond class barriers, gender, parties, habitats, and the like. This presupposes that, just as with the nation, the collective imaginary is one indivisible entity, free from any social mooring. But the reality may be quite different; it may accommodate competing visions whose social spheres of production and communication can at times be delineated quite precisely.

the formation of national cultures By national culture, I mean that part of the collective imaginary (produced by discursive practices) that acts as the official framework of symbolic integration for the entire collectivity. In every area of the New World, when the elites began to perceive themselves as belonging to another society, distinct from the mother country, they generated their first societal representations through the prism of the nation, a model borrowed from Europe. While conveying everywhere the same

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Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World

will to self-affirmation, the notion nevertheless started to allow for quite different symbolic resonances from one society to another. This in itself enables me to dispense with a specific definition of national culture: given the approach adopted in this essay, I simply rely on the various definitions put forth by the elites themselves. This methodological choice is all the more apposite since the nation’s symbolic content is continually in flux, frequently contradictory, and subject to constant renegotiation in the history of each collectivity – something of which this book offers many examples. Unlike other authors, I also avoid debating whether the national imaginary was the result of a search for authenticity or the product of falsification; this would go against my methodological premises. Applied in this way, the category of truth and falsehood would introduce a difficult and arbitrary judgment that is foreign to my approach, which focuses on discursive processes and stratagems. Finally, elites everywhere faced the same tasks: literally and figuratively, they had to allot a territorial base to the nation, define its identity, endow it with an intellectual and customary heritage, establish political goals, project utopias, and construct memory. I review these components of national culture, briefly identifying the difficulties in each case (i.e., the aporiai that discourse encountered depending on whether the nation was built on the model of continuity or rupture). First, one must inquire into the growth and driving force of the national idea. What are the problems and traumas that it sought to overcome and through which it was subsequently defined? At what point were the material, social, and institutional conditions of this operation secured – the capacity to print and disseminate ideas, the existence of an educated public, the emergence of an intellectual class? Once these conditions were met, discourse had to provide a rational justification, by way of a legal fiction or some other means, for the seizure of land occupied hitherto by Aboriginal peoples. It also had to mark out the spatial foundation of the nation and to imprint it onto the collective imaginary. An even more complex task consisted in defining a collective identity (e.g., features, values, symbols, images of the self and of others). During the historical periods examined here, the national idea normally stemmed from a premise of homogeneity and integration. It was difficult to conceive of the nation without common institutions, rules, language, customs, memory, and even religion.11 In the context of new collectivities, however, this premise was refuted in several ways. For example, whether in their land of origin or in areas of slavery, the presence of Aboriginal peoples (First Nations, Africans,

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American Indians, Maoris, Aborigines, etc.) was an apparently irreducible and refractory fact. The same applies to immigration, which, after the very first European occupancy, stimulated population growth and recruited from diverse regions and ethnic groups. By what symbolic or other means did the elites manage to substantiate the idea of the nation? At what price did they institute an identity, if not a homogeneity, within this heterogeneity? Every new collectivity, like every old one before it, has also sought to create an intellectual and aesthetic legacy, a pantheon of great works, of fine art and literature, to bear witness to its substance and greatness, distinguish it from its neighbours, and rally posterity around a single ideal. But how does a founding culture endow itself with classics or, dare I say, immortals? In sum, how does a founding culture manage to establish a great and venerable tradition, to invent its own roots?12 Here discourse appears to be faced with a choice that is actually an impasse. From a first angle – the perspective of rupture – it can play the authenticity card and create its own references anew. But then it exposes itself to the disdainful glance of the metropolitan centre and to the intolerable comparison with the latter’s ancient and prestigious heritage. Moreover, the new collectivity is then likely to experience for a long time the uncertainties and the feeling of peril that are typically the fate of stateless cultures. On the other hand, seen from the perspective of continuity, the nation can make up for its lack of civilization by drawing unreservedly from models and symbolic capital accumulated by the mother country; this provides it with a swiftly and easily obtained strength and credibility. But the price to be paid for this can be enormous: bound to imitation and dependency, the founding culture settles into an inferiority complex that stifles its creative potential, into a symbolic configuration that is out of sync with life on the new continent. There is ample evidence of this in the history of new collectivities, starting with the national language: the novelist or poet needs the latter to express fully his or her experience of the New World; but the language with which he or she is henceforward imbued is borrowed and bound up with a play of norms and constraints governed by the metropolitan centre. These observations show that discursive constructions must be analyzed from two vantage points, which correspond to the double role that they fulfill in the formation and transformation of the founding cultures. On the one hand, they contribute directly to building the imaginary: they affirm the nation’s existence, they determine the content of its

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Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World

identity, they state its premises, and they express its moods. On the other hand, they leave in their wake works that acquire a heritage value, that become the accumulated and permanent capital of the living nation, the most striking proof of its worth and longevity. National culture thus uses discourse both as agent and witness. National culture also seeks to claim a heritage of customs (e.g., rituals, festivals, dances, songs, etc.), particularly one derived from the common people, in order to endow itself with objective, empirical substance, so to speak – while the products of elite culture always retain the somewhat arbitrary and fragile quality of artifice. This view remains, however, largely illusory in a twofold sense. First, discourse modifies and recreates the raw material of custom in order to suit its own purpose. Moreover, and here we encounter a difficulty noted earlier: how does one establish the foundations, the roots, and the vigour of customary traditions within the new collectivity’s short and uncertain lifespan? Conversely, by drawing up utopias, it was the responsibility of the elites to imagine an exalting future for the collectivity. The seemingly limitless territory of the New World furnished choice material for these carefully organized, methodical dreams, which present the inverse of reality as the latter’s plausible, or at least desirable, extension. Distance, estrangement (dépaysement), and the fascination of the unknown magnified the features of the new continent: the expanses were unlimited, the wealth incommensurable, the perils gigantic. And yet, this potential for wonderment could be invested either in a will to recreate a larger, purified and perfected version of the mother country or in an attempt at radically new beginnings, based on a more rational and more harmonious collective structure, free of wrenching ties and enslavement to the Old World. In either case, the new society would be superior to those of Europe. Indeed, it seems that, to varying degrees, the mythology of the New World was always built on a countermythology of the Old World, even where elites banked on continuity. In this way, the history of Latin America gave birth to the utopia of a new cosmic race, born of an Indian, European, and African mix (see, primarily, José Vasconcelos, La Raza Cosmica, 1925. Many intellectuals also projected the dream of a great pan-American civilization, founded on the fusion of all the cultural and ethnic elements of the continent. There are also traces of a great urban utopia. In the United States, an ideal of progress, democracy, and individual liberty prevailed in the eighteenth century; the frontier myth reignited it in the following

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century. At a first glance, utopian thought does not appear to have thrived to the same extent or to the same scale in English Canada or Australia. In comparison, Quebec is quite original. Utopias based on rupture appeared there during the last third of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries. Grand utopias promoting the settlement of the North or the establishment of French and Catholic culture throughout North America arose mainly after the middle of the nineteenth century; but these were, most often, utopias of continuity, models of the Old World transposed or adapted to the North American continent, rather than plans to build something genuinely new that would have firmly repudiated the heritage of the mother country. Finally, elite culture had to secure the legitimacy of the nation and, in the same thrust, to validate the ruling strata that declared themselves its spokespersons. This task is obviously not specific to new collectivities, since all nation-states have had to defend themselves against arbitrary claims and manipulation. To that end, Providence has frequently been invoked to underscore the original and divine calling of the nation (or of the monarchy or any other regime). In other contexts, the nation is portrayed as embedded in the biological substrate of its enduring genealogical and racial filiations. It can also be minted through indelible moral and psychological traits, as was the case in Belgium: the reference to Caesar’s ancient testimony is proof of the bravery at the heart of Belgian national character (Stengers 1997). It may also flow from dispositions pre-established by geography, from the glory and indestructible charisma of great founding heroes, from the sovereign will of the people (following Herder’s theory), from its invincible culture, extending from time immemorial. Since we are dealing with new collectivities, a strategy that seems particularly interesting consists in endowing the nation with very deep historical roots. Thanks to historiography or other methods, Western nations, since the eighteenth century, have been preoccupied with delivering an ennobling narrative of their beginnings by situating the latter in an era as remote as possible, preferably stretching back to prehistory. In a way, they postulated that the nation’s ancient origins conferred upon it an objective and absolute character. Shielded from the ravages of time, it acquires a sort of transcendence, thanks to which it exists beyond the will of individuals. Thus, it cannot be said to be just the artificial creation and vested interest of one faction or dominant class; its permanence places it above all suspicion. But how does the memorial function (or fiction?) operate in a founding culture?

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Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World

How does one overcome the original impasse born of the will to claim ancient roots in a collectivity, which, by definition, is at point zero on the timescale? In other words, how does one construct a long memory on the basis of a short history? Another task consists of establishing the nation’s date of birth, ascribing to it remarkable acts or events that brought it into being and identifying its founding heroes. Once again, one surmises that this exercise varies considerably, depending on whether it fits into a paradigm of continuity or rupture. Similarly, the symbolic profit that can be extracted from it for the edification of posterity (e.g., in the form of commemorations on anniversary days and in times of national crisis, or simply for pedagogical ends) depends largely on the nature and form of the founding acts. A radical break in the form of a spectacular collective act lends itself better to myth-making than does gradual emancipation based on a long sequence of small events. Similarly, a great and victorious leader’s solemn proclamations on the field of battle are more likely to mark history than are press releases issued by a gathering of notables, however worthy they may be. That said, the national imaginary can also feed on deflating myths, as in the case of Quebec and its idéologie de la survivance (e.g., the commemoration of the defeat of the Plains of Abraham in 1759, of the failed Insurrections of 1837–38, of various episodes of constitutional bullying, pessimistic views of the future, etc.). Another point of concern is the need to retroactively establish references shared by the entire nation. The feeling of having the same ancestors and the same past is a powerful aspect of identity and symbolic cohesion. This touches on the problem of integration, which is central to the national cultures of the New World.

conclusion One could say that the field of comparative research that I have just sketched covers three large areas, namely, the cultural, the political, and the national – the latter being the site through which the state mobilizes culture. My inquiry addresses every type of discourse – literary or artistic creation, ideas stricto sensu – and all forms of custom. Moreover, it aims to join a horizontal perspective (a comparison of new collectivities) with a vertical perspective (an analysis of the metropolitan/colonial or centre/periphery relationships). These two axes are indeed inextricably linked to the extent that the second constantly and variously criss-crosses with the first. These conditions bring out the

Comparative History of New Collectivities and Founding Cultures

23

quite ambitious and demanding nature of the objectives pursued here, which call for a three-tiered approach. The first stage is descriptive; it involves reconstituting (or at the very least delineating in broad terms) the paths covered by the new collectivities from their inception to the present, and this in a form that makes them comparable. I devote the greater part of the book to that question. The second stage (which takes up just one, final, chapter) is an attempt at modelling aimed at identifying the specificity, but also the common features, of the typical sequences within the various paths under investigation. I also wish to identify general patterns within discursive practices, especially when these aim to overcome contradictions. Indeed, in order to maintain at least a semblance of cohesion in the collective imaginary, the elite culture is impelled to hone strategies, inventions, stratagems, defensive manœuvres, and subterfuges. One could feasibly extract from this symbolic arsenal the elements of a discursive grammar, a semantics of the imaginary. Finally, in a third stage that I only superficially enter, the challenge is to account for the convergences and divergences identified within the collective paths. I need to add four cautionary remarks. To a great extent, the following analysis crosses paths with anti-colonialist literature. For instance, many issues that are addressed closely connect with Frantz Fanon’s works (notably Black Skin, White Masks, 1968). The thread of postcolonial studies will be evident to all. My references to this prolific scholarship, however, are scant. At the time I was doing the research for this book, I was not very familiar with it (postcolonial studies are not popular in francophone circles) and, when I became more versed in it, I was struck (as the reader will likely be) by the similarity between this stream of research and the approach that I had developed. Therefore, I did not feel compelled to convert my vocabulary and to establish formal theoretical or analytical bridges. Likewise, the reader will not find detailed discussions here of major theorists of nation and nationalism (Gellner, Smith, Hobsbawm, Anderson). Somehow, I address this concept only by proxy, to the extent that the New World’s elites make use of it in their endeavour to build a collective imaginary. My interest focuses on (1) the meanings that they give to the concept in order to serve their political and social purposes; (2) the deadlocks and contradictions that they face; and (3) the ways and extent to which they surmount or circumvent the latter. In the following chapters, gender issues are scarcely visible, and fleetingly at that. This is the result of the choice I made to keep to the high road, so to speak, and to confine the analysis to very broad

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lines when dealing with the construction of collective imaginaries, the structure of discourse, the articulation of contradictions, and the symbolic material of myths. This choice clearly entails several losses. Indeed, the book’s vast embrace had to preclude engaging with many important areas of discussion and analysis. Again, I must beg the reader’s understanding for this shortcoming.13 Since this book often resorts to the concept of myth, a clarification is in order. Myth can be a deliberate, malicious falsification of reality, but it is not its very nature to be a mere lie. Basically, myth asserts, promotes, and ritualizes a value, a belief, an ideal, so that it becomes part of the symbolic foundation of a society, in which it fulfills major functions and can serve a large array of goals. In this way, without being necessarily a lie, myth is never innocent insofar as it is always somehow socially and politically determined. One point of primary interest is the way it is invoked and deployed within cultural frames in order to circumvent contradictions. The reader will understand that it was impossible to complete this whole program of research within a single book. I could have focused on one or two collectivities and studied them in greater depth. I ruled out that option and chose a riskier route. It seemed preferable to cover the greatest number of new collectivities from the very start, in order to reap all the benefits of the large-scale comparison, even if this meant increasing the number of shortcuts, approximations, and all-toocursory overviews, not to mention the factual errors inevitably strewn along this somewhat hectic itinerary. May these be excused, and may the reader see this book as giving form to an intention rather than as my final word on the subject.14 Finally, a word on the material presentation of my analyses. As previously stated, the latter draw essentially on published writings (a few hundred books and articles), hence the need to refer to numerous works in the course of the text. To avoid encumbrance, I have, however, chosen to eliminate a number of references deemed less essential. They are nonetheless listed with all the others at the back of the book, in the bibliography.

2 Why Compare (Oneself)?

comparative history in quebec By drawing primarily on historiographical scholarship in Quebec, I intend to present some views on the role of comparison as a process of objectification in building historical knowledge. In very general terms, comparison refers here to any scientific approach which consists in: (1) relating two or several objects of analysis belonging to as many collective settings and (2) foregrounding differences and similarities so as to increase knowledge either of one or of each of these objects. I return to this later. My ideas are intended as a vindication of comparative history; there are, however, several ways to broach the argument. One can construct it by drawing on the grand objectives of scientific humanism in the tradition of the Enlightenment (e.g., erudition, basic knowledge, and general culture). Such an argument can also emphasize the imperatives of globalization, now an essential factor in any approach to knowledge within the social sciences; in this sense, comparison functions as an effective means of opening up research perspectives (anthropology, for example, has shown this since the nineteenth century). Another route – the one I adopt – underscores the importance of comparison as a process of objectifying and enriching historical knowledge. A few decades ago, authors such as Raymond Aron (1948), HenriIrénée Marrou (1959), and Paul Ricœur (1955) raised doubts about the status of historical science. They claimed it was condemned to relativism, since it appeared too derivative of the present and of subjectivity, unable, as a result, to define its distinct disciplinary field. More recently, in the wake of Michel Foucault, works inspired by postmodernism have reopened this debate.1 Once again, historical practice is

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being accused of perpetuating and legitimizing collective mythologies and fictions (particularly of the nation), and of thus being complicit with dominant political ideologies. Consequently, in one way or another, historical science sees itself consigned to an essentially passive role, echoing the present rather than enabling a true voice to be heard. Viewed in this light, the reconstructions of the past are but a reflection of the present, a shadow theatre; here the historian becomes a mercenary of the present.2 In sum, for half a century, doubt has hovered over historical science, never really dissipating. Several historians have stressed that problem-oriented history, conceived in the spirit of the founders of the Annales School in France, represented a sufficient reply, since it called for a clarification of the steps involved in the construction of knowledge. But in reality, problem-oriented history may also be construed as an admission of relativism: indeed, this new history rejected the certainties of positivist history; it introduced flexibility into the once-sacred rule of objectivity; it allowed that the ”truth” of historical enquiry was short-lived and partial, if not manifold, and always derived from a particular perspective, linked to a social milieu or a given era. In short, it recognized that the interpretations produced by the historian had to be continually readjusted in function of an everelusive “reality.” Admittedly, such a reform, while being necessary and welcome on the epistemological level, could not dispel the allegation of relativism; on the contrary, it seemed to lend it ammunition. This whole question is central to my discussion of the comparative approach as critique, validation, and enhancement of historical knowledge; as such, it adds to the scientificity of the discipline. My thinking on this subject also stems from the fact that comparative history in Quebec has traditionally been held in poor regard. Statistics on articles in the Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française show that only 1.5 percent of the articles published between 1962 and 1991 were comparative in nature. The figures were 0.8 percent between 1987 and 1991, but 4.5 percent between 1992 and 1996. Moreover, 6.0 percent of the papers presented in 1997 at the Congress of the Institut d’histoire de l’Amérique française included a comparative dimension (8.6 percent in 1998). These latter figures may suggest a growing tendency.3 Some recent calls in favour of comparative work should also be mentioned.4 This said, it would be inaccurate to claim that comparison has been totally absent from Quebec’s historiographical tradition. Broadening the scope of enquiry, Guy Frégault notably in La Guerre de la Conquête,

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1955) and Michel Brunet made a point of referring to the history of the United States as far back as the 1950s. Later, the economic historian Albert Faucher sought to understand the characteristics of Quebec economic development in continental terms. Similarly, in their work on Lower Canada in the first half of the nineteenth century, Jean-Pierre Wallot and Gilles Paquet highlighted the Atlantic world as a backdrop for their analyses. Although comparison was not their principal objective, several important works also offer some comparative insights (e.g., Dechêne 1994). Closer to strictly comparative history, one finds several master’s theses (Delâge 1971, in particular), doctoral theses (Dupré 1993; Deshaies 1973), or somewhat isolated articles (Alcorn and Igartua 1975; Rouillard 1983; Taschereau 1988). The comparative history project on Quebec and French rural societies has rippled through the scientific field; originally under the direction of Joseph Goy and Jean-Pierre Wallot, this ambitious study has been under way for more than twenty years now.5 Finally, there are some noteworthy historical contributions by non-historians from the fields of literature (Bernard Andrès: Quebec/Brazil), demography (the Historical Demography Research Programme at the Université de Montréal: Quebec/France), and sociology (Sylvie Lacombe: Quebec/Canada). Clearly, this inventory (from which I have no doubt omitted some elements) is rather thin. I might add that the study of world systems, and of what is now referred to as macro-history (at the continental or intercontinental scale), has not yet taken off in Quebec. It is furthermore extraordinary that the majority of comparative studies, in particular regarding Quebec, have been carried out by non-Quebecers (see Saussol and Zitomersky 1996; Egnal 1996; McPherson 1998; O’Sullivan See 1986; and others). I shall have occasion later to probe this relative gap in Quebec historiography. Having said this, the phenomenon is not specific to Quebec: a similar observation has been made by several authors (e.g., Haupt 1995) in respect to France, where the Annales group, in particular, has been criticized for turning its back on an approach that had been an integral part of the founding program of social history.6 According to James Leith (1995) and Allan Greer (1995), a similar situation prevails in English Canada. It is true that the proportion of papers delivered at the Congress of the Canadian Historical Association in 1997 and 1998 that included a comparative content was only 5.5 percent and 3.9 percent, respectively. But one also has to take into consideration the many interdisciplinary collective works that compare Canada with other countries from the Commonwealth (in

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particular Australia) or with countries from Latin America. The same applies to countries such as Australia and New Zealand. The United States seems to be an exception, however. Comparative history has twice been the theme of the Congress of the American Historical Association in the last thirty years (in 1978 and 1990). During the Seattle meeting of January 1998, about half of the 158 sessions in the program included a comparative dimension. The themes most often tackled were slavery and racism, settlement and the frontier, the status of women, economic development, modernization, and social mobility. Louis Hartz (1962) is one of the principal pioneers of this strand of research, which has been growing continuously in the United States for several decades and has some great classics to its credit.7 Essentially, comparative history differs markedly from one society to another, and each case needs to be interpreted in the light of specific historical conjunctures and vantage points. My thinking draws on the example of Quebec, but the issues that I address belong to a broader perspective. I first introduce some indispensable definitions and distinctions in respect to methodology and the major trends in comparative history. I then review the main functions of comparison and the type of scientific and cultural benefit we can expect from it.

comparison: tendencies and goals Like historical science itself, comparative history is multifold; it can serve many different ends and adapt itself to all sorts of areas by adopting the most varied approaches. It also raises numerous problems of method. Clearly, to cover the entire field is out of the question. Given my objectives, and for the purposes of this overview, I highlight only two major models. Similarly, with respect to questions of method, I leave aside important aspects that various authors have already discussed in depth. These include problems linked to the definition of the units of comparison (Skocpol and Somers 1980); to the scale of analysis – transnational, multinational, infranational (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1970); or to the various ways of conducting observation. On this last point, recall the linear, convergent and divergent modes described by Nancy Green (1994) or the now classic distinction originally proposed by John Stuart Mill between method of agreement and method of difference.8 Finally, I avoid the most important problems of language that invariably surface in transcultural comparisons, where very different realities occasionally have to be brought together under

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a) Referential model

b) Integral model

Unit, object of comparison

Figure 1

Unit taken as reference point

Two Comparative Approaches

similar terms, models, and nomenclatures. Indeed, there are instances when language becomes so complicit with the object that it names that it hinders translation and comparison. This difficulty is illustrated by the concept of the “intellectual” as it was constructed in France around the Dreyfus Affair.9 There is also the challenge posed by the creation of the scales and grids used in classifying occupations in studies of social mobility across several countries.10 The first of the two major comparative models I wish to discuss is the referential model (figure 1). In this case, comparison involves two, three, or several different units belonging to as many areas or societies, but one of these governs the whole operation, acting as a launching pad and as a point of reference for comparison. Comparison is carried out in regard to that society and furthers knowledge of it by way of a detour through other societies. In a sense, the point of the exercise is to obtain a more precise image of oneself in the mirror of the other. Such would be a comparative history of settlement in Quebec, in the United States, and in Australia, where the goal would be to highlight Quebec’s particularities in order to explain and understand them

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better. Or again, a comparative study aimed at ascertaining the extent to which Quebec’s cultural evolution in the twentieth century conforms to the Western pattern. Sometimes, when the investigators identify with the “reference” society, they may invest a lot of themselves in this type of comparison. This is the case with national history, since, by definition, the essential point of this genre leads investigators to be part of their object. I call the second model integral. Here comparison is not limited to exploring the paths that link the unit of reference to the other units being examined. All the units are treated equally; each is compared to all the others. This type of comparison, which can be infra- or transnational, ordinarily aims to introduce some rational coherence into the diversity of elements being considered; its purpose is to extract a general principle that orders the object’s various facets. This can be carried out empirically by establishing statistical correlations, looking for causal links, testing a hypothesis, or developing typologies. It may also include more abstract goals: building general theories, models, ideal types, and so on. Depending on whether it falls into the referential or integral model, a comparison must satisfy specific rules. In the first case, the objects being compared must possess a certain number of common features, identified from the start; otherwise, it is impossible to establish connections with the society or object that acts as a point of reference. In the second case, depending on the stated question, it may, occasionally, be necessary to select the most contrasting objects. On the theoretical level, the aim of the integral comparison is to construct generalizations: for example, general theories of social classes, the nation-state, the family; models of economic development, demographic transition, and cultural dissemination; ideal types of feudal society, the bourgeoisie, and postmodern culture; general laws of social mobility, wealth distribution, and mortality crises.11 Similarly, such comparison might illuminate common formal logics, structural homologies, and constants, as is frequently seen in the historicogeographical study of tales, in the semiotic analysis of rituals, and in ethnological research on conjugal mating or systems of family inheritance. Finally, this type of comparison makes it possible to identify subsets within a macro-system in some cases where it had originally been thought that specific, autonomous systems were present.12 In empirical terms, these studies include factorial analyses of the growth in literacy, of the decline in fertility, of forms of criminality, as well as correlations between ethnic belonging and electoral behaviour,

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between family structures and residential patterns, and so on.13 In all instances, the particular areas or societies that initially headed the comparison tend to recede into the background in the final product. What remains primarily are proposals of a general nature, intended to deepen overall knowledge of social life or of one of its segments. Finally, this type of comparative history may simply pursue an encyclopaedic goal, such as locating and itemizing the various forms and permutations of a given phenomenon (e.g., institutions, behaviour, belief, etc.). Comparison based on the integral model may face a major problem when it becomes punctual or sectoral, when it focuses exclusively on various facets of the object within specific contexts and fails to consider the collective dynamic that structures each of these contexts. The inquiry then seeks to compare elements and social facts detached from their collective setting: for example, indices of premarital conception, illegitimate birth, literacy; forms of the famille souche, of agrarian capitalism, of exclusion, inter alia. The legitimacy of such a method might be called into question, inasmuch as social facts are explained through other social facts as one segment of social life assumes a shape and meaning only through the complex interplay of its interactions with other segments. What can one glean from a fragment, extracted from its roots, if not superficial, perhaps even deceptive, characteristics? The frequency of intermarriage in a given collectivity is determined by a web of relationships, including population structure (the “marriage market”), the economics of the family, representations of kinship, religious taboos, and other elements. Age at marriage also depends on a complex range of demographic, economic, social, and cultural factors at the heart of collective life. The same applies to the dowry system, criminality, migrations, and the status of women. Recent research presents even more pointed examples: the age at which children leave the family hearth, the length of time before children are weaned, forms of preference (préciput) in marriage contracts, and so on. These horizontal comparisons are problematic since they isolate the variables from their structural environment and treat them as pieces of a mosaic. The problem disappears, however, when these variables are studied as subordinate elements only, as mirrors or indicators of the environment itself.14 Another solution involves introducing the collective settings themselves into the comparison. The objects of study are then reinserted into their social context and the analysis aims to illuminate interactions, connections, processes, and embedded functions and structures.

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The analysis is no longer punctual or sectoral but relational. Daniel Levine (1988) adopted such an approach in his comparative study of the attitudes towards the poor, embodied in the social policies of various Western countries. His interpretation draws on national traditions and cultures as they are the product of specific collective experiences that shaped enduring attitudes. Leah Greenfeld’s (1992) work on the various forms of nationalism in England, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States offers another example. Here too, according to the author, the differences can ultimately be explained through ideological traditions, cultural foundations germane to each society. A last example is the way Michèle Lamont (2000) relates destigmatization (antiracist) strategies in France and the United States to the cultural foundations of these societies. This method proves to be particularly fruitful when the comparison covers large segments of social life or of substantial, well characterized, historical processes (e.g., the development of capitalism or of the nation-state, the decline of the sacred, the evolution of class structures, the end of systems of slavery, etc.). However, it requires an enormous labour of historical reconstruction and a very fine knowledge of two or several societies, which obviously lessens the frequency with which it is used. This methodological alternative (comparison in punctual or in relational mode) abounds in theoretical implications. In fact, it covers two visions, two philosophies of the social, which can be tackled either as a sort of mosaic, a more or less arbitrary array of juxtaposed pieces, or as a system in perpetual movement, the components of which are defined by a network of interactions. In the first case, the elements are, in a certain sense, detachable; in the second case, they can only be analyzed in relation to the entirety of social reality. Important discussions have been conducted on this subject, notably with regard to the comparative study of systems of slavery.15 Moreover, this is a longstanding question. Witness the French controversy, which, at the turn of the century, pitted Charles Seignobos and Henri Hauser against François Simiand over the question of the Roman family in the age of Empire. Seignobos and Hauser claimed that one cannot really understand the Roman family without also studying Roman society, of which it was both a by-product and a constitutive part. Simiand declared that one had rather to compare its features with others and that only many such comparisons could reveal its true nature.16 This debate, which opposes two great epistemological traditions within the social and historical sciences, remains open. But, contrary to what one might think,

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it does not lapse into the usual divide between two traditions: on the one hand, a historiographical tradition highly attuned to empirical complexities, to unpredictable trends, to the impact of social actors involved in singular situations; and on the other hand, a more theoretical sociological tradition that is keen to decode the social and to elucidate the general mechanisms governing its movement. Indeed, some more traditional researchers at the very heart of historical science, attached to what was once called “factual history,” feel more at ease with an approach of the sectoral type, which lends itself to a detailed delineation of facts and events. By contrast, numerous practitioners of social history subscribe more readily to the relational approach, which, from the start, inserts events and individuals into their collective setting.

comparison: scientific functions and advantages Let us return to the purposes of the comparative method, to the functions that it fulfills and to the advantages that it proffers our knowledge of the past and the present. It is often said of comparison that its goal is to foreground similarities and differences. This general objective is laudable, no doubt, because it consists in enriching analytical perspectives by diversifying them. Alone, however, such an objective would not always justify the important investments that comparative history requires. There is a famous adage that states: he who knows but one society, knows none. I shall take the latter as my point of departure, while attempting to make it more precise. First, on a rather basic level, comparison allows one to insert a sequence of unfolding events, an evolution of sorts, into the spatiotemporal threads to which it belongs. Second, it also provides ways of calling into doubt the false uniqueness that an all-too-ethnocentric perspective readily engenders; constructions of collective identity, most particularly representations of the nation, eagerly feed off such a perspective.17 In this sense, national history is quite obviously the most vulnerable genre. Along the same lines, several American authors (e.g., Tyrrell 1991; Grew 1985) have shown how comparative studies in the United States were biased by so-called exceptionalism, an argument that claims a priori that the United States differs in all respects from others. Sometimes this is accompanied by the notion that the United States is simply superior to the rest. In fact, this attitude was so dominant that

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American historiography scarcely felt the need to resort to comparison until the mid-twentieth century.18 In Europe, too, comparative works have been criticized for remaining fettered to a national framework and for thus accentuating ethnocentric tendencies.19 This is a long-standing problem. Soon after the First World War, Henri Pirenne (1923) made it the theme of his presidential address at the Fifth International Congress of the Historical Sciences. Getting back to the exceptionalist tendency itself, I must stress that it is far from confined to the United States. Was there not an element of identity (not to say a nationalist impulse) driving English historian Peter Laslett’s vast 1970s research program on household structures? This project, as we know, foregrounded the individualism of the English family as the crucible for the great entrepreneurial virtues exhibited in the development of industrial capitalism. In its own way, the book Jock Phillips (1989) edited on New Zealand is another case in point. Here, a significant aim is to establish the uniqueness of this small nation by way of a comparison with the United States; the book has no difficulty in showing that New Zealand was able to preserve its traditions and its identity in spite of a strong current of Americanization. Many more examples come to mind. Finally, from the strictly methodological point of view, the apology and illusions of uniqueness can create some significant biases that may even invalidate the results of the inquiry. Caroline B. Brettel’s (1981) comparative study of Portuguese immigrants in Toronto and in Paris illustrates this well. Thanks to the comparative method, she was able to relativize the influence of certain variables (e.g., the sense of community and the intensity of ethnic belonging) normally presented as dominant features and factors explaining various behaviour patterns. Indeed, when studying a group of immigrants of identical origin, one cannot, short of comparison, establish the relevance of ethnicity itself, of the migratory experience, of the sense of belonging to a minority, and of the socio-economic condition intrinsic to the newcomers. A third function of comparative history, closely linked to the above, is to establish what is truly peculiar to one or several societies, not necessarily to fuel national identity but simply to gain a better understanding of the variables involved and to deepen knowledge of these societies. Under certain conditions, this type of comparison may explain why two societies, which are similar in various fundamental respects, have nonetheless evolved in different ways. But it can also serve more general objectives. Classic works have exemplified this line of research, in particular Clifford Geertz (1971) on the evolution of religion in

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Morocco and Indonesia, Marshall G.S. Hodgson (1993) on Islam and Europe, and Reinhard Bendix (1964) on political modernization in Western Europe, Russia, Japan, and India. I return to this later. Comparison can also detect false determinisms, chronological sequences wrongly presented a posteriori as inevitable. Along these lines, one can clarify real social choices in the light of timelines originally imputed to those notorious necessities of history. Through this approach, one also discovers that different collective paths may lead to the same end (e.g., democracy can emerge outside of the Enlightenment, of the parliamentary system, and of capitalism). Conversely, similar evolutions may lead to a plurality of outcomes and give rise to very different collective forms (e.g., nationalism may be right-wing or left-wing, slip into ethnicism or promote the recognition of collective rights). In every case, any chain of events must be treated as the culmination of one scenario among others, and knowledge of the scenarios rejected by the course of history enriches our understanding of those that prevailed. In this sense, reflecting on what did not happen in history is integral to historical research. Such thinking is central to the tradition of historical practice construed (in the words of French historian Lucien Febvre) as the science of the possible (science des possibles). In keeping with a venerable humanism, this scientific tradition argues for the liberty of social actors, while recognizing the unpredictability of social change. Comparison has a fifth function: to defamiliarize and stimulate scientific imagination, to change the focus, to generate new questions and new answers. The goal is to vary the “lighting,” to inquire into aspects of the past that remained in the dark, and to awaken dormant truths. Comparison may contribute to this, first by suggesting transpositions and extrapolations. On the basis of his study of English rural history, Marc Bloch (1928) discovered the existence of an enclosure movement in the south of France between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Moreover, in a broader sense, comparison introduces a distance between the historian and his or her now too familiar object: it destabilizes the mind and blurs the points of reference. This somewhat resembles what Henri Matisse did when he lacked inspiration: he attempted to paint with his left hand to jolt his perspectives and to rediscover the freshness, the novelty of the object. In a similar way, the historian can usefully adopt an approach that makes him or her rediscover the past from new angles, as though he or she were seeing it again for the first time.20

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Finally, comparative history can fulfill another role, perhaps the most fundamental of all: it consists of breaking what I call the circularity, or the vicious circle, of historical knowledge. The latter puts forth interpretations of a society, of a culture, based on premises and schemas that it borrows from that society and that it tends to reproduce rather lazily – and often unwittingly. The idea, which is not really new, may be expressed thus: the historian constructs his or her knowledge on the basis of empirical data; he or she shapes it with the help of hypotheses inspired by concerns and questions that take the form of a problematic. And the relevance of these questions is determined by their connection to the collectivity’s concerns. This connection is often cited in scientific discourse, but normally in an elliptical fashion, when the historian recalls that his or her approach takes its cue from the present and that the past is constructed on the basis of the here and now. In reality, this link comprises at least five dimensions. 1 The present indicates to the historian the areas and the subjects of research for it defines their relevance. Thus, no one today ever studies divine interventions in the origins and unfolding of wars; nor does one work on the morality of the King’s Daughters who emigrated to New France in the seventeenth century. 2 The present dictates the questions to be posed within the subject matter to be studied. 3 At times, the present even stipulates the terms of the questions: was the Cession of 1763 responsible for French Canada’s underdevelopment? Did the clergy control the evolution of Quebec society? Was Quebec’s Quiet Revolution of the 1960s hijacked by the baby boomers? 4 The present defines the general light in which the inquiry will be conducted, the fundamental values and imperatives that circumscribe its direction: depending on the theme that he has chosen to consider, the historian tends to show respect for the higher interests of the nation, the citizen, the working class, women, the intellectual profession, and so on. 5 On a more immediate level, the present in a way censors research and its results: the historian knows that he or she will have to obtain research grants, that he or she will wish to be published, read, appreciated by his or her colleagues, students, critics, and the general public. In all these ways, society or culture makes its mark (and sometimes its impact) on historical knowledge. Consequently, the historian must

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guard against the danger of bringing to society, in the end, only that which he borrowed at the start. Otherwise, he or she is condemned to endorsing traditions and prevailing conventions, to whitewashing the myths, the fictions, the ruling ideas and categories; or further still, to recycling, and raising to the level of scientific “truths,” sundry cultural materials in which arbitrary, stereotypical, and even counterfeit elements often mingle with the most legitimate values and worldviews. Comparative history can play an essential role in revealing the deep postulates upon which knowledge is founded. It can expose codes that have been so assimilated as to become unconscious. It can shed light on those sites where the premises of knowledge are constituted within what Fernand Dumont (1968) would call primary culture. This is the price historians must pay to attain a consciousness and control of what they do and to develop a critique of their own culture. Instead of being mercenaries in their cultural environment, they become actors, agents of change. Instead of responding somewhat slavishly to the impulses of the present, they contribute directly, first and foremost, to a society or to a culture in the making. But they must first distance themselves (at least provisionally) from their roots, for that is the basic condition of scientific knowledge. The history of science, and in particular of the social sciences, teems with examples of this. Sociology could not have arisen in the nineteenth century without a rent in the social fabric, without a state of crisis in the relationship between the individual and collective representations. Sociology’s constitution as a scientific discipline occurred within the rift thus created. Religion only became an object of study through the actions of individuals who were able to redefine their relationship to the sacred. To study value systems as does the ethnologist, one must first admit that the values to which one subscribes are relative. Similarly, to study woman as a citizen, one must first have been able to imagine her outside of the reproductive function, the marital relationship, and the domestic sphere. To be able to state the problem of social classes, researchers had to remove themselves from their place of belonging. To study the contributions of nonfrancophones to the formation of Quebec culture presupposes a new attitude towards questions of identity and so on. In all these instances, significant cultural work must take place first, in the form of a break, of transgression, and even betrayal. Any transformation of the scientific outlook needs to be induced, either by society itself, in the course of its own transformations, or through measures arising from the scientific method. The comparative approach is one such measure.

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comparison and historical practice in quebec I now illustrate the main points cited above by drawing on Quebec historiography. I take the latter as an example, not because it is more suitable than any another, nor because some anomalous feature grants it particular salience, but simply because I am most familiar with it. All historiographies could be subjected to this type of analysis, to the usual spatial, chronological, and other variations. Still, I limit the exercise to the referential type of comparison cited above. The first question that I ask concerns a point raised earlier: the relative weakness of comparative history within this historical tradition. Between the last third of the eighteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century, Quebec’s past presents a picture of a society pierced by a sense of its own fragility and involved in a long battle for its cultural survival. After the failed Rebellions of 1837–38, the FrenchCanadian nation tentatively renounced its dream of political autonomy in favour of the Canadian compromise (in the eyes of many, the last resort). Parallel to this, since the demographic evolution of the continent reinforced the imbalance between the Protestant-anglophone element and the Catholic-francophone presence, the nation defined itself increasingly in relation to culture. It was thus led to affirm its singular features repeatedly (e.g., its language, religion, institutions, and customs), to advocate its distinctive character in North America, to mark its difference. Short of this, the nation’s very essence would have been compromised, since it is mainly on this ground that the majority of the elites had chosen to deploy it. One cannot, otherwise, explain the recurring disquiet over difference expressed in intellectual discourse. This said, it is clear that events might have unfolded quite differently, as was the case with other nations that were first built on the power of the State (think of France in 1789) or on the inherent value of its institutions (witness the case of Great Britain). In these two instances, at least until recently, the discourse of difference (of distinctiveness) has occupied a relatively small part of the public sphere. Similarly, on the cultural level, those nations drew on principles, universal values, and political ideas that granted little purchase for a rhetoric of collective identity (none of which is incompatible with a very strong national feeling). To a great extent, the same could be said of the United States. To return to Quebec (or to French Canada), the emphasis placed, up until the middle of the twentieth century, on forging the nation

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along ethnic lines fostered an overwhelming concern with collective identity and a virtual obsession with difference. Consequently, the face of otherness was, in a certain sense, deduced or posed a priori, if not, at times, simply invented. It is not enough to claim that there was no need felt to ground the question of difference in comparative studies; in reality, the latter might have proven detrimental, marking similarities where, on the contrary, it was necessary to underline distinctiveness. The nation’s fragility and the imperatives of survivance prohibited this type of imprudence. In other words, national culture did not allow the type of transgression or self-betrayal intrinsic to the comparative method. I referred earlier to American exceptionalism, to the triumphalist attitude that inhibited comparison up until the middle of the twentieth century and that subsequently distorted it. In a slightly similar way, one might attribute to Quebec a sort of reverse exceptionalism, fed on doubt and pessimism, but that also led to forms of insularity. One could no doubt assert, as does Rudin (1998), that continental Messianism à la Lionel Groulx (see, below, his project of spreading Catholicism throughout North America) constituted an expansionist attitude. But the latter represents a rather peripheral ideological vein, spurred by a quest for symbolic compensation, and that Groulx himself did not truly pursue. In short, my hypothesis suggests that the weakness of the comparative genre in Quebec historiography is due to the tenacious grip of the paradigm of survivance and the discourse of difference. Some examples illustrate the advantages that culture and scholarship would have derived from the application of the comparative method to knowledge of Quebec’s past. First, with respect to inserting objects of study into broad contexts (Continental, Atlantic, Western), Micheline Dumont (1998, 98) has recently pointed to a noteworthy statistical fact: according to various studies, the geographical areas covered by articles and research notes in the Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française over the last decades have shrunk dramatically. Between the journal’s first years (in the late 1940s) and the most recent period, the percentage of texts dealing only with Quebec rose from 27.6 percent to 83 percent. Meanwhile, the articles pertaining to North America declined from 7 percent to 1.4 percent. This transformation can be explained in large part by the new representation of the francophone nation, which slowly shifted away from the North American continent, even away from Canada as a whole, in order to focus on Quebec. To be sure, Quebec historians may be submitting to international journals articles

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that cover a wider geographical area. Still, the fact remains that Quebec’s major history journal publishes few articles of this kind. There are many features or historical episodes that have contributed to illusions of uniqueness. Some of these have haunted the collective consciousness, and have been presented as more or less specific to French Canadians, even though one readily finds equivalents of such traits elsewhere. Here are some examples. The feeling that a great threat weighs upon the national culture and makes survival uncertain is widespread among new collectivities: think of the demographic density of Asia (“the yellow peril”) for New Zealand and Australia; think of the US influence for English Canada, of the impact of the Indian in various Latin American countries dominated by a minority of Europeans; think of the fear of the immigrant in US history, expressed in recurring nativist movements. This factor has fostered similar defensive reactions everywhere. Similarly, ruralism (the celebration of agriculture and highly ruralized representations of the nation) has been very evident in the history of Australasia and elsewhere. The case of Australia is particularly striking. From the mid-nineteenth century on, the great majority of the population lived in cities, yet, up until the middle of the twentieth century, urban reality was practically absent from the national imagination, which fed instead on legends of the bush and the outback. These sorts of misrepresentations deserve to be studied in their own right, in their various transnational manifestations: New Zealand, for its part, long entertained an ecological myth; in the United States, the thinking of the Founding Fathers was suffused with a powerful pastoral ideology, and so forth. The theme of the grande noirceur in Quebec from the 1930s to the 1950s calls for similar treatment. It would be worth analyzing this period of Quebec history in connection with other collectivities, such as English-speaking Canada. Recall the extreme right-wing movements that held sway in that same era (Robin 1998), the eugenic policies instituted by some provincial governments, the treatment meted out to Japanese-Canadians during the Second World War, the restrictions surrounding the immigration of Jewish refugees in the 1930s, and the reservations about endorsing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and so on. Witness also all the forms of censorship practised in the United States before and during MacCarthyism as well as European fascisms as a whole. Up until 1949, France, the land of liberty, banned the publication of some of Baudelaire’s poems; up until the 1970s, it also exercised strict control over the content of television programs (in particular those that dealt with public affairs). Once

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again, as in many other instances, Australia provides an invaluable reference point. Nearly two hundred literary works were still banned there in the early 1960s. The isolationist and conservative attitudes there ruled so powerfully that John F. Williams (1995) went so far as to characterize the interwar decades as a period of quarantine. According to critical studies in literature and social sciences, there was apparently also a grande noirceur in Neo-Zealand between 1935 and 1960. It is clear that these phenomena are part of the same world conjuncture, a moment worth delineating: what happened in Western culture after the First World War? Equally extraordinary is that the memory of these experiences survived so very differently from one society to the next. On this question, Quebec appears to stand out due to its particularly painful, haunting, and even shameful memory of that era. There are numerous other examples that could be cited, including the powerful grip that Jansenist morality exerted over French-Canadian Catholicism; this too haunts current (Quebec) memory. But should collective memory allow itself to be so tormented by this phenomenon? There is undoubtedly a pressing need to analyze Jansenism, in a broader perspective, in relation to the Puritanism that prevailed in the United States (where the Constitution was amended in 1919 to prohibit alcohol consumption), English Canada, Great Britain, and elsewhere. I will only touch upon the ambiguous, even repressed, memory of the two conscription crises in Quebec. It is worth recalling simply that the United States itself delayed its involvement in the Second World War as much as possible. In Australia’s 1916 and 1917 referenda, the majority twice voted against the country’s involvement in war (despite the commitments the government had already made on the nation’s behalf) before eventually accepting it. Australia was then an AngloSaxon country, a member of the Empire, and very closely allied with Great Britain; and yet, Australian national memory retained no trauma from this partial betrayal. On the contrary, it has exclusively foregrounded the great military deeds of the Australian contingent, notably the famous episode of Gallipoli, which became the principal myth of national memory. Even in New Zealand, a country considered the most faithful ally of Great Britain, the attitude towards enrolment in 1914–18 was more than lukewarm. According to Maureen Sharpe (1981), it was precisely to conceal this popular apathy that the government did not hold a referendum on the country’s military involvement. On another level, after the middle of the nineteenth century, the French-Canadian intellectual class experienced a complex relationship of dependency on France. While it nourished them in many respects,

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this relationship (notably in the area of literature and fine art) placed the French-Canadian elites in an inferior status that caused them grief; they were only able to liberate themselves from this quite late, and only partially at that. Had they been more conscious that this was a universal phenomenon, they might have experienced it differently. Indeed, it occurred in all new collectivities, with but some variations (under different names and with specific outcomes), and it provoked the same disenchantment over the paucity of local culture, the same recurring appeals to rebuild the mediocre national culture. The recent rediscovery of américanité in Quebec’s elite culture is of the same order. This is a move that can be observed in the past of all new collectivities, again under different labels: here one speaks of Australianity, there of Brazilianity and of Antillanity, elsewhere of Africanity, and so on. Finally, the changes in national identity in the course of the past fifty years have also generated a familiar pattern, discernible in anglophone Canada, Chile, Mexico, Australasia, and elsewhere. For a long period, these nations sought homogeneity and resorted either to assimilation or to exclusionary practices. Then, pluralism took root and simultaneously compelled the elites to rethink the representation of the nation and to find other points of reference for the collective imaginary. In Quebec, as elsewhere, a crisis of representation and of identity surfaced, particularly among the old francophone stock. In order to assess correctly the place and role of religion in the Quebec society of old, it is also useful to consider it within the history of other societies, for example, that of the United States. One of the features that most struck de Tocqueville when he visited that republic in the 1830s was precisely the central role that religion occupied in community and public life. Of course, that in itself does not make the United States a priest-ridden society, yet it invites researchers to reflect subtly on the make-up of imaginaries that underpin the social order and on their manifestation in civic as well as in everyday life.21 Every Latin American country offers parallel examples of the syncretism between nation and religion. One could cite many other countries, such as Great Britain, where, according to Linda Colley (1992), the Protestant religion was the nation’s principal symbolic foundation. The stereotypes surrounding fertility in French-Canadian families also emerge quite altered from the test of comparison; the latter establishes that these levels of fertility do not appear so exceptional when comparison involves analogous rural territories (i.e., recently developed areas or those undergoing settlement). It also teaches that the moment

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when natural fertility was abandoned in Quebec compares readily with that of the majority of European populations; indeed, it even precedes it in several cases. Given their precocity, it is rather the United States and English Canada that are the exception among new collectivities (Bouchard and Lalou 1993). My own work on population genetics gave rise to a similar case. We know that the Québécois of French ancestry display a high frequency of certain hereditary diseases, which are virtually unknown in other world populations. In some circles, notably the media, this phenomenon has fed into the stereotype of a degenerate population, at least with respect to certain areas of Quebec. For a long time, it was believed and reiterated (even in works of scholarship) that this phenomenon stemmed from an excessively high frequency of consanguineous marriages. However, a comparative study revealed the same pattern of rare genetic disorders even in Scandinavian countries, where no one would dare think that the biological heritage is at issue. Moreover, I have been able to show that there was nothing particular about the frequency of intermarriages within those Quebec regions and families. The high incidence of some genopathies in Quebec combines with another remarkable, though often unnoticed, phenomenon: the absence or great rarity of various diseases that are considered among the most frequent in Western populations. Finally, it has been established that the genetic particularities of the French-Canadian population were due to their demographic structures and that they could be discerned in all populations that had been formed on the model of the founder effect.22 The Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, and the cultural effervescence associated with it, is another episode of Quebec’s past that has most often been treated as unique. Yet, it is easy here, too, to identify comparable transformations in several other societies of the exact same era. As for social development and institutional reforms, there are striking similarities between Quebec and, most particularly, New Brunswick, Denmark, Norway, and Ireland. With respect to Quebec’s cultural changes, and the great collective vitality that surfaced in that era, there are parallels with societies as diverse as California, France, Mexico, Greece, Australia, and so forth. In the latter two cases in particular, one notes the same renewal of collective identity and the same quest for authenticity that involved a return to origins, drawing heavily on tradition and popular culture. At the same time, intellectual life attained a new level of maturity and experienced a veritable renaissance. Representations of the past were also reconfigured. Consequently, we are

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once again confronted with the need to study the massive historical convergences and deep tendencies that pervaded the West during this period. Had Quebec historiography followed this path from the start, it would no doubt have been quicker to acquire a more accurate and more nuanced view both of what was labelled the grande noirceur and of its counterpart, the Quiet Revolution. For instance, more elements of continuity would have appeared where, spontaneously, most observers had first perceived sharp breaks. Conversely, the ruptures themselves, once put in broader perspectives, would have been better understood. In its own way, a historiographical current of modernist inspiration strove to accomplish this task of reappraisal from the late 1970s on. So far, with respect to illusions of uniqueness, I have stressed the scientific benefits that can be reaped from comparison. But, more broadly, the prospects of a cultural advantage are quite significant as well. Indeed, all the features, experiences, and episodes just discussed in relation to Quebec have, to varying degrees, fed into collective representations and structured the imaginary. In this respect, I have elsewhere evoked the false identities of which francophone Quebecers have for a long time been both objects and agents (Bouchard 1995b, 1997a, and see below, chapter 3). Comparative history practised according to the referential model furnishes a means of criticizing these representations, as I have mentioned; but it also helps to discover and confirm the true distinctive traits of a society, making it possible to explain them more effectively and to acquire enhanced self-knowledge. In this sense, one is prompted to consider anew the fact that, of all the new collectivities, Quebec is one of the few (along with Puerto Rico and a few others) that failed to achieve its political independence. It is also the only one to have so alternated between adhering to, and breaking with, the cultural hegemony of its mother country (the current situation remains very ambiguous in this respect.) Moreover, at the heart of all new collectivities, Quebec is the one whose cultural elites have had perhaps the most difficulty in freely and enthusiastically embracing the new continent (this is clearly and primarily evident in features of its utopian thought) and where the gap between popular and elite culture has been the most pronounced. It is also a collectivity where ethnic homogeneity was highly emphasized. This last feature needs to be underlined. It is the basis upon which one can highlight important aspects of Quebec’s socio-cultural trajectory. In this respect, for example, one of the main difficulties faced by the United States in the course

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of its history was consensus-building, creation of social cohesion in the midst of great heterogeneity; by contrast, Quebec took a long time to break the old pure-laine identity – an identity born out of struggles to survive – so as to adjust the nation to its internal diversity. I have argued that comparison helps one to recognize retroactively paths that history could have followed but, for one reason or another, did not. With the passage of time, the road travelled is sometimes represented as an inevitability, as a determinism. One example of this will suffice. Most historians agree that, on the morrow of the 1837–38 Rebellions, Quebec society took an important turn. Broadly speaking, the magnitude of the failure and the circumstances surrounding it dashed the dream of an independent state, and, as I have pointed out, the national aspirations were then channelled away from politics in order to concentrate on culture. It was in this context that the paradigm of survivance took shape, with all its conservative and defensive designs. Another corollary is that the nation’s cultural turn placed the Church in a collectively dominant position. After the Cession of 1763, this institution always knew how to deploy the necessary means (and accept the compromises) to ensure good relations for itself with the colonial government; it alone seemed to possess the structure and the requisite resources to act effectively on the whole of society, to take charge of the nation’s destiny. The Church had an immediate interest in this, given the close link between language and faith underlying the concept of nationhood. The major role that the clergy was able to play in Quebec’s social and cultural history up until the middle of the twentieth century is accounted for in this way. This reasoning has led several scholars to conclude that, without the clergy, French-speaking communities would not have survived in Quebec. Nevertheless, this portrayal seems highly disputable when subjected to the test of comparison. If, for example, one considers the situation of Australia prior to the middle of the nineteenth century, one discovers there a whole set of circumstances that could have dictated a similar evolution to that of Quebec: a destitute population consisting largely of convicts or ex-convicts (the country was created as a penal colony in 1788); a society ruled by British colonial authorities and British soldiers, where views of political autonomy seemed quite remote; an Asiatic environment perceived as very threatening; an arid land. And yet, at the end of the nineteenth century, the Australian Commonwealth was born, a secular society developed, radical social thought became very influential, and the working class wielded significant power, thanks to support

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from a substantial portion of the elite (a Labour government would soon be elected). This reminder draws attention to two points in respect to Quebec’s past. First, it is not exactly true that representations of the nation shifted abruptly from the political to the cultural sphere after 1837– 38. That is to omit, among other things, the significant French-Canadian participation in the development of the Canadian state during the decades that followed 1840. In fact, the political project continued, with strong ideological and national investment, but a pan-Canadian vision took over. Second, it would be wrong to present the clergy’s socio-cultural leadership, in some sense, as a predictable or even inexorable outcome. There were other possibilities within the social and cultural spheres: for instance, the creation of a secular society under the aegis of the petite-bourgeoisie; initiatives in economic development drawing on possibilities that the local business of the time afforded; widespread intervention in popular education, stressing professional and scientific training; vigorous assertion of radical social thought grounded in trade union activity and popular movements. Each of these trends could have prevailed. None did, and there is still much to learn from that. To be sure, we know that, in social and cultural terms, conservative thought triumphed over what was called liberal thought.23 The clergy long succeeded in preventing the formation of a secular society, while the emergence of a popular movement and a radical social thought was checked. But if knowledge has increased in relation to the ups and downs and the chronology of these broad trends, much less is known about the collective dynamic that sustained them: class structure and class strategies, social relations, the structures of production, the distribution of economic power, the interplay of international forces. A final example to conclude this point: on several occasions, in the course of Quebec’s history, the Church took initiatives in social and cultural development (the creation of public libraries or institutions of learning; the founding of unions, of cooperatives, or of leisure organizations; etc.) but in a reactive mode, in order to contain and, if possible, cause projects of a similar but secular nature (put forward by liberal groups) to fail. It seems that the clergy’s actions succeeded in the majority of cases. Why? It does not suffice to cite factors such as the clergy’s moral authority, the hegemony that it wielded over the entire culture, the various influences that it could bring to bear, the pressure that it exerted on public consciousness and on institutions,

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the weakness of other institutions or classes, and the submissiveness of the masses; that, indeed, is what needs to be better explained. Part of the answer may reside in the fact that, for the French-Canadian society of the era, Catholic religion was a unifying factor, a source of collective cohesion; granted, this was an important asset for a nation involved in a struggle to survive. But why not locate this source of cohesion elsewhere? In popular solidarity, for example, in a sort of social pact, as in Sweden, Norway, or Australia at the end of the nineteenth century. Here one sees that the question of religion’s role brings us to another, no less central query: why this elitism of the nation? The latter comment brings us to the silences of Quebec historiography. “Silences” refers not to the questions that remained unanswered but to those that were simply not raised (or only recently so). Once again, exploring other paths, in other spaces of the New World, fosters a new awareness. Thus, insufficient attention may have been paid to the fact that, with the exception of the 1940s, Quebec intellectual culture did not develop a genuine radical social thought, even less a revolutionary ideology.24 Why did the ideas of Marx and Engels (who came to Quebec in the 1880s) not find a following in French Canada (were they even read and discussed?) before the Second World War? The same lacuna is evident in utopian thought, which, oddly, is usually partial to themes such as equality, solidarity among humble folk, struggles against injustice and poverty, the ignominy of opulence. The influence of Lammenais, of Montalembert, of Veuillot, of Dupanloup, of Rerum Novarum has been fully explored. There is also the influence of the French and other Encyclopédistes. But Fourier? Proudhon? And what of all the other thinkers associated with the new social engineering in nineteenth-century Europe? Certainly, Liberals proved sensitive to themes of economy and education, though more often from the vantage point of development and progress than from that of egalitarian distribution of wealth. Similarly, if they concerned themselves a lot with democracy and its popular foundation, it was primarily in the manner of the Encyclopédistes, to establish the legitimacy of the institution of parliament and the prerogatives of the Liberal state. With a few exceptions, their concern with the social question was subordinated to their interest in civil society; indeed, it is primarily on the turf of secularity that they led their most bitter struggles (and that they suffered their greatest defeats) in the nineteenth century. On the whole, one could say that, beyond their doctrinal divisions over relations between Church and State or over forms of democracy, the elites

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agreed on making the nation’s imperatives prevail over social change. And yet, very early on in Quebec society, conditions for the emergence of left-wing thought were favourable: a dependent, peripheral economy; ethnic domination; rural underdevelopment; and urban poverty. One is tempted to explain this absence or weakness of radical social thought, as is regularly done in the United States, in terms of the enormous possibilities for acquiring wealth afforded by the New World: the new country’s equal opportunities and abundant resources prevented the introduction of barriers and splits, granting the radical and revolutionary movements little leverage. But these perceptions were highly uncommon in French Canada, where aggressive, American-style frontier rhetoric did not appeal to the elite culture. It was supplanted by the soothing colonial discourse and its righteous corollaries: social harmony, laudable toil, and communitarianism. As for the myth of upward mobility and of the self-made man, it scarcely penetrated the national discourse and the culture of the educated in general, with the exception of representations disseminated by the mass media, largely inspired by the American model, and predicated more on material wealth or conspicuous consumption than on acquiring wealth in Yankee style. Whatever the case, none of this is comparable to the intense and vigorous projections that fed into the US imaginary. The French-Canadian novel, for example, reproduced the success story, but more often in a negative manner, as a foil. In Maria Chapdelaine, Lorenzo Surprenant’s proposals are rejected; Maria chooses to marry Eutrope Gagnon so as not to betray the imperatives of nationhood. In another genre, Jean Rivard embodies personal success but only in the interests of the collectivity, of nationhood. One could cite many other examples. From another angle, the European experience shows that social radicalism arises when elites have to destroy privileges, orders, and despotisms in order to guarantee their ascendancy. There was no such thing in this case, after the failed 1837–38 Rebellions. The clergy’s grip on social organization could have constituted such a driving force; but the ideological opposition that it provoked never turned into a genuine social movement, no doubt because most members of the (economic, socio-cultural, and political) elite found some advantage in the existing order. To be sure, struggles were fought over many issues. For some, it was a battle against the colonial tie and submission to English power. For others, the main threat was a continental environment that marginalized French culture. But in each case, the stakes were defined within the arena of the nation. Consequently, despite the bitter quarrels

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that deeply divided the elites, and of which historiography has provided a careful and competent account, one ought perhaps to grant more attention to the large areas of consensus within which conservatives and liberals developed their divisions. But this cannot be seen fully without observing Quebec from the outside. The study of other new collectivities, in particular Australia and the United States, shows that the broad issues raised by Tocqueville on completing his sojourn in America fascinated the intellectuals of the New World. The latter were concerned with the potential flaws of democracy as a foundation for a new social order (excessive growth of central power, decline of civilization, tyranny of public opinion, relativism, etc.) and with their necessary remedies.25 It is interesting to note that this question was, in the end, hardly debated in Quebec (just as in anglophone Canada, for that matter) between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Should one conclude, as many publications on the history of ideologies lead us to believe, that it scarcely featured among the elites’ principal preoccupations during this period? That would be surprising, all the more so in that democracy was alive and well on the local level, in the rural parishes, for example (including the new parishes established in settlement areas). It is even remarkable to see the extent to which community affairs – today one would say public affairs – generated interest and commitment. The status of the municipal councillor was highly respected. Electoral meetings were enthusiastically attended. Voting day was a uniquely intense experience; the victories that crowned it gave rise to all manner of excesses. All this vitality in civic life, which the people so much enjoyed, this whole democratic popular tradition that the sociologist Léon Gérin (1894) marvelled at in his own time, does not appear to have permeated the discourse of the elites, be it specifically ideological representations or the novelistic, pictorial, and other forms of imaginary.26 According to an old cliché, small-town democracy is a hallmark or invention of American frontier life. Could it be that it also flourished in Quebec almost unbeknownst to the educated, who were too busy with other priorities? This observation touches on another particularly pronounced structural phenomenon in Quebec, which I have already discussed elsewhere (Bouchard, 1985–86, 1995b, 1996a); it concerns the distance between the common people and the elites – especially on the social and cultural fronts. On this matter, I have spoken of an antinomy: the culture of the common people fed entirely on experiences from North

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America, while elite culture drew its references and cultural markers largely from France and Europe. Consequently, the elites often repudiated popular culture. They distrusted it. Rather than credit and value its quintessential reality and originality, to find nourishment in it, they sought to correct it. This difficult relationship, this mutual impermeability that long prevailed between elite and popular culture in Quebec, contrasts radically with the American, Australian, and Latin American models. In a sense, the features and traditions of popular culture in Quebec were censored and reinvested in a vision of the nation predicated on the paradigm of continuity. In other new collectivities, they were amplified and deployed in a discourse of emancipatory selfaffirmation and rupture. Why this elitist nationhood, then? To aspects of the answer already proposed, one could add the following: ultimately, for the French-Canadian elites, the common people did not appear to be a very reliable ally in the struggle for nationhood. Just as values of egalitarianism and democracy, decidedly present in popular culture, scarcely resonated with the elites, so the latter hardly proved attuned to urban culture, most particularly to working-class culture, except when they sought to deplore its immorality, its unruliness, and the like. Consequently, even today, a gap remains in Quebec’s memory. With very few exceptions, the first historical works on this subject only appeared over the last two decades. As a result, while the sanitized images of the pioneer (colon), the habitant, the coureur des bois, and the homme de chantier abound in the collective imaginary, the stereotypes of the urban dweller and the legends of the city are poorly documented. In itself, this is a most remarkable socio-cultural fact. Oddly enough, such a comment could apply to representations of the nation itself. There, too, historiography has generally been content to reproduce the most hackneyed clichés advanced by the elites: FrenchCanadian nationhood resides in the French language, in Catholicism, in institutions, and in customs. Yet, it is more than likely that there is a world to discover behind this stereotype, a reality of diversity and change for which the evidence resides in sources such as school textbooks and newspaper columns as well as in the symbolism and staging of la Fête nationale and other significant commemorations.27 Other omissions include the scant attention given to the nation’s exclusionary practices in the name of la survivance: symbolic exclusions (those non-French Canadians who won renown in their time but of whom no trace remains in collective memory); socio-cultural exclusions (opposition to projects of settlement by non-francophone ethnic

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groups, foot-dragging in allowing non-Catholics to attend French and Catholic schools, reservations with respect to mixed marriages, etc.); socio-economic exclusions (discrimination in hiring and in professional promotion, notably with respect to women); spatial exclusions (First Nations), and so on. Generally, with the exception of the last twenty or thirty years, historiography has shown little interest in the immigrant reality, in ethnic relations in everyday life, in citizenship, and in the relationship with the State. One also notes the absence of a clear pro-Aboriginal tradition that would have formulated a fundamentally critical perspective on European immigrants and their successors. Nor has anyone dwelled on the low rate of intermarriage between Whites and First Nations. Quebec shared this feature with other British colonies (English Canada, the United States, Australia, South Africa, etc.), whereas the opposite held true in several Latin American populations in which syncretism was central to the national idea. This needs to be related to the way in which French-Canadian historians have traditionally represented the origins of the nation, by construing it as the extension of France in America. On this view, the history of French Canada began with the arrival of the Europeans; the whole of the First Nations’ past was thus relegated to a parallel path, defined within a different memory. This is yet another example of symbolic exclusion. Similarly, there is no real critical tradition with respect to France as a metropolis and imperial European power. The imperatives of survival, as they were conceived, thwarted the development of such a tradition because they shaped the nation as a direct extension of the mother country and forced the nation’s members to be faithful to their roots. Here, too, Quebec stands out among most new collectivities. Finally, here are some other examples of silences, of questions not raised or of neglected themes. There has been little probing of the social type that emerged from Quebec’s specific settlement context or of the way it differs from the American frontier, the South American pampa, or the Australian outback. Also, little thought has been given to the strange coincidence revealed by the study of sexuality: how to explain the fact that, to a large extent, the same prohibitions, the same fears, the same customs, and the same behaviour can be found just about everywhere in the Western world, among Protestants and Catholics, in the most and the least industrialized and urbanized countries, in those with liberal or conservative traditions? In regard to the imbalance in the social relations of gender, so pervasive in Western societies, one might suggest that, in Quebec, as elsewhere, it took on

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a specific, original form as a result of particular contexts, processes, and social structures within which it emerged and took shape. The (non-)participation of francophone Quebecers in the First and Second World Wars is another taboo, which is just beginning to be challenged. In rural history, compared with other new collectivities, little attention has been devoted to explaining the specifics underpinning the relation to the land (e.g., why did small family holdings prevail and persist for so long in Quebec? Why did large-scale agricultural property develop late?). Finally, in spite of several important contributions, the annals of anti-semitism in the history of francophone Quebec are still a neglected area; there is an obvious reluctance to grapple with this question. Most of the examples that I have just put forth illustrate in various ways the circularity or the vicious circle of historical knowledge, this universal phenomenon through which history unintentionally, and at its own expense, places itself at the behest of the nation’s imperatives and urgent needs, letting these influence the premises and direction of its own inquiry. With regard to Quebec’s past, this phenomenon is exemplified in the silences and refusals of a historiography that, for a long time, has occluded urban reality; the contributions of nonfrancophones to national culture; the significant similarities between Quebec and its neighbours; the diversity of Quebec society; the immigrant reality concealed behind concerns about survival, roots, and continuity; and Quebec’s américanité as a New World society, as a thoroughly new collectivity. As we see in chapter 3, this phenomenon is also evident in certain interpretations that Quebec historiography has advanced: false identities, fictions of difference, ways of explaining various phenomena such as the colonization movements (a national, catholic project), the high fertility rate (the “Revenge of the Cradles”), the power of the family unit (allegedly inherited from French peasant traditions), and the like. In each of these cases, and in many others, historiographical discourse has, at one time or another, shown that it has been shaped directly by the ideology of survivance. It was, indeed, a matter of ideology, and not merely of an inexorable, objective empirical constraint: since this ideology was beaten back (starting in the 1950s), Quebec’s francophone community has not weakened; on the contrary, it has experienced unprecedented growth. Yet, certain aspects of the old ways have been perpetuated. Think of themes that could nowadays be considered priorities but that have, until recent years, been relatively neglected or that have scarcely engaged historical practice – for example, the exercise of democracy

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(in particular, on the local scale),28 issues relating to citizenship, exclusionary practices, Aboriginal communities, socio-economic inequalities, class structure, and so on. The weakness of comparative history is in itself a part of this legacy. Yet, given the vast project of symbolic reconfiguration in which Quebec has been engaged for more than half a century (new representations of itself and of others, a new relationship with the international world, a reconstruction of memory), most of the questions that it raises and that the historian takes up cannot be truly illuminated without recourse to the comparative perspective. One could extend this observation even further. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, Quebec historiography has reflected, beyond its internal divisions, on its own object of study (at least implicitly) in terms of distinctiveness and difference, insularity and openness, its relationship to self and to the other, its dual (European and American) sense of belonging – and, more recently, it has done this in terms of socio-economic inferiority and late development. That this set of themes has not been able to give rise to a vigorous approach in comparative studies is a striking socio-cultural phenomenon.

towards a new paradigm It is useful to dwell momentarily on the very remarkable case of modernist historiography, which has dominated historical practice in Quebec since the end of the 1970s. This scientific trend has been attacked by Ronald Rudin (1997b), who mainly criticized it for somewhat artificially proposing a new representation of Quebec’s past that he deems too naively derivative of the worldview associated with the era of the Quiet Revolution. According to Rudin, this attempt at redefinition, which he likens to revisionism, fails the test of objectivity. In my view, modernist historiography, on the one hand, clearly remains subject to various criticisms: for example, it may at times have seen modernity where others would rightly have seen vestiges of the past, if not resistance to change. On occasion, it also inflated certain features and understated salient facts. Yet, on the other hand, these and other weaknesses should not make us forget the essential point: we are talking of a genuine, rich, scholarly trend that introduced a renewed vision of the Quebec past. It succeeded by drawing on a reformed scientific practice that produced works of great quality. It should be judged above all on this overall achievement, on the path that it blazed rather

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than on its margins or its excesses. For this reason, I do not share Ronald Rudin’s opinion on this point. Modernist historiography was a necessary and fertile reaction to other historiographical trends that persisted in projecting an extremely distorted and wanting representation of this past. Thanks to this reaction, analysis is much richer, hypotheses more varied, and questions infinitely more nuanced. Actually, I want to consider the modernist contribution from another angle. One of its core aims was to counter the old stereotypes that associated the Quebec past with reactionary, almost tribal, attitudes, which were hostile to progress and tainted by a mentality fundamentally resistant to modernity. These are the features traditionally used to explain what was commonly called the backwardness of FrenchCanadian society (in accordance with which the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s was seen as essentially about catching up, making up lost ground). Wishing to challenge the reductive representations of the past by bringing complexity back in, modernist history engaged in a critical examination of the backwardness thesis and all the elements of the archetype that cast French-Canadian society as a sort of anomaly in North America, if not within the whole of the Atlantic world. In doing this, modernist history eventually showed that Quebec had, in a certain sense, experienced a normal evolution, considering the circumstances in which it was shaped (the term “normal” is not often used, but one finds it in certain writings and, in my opinion, it reflects the spirit of the undertaking.) It is clear that this school of thought was also built, at least implicitly, around the question of backwardness and of catching-up, of difference and convergence (not to mention normality). For this reason, it is surprising that it did not adopt the route of comparative history from the start; rather, it embarked on the path of critical history and developed a global counter-proposal. The comparative drive was virtually present within it, but it was not truly exploited and expressed empirically (even when the modernist works contain several references to other Canadian provinces and to the United States). The modernist school usually constructs its arguments with reference to a sort of ideal type of modernity (urbanization, secular life, capitalism, liberalism, individualism, etc.), the aspects of which it implicitly ascribes to neighbouring societies, taking the latter as models and demonstrating how their features work in Quebec itself.29 In this respect, the comparative turn that I am advocating may be seen as a complement and a quite logical extension of modernist (and other types of) historiography.

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The old concerns that gave rise to it, and to which it has given shape since the nineteenth century, will no doubt continue to drive Quebec historical research for some time. But one can see how this historiography could find new life in the broadening of perspectives afforded by comparison. Considered purely from the perspective of offering us a better grasp of the society’s history, of the paths that it travelled and the choices that it made, the comparative turn appears indispensable indeed. It would be easy to extend the list of themes and questions already cited as examples. Emigration to the United States, which began between 1830 and 1840, is among these items. We know that this phenomenon spread across the Western world, deeply affecting small countries such as Ireland, Norway, and Sweden. Comparison should begin there to ensure that the appropriate questions have been raised (and the correct answers formulated) about this social fact, which has mostly been discussed in Quebec from the perspective of identity and nationhood.30 It would also be useful to look at English Canada, where, according to Bruno Ramirez (2001), massive emigration to the United States generated different perceptions and reactions. The same applies to the study of ideologies, which would have benefited from drawing more substantially on Richard Hofstadter’s perspective (1948) on the United States. This book reveals the strong bond that can unite seemingly irreducible, quarrelsome factions in one social relationship. Among future directions for comparative analysis, I could also mention: the development of agrarian capitalism along the lines of Donald Denoon’s study of six new countries of the southern hemisphere (1983); the 1837–38 Rebellions as an episode in the Age of Revolutions in the West and, more specifically, in the Americas (Langley 1997); the relation between the process of urbanization and parallel developments in the New World (Hamer 1990); the role of religion as a factor of cohesion in emerging collectivities; the Cession of New France in 1763 as an instance of intermetropolitan transfer (history provides various instances of this phenomenon). One last example concerns the broad comparative study of new collectivities, the object of the present study. These populations all confronted the same obstacles, the same tasks: they had to build another society in an already occupied space, populate a territory and shape it according to projects of a new kind, create collective cohesion, secure an imaginary, and try to disengage from metropolitan tutelage. Quebec also experienced this, and, for each obstacle encountered, it developed its own (symbolic and other) solutions. As for myself, I believe that one cannot

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properly grasp any one of these solutions if one does not situate them in relation to the parallel realities of other new collectivities.

conclusion The proposal that caps the preceding pages would extend modernist historiography into another paradigm, hinging on the comparative history of Quebec as a new collectivity. Let us reiterate the concepts articulated above: the aim is to apply a comparative approach that is both referential (offering a better grasp of Quebec’s past and present) and integral (building a model of the formation and evolution of new collectivities as well as of collective imaginaries). But the main point to consider for the moment is the plea for comparative analysis. In its deepest underlying purpose, this approach ultimately seems to be of the same order as that of history itself; indeed, the study of the other in space draws on the same type of research, on the same concern as the study of the self in time. In both regards, the aim is to reduce opacity through a quest for better self-knowledge, and this, in the spirit of a general anthropology. For the historian, comparison is thus a stratagem that, in a slightly paradoxical way, invites one to discover a more faithful picture of oneself in the mirror of the other. It also constitutes the means by which the singular acquires universality. Finally, let me return to the question of objectivity, first to stress that this concept, inherited from the triumphalist era of scientism and positivism, is scarcely appropriate as a characterization of historical science as we conceive and practice it today: historical knowledge does not and cannot turn away from subjectivity; it is built on it and feeds off it constantly. The same may be said of the concept of historical “truth, which contains the ever-broken and unsustainable promise of a perfect, indeed, definitive and universal, coherence between the researcher’s statements and “reality.” Any discussion pursued with the aid of these three concepts and in the spirit within which they are ordinarily conveyed can only be misleading. In fact, the objective of historical science is to generate statements or coherent interpretations (i.e., in relation to a theory) that are verifiable (i.e., in relation to a method) and significant (i.e. in relation to a society’s current reality). The resulting knowledge assumes a particular status, which is distinct from the knowledge associated with opinion, intuition, myth, or religious belief. This knowledge can only be considered scientific by virtue of the procedures of objectification (i.e., gathering and processing of data, building concepts,

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formulating and evaluating hypotheses, theoretical critique, etc.), which preside over its production. The notion of “objectification” does not, therefore, mean that knowledge can be detached from its social and cultural roots or reach some hypothetical neutrality; rather, it refers to a method of building the object of study; and the resulting knowledge must be evaluated in relation to the rules that govern this operation. Comparison is a component of processes of objectification since it represents a means of creating distance between the subject and its culture; it helps to break up the chain of knowledge production at the very site where paradigms take shape, upstream of theory and concepts. Indeed, it is useful to break apart the articulation of knowledge at its socio-cultural source, not to challenge it – that would strip scientific statements of all substance and meaning – but, rather, to redefine its moorings, to subject it as well to the critical process of building the object of study (of objectification). In a sense, comparison embodies the exile, emigration, or transgression that this operation requires. It enhances the scientific gaze, not only insofar as it facilitates a clear view of the social from the standpoint of a specific cultural matrix but also in that it illuminates this matrix itself, proffering the means by which to modify it. On this condition, historical science can avoid the circularity mentioned earlier, through which historians risk being merely mercenaries of the present, bound, in a sense, to a whitewashing of dominant outlooks and aims; they ought rather to present themselves as actors and detractors, as agents of chaos and of reconstruction, and thus to contribute directly to culture in the making. In sum, there are two ways for historians to connect their approach to the present: they may trace their route either with the help of a lantern or with the help of a mirror. They may seek to illuminate it or be content to reflect it. Let me return to the study of new collectivities, as I see it. Comparison features here both in the referential and integral modes. Insofar as my inquiry aims to produce an enhanced understanding of Quebec society, the referential mode prevails; consequently, comparison functions as a distancing catalyst. But to the extent that my approach must also lead to a general knowledge of new collectivities or founding cultures, and in particular of the ways of discourse, it also belongs to the integral mode. However, given the above-cited reservations, I wish to avoid the sectoral comparisons by reconstituting collective dynamics in their totality. The goal is immense indeed, and the reader will understand that such an aim has only been partially achieved in the chapters that follow.

3 A New Old Country? The Formation and Transformations of Culture and Nation in Quebec quebec in the new world In the following pages, I probe Quebec’s cultural and national history on the central questions outlined in chapter 1. Like all new collectivities, Quebec had to ensure its survival and development on a continent yet to be discovered and tamed, alongside long established inhabitants, Aboriginal peoples with whom it invariably had to reckon. As elsewhere, the formation and transformations of the new collectivity occurred in a context of colonial dependency. In fact, in Quebec’s case, at least four types of dependency appeared simultaneously or successively between the seventeenth and the mid-twentieth centuries: political (France, Great Britain), religious (France, the Vatican), economic (France, Great Britain, United States), and, in the widest sense, cultural (France, Great Britain, the Vatican, the United States). I hasten now to clarify an important point of methodology. In taking Quebec as an object of study, I am arguably guilty of defining its subject matter on the basis of a political or ideological choice. In other words, insofar as the francophone fact has been an inextricable part of Canada since the nineteenth century and beyond, its history (seen from the vantage point of new collectivities) should necessarily be integrated into the Canadian context. On this view, there are not two threads here, but only one: a Canadian one with a French-Canadian segment, a dissident minority group whose every attempt at emancipation resulted in failure. My position is as follows: on the empirical level, the history of the francophone collectivity in Quebec and in Canada is clearly a distinct object of analysis; it involves no ideological or political bias. The francophone/anglophone duality has always been deeply

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entrenched, first on the ethnographic level (i.e., language, religious tradition, customs, etc.) and then on the level of behaviour and collective representations (i.e., ideologies, national identity, memory, and political action). In 1831, Tocqueville was struck to discover in Quebec (roughly the Lower Canada of the time) so distinctive and closely integrated a nationalité, with its language, religion, mores, laws, and so forth. To be sure, the areas occupied by francophones and their territorial ambitions changed several times between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. The nation’s symbolic content also underwent changes, as we shall see. Nonetheless, a dense and coherent collective narrative of historical events ties New France to contemporary Quebec. It embraces a societal project that always assumed a globalizing character and displayed considerable continuity up until today: it even precedes the English-Canadian narrative, since its roots stretch back to the settlement of New France, to the first decades of the seventeenth century. Finally, this history cannot be reduced to any one trend or ideological fraction that advances a particular model for Canada in competition with others. On the contrary, the goal of the majority of francophones was to constitute a specific collective site, another nation, alongside the anglophone one. Furthermore, a great variety of formulas and proposals have been put forward to define the nature of the political relations that ought to exist between these two nations. In short, various indicators demonstrate the singularity and strength of this collective francophone/Quebec narrative: an ever-sustained emancipatory ideological discourse; a long tradition of constitutional and political battles; rootedness in the Laurentian territory as the main site of attachment; an enduring collective identity and a strong sense of belonging; the reproduction of a national imaginary, conveyed in historiography, literature, fine arts, and ideologies. Canada’s political dualism is illustrated by the age-old character of its constitutional struggles; its cultural dualism is exemplified in the specific nature of its two collective imaginaries (francophone and anglophone).1 Even the recent change in the definition of Canada as a political and social entity has not erased this traditional view. A lot of Canadians now see their country as composed of three founding peoples (anglophones, francophones, and Aboriginal peoples). The Quebec situation clearly lends itself in every respect to the analysis of new collectivities as defined above. However, alongside it, a Canadian collectivity was also being built, with its diverse ethnic components (the francophone being one), its alternative and dissident

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elements, its proposals and counter-proposals. This second narrative, which encompasses the first, has given rise to various definitions; some of these have been advanced by French-Canadian intellectuals or politicians. Indeed, in every period of Quebec and Canadian history, there have always been francophones willing to participate ardently in building Canadian society. These first of all include politicians such as Lafontaine, Cartier, Laurier, Saint-Laurent, or Trudeau, and many intellectuals. Take just two examples. In opposing the imperial vision at the beginning of the twentieth century, Henri Bourassa sought to win acceptance of his conception of Canada: a binational state, independent of Great Britain. Further back in history, after the failed Rebellions of 1837–38, Étienne Parent became the theorist of a greater Canadian nation in which the two main ethnic communities would coalesce (or, to be more exact, in which the anglophone community would absorb its francophone counterpart). Also of note here are Joseph-Charles Taché, Lionel Groulx (in many of his writings), and numerous others. Within the comparative study of new collectivities, and depending on whether or not one inserts it into the pan-Canadian context, Quebec’s history lends itself to a double reading. In fact, Robert Bothwell has written a book entitled Canada and Quebec, One Country, Two Histories (1995). In the present study, I explore both of these paths, but separately (see chapter 6, which analyzes the pan-Canadian narrative). This theme of interlocking nations and of the double reading that they entail can be illustrated in various ways. Consider, for example, those Charlevoix landscapes that lent themselves to being depicted in two ways: first, in the nineteenth century, by anglophone painters searching for a Canadian identity (cf. Lucius R. O’ Brien, the Picturesque Canada movement, etc.); then, in the twentieth century, by francophone painters in quest of a French-Canadian or Quebec identity (Clarence Gagnon, Jean-Paul Lemieux, Jean Palardy, Henri Masson, and others). As Gilles Sénécal has shown (1990), the same pattern may apply to politics of the “national territory” as a whole. In literature, too, some strongly nationalist francophone authors are celebrated both as Québécois and Canadians (e.g., Hubert Aquin, among others.) A similar phenomenon of double symbolic appropriation appears in various celebrations of national memory (parades, monuments, museal reconstructions, etc.). However, among French-Canadian intellectuals and politicians who chose to work within the pan-Canadian context, many were primarily searching for the path most suited to ensuring the future

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of the francophone nation. This, too, underscores the legitimacy of my approach. A second question surfaces in relation to the very name, Quebec collectivity. In one sense, the expression is rather anachronistic (or teleological) since it tends to label the francophone society in terms of its outcome in the latter part of the twentieth century. It is well known that this society, along with its own self-representation, has changed significantly since the seventeenth century. Its identity has shifted from Canadien to Canadien-français, then to Québécois, a term that has come to include a significant proportion (almost 20 percent) of citizens who by birth are non-francophones. In the era of New France, the relationship to space, or the symbolic relationship to territory, encompassed a large part of North America. With the Cession of 1763, it was radically amputated, restoring a part of its losses in 1774, only to shrink once more in 1791. In the second half of the nineteenth century, this relationship became pan-Canadian, extending towards the West. Finally, in the course of the first half of the twentieth century, it slowly withdrew onto what is now Quebec soil. Amidst all these incarnations, however, the one guiding thread that remained intact was a francophone community (francophonie) that managed, against all odds, to survive in North America under great duress, and that made survival a calling. At the heart of this story lies a particular segment, of special interest to me. Specifically, it is the one whose principal attachment, whose original point of reference, is the Laurentian basin; for the greater part of its history, it has been identified with the province of Quebec. I refer to the inhabitants of this region, in a general sense, as Québécois, insofar as this area is the site of the original francophone community, combined with ethnic minorities or ethnocultural communities. Yet, in referring specifically to a subperiod or a subpopulation, I may also draw on other terms (e.g., “Canadian,” “French-Canadian”). The general thesis, which I propose to develop on the basis of the comparative analysis of new collectivities (or founding cultures), can be summarized as follows: 1 Quebec’s emergence in the New World as well as its growth as a nation and as a minority culture occurred in a context of ongoing adversity and dependency; this made it a fragile society, ever concerned with its survival. Periodically unable to resist the temptation of shrinking into marginality and insularity, it nonetheless managed

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to deal with adversity and to generate great collective movements. In addition, Quebec has been the site of significant divisions for more than two centuries (first among the elites, then between the elites and the common people), which contributed to its fragility and chronic insecurity. Moreover, all throughout its history, and unlike most other new collectivities, Quebec was incapable of securing the outside political support that would have granted it the security and confidence that it lacked. France was a very distant, rather passive ally to Quebec. The repeated appeals to Great Britain during the first third of the nineteenth century were in vain; so, too, were Papineau’s initiatives in the United States after the failed Rebellions. Projects of joining the United States never won majority consent. Alliance with English-speaking Canada in 1867 produced a very ambiguous legacy. Finally, on the demographic level, Quebec always stood out due to its modest numbers (70,000 inhabitants at the end of the French Regime in 1763; 200,000 in 1800; 4 million in 1901; slightly over 7 million in 1996). The combination of all these facts made Quebec a hesitant society; each time it stood before decisive choices, it ran into its internal divisions and uncertainties, relying either on the status quo or on half-measures; its conciliatory spirit often placed it in quandaries and contradictory stances, in a mindset condemned to vacillation, for it was too anxious and incapable of efficiently articulating opposing ideals. Indeed, the constant tension between competing visions and destinies has been one of its most salient features. Its history on the continent has been marked by traumas, by political and other humiliations, which, for a long time, induced it to feed off what I call deflating myths. In several instances, on the political level, it toyed with the dream of sovereignty, yet did not realize it. Its relationship of dependency with Europe, and in particular with France, spawned complicated processes of rupture and continuity, defined by ambivalence and about-turns. Quebec’s intense and tormented cultural relationship with the mother country has been accompanied by an inhibiting, repressive effect that it has never completely overcome. Today, Quebec is still grappling with debates over the linguistic norm (French? International? Québécois?). Torn apart and cobbled together (rapaillée) (G. Miron), this culture long projected false images of itself and of others (I refer to these as false identities). In general, it was unable to enjoy the continent’s overtures and promises wholeheartedly; it was never able to yield,

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freely and unanimously, to the New World’s path-breaking utopian dreams. Consequently, it has failed until now to convince itself of the need to carve its autonomous, manifest destiny in the New World, in the image of Old-World nations, as most other new collectivities did. Contemporary Quebec is just surfacing from a troubled period, in which its vision of the New World has been obscured by that of the Old. All these factors have confined it to a type of in-between place occupied by an eclectic and conflicting set of world views, which the entry into modernity has not yet completely dispelled. 6 Paradoxically, these same factors have been the source of delicate yet enduring balances. Given fears of overly radical choices, old options and antinomies were not jettisoned but persisted in the form of a disparate heritage. Today, at the heart of this legacy, parallel (social and cultural) ideals co-exist alongside contradictory allegiances (to Europe and America, to continuity and to rupture), awkwardly interlocking options (Quebec and Canada), and a loose mix of identities (French-Canadians, Québécois, francophones, Canadians, Americans, etc.). Quebec drew on all of these directions and references in its struggle to find its way, while avoiding any irrevocable commitment. Eclecticism, flexibility, pragmatism, the capacity to adapt and survive are thus the flip side of fragility, indecision, contradiction, and ambivalence – elements that have long accompanied this small, unstable, yet, in its own way, resilient nation. This is the landscape or collective path that I briefly survey in the light of my central preoccupation: the formation and transformation of an imaginary, in this case, a national culture, lodged in a context of colonial and other types of dependency. I then proceed to scrutinize the nature and evolution of the relationship with the mother country as well as related factors and corollaries. In situating the beginnings of francophone Quebec history in the early seventeenth century with the founding of the City of Quebec and early French settlement, I consider four subperiods. The first (1608–1763) corresponds to the French Regime and ends with the Cession. The second (1763–1840) begins with the English Regime and covers two more or less related and successive episodes, which aimed to abolish the colonial relationship with England so as to establish a sovereign political nation. The third subperiod (1840–1940) witnessed the emergence of a cultural nation, largely bound to the cult of French tradition and dominated by a conservative nationalism. The fourth (1940–2000) initially marked the

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strong shift back to a dynamic of political, as well as cultural, rupture; but the period seems to have ended in the rebirth of a spirit of ambivalence and hybridization, apparently placing all the options from the past on the agenda again by pitting them against each other. Other caveats regarding method are in order. Each subperiod displays its inevitable heterogeneity, since the dominant tendencies identified above are always accompanied by divergent trends. Moreover, important changes occurred within each, some of which modified the main tendency but without truly reversing it. Clearly, there also remains some arbitrariness in this periodization. Some pivotal dates could be shifted about slightly, or replaced by decades, and so forth. Complex developments, not always linked to an even timeline, are difficult to date punctually. I anticipate and readily accept these types of criticisms, even though they do not threaten the general architecture of the approach. Further, it is necessary to explain the criteria that have enabled me to identify what I have called the main or dominant tendencies in each subperiod. There again, my choices cannot always be based on quantitative indicators or obvious chronological breaks. According to my main criterion, the dominant socio-cultural tendency is the one that prevailed not only in the sphere of values, collective representations, and ideologies but also in social organization; this tendency permeated institutions, guided their action or operations, and ordered the dissemination of ideas. In this view, the main vehicles and authorities targeted here are the state, political parties, the Church, schools, print culture in general, trade unions and other professional associations, welfare, mutual-aid, leisure organizations, and the like. The predominant tendencies can be discerned in various ways, notably in forms of lasting consensus expressed in elections. But the notion of social control is pivotal here; thanks to it, a cultural model could be disseminated and imposed with the support of institutions and power relations as well as through the weight of censorship. The other criteria are more specific: the influence or intensity of a cultural trait or collective representation is shown in the multiplicity and diversity of places in which it appears; in its repercussions within various cultural spheres; in its ability to bind these effects into a coherent logic, like a matrix or a paradigm; and in the persistence and continuity it exhibits. In line with the perspective presented in chapter 1, I seek in each section to ascertain the relationships of dependency, the symbolic and other sorts of ties established with the new territory, as well as the formation and transformation of collective representations. But the

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reader will understand that the framework of the present chapter, written in essay style, has constrained the exercise, reducing it to scarcely more than an overview intended to show the relevance and usefulness of a particular analytical approach.

a mere replica? france in north america (1608–1763) The decidedly conventional periodization of this era is inevitable. The history of New France represents an initial project of settlement and territorial appropriation that determined the fundamental parameters of the Quebec collectivity for years to come, be it in the configuration of space, material civilization, legal tradition, or in the legacies of custom, language, and religion.2 In addition, the period concluded with a change in metropolitan centre, which impinged heavily on the imaginary of this francophone society and on its long-term national destiny. And this, in spite of low demographic numbers by the time of the Cession: less than 10,000 inhabitants in 1680 and 70,000 in 1760 (a little more than 30,000 immigrants in total came to New France; of these, only 12,000 came to settle permanently). The collectivity established during this 150-year period of colonization was, to a large extent, a copy of the metropolis. First, with regard to institutions, New France adopted France’s main features: absolute power and a centralized administration, the Catholic religion, the French language, education, law (Custom of Paris), the seigneurial system, and so on. Differentiating elements appeared very early on, however, due to the exclusion of Protestants and Jews (even if some of them came), the initial underrepresentation and then rapid elimination of dialects unrelated to French, the rejection of the whole range of customary systems that criss-crossed French lands at that time, and, finally, the inevitable changes in the seigneurial system, due in particular to the very poor ratio of men to land. In this sense, the colony was a standardized, simplified version of the French model. Other elements, such as the institution of the militia and the creation of a currency, lent it a degree of originality. As for agriculture and craft industry, these relied, initially at least, on the same techniques and sets of tools as those used in the old country. But there, too, the constraints of land and climate, the availability of materials and the inventions born out of practice, slowly introduced important changes (e.g., the history of the plough provides a good case in point). So far as one can

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tell on the basis of the very fragmentary facts that have survived, customs, tales, and rituals (e.g., of birth, marriage, and death, etc.) largely perpetuated the legacy of the old country. Otherwise, given the prohibitions against printing that impinged upon this whole period, the life of local ideas is only partially known. Still, private archives and French documents lead one to believe that the colonial elites aligned themselves largely with Paris, the fount of political favours and the source of demotions. The arts (painting, music, and architecture, mainly) tailed behind the metropolis and rarely yielded to local inspiration; this is particularly evident in religious painting (Gagnon 1975; Gagnon and Cloutier 1976). Finally, there was no Canadian literary fiction per se. Elements of differentiation also developed out of the landscape: fortified sites, settlements clustered around the church, and the ribbon farm as the peculiar local form of allotment, the principle of which was, nonetheless, inherited from Europe (Hamelin 1986), and so on. The same applies to clothing, especially in the countryside (e.g., see the appearance of the “Canadian hooded coat,” furs, the spread of woollen goods, etc.), to housing (decline in the use of stone in favour of wood, and the adaptation of French models), or to food (game, fish, and wild berries).3 In this area of material culture, Aboriginal contributions were crucial: knowledge of flora and fauna, hunting and fishing techniques, methods of orientation in the forest, modes of transportation (e.g., canoe, toboggan, and snow shoe), clothes, new crop cultivation (e.g., corn, beans, and squash), medicinal plants, forms of insulation against the cold, and so on. Also noteworthy is the petite guerre, the ambushing technique that the French had already witnessed in South America. To this, a number of other authors add cultural influences, even while such features are present in most new collectivities: for example, the quite liberal way of raising children, the spirit of independence, of equality, and defiance. Other aspects of differentiation between the Canadian colony and France relate to demographic patterns (i.e., higher fertility rates and higher geographical mobility, low marital age among women, lower infant and juvenile mortality)4 and to the social structure (i.e., an aristocracy without great wealth, a more diffuse social hierarchy in the local society, a less pronounced rural/urban split). On the cultural level, language, as mentioned above, was rapidly being standardized (the French of l’Île-de-France), at a time when the metropolitan linguistic space was still a patchwork of numerous patois and dialects.5

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There were also linguistic innovations and borrowings from Aboriginal peoples (vocabulary in particular). Finally, on the level of mentalités, two types appeared: the habitant, whom people liked to imagine as rebellious and recalcitrant (towards both religious and civil authorities) and the coureur des bois, whom people regarded as having simply “gone native.” Apart from growing feelings of rootedness in the native soil, did these distinguishing features suffice to create a sense of identity among the people of New France? As Fernand Dumont claims (1993, chap. 1), it is important to remember that, after the failure of its great missionary and political utopias, the metropolis began to take note of the new society’s specific character. Second, a great deal of testimony from residents, colonial authorities, and French visitors confirms the early appearance and intensification of distinctive signs distinguishing the inhabitants of the colony from the French. In this vein, historians and ethnologists have often referred to excerpts from the correspondence, reports, or private writings of Marie de l’Incarnation (starting in the 1640s); of Duplessis Faber and of Pontchartrain (“two different nations,” late seventeenth century); of Intendants Raudot, Dupuis, and Hocquart (at the beginning of the eighteenth century); of Bougainville and of Father Charlevoix (towards the end of the French Regime). The latter spoke of the “Creoles of Canada.” To this we can add the testimony of language itself. As early as the middle of the seventeenth century, certain linguistic traits reveal a difference between the French and the Canadiens. Gervais Carpin, for example, has shown that the ethnonym Canadien appeared during the 1660s and became a frequently used term at the end of the century to refer to inhabitants of New France (1995). Observers (mostly French) reported other features that they associated with the Canadiens: an independent spirit, the rejection of social constraints, a lack of discipline, a love of liberty, insubordination, and arrogance (Mathieu 1998, among others). Misunderstandings between Canadien soldiers and French officers, dissension among Montcalm’s troops, and conflicts at the heart of the religious communities were also reported. Those from the metropolis attributed these character traits to contact with les Sauvages, to the fragility of civilizing institutions in the colony, and to the decidedly rugged existence dictated by the New World. As for the awakening sense of identity, it was obviously enhanced by a rapid standardization of language. It was also fuelled by increasingly divergent interests between the habitants and the metropolitans, notably

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in the area of commerce. Conversely, it is certain that the detracting image of the Indian as torturer and cannibal inculcated a sense of otherness and helped to sharpen the contours of a burgeoning identity.6 Yet did these Canadiens form a nation? Indeed, a few historians, such as Guy Frégault and Lionel Groulx, have argued this (Lamarre 1993, 241 ff.). This position, however, has been strongly criticized and is scarcely advocated today. The society of New France was undoubtedly a specific cultural entity (as ethnographic data show), fuelling a feeling of identity. But to reach the idea of nationhood would have required the creation of a discourse, of an articulate political consciousness; signs of this are not very apparent. Indeed, there is no trace of ideological developments expressing such a representation. On the whole, it appears that the elites were rather respectful of the metropolis (some of them, for that matter, were only temporarily detached from it). If bourgeois (or proto-bourgeois) elements had thoughts of a national type, they did not formulate them – or they did so in writings that have remained unknown. As for the people, they did not form an official political body with which rights would have been associated. Like the inhabitants of the kingdom of France, the Canadiens were the king’s subjects, but this title did not grant them any collective status, unlike the Latin Americans who, from the colonial period, formed the “Republic of Spaniards.” The administration of New France was very centralized from the moment Versailles took direct charge of it (1663). As for the principle of representation and consultation, recall Colbert’s admonition to Frontenac, who had taken it upon himself to convene the “Estates General” (“It is good,” recalled Louis XIV’s great steward, “that each speak for himself and that none speak on behalf of all”). Nevertheless, the democratic spirit filtered down to the local level (e.g., the choice of the captain of the militia, the inhabitants’ general meetings), and certain (highly restricted) consultation practices were put in place among the elites. On the whole, however, none of this carried a lot of weight compared to the powers conferred by the king on the governor, the intendant, and the Sovereign Council. On the one hand, this authoritarian administration did not encourage dissenting opinions. But, on the other, it is equally fair to say that, for precisely this reason, and by its very nature, it could have stimulated an awakening consciousness. Whatever the case, signs of this are not apparent. Historians such as Guy Frégault, M. Séguin, and Michel Brunet believed that, by virtue of its evolution, the society of New France would inevitably have challenged and severed the colonial tie.

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But for the moment, this claim has little empirical foundation, with the exception of Bougainville’s oft-cited words. At the end of the 1750s, the latter believed that Canada would give birth to kingdoms and republics independent of France. In sum, Canadian society under the French Regime may be described as a culture that was already quite diversified, both with respect to the opposition of city and countryside and to the opposition between the elites and the people. The elites themselves comprised business circles, civil servants, and the church. Among the common people, language defined an ever-sharper demarcation. While the administrative, religious, and other elites were subject to Parisian rule, notably because of the norms of the written word, the illiterate, thanks to oral expression, enjoyed a greater freedom to invent and adapt language. Various studies in linguistics (Poirier 1998, in particular) have shown that the language of the common people was the primary source of lexical innovations. Even before 1763, the first sign of a cleavage, which would progressively deepen, appeared between a popular and an elite (or elitist) culture. To be sure, this division was both reinforced and expressed in other forms, in ways of life and types of work, in clothing, cuisine, leisure, and elsewhere.7 But the linguistic differentiation had an impact of a different order; the already growing gulf between North American and European forms of speech prefigured the antinomy that would grow between a popular culture absorbed by the continent and an elite culture bound to the French model. According to Serge Courville (1983, 421), two parallel patterns of development and relationships to space unfolded. The first, governed by the habitants, revolved around the development of the soil and the exploration of the land; the second, ruled by the colonial elites, stemmed from Atlantic trade and culture. On the whole, however, Canadian society was especially notable for its many homogeneous aspects, a feature due mainly to its exclusions. As I have mentioned, there were few Jews (Vaugeois 1968) and Protestants in the Saint-Lawrence Valley.8 The presence of slaves has been noted, although their numbers were relatively small.9 As for Aboriginal people, whose numbers in the Saint-Lawrence Valley increased during this period (from 700 in 1625 to 3,700 in 1750), they were held at bay given fears of moral contamination (Dickinson 1996, table 1). They were deemed inferior, and métissage was discouraged. On the political level, they were considered allies and not His Majesty’s subjects.10 The Gospel could raise them to the dignity of civilization, but

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many of them proved recalcitrant. In addition to being held at a physical distance, Aboriginal people were symbolically excluded. Bernard Andrès (1990, chap. 2) has shown that they did not appear in seventeenthcentury theatrical performances; they were represented exclusively by characters played by Whites. Similarly, when the habitants began to identify themselves with the ethnonym, Canadien, one might have thought that they were growing closer to Aboriginal people, with whom the name had been hitherto associated. But the opposite occurred; in reality, the Europeans’ appropriation of the name simultaneously excluded Aboriginal people. On a far more empirical level, another set of relationships developed with Aboriginal people for the purposes of the fur trade. The commercial deals that were struck enabled the French to secure substantial profits for themselves at minimal cost (Delâge 1999). The work of genealogists, historians, and demographers reveals that the great majority of immigrants were of French origin. Taking into account the exclusions cited above, the population of New France was characterized by great uniformity in religion, language (at least from the early eighteenth century on), tradition, and institutions. In short, if elements of diversity are undeniable, the current state of research scarcely endorses the adjective “multicultural” that Allan Greer (1997) applies to this society (unless one unduly stretches the meaning of the term). It seems wiser to reserve the use of the word for later periods or for other collectivities of the New World. To conclude and sum up this section on New France, current knowledge indicates that experience on the continent most likely instilled in the common people important elements of a new imaginary, to the point of engendering a sense of identity. Cultural differentiation from the mother country was also already quite advanced, and it was apparently under way among the elites. But there are no signs that the latter had attained a national consciousness. Finally, no segment of the population seems to have expressed a will to break with the metropolitan order or to call it into question in any way. That a majority of leaders returned to France after the defeat of the Plains of Abraham confirms, in its own way, their weak (social and ideological) attachment to the colony. How and to what extent did the 1763 Cession, which transferred authority over the colony from France to England, modify this situation? The question of the long-term economic and social repercussions of this transfer has provoked heated debates, recently recalled by Jean Lamarre (1993) and Ronald Rudin (1997b). First, from the perspective

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we are mainly interested in – the formation of an imaginary and of a national consciousness – there are five points to note: first, the Cession diversified the connections and dependencies; the new colonial power only partly replaced the old one. The English had become the new political and economic masters, but France remained the cultural mother country. Second, the new administration would soon threaten the colony’s culture through various restrictions and prohibitions that affected religion (e.g., the Test Act), language, legal customs, and so on (e.g., the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and subsequent Instructions to the Governor). Third, the end of the French Regime provoked the return to France of much of the elite, clearly weakening francophone society and especially altering the balance of power in favour of the clergy. Fourth, the clergy would substantially increase its authority over the colony by filling a role of mediation and conciliation with the English. In this sense, at least in the short run, the Cession reduced the potential for opposition to the colonial tie by urging emigration on a secular elite, within which a proto-bourgeoisie was most likely developing, and from whom an anti-metropolitan discourse might have emerged. Fifth, conversely, it is no less true that England, in quickly advertising its assimilating intentions, in powerfully marking its religious and linguistic presence, sowed fear in the population and awakened a consciousness likely to strengthen feelings of collective identity. Substantial amputation of the colony’s territory and enclosure of francophone society within the Laurentian basin had a similar effect. The Cession thus made the colonial tie more visible. Although these all-too-brief comments shed some light on the formation and state of the collective imaginary during the era of French settlement in the Saint Lawrence Valley, I am conscious that they also reveal all that is yet to be learned about the subject, particularly with regard to the culture of the common people.

towards the nation and the republic: two attempts at rupture (1763–1840) Under the English Regime, cultural differentiation occurred in the sphere of custom. The language of the common people grew more North American (in the sense of embracing the continent) as it created new forms of speech, often linked to climate or geography, and as it incorporated Aboriginal and subsequently English influences. The work of Claude Poirier and his team (cited above) has established that, after

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the Cession, with the development of the written word, certain popular forms were transferred to the language of the elites. Along parallel lines, other features appeared or increased their spread among the common people: in culinary customs (the English breakfast, porridge), in dress (local fabrics), in ritual festivities (Santa Claus), in the architecture of the rural and urban house (in the neighbourhoods of Quebec City). In all these instances, innovation was the combined result of an adaptation of French forms and various borrowings from the English in Canada and in England, from the Scottish and Irish, and from those English in the South who had begun calling themselves Americans.11 More specifically, with regard to the cultural elites, the British influences were felt in the areas of cuisine, fashion, furniture, and good manners. They also penetrated urban architecture, especially during the first half of the nineteenth century (Noppen 1999), at a time when Montreal boasted an English majority, and when anglophones represented more than 40 percent of Quebec’s population. Certain vernacular forms emerged as well; for example, the architecture of tabernacles, which, according to Raymonde Gauthier (1974, 43–44), began to “adapt to the country’s tastes.” In other areas, it has been shown that an original style developed in the silversmith’s trade, thanks to various local and foreign influences (Robert Derome [1997]12 speaks here of métissage). Similarly, thanks to the freedom to print introduced by the English Regime, a literary life took shape, notably in newspapers but also in the essay and in theatre, with Mesplet, Du Calvet, Joseph Quesnel, and others. The work of Bernard Andrès and his team (at the University of Quebec in Montreal) shows that an initial Canadien imaginary crystallized among the educated in the last decades of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the next (e.g., mythical representations of the Siege of Quebec in 1759, the wreck of the Auguste in 1762, the invasion of Canada by the American Insurgents in 1775–76). For their part, Maurice Lemire and his collaborators (1992, 1993) were able to reconstitute the beginnings of a veritable national literature during the first half of the nineteenth century, which, in 1837, saw the publication of the first French-language Canadian novel (P.-I.-F. Aubert de Gaspé’s L’influence d’un livre). During the same period, a Canadian memory began to form. Histories of Canada were first published by anglophones such as William Smith and Robert Christie. Taking the side of the British, these texts projected a very negative image of New France and of the French. They were followed by francophones such as Jacques Labrie, Michel Bibaud, and Jean-François Perrault, who reproduced the same

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point of view. It is not surprising that all these works were poorly received in Lower Canada. On the whole, they only contributed to the emergence of a national consciousness among the francophones by producing a backlash. By contrast, when Pierre-Jean de Sales Laterrière published a book in London in 1830 opposing these perspectives and seeking to restore the image of New France, it came as a real innovation. These differentiating elements should, nonetheless, be balanced against the significant weight of the ongoing and even renewed legacies of the past. The Quebec Act, 1774, restored a good part of what the Royal Proclamation had suppressed, in particular the French Civil Code, the seigneurial regime, and increased freedoms for the Catholic religion. Furthermore, French influences and references in the life of literature and fine arts grew more diverse, and the impact of the Enlightenment was felt beside more conservative, orthodox trends. The cultural weight of France did not therefore diminish. In the sphere of custom, the educated sought to revive the (“so purely French”) ancestral traditions and morals. Newspapers, such as Le Courrier de Québec, dedicated columns to the topic. It is true, however, that the European influence splintered as well. The weight of Great Britain came to bear next to that of France. The case of François Baillargé – painter, sculptor, and architect – is revealing in this matter. After studying in Paris between 1778 and 1781, he returned to Quebec, where he established an important career in religious architecture, imitating the French style. But he also worked in the construction of public buildings, where he mostly reproduced the British style. On the whole, old New France remained quite attached to its roots and distinctive characteristics on the continent. The young Tocqueville was struck by this in 1831 on a visit to Quebec, where he discovered, to his amazement, the features of old France: “the Frenchman of a century ago, preserved as a mummy to educate the current generation.”13 This testimony confirms many others expressed in the same era by colonial administrators or travellers, including Lord Durham, for whom these Canadiens were, indeed, French, yet in every respect inferior to those from overseas. The clergy (or at least its highest ranks) proved scrupulously loyalist in political matters, having fervently embraced the cause of the new masters, as did the residual elements of the ancient seigneurial aristocracy (Thério 1998). This attitude was sufficiently widespread among the elites to scuttle the invitations sent by the Philadelphia Congress in 1774 and in 1775, urging involvement in the American Revolution.

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However, two attempts to break the colonial tie and to establish a republic on Laurentian soil were no less significant in marking the period. In the 1770s, exploiting the freedom of the press introduced by the English Regime, a few francophone intellectuals launched the first communication network (gazettes, debating societies – one of which was a Masonic Lodge), providing a forum for an Enlightenment utopia adapted to the Canadian context. Mesplet, the founder in 1778 of the Gazette de Montréal, would have liked to join the American Revolution, just like Jautard, du Calvet, and others of their ilk, who defended the idea of a sovereign, secular, and democratic nation (an amalgam of Canadiens of French and English origin). Some of them, who had been born in Europe, had visited the United States before reaching Canada. They drew on Montesquieu, Rousseau, Locke, d’Holbach, and others. A Voltairean Academy opened in 1778–79, and, some years later, the project of a secular university was launched. But this intellectual energy, accompanied by a call to revolution (e.g., Henri Mézière), was soon quashed. Some of the principal actors were imprisoned and their publications censored by the British rulers.14 Such was the end of the first great dream of an American-style political rupture conceived by Canadian francophones. This ideological offensive, combined with the psychological and political repercussions of the Cession, caused a real national sentiment to emerge among members of one section of the elite. In 1769, reference to a “Canadian people” and to a “rejected nation” appeared in a petition addressed to the King of England. In recognizing the rights and specific character of Canadian francophones, the Quebec Act, 1774, precipitated, in its own way, the awakening of a national consciousness. The same can be said of the Constitutional Act, 1791, which severed Canada into two entities (Upper and Lower Canada) along ethnic lines. From that point on, the national idea strengthened in Lower Canada; it underwent a renaissance, drawing sustenance from anglophone otherness, from reference to the Enlightenment and to the American Revolution. In the opposite register, that of loyalism, the Church turned the battle for the Catholic religion into another national issue. In this context, it is useful to recall that the invasion of the Province of Quebec by American troops in 1775 scarcely met with any hostility among the peasantry but, rather, mostly inertia and neutrality, and even sympathy. Popular sentiment thus contrasted with the attitude of the clerical and conservative elites. Like the linguistic divide noted earlier, this points to the growing distance between these groups.

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British power had little difficulty in coercively breaking up this first movement of colonial emancipation, which had failed to develop a strong popular political base and to ensure broad support within the francophone elites. It was quite another matter with the second movement, led by the Patriotes, and which took over at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Uniting mainly French Canadians educated in the collèges classiques, peasants, and shopkeepers, the movement found a voice in the Parti canadien (founded in 1805, renamed Parti patriote in 1826) and in a newspaper, Le Canadien, launched in 1806. The newspaper closed down with the 1837–38 Rebellions, which also ended in failure, this time at the hands of the army. Three hundred of the Patriotes died next to twenty or so British soldiers. The rebels’ main objective was political; they sought to put an end to the colonial tie that linked Lower Canada to Great Britain and to establish a republic based as much on the model of the United States as on the model of France. This emancipatory impulse became more pronounced during the 1830s, when the movement, expecting nothing more from London, grew more radical. Recent studies (Greer 1993; Lamonde 1995; Harvey 1990, 1995) have shown that the model of society advocated by the Patriotes opened out onto important aspects of modernity: separation of Church and state, democracy, liberalism, public schools, and so on. Patriote thinking defined a form of national selfaffirmation that was largely free of ethnic references; it was open to all religions, to all races, and conformed to their idea of a society of the Americas. The movement also repudiated slavery, defended Jews in the 1830s,15 called for immigration from all countries, established the equality of all churches before the law, and declared that the society to be emancipated was neither French, nor English, nor American but that its foundations would above all be in its institutions.16 The nation to be built would be more political than cultural or ethnic, and that is one of the reasons for which the Patriotes’ writings yield so few indications of the content and distinctive features of the future nation or of what was later referred to as nationality. In the spirit of LouisJoseph Papineau, the movement’s leader, the principal aim was to promote the fullest development of “the Man of the New World.” That said, on other points, especially economic and social ones (e.g., the future of the seigneurial regime), the project comprised distinctly conservative elements.17 On the whole, this second attempted break and the one that took place between the 1770s and the 1790s resemble each other in several

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essential respects; however, they need to be addressed separately. Indeed, in the Patriotes’ writings, there are few references to their predecessors, and it is impossible to trace any direct link, at least on the basis of current research.18 One must remember that the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, with which Mesplet’s generation had been identified, had a poor reputation at the beginning of the nineteenth century, given (notably anti-clerical) episodes of terror and violence that followed 1789. The two movements also differ significantly on other points. The second was more politicized than the first, its arena being the Colonial Assembly. Confrontations with English rule were more intense, more organized, as were the ideological exchanges. Moreover, the Patriotes were able, for a long time, to enjoy strong popular support, as demonstrated by their electoral success, including that of 1834 when their radical program, the Ninety-Two Resolutions, served as their party platform. Finally, they formulated a very explicit continental vision, advocating a very open economy extending towards Hudson Bay as well as the United States; their political thought drew more readily on the American model than on French tradition,19 and it sought to build a more equal society, based on non-European institutions. Many of Papineau’s texts endorse this claim. Thus, on January 21, 1833, he wrote in La Minerve: “Institutions which are suited to an old country where laws, mores, practices differ from our own … cannot be suited to our new country.” As for Étienne Parent, he frequently denounced the vices, the corruption of European societies, and underscored the distinctive features of North America.20 The movement split apart on the eve of the Rebellions, many of its supporters refusing to take arms. The far more numerous British and English-Canadian troops had no difficulty in crushing a poorly prepared military offensive that lacked unity and was insufficiently equipped in weapons and men. But the metropolis wished to seize the moment to eradicate the roots of the problem by forever breaking the emancipatory will of Lower Canada. Indeed, following the failure of 1837–38, radical constitutional changes were enforced in the form of reprimands, as Governor Lord Durham had wished in his famous 1839 report. In 1849, the Union Act joined Upper and Lower Canada in the “Province of Canada.” Thereafter, anglophones were in the majority. Public debts were also merged to the detriment of the French; the French language was partly banned from the Assembly and from court proceedings. This episode ended an attempt at a fundamental realignment inspired by a genuine dream of a New World severed from the

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Old. The aborted Rebellions would produce a wholly new conjuncture, rich in realignments of all sorts.

the paradigm of

SURVIVANCE

(1840–1940)

Contrary to the former period, the dominant theme of this era was continuity. Driven largely by concerns over the nation’s cultural future, the matrix of survivance, as I call it, played the dominant role in discourse.21 Above all, the focus – and thus dependency – on France as the cultural point of reference grew more pronounced, imposing its standard in all areas of intellectual production. That said, the paradigm of continuity did not crystallize immediately; it incorporated elements of self-affirmation and local emancipation; it played out in several variations; it allowed authentic signs of rupture to survive; and, finally, it declined in the course of the era’s last twenty or thirty years. From this point of view, 1940 (or 1935–40, if one prefers, or even the Second World War years as a whole) was a watershed in various respects.22 The industrial economy experienced rapid growth, spreading massively. Urban reality had definitively replaced the rural world in the collective imaginary. A sharper social consciousness had begun to surface, particularly within the trade union movement, soon giving rise to a more aggressive social thought. In the course of the 1940s, social sciences truly began to develop, as Marcel Fournier has shown (1986), while natural and applied sciences began a spectacular period of growth (Duchesne 1978). Similarly, these years saw the emergence of social realism in literature as well as a new perspective on France and America. Social Parameters The composition of the educated elite, whose discourse I propose to explore, is disparate and difficult to specify. It embraces representatives of various social groups (or classes?): the clergy in general (particularly its upper ranks), the liberal professions, the business community, teachers, journalists and essayists, public service employees, leaders of the labour movement, and representatives of the world of fine arts and literature. There is clearly something artificial about this inventory: many actors held various roles concurrently and several categories overlapped; this is partly due to the narrowness of the French-Canadian intellectual milieu of that period. The social structure is also relevant here. From the mid-nineteenth century on, Quebec underwent considerable

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change and began to display the signs of a growing capitalist and urban society. Under these conditions, it is sometimes impossible to circumscribe precisely the social bases of discourse. In a general way, I venture to identify three main groupings or social configurations: first, a business class identified with emerging FrenchCanadian capital but also, in the role of ally and servant, with big British and North American capital; second, a socio-cultural bourgeoisie that included the clergy and a large section of the liberal professions, whose factions (in competition with the business class) fought over control of political authority of schools, the media (or print culture in general), and all that pertained to social organization; and third, the people (i.e., labour unions, rural women’s groups, small cooperatives, and mutual aid and welfare associations). Once again, however, this attempt at classification is wanting in more than one respect. First, it leaves little room for the middle classes that grew a lot during the first third of the twentieth century; moreover, it does not do justice to the complex dynamics that brought about all kinds of interactions and exchanges between the three components mentioned above; finally, it does not adequately reflect the important changes that occurred during the period and altered both the impact of these three entities and their mutual relationships. Nonetheless, in the context of the present essay, this summary reference tool and these all-too-general concepts will have to suffice. I frequently refer to another division partially superimposed on this first grid: the opposition between the culture of the educated – the culture of learning, which sustained a privileged relationship with writing and other formal means of expression – and that of the urban and rural common people. The former, very literate, was associated with the world of non-manual labour. The other expressed itself largely in oral terms; its sphere of work was defined by urban and rural manual labour. In this sense, one can speak of the educated (les lettrés) and the uneducated (les illettrés). We shall see that this typology, while crude, is nonetheless well founded and useful in more ways than one: indeed, beyond their noisy and divisive ideological disputes, the elites were in agreement over fundamental collective representations. Structural Barriers Before describing the culture that was established in Quebec after 1840, it is important to recall the structural premises of its development.

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Broadly speaking, the empirical data, as well as the sentiments and perceptions expressed by the educated of this period, confirm the image of a trapped society. In spatial terms, French-Canadian society was largely concentrated in the old seigneurial areas of the Saint Lawrence Valley; in a sense, it was encircled by the townships that had been staked out and granted since 1792, following the English system of free and common socage. Most of the township land close to the valley was owned and occupied by British immigrants. Demographically, about one million (mainly English and Irish) immigrants landed at the Quebec and Montreal ports during the first half of the nineteenth century; a number of them, however, settled in Upper Canada and in the United States. Moreover, by merging Upper and Lower Canada, and forming a new province, the Union Act placed the francophone population in a minority. In 1850, the population of United Canada was 2.5 million. Of these, 750,000 were French Canadian, 90 percent of whom lived in Quebec. As mentioned earlier, the English were a significant presence in Montreal and in Quebec. The migratory trend to the United States had been in full swing for fifteen or so years; it would take with it nearly a million francophones in one century. On the political level, the failed Rebellions and their immediate consequences convinced a good portion of the elites that it was better to renounce the republican dream and henceforth envisage the destiny of francophone society within Canada and the Empire, even though the Durham Report (1839) advocated the assimilation of French Canadians into the English race. As for big business and industry, they were dominated by anglophones, which left francophones only slim prospects of upward mobility – at that time, the theme of “the glutted liberal professions” flowed from every pen. It is hardly surprising that certain leaders or francophone spokespersons (the most famous examples being François-Xavier Garneau and Étienne Parent) felt on the morrow of 1840 a sense of hopelessness, a feeling that the horizons had closed in on their society. It is true that these “national” elites were bereft of the support and characteristics normally associated with the nation-state: they had no army and controlled neither the political institutions nor the economy. In this sense, they ruled over a nation poor in infrastructure and bound to remain inferior given its choice to preserve the French language, institutions, and customs. Moreover, a large part of the educated population expected nothing of London since the latter had rejected the Patriotes’ main demands (the 92 Resolutions), and no one would have dreamed

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of seeking aid from France. From this seemingly hopeless situation emerged a strong conservative ideology, accompanied by what I call equivocal thinking (see below). To many contemporaries – perhaps to the majority – it appeared that, under difficult circumstances, survival and the affirmation of nationhood had, by default, to take the cultural road. This would involve preserving and celebrating French traditions, perpetuating the cult of origins (the cult of the mother country), resuscitating the memory of ancestors, and reproducing their deeds. Officially defined by an oath of fidelity to the past and to French culture, this position presented two corollaries. First, it long placed the culture of the elites in a state of dependency, over which no one appeared too concerned. The term “dependency” must be interpreted in the widest possible sense: for example, various borrowings from French literature, arts, political thought (right-wing or left-wing, traditional or modern); submission before the models and norms of the mother country; and discomfort with – if not contempt for – all things local. Second, by cleaving to tradition, the educated were condemned to a tortured relationship with the continent: their appropriation of the New World would always be ruled by an allegiance to the Old Country. Add to that a last structural element that was ever crucial during the following decades: the antinomy that pitted the culture of the elites (largely suffused with European, and in particular French, references) against the culture of the common people, who were deeply immersed in the reality and dreams of the continent, both far and near.23 Scarcely insular, this francophone culture was doubly open: to the old continent on one side, to the new continent on the other. Thus, the imaginary developed at the two extremities of nationhood (or nationalité), yet in opposite ways. The result was a lasting tension between the elites and the common people. The former, who aspired to a national culture imbued with the greatest European traditions, consented to their dependency on the mother country. The latter fuelled their imaginary with the relationships that they developed from their day-to-day experience on the continent, relationships that took shape within the household, community life, work, and migration. The words, manners, and legends that defined them shaped a robust, somewhat wild culture, exhibiting many features of the old French ways, albeit transformed by inventions, borrowings, and adaptations. The free, eclectic, and often poorly articulated forms of the new popular culture – signs of an original, chaotic américanité – soon incurred a malaise among the elites,

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who had trouble recognizing their own sophisticated references in this demotic idiom. This statement, however, calls for three nuances. First, it is likely that the oppositional relationship was softened by the fact that many of the educated were themselves of popular descent. Yet, this proximity, which is characteristic of those who have become detached from their roots, could just as easily have translated into more friction and alienation. Later, I stress that the business elite escaped this antinomy insofar as its professional sphere and interests rooted it in pragmatism and afforded it a vision of the continent that was partly free of the tensions of the new national culture. Finally, as previously mentioned, the culture of the common people remained suffused with traditions and rituals of French origin; this is particularly true of the oral culture of tales, songs, and so on. A Nation with a Cultural Calling? Backward Looking? According to a very widely received thesis, powerfully reformulated by Fernand Dumont (1993), as well as by many others, French-Canadian society was driven after 1840 into a structural impasse, which left only one road open for survival and national self-affirmation: culture. But it was a culture of a particular kind, nurtured on the epic memory of ancestors and of French tradition, focused on protecting symbolic assets, on being faithful to the nation’s origins. This view replicates the framework that François-Xavier Garneau sought to legitimize in his Histoire du Canada (1845–52), in the form of a retort to Lord Durham. Garneau defined the parameters of what later became the famous ideology of survivance. Fernand Dumont (1987, 329) has encapsulated Garneau’s message thus: “The (political) nation’s empirical existence will end, but it will survive in men’s memory thanks to the monument erected by the writer.” Elsewhere, Dumont speaks of a collectivity that “exiled itself in a parallel social universe, that of memory, dream, speculation” (Dumont et al. 1974, 10–11). True paradigm of the new national culture in the making, this trend created a defensive, insular, and backward-looking vision of the nation, which was supposed to secure its longevity. Its grip was such that, during a century at least, it provided the discourse of historiography with its dominant categories. Today, the era launched by the Act of Union, 1840, is still most often perceived through Garneau’s pessimistic tones and those of Étienne Parent or of P.-J.-O. Chauveau. Indeed, it has often been said that, with

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the closure of the political and economic routes, one had to be resigned to building the nation through culture, to promoting a cultural identity instead of a national state (Beaudoin 1989, 194, inter alia). On this matter, I wish to express some reservations and then a disagreement. Here is my reservation: the established national culture that developed after 1840 appealed, in fact, to more than memory; moreover, its general tendency cannot be reduced to insularity. Against this idea and the significant distortion that it conveys, it is important to stress the remarkable dynamism that this culture exhibited during the second half of the century, in particular its initiation of an energetic program of self-affirmation and growth in literature, fine arts, and religious action. After 1860 (here lies a paradox for later discussion), the socio-cultural elites (the literary figures, especially) spoke as much about creating a national culture as about preserving old traditions. Moreover, should one not, in one way or another, take into account the culture that was unfolding among the common people, within américanité? Now to the disagreement: in reality, the development of the nation adopted many other routes besides culture. Consider first the political path. Responsible government was achieved in 1848–49; English unilingualism ended in 1849; Confederation granted Quebec significant powers to manage its own affairs; starting in 1886, Prime Minister Honoré Mercier strengthened the nationalist way in politics by advocating provincial autonomy, and so on. It is easy to understand why these forward steps in the construction of the state did not engender a triumphalist memory. For those who aspired to total sovereignty, such progress did, indeed, fall short of the mark. Be that as it may, the actions of the reformists (La Fontaine, Cartier, and others) were not fruitless, and they were pursued unrelentingly at the pan-Canadian level, their strategy being to restructure the colonial tie rather than to eliminate it. In other words, the political construction of the nation was not interrupted, even though the national memory has scarcely highlighted these advances. At the same time, the settlement and enhancement of the land occurred at a spectacular rate. In the course of one century, from the 1830s on, the old Laurentian habitat, hitherto cloistered in its corridor (the Laurentians on one side, the Appalachians on the other) literally burst open, expanding the ecumene in every direction. This eruption spawned a dozen settlement regions. Strong demographic growth also features among the forms of collective dynamism and national development. In large part, this was the result of family reproduction, which

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in spite of massive emigration to the United States brought the number of inhabitants from 200,000, at the start of the nineteenth century, to 4 million in the middle of the following century (the educated called this “the revenge of the cradles”). The nation thus grew considerably in terms of space and population. Surprisingly, scholarly memory has not celebrated this vast popular experience in its real breadth. Finally, the nation’s development and dynamism unfolded along two other paths: on the economic front, through capitalist industrialization; on the social front, through working-class action. It appears quite extraordinary that the period’s own dominant representations, like those that were transmitted to posterity, hardly drew on these positive experiences. In any event, the latter contradict the image of an insular, prostrate society, immobilized before an impossible future, wallowing in the memory of its traumas. Yet, that is the interpretation that dominated Quebec historiography for more than a century (it survives, for that matter, today) in the tradition inaugurated by François-Xavier Garneau. A second thesis that is still widely endorsed today concerns the way in which the nation managed to ensure its survival. It is generally held as logical and inevitable that, after 1840, the clergy’s authority over French-Canadian society grew substantially and persisted for more than a century. Most commonly, it is thought that the Church was the only institution sufficiently powerful and broadly enough deployed to be able to claim to speak for the whole nation and to take charge of its destiny. Since Catholicism was virtually the only religion implanted in francophone families, it became a powerful unifying factor, a force of national cohesion. Hence the social power that the clergy was able to exercise for so long. Faith was soon joined with language as the two central pillars of the nation. It is held that these circumstances account for the clergy’s long-standing socio-cultural domination of Quebec. Here, too, I challenge a thesis that, in a sense, confuses cause and effect. In my view, it is rather the withdrawal by other social actors that most contributed to placing the clergy in a position of control. I explain this later. Survivance: A Paradigm of the National Culture The 1840s remain a pivotal period insofar as they mark the end of an intensified period of rupture. Significant elements of cultural continuity (with France) and political loyalism (to Great Britain) dominated

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the next century. In the wake of Garneau and his emulators, a world vision crystallized around the theme of survivance. As a paradigm, this globalizing ideology can be summed up in eight propositions: 1 The Cession of 1763, the failed Rebellions, and the new constitutional order introduced by the Act of Union compromise the nation’s development. Closure of all social, economic, and political prospects entails resignation to a defensive, backward-looking vision, predicated on survivance and the protection of established rights. 2 The nation will first survive culturally, notably in religion, language, tradition, and memory. 3 Within Canada, the nation is politically inferior, and in North America it has disproportionately low demographic numbers; its condition is considered to be very precarious. This sense of fragility fosters lasting timidity and disquiet. 4 Though fragile, the nation draws support and solace from the strength and wealth of its French tradition. Hence the importance of preserving and ceaselessly cultivating references to France’s ancient culture – a reservoir of values and models to emulate. 5 But, simultaneously, and this statement almost contradicts the preceding one, French-Canadian culture is held to be wanting, inferior to other cultures – in particular to that of France. The elites will have to dedicate themselves to the age-old mission of remedying this deficiency (some call it mediocrity). 6 In a parallel way, and despite adverse conditions, the elites wish to erect a society, an original culture that takes advantage of the New World’s resources and affirms its identity vis-à-vis the old, even if that means altering tradition. In this sense, the nation is young, emerging, full of promise; but it is also entrenched in an ancient tradition, of which it is the product and extension on North American soil. 7 Contrary to its neighbours in America, the nation is held to be exceptionally homogeneous in every respect; this proffers it an important advantage in terms of cohesion, solidarity, and fidelity to its calling. 8 Moreover, it is very different from the others, especially from the American nation or culture. The educated tirelessly strive to demonstrate this in all sorts of ways, foregrounding the nation’s multiple distinctive elements. This preoccupation pertains to what one might call a French-Canadian exceptionalism.

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Forming the matrix of survivance, these propositions governed several features of the national culture that developed between 1840 and 1940. I present some of these in the form of corollaries: 1 The feeling of collective impotence gives rise to a loyalist attitude in politics. The nation’s future is only conceived within the colonial and Canadian bond, although efforts are made to erode it. 2 The commitment towards continuity with France and its rich tradition constitutes an element of cultural security; but it is also a source of inhibitions, producing psychologically repressive effects that will long thwart the creativity of the French-Canadian culture. 3 French Canada’s record of cultural poverty and underdevelopment has generated repeated efforts to construct and reconstruct the national culture. Just about every generation of intellectuals grew up with the sense that the national culture must be rebuilt. Note once more the paradox: this feeling is hardly compatible with the cult of tradition that is otherwise professed. The following two clauses offer another example of a paradox, if not of blatant contradiction. 4 The culture of the common people, too heavily engaged with the continent, is a threat to the national culture as construed by the educated classes (for whom French and other European traditions are the model and reference point). 5 The culture of the common people is considered to be a real treasure-trove of values, customs, and authentic French heritage. Therefore, the national culture must draw upon these elements in order to remain faithful to its origins and ensure its survival. 6 The acute feeling of peril that hovers over nationhood perpetuates a virtual obsession with national identity; this provokes a constant search for distinctive features and even spawns fictional representations of the self (false identities) and of others (false differences). 7 The nation’s homogeneity is an essential asset in the struggle for survival and must be advertised: signs of diversity, cleavages, and divisions are thus concealed. 8 The nation’s fragility spawns an enormous fear of the foreigner. It also generates exclusionary social and cultural behaviour towards ethnic minorities who have settled in Quebec or wish to settle there. Difference threatens the nation in some way. 9 This fear is directed particularly at the United States, whose culture is portrayed as invasive, decadent, and corrosive. An anti-American discourse is thus closely associated with the paradigm of survivance.

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10 Due to this set of beliefs and collective attitudes, the FrenchCanadian elites – especially in the socio-cultural field – experience much difficulty in establishing a spontaneous, liberated, coherent, and creative relationship with the New World. 11 The incompatibilities inherent in the matrix of survivance foster an equivocal discourse fuelled by syncretism. I take this feature to be the principal characteristic of the culture of the educated in this period. These statements, as well as their corollaries, comprise a sort of archetype or ideal type, which dominated the development of FrenchCanadian culture during the greater part of the 1840–1940 period. I shall attempt to illustrate this by surveying the various fields of discourse. Yet, in doing this, and as mentioned above, I also take pains to show: (1) variants, compromises, and deviations that the paradigm had to accommodate; (1) important changes that it underwent; (3) the survival of a counter-culture, then the emergence of a substitute paradigm. More specifically, I foreground the antinomies and contradictions of the discourse of survivance in their diverse aspects. For it would be wrong to regard this French-Canadian worldview as a faithful reflection of its reality: it stemmed rather from a mixed program that included, at once, elements of confusion and defiance, of dream and refusal.

continuity and partial breaks: towards a french and canadian nation The following brief overview deals, in order of appearance, with the nation’s symbolic content (once called nationalité), the vision of the past, the development of an intellectual heritage through political thought, fine arts and literature, and, finally, the representation of the customary heritage. Representations of the Nation It is necessary to distinguish between the official definitions of the nation – those, for instance, that were solemnly declaimed during great celebrations – and the common images, stereotypes, and descriptions conveyed by literature, ideology, everyday life: in short, all that relates to ethnography more than to political science. The first type of definition gave priority to the Catholic religion, to language (“guardian of

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the faith”), to French origins and traditions (commonly identified with “race”), to customs, laws, and institutions. The nation was presented as tightly knit, united in its struggle for survival and fundamentally different from its neighbours on the continent. Thus, it was pre-eminently affirmed through distinctive features that made up an ethnic profile. The nation was also perceived as fragile, truncated by the 1763 Cession, and threatened in its survival. Proof of this lies in some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anglophones’ wish to assimilate it. Other, peripheral, characteristics were inextricably linked to the above traits. Nationalité cultivated a special relationship with the rural world, all the more since francophone culture declined in the urban areas under the impact of industrialization. The family and the parish were two other pillars of the nation. A wide range of values and moral qualities crowned the French-Canadian “soul”: a spiritual penchant, communitarian feeling, modesty, courage, integrity, and a sense of hierarchy. Out of these features emerged the image of the dominated and stoic French Canadian, “born into poverty”: waterbearer, working poor, lamb of Saint-John the Baptist. On another level, according to a very rough ethnography impervious to inaccuracy or contradiction, the French Canadian was pictured as sedentary and averse to risk-taking, thrifty and frugal, hostile to change. But other descriptions just as arbitrarily ascribed to him totally different traits, some quite at odds with the latter: undisciplined, improvident, disobedient, unstable, individualistic, and so on. Of course, this very eclectic and contradictory portrait says less about the French Canadian of the time than about how little he was known. This gap in knowledge has not been entirely overcome; the field remains open for research. According to another assumption, the nation was deemed profoundly homogeneous. The portrait of the French Canadian largely dismissed elements of diversity and division, sources of tension and growing cleavages: for example, those due to spatial stratification (e.g., regions; city/countryside), to economic and social conditions (classes), to gender (male/female), to ethnic and religious plurality (especially in the Montreal region). Nor did it incorporate the break arising out of the above-mentioned rift between Europeanized francophile elites and the increasingly Americanized common people – even if the educated were well aware of this divide (Bouchard 1995a, 19ff). For some, following Étienne Parent’s lead, nationhood comprised a significant economic dimension. This minority view was common among the Rouges

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(Dessaules, Doutre, Papineau, etc.) and in business circles; it grew stronger after 1915–20 in tandem with urbanization. For others, such as P.-J.-O. Chauveau (in Charles Guérin), the nation could not exist due to the Cession’s tragic legacy. For others still, it would eventually take shape with the fusing of two “races,” the English and the French.24 But this latter opinion was not widespread. On the whole, as we shall see, the educated perceived Canada as a country formed of two nations (“two founding peoples,” an expression attributed to Honoré Mercier). Much remains to be learned about the symbolic content borne by the nation between 1840 and 1940, and about its differentiation in terms of social milieu or region. The same may be said of changes that occurred during the period. For example, it is certain that the rural lost much of its purchase as a point of reference, even though many of its manifestations can still be discerned in the 1930s, thanks in part to the spectre of the Depression. The Catholic religion is no longer part of the way Ringuet and some other men of letters of the 1920s represent the nation. On another front, several members of the clergy, at the end of the 1930s, took the initiative to establish closer ties with the Jewish community. Until then, the French-Canadian nation had remained rather cloistered; several spokespersons had lapsed into xenophobia and some into outright anti-Semitism (Langlais and Rome 1986; Anctil 1988). During this whole period, however, both among the common people and within the elite, national consciousness remained acute; it was continually recharged by the humiliations and setbacks inflicted on francophones across Canada: Riel’s execution in 1885, the violation of educational and linguistic rights in New Brunswick, in the western provinces and in Ontario, and the Canadian government’s broken political commitments (i.e., conscription crises in 1917 and 1942). The controversies surrounding these episodes further hardened the culture of survivance among francophones. Significantly, contrary to what occurred between 1860 and 1940 in English Canada, the United States, or Europe, the French-Canadian nationalist ideologues did not lapse into eugenics (e.g., a will to “improve the race,” laws instituting mandatory sterilization for certain categories of people, prohibitions against marriage, etc.). In Canada, eugenics laws were adopted during the first decades of the twentieth century by the Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia governments. In Quebec, members of the clergy put forward doctrinal positions against eugenics, sterilization, and racist theories in general (e.g.,

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Caron 1940.) The École sociale populaire also tackled the subject in the same way (notably in 1934 in its pamphlet no. 250).25 To be sure, it is not difficult to detect ambiguous statements on the purity of the “race” in many French-Canadian writings. But among the educated, this term normally referred to culture or nationalité in general. In certain instances, it assumed a decidedly biological connotation. In the racist statements I have been able to identify, the authors were especially anxious to show that French Canadians had no American blood, which they regarded as a stain. This preoccupation led, among some of these authors, to meticulous genealogical reconstructions aimed at establishing unsullied filiations with the most remote French ancestors.26 But there, too, the principal concern was to establish the integrity, the moral purity of the nation, and not its physical superiority. This same concern provoked a desire to show the low rate of illegitimate births among Canadian ancestors, or the irreproachable virtue of the “King’s Daughters,” those valiant seventeenth-century female immigrants that some had dared to compare to women of easy virtue (filles de joie). Fundamentally, a political motivation underlay these initiatives: it was necessary to counter an anglophone discourse that stated that French Canadians were a poor replica of their French ancestors, that their cultural heritage was dubious, that they did not constitute a true nation and, thus, did not deserve the political prerogatives normally associated with nationhood. The nation’s representations were accompanied by a very intense and moving reference to territory, which mirrored the fundamental goals as much as the disappointments of nationhood during that era. In 1840, Quebec’s territory was practically circumscribed by the Saint Lawrence Valley (later referred to as the “Laurentie”). But towards the middle of the century, under the pressure of demographic growth, the rich agricultural lands of the valley gradually became saturated. Under these circumstances, emigration from the old parishes began with the aim of colonizing the hinterland on both sides of the Saint Lawrence. In one century, a dozen regions were thus created, giving rise to all sorts of utopias of expansion and national renewal (Bouchard 2004, chap. 1). A genuine passion for the land gripped the literary community; there writers spotted another chance (the last perhaps?) for the nation. This excitement also generated a northern mythology, numerous local and regional monographs, as well as genuine regional planning. Francophone emigration also reached out in a second direction,

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westward to Ontario, then to Manitoba and other surrounding territories. Along the way, a pan-Canadian conception of the nation took shape. It was buttressed in a sense by the British North America (bna) Act, 1867, which created the Canadian Confederation and gave Canada the status of Dominion. Most francophones, starting with the nationalist leader Henri Bourassa, saw in it a pact officially enshrining the duality and equality of the two – English-Canadian and FrenchCanadian – nations. The latter would thus stretch from one ocean to the other, yet north of the space occupied by the former: it would be “the great boulevard of nationalité” for which Father Labelle (among many others) longed so much. Finally, in a third direction, the nation extended to the United States, mainly to New England. Once again, this gave rise to the most fanciful goals (nearly one million French Canadians went south between 1840 and 1940). Then the dreams of territorial expansion dissipated. Everywhere outside of Quebec, the rights of French Canadians were slowly being suppressed or substantially curtailed. In implementing the Sifton plan, the Canadian government adopted a massive policy of international immigration (emanating primarily from Eastern Europe) to populate the western territories; this thwarted francophone aspirations and undermined the model of national duality in Canada. The two conscription crises confirmed what, in the minds of several, would become increasingly clear in Quebec: breached on several fronts, the principle of equality and duality was a mirage. The clergy itself saw its dream dampened by competition from Irish Catholics. The Vatican invariably gave the latter priority in managing Canadian Catholicism outside of Quebec. The news was no better in the United States, where it soon became increasingly clear that the assimilation of French Canadians was unfolding rapidly. From that point on, national consciousness slowly began to recoil back to its old Saint Lawrence territory, a process completed during the second half of the twentieth century. Authors such as Jules-Paul Tardivel (journalist), Lionel Groulx (historian), Marie-Victorin (naturalist), and many others, respectively celebrated the Laurentie as the homeland of French Canadians. At the same time, geologists and geographers, botanists and surveyors, as well as museal reconstructions, promoted the national (Laurentian) territory and thereby pursued the process of symbolic appropriation. The ethnonym Canadien had begun its slow and final decline. The term CanadienFrançais became the dominant form towards the end of the era.

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The Construction of National Memory In the foregoing, I have stressed that the nation’s future was the object of conflicting visions following 1840: dark and without hope for some, viable for others. In the latter case, opinion varied between a concept of survivance confined to the cultural sphere and a broader view that raised hope for comprehensive development, including politics and the economy. This range of perspectives and feelings produced very different visions of the past, which nonetheless harmonized in respect to several fundamental issues. Moreover, in the wake of Garneau, one historiographic tradition became dominant, pushing aside all competing trends. A central theme is the vanquished nation, severed first by the defeat of 1759, then by the aborted Insurrections of 1837–38 and the constitutional repression that followed. These memories instilled in French Canadians the sense of their fragility. Repeated threats of assimilation from the new masters reinforced this feeling of insecurity. The latter also anchored in them the determination to resist. Such resistance fed off the deflating myths that were constantly recharged by new failures and setbacks among francophones across Canada. Such is the first facet of memory, a tragic side, a collective destiny of sacrifice, twice shattered by military force while in full tilt. Among the heroes selected for commemoration, several invariably incarnated this spirit of courageous defeat, of the vanquished ideal: these were the Canadien holy martyrs Dollard des Ormeaux, Montcalm, Papineau, Mercier, and Henri Bourassa. Other figures represented moral and spiritual values to be preserved, which had to sustain the great and noble French-Canadian tradition. Here, the gallery made room for many witnesses whose exemplary lives had reproduced the deep values of eternal France, daughter of the Church: Monsignor Laval, Madeleine de Verchères, Marguerite Bourgeois, Marie de l’Incarnation, and several others. In this context, women occupied a dominant position. On another, more modest, level, they also featured in the role of the faithful wife, generous mother, servant of God, and ally of the priest. On the fringe of these representations, a second side of memory appeared, that of an energetic, victorious, nation-building people, hungry for adventure, a discoverer of continents. This perspective foregrounded the victorious military leader (e.g., Frontenac, d’Iberville), the valiant pioneer (e.g., Louis Hébert), the intrepid explorer (e.g.,

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Jolliet, Marquette, Cavelier de La Salle), the adventurer on every frontier (e.g., the coureur des bois).27 It also highlighted the victorious political resistance against the Englishman (“Our fate is to fight relentlessly,” wrote Garneau), the great French adventure on the continent, and the flourishing of a strong and proud race (e.g., “the revenge of the cradles”). Finally, along these lines, although in a slightly different way perhaps, political figures such as La Fontaine, Cartier, and Laurier came to feature in the hall of fame. Somehow, these two antithetical sides of memory, one reflecting deflation, the other epic heroism (but the first dominating the second) coexisted in the collective imaginary. Still, they exhibited the same, more or less pronounced, tendency to idealize New France (see the writings of Garneau, Ferland, Casgrain, Gosselin, Dionne, Gagnon, Groulx, Filteau, etc.), which further underscored the trauma associated with the defeat on the Plains of Abraham. Given this, the narrative of the past took on nostalgic tones. But it also established a great hope of reconquest, expressed in various ways in the thinking of the elites. The direction of this collective restoration was partly defined through the French and Catholic tradition; but we will see that the experience of the continent brought about incompatible additions, diversions, and even transgressions. In all events, long memory was preserved. In the minds of all, its roots reached back into the most distant past of France, the great mother country, the land of founding ancestors. This link guaranteed the fragile nation an invaluable symbolic anchor. Simultaneously, it firmly set the nation on the path of continuity. Against this background two important theses relating to the nation’s survival slowly crystallized. I have already mentioned the first: it states that just after the Cession and even more after 1840, the Catholic Church was – somewhat by default – the only institution able to take charge of the nation’s future; its experience, its growing personnel, its intellectual and material resources made it the obvious candidate for this responsibility. In this view, these particular circumstances made the clergy the main architect of cultural survival. According to the second thesis, the Church and its allies within the elite enjoyed a substantial contribution from the people in the form of “the revenge of the cradles.” We owe this expression to Jesuit L. Lalande (1918), who was the first to formulate the thesis in a rigorous fashion. It highlighted the pivotal role of high fertility (especially, peasant fertility) as a lever of survival. It also claimed that the nation’s highest interests had been central in motivating and inspiring couples to procreate. Expressed in

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various ways, these two theses were widely accepted, and they have survived in historiography until recent years. In the foregoing, I have evoked a first dualism in the representation of the past, which combined both pessimistic tones and triumphant memories. When joined together, demands linked to collective identity and professions of faith in the nation’s continuity with the past produced another instance of dualism. According to the first, this national identity was original; it had its own personality. According to the second, French-Canadian culture was a replica of French tradition; such was its reality and calling. This dichotomy could easily be illustrated by numerous excerpts from historians of all tendencies throughout the entire period. Suffice it to call Lionel Groulx as witness. This historian’s work is replete with numerous passionate appeals for respect for tradition, origins, “historical continuity” (Notre maître, le passé, 1924), appeals for the cult of France, eldest daughter of the Church, for the imitation of its great classics, and for the practice of “French values.” This aspect of his work is well known. But alongside this, Groulx also stresses the French-Canadian nation’s singularity and its differentiation from France. A new race was created in the Laurentian crucible under the impact of the environment, of forms of labour, and of challenges overcome. Original features, contingent on the conditions of the new country, began to set: a temperament, a soul emerged. Added to this were political choices, a specific history, an accumulation of distinct feelings and memories. Does this imply that the new race broke with the old? Indeed not. It is rather an extension of it: the FrenchCanadian nation, just like the Acadian race, is a variety within the great French family. Its features enhance it, its initiatives extend it. But the fount that nourishes all this life is the great, singular, ancient, Catholic, French tradition: “The birth of a new race in Canada in no way implies that this new race breaks with its old French past” (Groulx 1938, 11). In other words, this race is both old and new, common and distinct. Groulx’s historical work is built around this duality (or antinomy?) of partial ruptures and a matrix of continuity that gives it a specific character. One could readily show that, through different themes and tendencies, the same type of fracture defines the work of Ferland, Sulte, Chapais, Lareau, and other historians. The register just changes along the conservatism/liberalism axis. Significantly, in this uneven marriage of tradition and innovation (of which we will see other forms later on), the educated tried to negotiate a compromise in order to combine fidelity to their roots with the equally constraining imperatives

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of adapting to the new continent. In other words, they had to reconcile memory with dream. This second antinomy coincides perfectly with the first. National culture was thus in a position to play both on the insular, redemptive nostalgia for its immolated heroes and on the utopia of development amid the euphoria of the New World. However, there was a void that could not be filled within the whole project of national culture: the absence of a founding moment of nationhood, a clear and unequivocal act of glory, such as the 1776 Revolution in the United States, that could have served as the staple of collective consciousness. In lieu of this precious symbolic springboard, the elites had to come to terms with deflating events. This fact, no doubt, explains the imbalance in Quebec’s collective memory; following a tradition blazed by Garneau, the national imaginary mainly fed on great traumas. Consequently, other historical (political, cultural, and socio-economic) narratives, which could have instilled a different mood in national consciousness, were shunted to the background. Visions of the New World I shall attempt in the course of a few pages to sum up the dominant factors that structured the culture of the elites (this time in the present and in the future) and that, in a sense, founded the nation’s intellectual heritage. To this end, I draw on language, social thought, literature, fine arts, and science. A few main features are particularly salient: (1) the wish to rely, in every respect, on models from the mother country; (2) the need, however, to differentiate oneself, to yield to local life, which gives rise to partial breaks with the past; (3) an ambivalent relationship with America (in the sense of the American continent), perceived both as seductive and threatening; (4) a tense and tormented relationship between the culture of the educated and that of the common people; (5) a difficulty in “naming the country,” which, within elite culture, leads to a delayed appropriation of the continent; and (6) the quest for incompatible ideals, which condemns the discourse of the elites to syncretism and antinomies, or to equivocal thinking. For the educated, language, more or less on a par with Catholicism, was the heart of the French heritage, the keystone of survivance. The nation’s language had to align itself with the French and, more specifically, with the Parisian norm. Virtually everyone, whether conservative or liberal, agreed on this matter (e.g., Arthur Buies, Olivar Asselin and others; however, in the case of the latter, language was not so closely

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tied to faith as a component of nationhood). This assertion of continuity was dictated by the cult of tradition, but mixed in with it were some strategic considerations. A language that had cut loose from its French moorings would simultaneously have deprived itself of a prestigious link with a great civilization. The educated French Canadian needed this affiliation in order to bear the disdainful attitude that English Canadians displayed towards the Quebec francophone community (English Canadians derided the Canayen, French-Canadian patois, and the like). In this context, it was also feared that the cause of French language rights in other provinces could be even more compromised. Here once more is the political motivation mentioned earlier. In general, the educated asserted the homogeneity (the “unity”) of spoken French in Quebec. At the same time, they were also united in denouncing “bad French,” first among the bourgeoisie, which allowed itself to be taken over by Anglicism, then among the urban lower classes, whose culture had been contaminated by industrial city mores and by the spread of American models. A strenuous effort to correct this crumbling language was thus needed. It was a task of national interest in which educated people of every kind laboured through countless lectures, newspaper articles, books,28 and awareness campaigns. Until the 1940s, the language of the peasantry was usually spared these denunciations. Its particularities were deemed acceptable, even welcome; they were considered to be part of the purest French heritage, that of the century of Louis XIV. This part of popular language was thus absolved in the eyes of the educated (not that any of the latter would have dreamed of adopting it). The difficulty was that peasants were ever fewer in number, while city dwellers were multiplying. As a result, the nation’s claim to linguistic uniformity suffered. The social cleavage was compounded with regional variation, as ethnologists Marius Barbeau and Jacques Rousseau noted in 1910 and 1930. More recently, Rainier Grutman (1997) was able to speak of heterolingualism in relation to the French of the second half of the nineteenth century. On another front, most defenders of the French language made some concessions to vernacular deviations. As of the nineteenth century, “lexicographers” such as Dunn and Clapin accepted dialectal particularities, as did the Société du parler français au Canada (founded in 1902). Somewhat paradoxically, such contradictions in the continuity paradigm were tolerated even among the most conservative minds, happy to establish a certain distance between the Catholic nation on the continent and the secular republic that

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henceforth governed France’s fate. This stance was expressed with particular clarity in 1937 during the Congress of the Société du parler français in Quebec City, where the organizers shunned Léon Blum’s socialist France. During this period, substantial progress in written language under the aegis of the French norm helped to solidify the language of the educated. Meanwhile, the language of the common people continued on its North American drift. The gap between these two socio-cultural spheres grew, but the watchful control exercised by the elites (largely through the media and educational institutions) delayed the emergence of a typically Québécois language. This result, however, came at a price: the devaluation of local speech. The self-repressive effect tied to cultural continuism was under way.29 As for social thought, a huge research effort would be needed to bring out the essence and detail of the matter.30 My presentation is necessarily schematic. First, with respect to continuism, it would be simple – yet scarcely useful for all that – to gather testimony and declarations of faith among the educated, be they ultramontanes, conservatives, moderate liberals, or radicals. From one group to the other, the intellectual (or ideological) reference points were clearly different. Each invented its own “real” France, carved out its universe, its authors, its legacies, its exemplary model for Quebec, and based its fidelity upon it. The gamut of references stretched from extreme right-wing prerevolutionary thought to the most liberal (I do not include left- or extreme left-wing ideas, since these currents had very few representatives in Quebec during this period), secular, and republican social thought. But the principle of cultural continuity, of borrowings and imitations, generally prevailed, such that the relationship of dependency on the mother country was reproduced everywhere, albeit along different paths.31 Indeed, it is only downstream from this relationship, in its extensions and contextual articulations that all those well-known ideological and partisan disagreements crystallized in relation to Quebec’s political and social trends: relationships between Church and state, civil liberties, universal suffrage, the role and content of education, and so on. However, I am not conducting my analysis at that level but, rather, at the level of the paradigm itself and the relationship of dependency that it shaped. This qualification is important: the Quebec-France axis is our vector here, not the liberal-conservative axis. However, in this light, most of the ideological divides become blurred. On the liberal side, for example, Victor Hugo was the honorary

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chair of the Institut canadien; la Revue canadienne, published in Montreal (1845–48) and leaning towards les Rouges, was filled with texts on the history of France, its great writers, its political and social situation; library collections (such as that of the Institut) and bookshop catalogues revealed the ubiquity of French books; the Masonic lodges reproduced the program of the Grand Orient de France; the very liberal Louis Fréchette adulated the great French works and became their emulator; Olivar Asselin, the liberal nationalist, opposed the idea of an allegedly national, Canadian literature asserting itself at the expense of French literature. He became a volunteer in 1914–18 in the name of threatened French culture. Honoré Beaugrand had a Gaullish rooster on his “coat of arms” and “France First” as his motto (Beaugrand 1989, 9). Étienne Parent, L.-A. Dessaulles, Benjamin Sulte, and Arthur Buies were also very attached to France, as were L’Avenir (1847–57), L’Autorité nouvelle (1913–32), and many other liberal publications. Moreover, conservatives and liberals also agreed on themes such as the primordial role of the family, opposition to emigration to the United States, the importance of colonization, the safeguarding of traditions, respect for religion, and so forth. As we have seen in relation to language or representations of the nation and of the past, continuism in social thought also embraced elements of distanciation, partial breaks that signalled a growing autonomy. Indeed, for most of the educated, fidelity to French tradition was in no way incompatible with affirming an authentic French-Canadian culture – an original intellectual heritage – in the areas of ideology, philosophy, and theology. Here, metaphors of ramification (root and tree, tree and branch, etc.) clearly abounded. This duality became encrusted during the period, until it became contradictory (see the results of an enquiry led by L’Action nationale in 1940–42).32 Both the need for filiation with the mother country and the need for an original nationality were vigorously reaffirmed. The same spirit permeated all the fields of social thought, including theology and religious life in general. Thus, as Raymond Brodeur (1990, 1998) and his collaborators have shown, the various editions of the petit catéchisme reveal the Catholic clergy’s constant preoccupation with national identity. On the institutional level as well, the borrowings were often accompanied by adaptations, innovations, and even certain tensions with French parent associations or namesakes (witness the establishment of various societies such as Saint-Vincent de Paul, Semaines sociales du Canada, Action française, and Action canadienne-française).

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Significant elements of dissent touching on one or another aspect of the paradigm of survivance are also readily discernible. Depressed by the failure of the Rebellions, Joseph Lenoir-Rolland (1822–61) nonetheless rejected Garneau’s backward-looking stance and continued to promote a social and democratic ideal in line with the New World view. Some, such as J.-A. Chapleau, spoke out against ruralist thinking. Liberals’ affinity with the theme of nationality was uneven, especially at the turn of the century; Godefroy Langlois was not a nationalist, nor were numerous businessmen (Roy 1988; Lamonde 1995, and others). Some conceived the nation itself differently, reference to Catholicism being muted, if not totally eclipsed. In general, liberal thought proved less fearful of foreigners and of United States culture. Admittedly, this current had become marginal since the midnineteenth century. (As in the preceding chapter, I am referring to the social and cultural content of liberalism – tolerance, freedom of expression, secularity, a spirit of equality – and not to its economic dimension, which relates to private property, free enterprise, and material and technological progress; with regard to the latter, the elites were generally at one.) But it was expressed more powerfully during the last twenty or thirty years of the period. Even more remarkable than the dissenting elements was the ambivalence that typified social thought among the educated, especially in their relationship with the United States and, indirectly, with the Americas. To be sure, one can discern total refusal (e.g., in the case of several ultramontanes) or an unconditional embrace (e.g., among certain annexationists) at each extreme. Radical minds on all sides wished thus to simplify the national equation, but they only managed to marginalize themselves. More often than not, there was a varying combination of the two ingredients. The seductive power wielded by the image of this great, whimsical, and free country to the south, in which audacity, progress, and inventiveness took on a thousand guises, coexisted with disquiet about identity, with fear of assimilation, with a concern to protect the small fragile nation. This double feeling was expressed in many ways, the latter normally superseding the former – nationalité oblige. For some years now, several analysts have called attention to the anti-American discourse of the educated, drawing heavily on the rich testimony of their writings. In my view, the truly significant feature here resides rather in an inner conflict, in the contradictory attitudes that the educated concealed beneath their moral denunciations, which were intended specifically to dampen the enthusiasm of the common people (and to curb the

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amazed curiosity of the literary community itself). Once this discourse is distilled of its rhetorical artifices and conventional distortions, matters of discord between French-Canadian conservatives and liberals appear less substantial. Perhaps it was suppression more than genuine rejection. Such is the hypothesis that ought to be pursued by invoking the testimony of rich and complex figures, such as H.-R. Casgrain, J.-B.-A. Ferland, Benjamin Sulte, Edmond de Nevers, H. Beaugrand, Marie-Victorin, Olivar Asselin, Édouard Montpetit, the young André Laurendeau, and many others. Whether it entailed suppression or rejection, this nonetheless led to a relentless campaign of denigration that served to stress the irreducible difference between French Canadians and Americans by asserting the moral superiority of the former over the latter (the former were said to constitute the “soul” of North America, the latter its “body”). Over time, this anti-American discourse evolved into a sort of tradition, which, through constant renewal, always occupied an important place in French-Canadian thought. In addition to dispelling the threat of cultural integration, this apology of difference sought to build FrenchCanadian identity by way of inversion, by presenting a counter-point to what was presented as the national character of the United States: the result was a stereotypical French Canadian devoted to spiritual values, destined to till the soil, tied to tradition, respectful of hierarchy, and friend of order. It was a way of inoculating nationhood against the invasive proximity of the other. In this respect, différence was simultaneously a corollary and a lever of survivance. The ambivalent relationship with America merits one further remark. I believe we need to extend this idea to the entire worldview of the educated. Indeed, they were subject to many other incompatible imperatives. For example, cultural difference was a sacred ideal, but it narrowly circumscribed américanité, reducing its breadth; aspirations of autonomy were shattered by the Canadian political reality; respect for tradition was hard to reconcile with dreams of development inspired by modernity. On all sides, the professions of continuist faith seemed at odds with any attempt at fully taking on the New World. Nevertheless, most of the educated strove to articulate these opposing tendencies. Far more than atavistic conservatism or latent liberalism, equivocal thinking was the main characteristic of this elite culture. By equivocal thinking, I mean the syncretism, antinomies, and open contradictions that shaped the consciousness of individuals enticed and torn by diverging ideals.

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Earlier on, I cited some literary figures whose work deserves to be explored in this light. In a preliminary way, I engaged in such an undertaking (a few years ago), discussing the great utopias of the period (Bouchard 2004, chap. 1). The result was striking. Utopian constructions that were considered either modern (Robert Lozé by Errol Bouchette) or traditional (Maria Chapdelaine by Louis Hémon), or again, by turns, modern and traditional (Jean Rivard by Gérin-Lajoie) are revealed to be essentially dualistic in their make-up. Their main quality is precisely to juxtapose elements of tradition and elements of modernity. Utopias of colonization are the most eloquent, and the example of Jean Rivard is undoubtedly the most remarkable of all, precisely because it was the object of contradictory readings. Long held up as a model of ruralist thought, this novel was recast by R. Major (1991) as a model utopia of the Americas. A careful rereading from the point of view I propose here would see it, I believe, as a model of syncretic thought that foregrounds the equivocal hero par excellence. This type of interpretation applies as much to Robert Lozé as to the writings of Father Labelle and many others. But, at the same time, it is no less evident that, in most of these texts, priority is granted to tradition and continuity.33 Throughout the period, successive generations of the educated classes, representing the entire ideological spectrum, deplored the poverty or mediocrity (some went so far as to say “vulgarity”) of FrenchCanadian national culture and consequently declared a sort of state of emergency. Several even claimed that French-Canadian national culture did not exist and called for its construction. There is another contradiction: this culture could not at one and the same time be richly endowed with its great French tradition, whose model it proudly perpetuated, and show stigmas of grave underdevelopment. Here, once again, many examples could be drawn from Octave Crémazie and Arthur Buies to the young Jean-Charles Falardeau and Pierre Dansereau. One might also refer to the already cited inquiry conducted by L’Action nationale in 1940–42. The majority of respondents thought that a true French-Canadian culture did not exist, or that it was “rudimentary,” “amorphous,” “scarcely evolved,” “hardly advanced in the scheme of civilization,” in a state of “dismemberment,” “embryonic,” in “dangerous crisis,” and so on. Finally, various changes occurred during the period, especially in the latter decades. There was a renewal in conservative thought, which partly opened up to more liberal ideas. This was the case with the spread

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of personalism (Emmanuel Mounier) to social ideas and with the setting up of organizations such as the Jeunesse ouvrière catholique. But there again it was a matter of European borrowings; dependency was perpetuated no less here. Also noteworthy is a new affinity with américanité among young intellectuals such as André Laurendeau and Guy Frégault. On another front, communities of teaching brothers broke the secular clergy’s monopoly over the collèges classiques, introduced important elements of modernity into teaching, and jolted certain continuist credos. With Édouard Montpetit, Esdras Minville, and some others, an economic dimension slowly filtered into the concept of the nation. However, the paradigm of survivance maintained its main bases of support. The clergy, with the help of the socio-cultural elites, still ruled the school system; controlled a large part of the publishing industry; closely watched and, at times, censored the media that it did not directly control; ran social service organizations; wielded considerable influence over the government, and so on. Broadly speaking, in literary and artistic creation, one finds the same vision, the same features, but in a different genre and a different language. The literature that arose during the second half of the nineteenth century assigned itself the task of substantiating FrenchCanadian nationhood by feeding it symbols, heroes, and myths. As with Garneau, following 1840, it was a matter of responding to Lord Durham’s injurious aphorism (“a people without history or literature”). This program of national literature, which rallied liberals as well as conservatives, was first embodied in the Mouvement littéraire et patriotique de Québec. Its pioneers were H.-R. Casgrain, O. Crémazie, P. Aubert de Gaspé, L.-O. David, A. Gérin-Lajoie, J.-C. Taché, Faucher de SaintMaurice, and several others clustered around Soirées canadiennes, Foyer canadien, then Nouvelles soirées canadiennes. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a regionalist movement, born out of the École littéraire de Montréal and led by Monseigneur Camille Roy, took over. In each of these cases, the national mission of literature was so imperative that it outweighed the strictly literary value of the works. Declarations of faith inspired by the paradigm of continuity were many, from Louis Fréchette to Félix-Antoine Savard; so, too, were the borrowings from, and imitations of, France. The nation’s status was enhanced in order to educate contemporaries and posterity; a glorious past and magnificent heroes were literally invented for the same purpose. An idyllic picture of New France was built. In this respect, Casgrain was a tireless craftsman, along with many others. In the same vein, the peasant was

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also idealized as a symbol of the nation. It was Casgrain who introduced the watchword, inviting his fellow writers to describe the people not “as they are, but as they should be.”34 A prolific literary current, the roman du terroir (this “novel of fidelity,” to use H. Tuchmaier’s term) would apply this motto to the letter. French-Canadian mores were presented as uniform and in all respects superior to US manners. Here, once more, is the organic nation, free of segmentation, cleavages, and distinct from its neighbours. According to Jacques Michon (1999) and his collaborators who studied the evolution of literary publishing between 1900 and 1930, tradition prevailed and the avant-garde proved marginal and short-lived. Shifts and partial breaks also emerged against this background of continuity. In the minds of the writers of the second half of the nineteenth century, literature would only be truly national if it was simultaneously French and Canadian: it was the old tradition of the mother country, faithfully reproduced but rooted in landscapes, forests, and Canadian lakes, imbued with the history and mores of the people. Spiritual values, heroes of faith, and the authority of the Church played an uneven role, depending on the ideological tendency. Likewise, while the mother country was a reference point across the spectrum, for the right it meant France’s eternal, aristocratic heritage, but for the left it meant the post-1789 progressive and modern France. Starting in the twentieth century, the regionalist novel, as it was called, developed and deepened this pattern. Invoking the mother country and appealing to authenticity, to local colour, became more compelling than ever; still, reference to France remained pivotal.35 Thus, for Monsignor Camille Roy, French Canadians’ nationality drew some of its originality from its proximity to English Canadians – but against the immutable backdrop of “indestructible atavisms” (Roy 1934, 8). Deeply attached to French tradition, he went as far as to oppose the promotion of Quebec’s spoken French as the national language.36 On a far more secular level, Ringuet, the francophile, also proposed an alliance that, “by sharing our particularity with our French brothers,”37 would reach a sort of national compromise but under the aegis of the great French tradition. In the same vein, one could also mention the main representatives of the novel and of regionalist poetry (D. Potvin, N. Beauchemin, P. LeMay, F.-A. Savard, and others), each with his own accents and set of variables. Other examples stand slightly at a distance or categorically in opposition to these models: P.-J.-O. Chauveau (Charles Guérin, 1846) was not

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loath to make his peasants speak in their own tongue; Arthur Buies’s prose was often attuned to l’américanité; and for Hector Fabre, “our society is neither French, nor English, nor American” but Canadian (quoted in Lamonde 1996, 41). One should also note breaks that were not obvious. This is the case of the so-called exotic literature, which, at the heart of the École littéraire de Montréal and in opposition to the regionalist current, escaped from the imperatives of national literature and devoted itself to a labour of experimentation and innovation in the spirit of modernity. Such was not the case of Nelligan, SaintDenys Garneau, and all the authors associated in 1918 with the periodical Le Nigog. Still, it is important to stress that dependency on France was reinforced in this way for these writers favoured the mother country’s pure language and opted unconditionally for the French norm and for a wholesale imitation of styles and genres. Indeed, this trend broke with Romanticism, only to establish, first, the Parnasse, then Symbolism. Its cosmopolitanism was wrought of European borrowings such that one could describe the exotics as a school of exile (were these literary figures not accused of being “Parisianists”?). In my view, this movement tipped the scale in favour of continuism, and this more than regionalism, since it repudiated the quest for a local identity. Beyond its liberating contributions on the literary and cultural level, this modernity had nothing Canadian or Québécois about it: it restored the metropolis as the central point of reference. In large part, the same might be said of La Relève (1934), strongly influenced by the French philosophers Maritain and Mounier. As for the experience of subjectivity that Pierre Nepveu (1998, 79–91) retraced in Laure Conan’s work, it seems peripheral and not relevant to my analytical framework. This being said, the writings of this novelist betray a deeply continuist tendency (“We are the France of the New World,” she wrote in Si les Canadiennes le voulaient, 1886). In other respects, real changes occurred. The 1920s especially witnessed significant departures from the traditional ruralist novel. With Ringuet (Trente Arpents), Léo-Paul Desrosiers (Nord-Sud), Albert Laberge (La Scouine), and Claude-Henri Grignon (Un homme et son péché), peasant realism was underscored; it dramatized vice, failure, and disenchantment. These authors had isolated precursors in Honoré Beaugrand (Jeanne la fileuse, 1878), Ernest Choquette (Claude Paysan, 1899), Rodolfe Girard (Marie Calumet, 1904), and Arsène Bessette (Le Débutant, 1914). Along parallel lines, in the work of poets such as Robert Choquette (Metropolitan Museum, 1931) and Clément Marchand

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(Les Soirs rouges, 1930–32), the city entered the literary field timidly. A social sensibility with populist tones began to appear in Jean Narrache’s miserabilist poetry (he was to poetry what La Bolduc was to the ditty). Another face of the New World, liberated from the tensions of survivance, was revealed in the prose of Alain Grandbois (Né à Québec, 1933) as well as in the poetry of Alfred Desrochers, Rina Lasnier, and Gatien Lapointe. This is the Desrochers who, at that time, advocated with Albert Pelletier and Harry Bernard the creation of a typically North American francophone idiom.38 Finally, first with Marcel Faure (1922), then with Les Demi-civilisés (1934), Jean-Charles Harvey opened a “continental” path that a whole generation of literary figures would later follow. All these movements prefigured the effervescence that would soon upset the old national literature. It is in reference to this conjuncture that Laurent Mailhot (1989–90, 96) wrote that French-Canadian literature was “born old” and grew “more youthful over time.” Notwithstanding these few discordant notes, a more in-depth analysis could readily highlight all the other features of the paradigm of survivance within this body of literature. These features often come with the usual ambiguity: critique of the United States, absence of the foreigner, refusal of the exotic, denunciation of literary mediocrity (in Garneau, Crémazie, the authors of Nigog, Ringuet, Grandbois, and others). The latter trait undoubtedly echoed not only the very uneven quality of French-Canadian writing but also the feeling of inferiority engendered by dependency on France, a feeling that for a long time expressed itself through a sort of contempt for local products and the local situation: “France was everything and everything was conceived in reference to it,” wrote Jean Le Moyne (1969, 25), conjuring up youthful memories. Even the regionalists did not escape this inhibition, which forced them to misrepresent their object so as to glorify it and, in so doing, render it worthy of the aesthetic project, just as Casgrain had recommended.39 The result is an inability to “name the country,” to translate the American experience (in the continental sense) and the real feelings of the common people as well as those of the elites themselves. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Frenchman, Xavier Marmier, lamented that the “Canadian compositions” were but a pale shadow of models from the mother country, even in their descriptions of landscapes and Aboriginal people (the latter being depicted in the fashion of Chateaubriand).40 The tensions weighing upon the symbolic appropriation of the continent cannot be better documented. The same impotence would be denounced by François Hertel in Le Beau Risque

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(1939). One is also reminded of Gilles Marcotte’s comment (1989, 91) that “French Canada was unable to tell itself the story of America.” It was unable to tell it any better to others. The whole area of fine arts, which I shall just touch upon, also opens up a vast landscape on which the (old and new) paths of culture and nation were imprinted. French and European influences were particularly significant in painting, though in new forms, from the most traditional models conveyed by the fonds Desjardins in the nineteenth century to aspects of modernity imported at the end of the era. Joseph Légaré, for one, copied a lot. Religious painting (Louis Jobin, Ozias Leduc) faithfully reproduced European models, revealing an inability to develop an original perspective on Canadian realities. Lynda Villeneuve (1999) has shown that nineteenth-century painters were happy to copy works of French and British landscape artists visiting Quebec. Then, with Clarence Gagnon, Suzor-Coté, and others, French postimpressionism was grafted onto landscape painting that purported to be Canadian, slightly in the vein of national literature and the regionalist novel. This current would also lend itself to a rich analysis of antinomies and syncretisms, as shown by the ongoing research of L. Vigneault (2002). Think of those strange pictures by Gagnon representing landscapes of Charlevoix in all their “authenticity” (notably Village dans les Laurentides, 1925) but capped with bald mountains that are in fact alpine glaciers (which the painter liked and had studied in France). Or consider the paintings of Marc-Aurèle Fortin (a student in Chicago in 1909–11, where, in particular, he discovered the Barbizon School, etc.) representing the city of Montreal, yet always covered in vegetation and bathed in a rural setting. Signs of rupture appeared in the 1920s, notably with the urban realism of Adrien Hébert (who collaborated with Nigog) and of Jean-Paul Lemieux (Maisons à Magog, 1936). Within intellectual culture, architecture seems to have harboured the most combinations and surprises. It consisted mainly of borrowed forms, displaying a greater range of sources than did other arts. The influence of Greek, Egyptian, and Roman antiquity was filtered through France, Italy, Great Britain, and the United States. Raymonde Gauthier reminds us that American models even permeated the architecture of rural churches (Gauthier 1994). But many inventions and adaptations are evident, for example, in the steeples of Baillargé or the famous staircases of Montreal’s residential streets. After the First World War, a so-called national architecture developed, stimulated by the

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example of neocolonialism in the United States. In the same vein, and deserving further study, music and, indeed, sculpture, theatre, and cinema were all imbued with national fervour (Lefebvre 1986).41 Finally, natural, applied, and social sciences bear evidence in their own way of the evolution of the national culture. A preliminary, superficial analysis would show that scientific discourse had a tendency to reproduce and even to reinforce various aspects of the paradigm of survivance. Scientists (especially in the 1920s) were motivated by the need to remedy what they regarded as serious cultural underdevelopment in French Canada. The first studies in sociology and human geography demonstrated the homogeneity of French-Canadian society and culture. Having shown “the uniformity of mores, habits and language that developed and persists in the whole country,” G. Lévesque (1982, 311) found “it all the more admirable, in that it produces this unanimity of sentiment and thought that makes all Canadians, as it were, one man.” A similar theme was taken up by C.-H.-P. GauldréeBoilleau and Léon Gérin with respect to rural society. Marie-Victorin, the renowned botanist, enjoyed noting that the French-Canadian difference even left its mark on geography: witness the existence of a Flore laurentienne (1935).42 The geographer, Émile Miller, practiced his discipline “out of patriotic fervour,” and so on. A closer study would also reveal shifts, tensions, and breaks, as was the case with the natural sciences. Marcel Fournier (1986), Luc Chartrand, Duchesne, and Gingras (1987), along with Yves Gingras (1994), have pointed out that the effervescence of the 1920–40 period (marked by the creation of the Association canadienne-française pour l’avancement des sciences) was heavily influenced by the United States. Note here that the cradle of modernity was mainly American in the sciences but primarily French and European in the fine arts and literature. On the whole, the social sciences embraced the European model more, while making numerous overtures to the North American continent, especially the United States. The sociology of Léon Gérin and Stanislas-A. Lortie faithfully replicated nineteenth-century French models (Le Play, Tourville, Demolins). But, at the same time, these two intellectuals broke with Casgrain’s watchword and introduced scientific method into the study of the life of the people. In geography, the imprint of the mother country was dominant, as is shown in the influential works of Leroy-Beaulieu and the two Reclus brothers during the second half of the nineteenth century and, later, in those of Marcel Dubois, Henri Baulig, Raoul Blanchard (Sénécal 1992). At the University

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of Montreal, under the supervision of Édouard Montpetit, the School of Social, Economic and Political Sciences (1920) borrowed heavily from the United States but even more from the French model.43 The same can be said of the School of Social Sciences at Laval University (1938). It was primarily in the contents of certain teachings that continuism lost ground. Some episodes deserve to be studied more closely. In 1873, P.-J.-O Chauveau, for example, wished to show his acceptance of the “tendency of things on this continent” and advocated a larger place for “practical” (commercial, scientific) teaching.44 A number of school administrators, particularly in Montreal, were already taking an interest in American educational experiences; here, the Church seemed ready to surrender some control over education – as long as the humanities were not touched. At the turn of the century, technical, scientific, and commercial teaching developed significantly, mainly driven by religious orders (Christian Brothers, Frères de Saint-Viateur, and others). It is hardly an overstatement to claim that they infiltrated the Church monopoly of education through the back door, bringing to it a pragmatic, Americanized content. Motivated by nationalism and respectful of French origins, they nonetheless laid the groundwork for a deeply refurbished image of nationhood. Moreover, they encountered sharp opposition among the more traditional elites. Also noteworthy is that their teaching largely targeted lower-class children who had been excluded from the “noble” pathways of classical colleges and universities dedicated to the elites. In short, the split introduced in national culture by the teaching brothers was reinforced by another, preexisting culture.45 Once again, it is precisely a member of a teaching community, Brother Marie-Victorin, who, during these years, embodied the most striking form of rupture (see Yves Gingras’s [1996b] reading), while the prize for syncretism (and equivocal thinking) would certainly go to the already cited Édouard Montpetit, or to Marius Barbeau, the pioneer of ethnology, who was educated in the United States and then converted to the cause of the French-Canadian tradition. In the same vein, it would be useful to examine the rather paradoxical case of the École des hautes études commerciales, founded in Montreal in 1907. By its very function, this institution immediately had to deal with the realities of the continent; yet, it adopted most of the premises of the old national culture. The intellectual trajectory of Esdras Minville illustrates this well. He advocated the return to the land as a remedy for

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the Crash of 1929 and worried less about economic growth than about its effects on French-Canadian values. A French Popular Culture These remarks relate to the intellectual heritage. But the educated also wished to endow national culture with a layer of customs. They felt the need to imagine a vigorous popular culture, guarantor, in its own way, of nationhood, because it, too, was fed on old French traditions. My intention here is not to describe the features of this popular culture, nor even to define it; rather, I am interested in the way the elites themselves perceived and described “the culture of the people.” In their minds, this culture had to be the oral counterpart to elite culture and its discursive practices. As of the middle of the nineteenth century especially (although there were already initiatives of this kind at the beginning of the century), a very large number of the educated, liberals46 as well as conservatives, strove to promote popular culture in one way or another: they gathered oral data, published catalogues, conserved artifacts, and transcribed tales and legends. Officially, the purpose was to advance civilization by securing the memory of this precious symbolic material before it disappeared. Most countries or nations in Europe had done so since the end of the eighteenth century, as Anne-Marie Thiesse (1999) has noted. However, as we shall see, several motives of a more strategic order were mixed in with this general aim.47 The main idea was to show that the culture of the people (especially the rural people, regarded as the model) had its origins in old French traditions and reproduced that template. Every example of so-called traditional culture was invoked in order to achieve that objective: tales, legends, celebrations, songs, dances, clothing, furniture, architecture, tools, sayings, language forms, culinary recipes, and other ritual practices tied to birth, marriage, death, and so on. These cultural forms were supposed to have been brought by the first French settlers and to have been passed down in their totality since the beginnings of New France. They were therefore a living sample of the oldest French culture in all its authenticity, affording French-Canadian national culture the natural pedestal that it lacked; they rooted it in the remotest times, granting it a legitimacy beyond all expectation, and cemented continuity in the most beautiful fashion, creating a filiation between the old continent and the new. Clearly, the calling of the educated was hence-

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forth to ensure the conservation of this culture, miraculously preserved in small cottage life. Their task was to promote it, even to enrich it where necessary, and especially to imbue the people with it even more. For in its great (and sinful) insouciance, the latter was allowing itself to be gradually led astray, swept away by the illusions of continental, and more particularly American, culture. To accomplish their pedagogical mission effectively, the educated did not hesitate to take liberties with the empirical facts when these proved recalcitrant and inhibited the flow of the beautiful French and national lesson that they surely harboured. Once again, Abbé Casgrain’s instructions were obeyed: represent the peasantry not as it was but as one wished it to be (or as it ought to have been). Consider first the educated idealized peasant life. In this context one must reread Chez nos ancêtres by Lionel Groulx (1920). There one discovers at the time of New France a population both morally and physically irreproachable, “a state of society not far from ideal.” Similarly, Notre maître, le passé (1924) offered an idyllic description of the French-Canadian family, blessed by the following features: sobriety, integrity, moral purity, a sense of honour, courage, harmony, physical robustness, respect for authority, and model parents (ambassadors of God, they embodied “a domestic pontificate”). All these features were described as suffused with a very French spirit. Similar pages may be found in Garneau, Sulte, and in the whole output of the roman du terroir. Censorship was very common as well. In the interest of the Christian supernatural, of edifying actions, and moralizing denouements, the transcription of tales and legends withheld perceived vulgarities, rude expressions and toponyms, indecent episodes, the pagan supernatural, and improper superstitions. Joseph-Charles Taché’s fictionalized narrative, Forestiers et voyageurs (1884), represents one of the rare texts, in this ethnographic vein, that offers some realistic insights into the everyday life of the coureurs de chantiers (lumberjacks); but they are buried under a sanitized discourse imposed by the genre (e.g., while old Michel is shown drinking and smuggling, he is presented as no less virtuous, pious, in love with the healthy and harmonious life in the forest, acknowledging the impact of Providence everywhere, etc.). Distortions and inventions abounded. In Maria Chapdelaine, the mythical novel par excellence, Louis Hémon (1916) was able to turn the Saguenayan settler into a man of memory, a symbol of rootedness and continuity. Nonetheless, it was through this inverted image that a large part of French-Canadian elite culture until quite recently imagined

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a complicated rural past, in which mobility or instability (emigration to the United States, inter-regional migrations, successive new beginnings on one pioneering front after another) were essential components (Bouchard 1996b, chaps. 2 and 11). Settlement became a highly national task in which the settler was the crusader, sworn to serve the expansion of Catholicism and French culture. The ploughman’s hand and the writer’s quill united in this gesture of civilization and continuity. In a similar way, the elites endowed nationhood with specific and intrinsic features to mark its difference. In architecture, the model of the maison canadienne was largely an invention.48 The same could be said of the ribbon farm, long considered an original creation of the Laurentian peasantry (on this subject, see Hamelin 1986). In other instances, (good) popular culture was completely fabricated: particular values inherited from France, old traditional songs, styles of clothing typical of regional heritages, culinary traditions, and tales from the land. Several men of letters distinguished themselves in each of these areas. But the prize undoubtedly goes to Abbé Victor Tremblay, who, on the occasion of the centenary of the Saguenay region in 1938, himself designed several dozen “traditional” costumes (one for each parish), which were worn during parades. I have kept to a few examples for the sake of illustration. It is not possible to reproduce extensive evidence based on recent works that have begun to challenge persisting stereotypes, inherited from a less than scrupulous ethnography and overly keen to serve the imperatives of national culture. It is important to recall that the first scholars to conduct pioneering research into folklore in the early twentieth century largely took over this program: the scientific study of folklore systematically gathered the traces of popular culture to establish its French origins and to labour at preserving it in the spirit of survivance. E.-Z. Massicotte subscribed to this program, as did Monseigneur F.-A. Savard and less lyrically inclined minds, such as the anthropologist Marius Barbeau, for whom reconstructing folklore contributed to “regeneration of the race” (Handler 1983, 110). These representations of popular culture enabled the educated to extricate themselves from certain straits and to overcome contradictions in their vision of national culture. From this point of view, the ethnographic strategy – one might even say the ethnographic move – proved most beneficial. First, through an unexpected route, it established the French origin of a substantial component of nationhood; at the same time, it tied the French-Canadian raft ever more tightly to

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the metropolitan fortress. Moreover, it showed that, in spite of the recent and precarious nature of settlement, rural life was the site of a very rich tradition, born of ancient roots. Third, it embedded ever more deeply the idea of French-Canadian difference within the anglophone North American environment. It also granted the nation a robust and, as it were, natural foundation, whereas elite culture was fragile, always in need of rebuilding. There was another advantage: this treatment cleansed popular culture of the continent’s murky waters, freed it of the suspicion that hovered over it; it came out redeemed, ennobled, worthy of a place beside elite culture. The ethnographic operation included another, perhaps pre-eminent, benefit: contrary to what its slovenly appearances might have suggested, the culture of the people was, indeed, of the same cloth as the culture of the educated; its French origins testified to this. Thus there was no fracture at the heart of the nation. Finally, to direct it away from the continent’s artifices and illusions, the common people were invited to get back to their true roots, to rediscover their French soul, under the aegis of their natural guides.

cracks in the nation And yet … One could say that this nationhood did, indeed, survive, but on the level of discourse, in the imaginary, which the educated disseminated through institutions that they controlled, more than through the sustained attachment of all classes in society. This nationhood survived but at the cost of want, tensions, imbalances, and exclusions. And even at the level of discourse, it had to come to terms with many distortions and contradictions. Without reiterating those already mentioned, we must recall that the architecture of the culture of survivance proved shaky in more ways than one. I briefly identify the main paths that a detailed critical analysis could follow. Obstacles and Evasions in Discourse Most of the educated who subscribed to the ethic of survivance professed a cult of French tradition. For the majority of its members, this cult went hand in hand with a condemnation of American (US) culture. Yet, they were imbued with it themselves and acted as its key conduits. I have already mentioned that architectural models for rural churches were imported, and it is known that these models permeated

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urban architecture even more. Edifying pageants were a fashion borrowed from the United States (which had imported it from England), as were the spectacles of lyrical art that many of the educated denounced but continued to attend. Fenimore Cooper and Longfellow’s influence on the French-Canadian novel is also well known. Many of the educated were very familiar with the United States, having travelled there extensively; they brought back living memories, which they hastened to wrap in moral disapproval. The famous Abbé Casgrain, among others, frequently visited the United States (Florida in particular), largely for health reasons; he struck up friendships there. Take Francis Parkman, with whom he sustained an intense and enthusiastic correspondence. In considering the whole set of anglophone influences (British and English-Canadian), one is tempted to ask: was it not the elite language that was most affected by Anglicisms? In this same vein, I have already cited the examples of cuisine, etiquette, and interior household design. To this, one could add marriage rituals, associational traditions, sports, and the like. This is another avenue that deserves further exploration. And yet, all this cultural dissemination was erased by official representations; it was left outside the parameters of collective identity. There are other examples of contradictions: within an increasingly urbanized and industrialized society, the rural world constituted the dominant sphere of reference for the national imaginary; the nation’s uniformity was postulated, regardless of differentiations and divisions linked once more to the city and to industry, to social inequalities, to ethnic diversity, and to the economic and cultural stratification of Quebec; popular culture was quarantined because it had been contaminated by its frequent contact with the continent, but it was nonetheless vindicated as the vehicle of the most authentic French tradition. There were contradictions, but also distortions, truncations, and amplifications. The educated tended to project a skewed vision of the origins of national culture, distilled of other components (Aboriginal, Scottish, Irish, American, German, etc.). For several writers, community and family spirit, mores and manners all formed a part of the French heritage. Even the regional landscapes of Quebec reflected those of the old French provinces (Chartier 1939). Historians ascribed an especially peasant origin to pioneer immigration to New France, whereas the urban component actually represented a very significant part of that influx. The rural mythology eclipsed the urban presence. According to J.C. Robert (1993, 200), the city only entered into the collective identity after 1950. As mentioned above, most of the educated cultivated France

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as a point of reference, while ignoring much of its contemporary reality – namely, the part that had turned away from Catholic and conservative tradition. On the international level, the areas of interest and exchange hardly exceeded the United States, France, England, Italy, and the holy places. Missionary activity, wherever it took place, remained focused on priorities of faith, leaving little room for political or sociological reflection, the kind that could have enhanced the consciousness of the elites.49 All kinds of external perils were imagined and intensely exaggerated to keep the nation in a state of vigilance and solidarity, such as invasions by Fenians, Doukhobors, Menonnites, Orangemen, Jews, and Scandinavians, not to mention the spectre of Communism, FreeMasonry, international trade unionism, and Protestantism. In the 1930s, adhering to the Church’s directives, the municipal councils of the most remote rural parishes passed robust resolutions to combat communism (in fact, no trace of it could be found).50 In the past, much was said in Quebec about colonizing movements led, according to the prevailing opinion, by the clergy. This vision is flawed. Members of the clergy formulated and spread the official colonizing discourse, spawning a constant preoccupation with it, but, on the whole, they contributed relatively little to settlement. Some deserving priests did, in fact, launch some modest but heavily celebrated initiatives. In reality, most colonization occurred spontaneously, as a result of the isolated initiative of families and in response to socio-economic factors. I have demonstrated this with respect to a famous parish priest, Hébert, and his colonizing work in Hébertville (Lac Saint-Jean) in the midnineteenth century. In three years, the colonizing missionary helped establish some forty settlers, that is, slightly less than a hundred people in total (including children). Yet, during this same period, almost three thousand immigrants came to settle in the Saguenay (Bouchard 1966b, 31–32). Here again, the educated superimposed on popular experience a distorted image, divorced from reality. Yet, these settlement movements had much in common with the American “frontier,” and they also bore the continental values of liberty, equality, and democracy. However, none of this entered into the dominant mythology. These perversions of meaning abounded in the writings of the period, particularly during the nineteenth century. Again, in respect to colonization, the new regions created in the peri-Laurentian areas after 1860 virtually all harboured dreams of urban and industrial development (people spoke at the time of the Saguenay “Americans”). But throughout, it was pre-eminently the ruralist discourse that was heard.

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There are also surprising silences or omissions – for example, the absence (or at least the very marginal character) of radical social thought. Here again, there are some exceptions: socialist beliefs within Masonic thought; indictment of poverty by liberals such as Faucher de Saint-Maurice or Joseph Doutre; deep working-class sympathies (notably in Jean-Charles Harvey, who attempted in vain to set up a popular newspaper in Montmagny between 1918 and 1922); newspaper columns by the journalist and trade union sympathizer Jean-Baptiste Petit and activists like Eva Circé-Côté, Madeleine Parent, and Marie-Gérin Lajoie; a few small, ephemeral left-wing journals, such as Vivre (1934); and a smattering of other praiseworthy, yet modest initiatives. Moreover, there were also advocates of compulsory public education, although all too few in number. Compulsory public education was only instituted in 1943. Similarly, from the early twentieth century on, the clergy and conservative elites exhibited a greater sensitivity to social problems. Signs of this may be found in Lionel Groulx, in the journal L’Action nationale, and in the pamphlets of the École sociale populaire. This was the era of the first Catholic trade unions, of the Semaines sociales du Canada, of the Programme de restauration sociale, and of the Jeunesse ouvrière catholique. But on the whole, these initiatives arose precisely out of fear of a secular, excessively intransigent trade unionism, and they aimed to counter the growth of socialism and communism.51 In this they remained subordinate to the priorities of nationhood. During this era of economic and social change, French-Canadian thought was remarkably free of great radical utopias that promoted an ideal of egalitarianism and appealed to the people’s solidarity and action, to the open fight against lawless capitalism. (The corporatism of the 1930s was an anti-democratic, right-wing ideology.) Can this anemic radical thought be explained by the strength of an individualist mythology that celebrated the self-made man and the redeeming virtues of social mobility on the American model? As indicated in chapter 2, the American myth of achievement or of the social climber was scarcely present in the discourse of the socio-cultural elites (except in the wide circulation newspapers) and was practically absent from the national imaginary. And yet, a radical social thought could have arisen from the more militant elements of the international labour movement. But who in that era was even concerned with keeping alive the memory of Gustave Frank, founder in 1916 of the Monde ouvrier and dominant figure of Quebec trade unionism? Similarly, as stated in chapter 2, no echo of the great social thought of nineteenth-century Europe was

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heard among the French-Canadian elites of this period. And neither Zola nor Dickens had a following among the novelists of this era. The comparison with the United States, but also with Australia, points to another omission. It is remarkable that the big issues raised by Alexis de Tocqueville (De la démocratie en Amérique, 1835), after his sojourn in America in the early 1830s, scarcely produced any response in Quebec between 1840 and 1940. Yet, the famous analyst grappled with themes that ought to have gained attention here, as they did elsewhere: how do new collectivities lay the foundations of social cohesion? Is a democratic regime the right solution? Is there not a risk that it might establish the reign (“the tyranny”) of public opinion and, consequently, of conformity, of anti-intellectualism, and even of mediocrity? Is the state not bound to become too centralized, too powerful, thus depriving the citizen of the right of oversight, which is the essence of democracy? On the one hand, how can individual prerogatives be preserved? On the other, how can the efficient administration of public affairs be reconciled with the passion for equality? That Tocqueville’s set of issues is virtually absent from the discourse of the educated is all the more striking in that everyone, whether conservative or liberal, could have exploited it. I believe this absence can be attributed to three factors. First, the basis of cohesion in the French-Canadian nation was to be found less in political institutions than in culture – specifically, in the ethnic conception of a homogeneous nation cemented by language, religion, customs, and common origin; as a result, administration of the affairs of state was less of a concern. Furthermore, reflecting on the structure of new collectivities might have awakened the dream of a sovereign state. Second, the survival of French Canada’s nationhood was as great a preoccupation as was its form of government. Finally, and for the same reason, the ideal of social equality, the status of the citizen-individual, and the legal and sociological subtleties of the latter’s relationship to the state, were not the highest priorities among the dominant elites. It is true that liberals fought hard for non-religious, efficient public administration and, thus, for a philosophy of citizenship and social justice. They were also more concerned with providing schools for the masses and reforming the poll tax. But, all things considered, with the exception of the radicals, was their concept of day-to-day democratic life so radically different from that of conservatives? The many references to the people throughout their discourse certainly recall the liberals’ espousal of Enlightenment theories, of a republican

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concept of the state and of the legitimate basis of power; but they cannot be conflated with genuine popular solidarity, even less with populist commitment. Many liberals did not in fact think very differently than conservatives on these issues. With some exceptions, both ideological families, despite their own modest origins, stemmed from a class of notables removed from the common people. We are dealing here with fractions of the petite bourgeoisie. Beyond the loud quarrels over the relationship between Church and State, the political society was rather elitist, as I argued in chapter 2. Had things been otherwise, an earlier consensus would have been reached on the need to introduce compulsory education, for example, so that a more enlightened citizenry could intervene effectively in the management of public affairs, in the spirit of democracy. From this point of view, the hero in Antoine Gérin-Lajoie’s well-known novel (1862–63), Jean Rivard, is an archetype of sorts. Reputed to be liberal and American, he was an enlightened, paternalistic, and admired leader in his little republic; anticipating and directing everything, he managed to move public affairs forward in spite of the people’s ignorance and ingratitude. Finally, the restrictions surrounding the right to vote (e.g., exclusion of women, poll tax, etc.) were not the object of much debate either. In the search for difference, for a distinctive national character, especially in relation to the United States, general or relatively common features among new collectivities (e.g., the high fertility rate, the small family farm, family strength and communitarian solidarity, and the importance of religion) were nonetheless construed as the special traits of a particular identity. This was also true of features in no way grounded in empirical fact (e.g., the sedentary farmer who blindly obeyed clerical authority, the self-sufficient peasant economy, the predominance of spiritualist and national values over material ones, etc.). There were contradictions, distortions, silences, therefore, and then sheer falsifications, invented self-representations, false identities. Similarly, a stereotype of American identity was created that simply inverted French-Canadian national identity (e.g., irreligion, materialism, individual selfishness, insubordination, and family disintegration). Yet, on the cultural level, even a cursory examination would not have failed to discern important and truly distinctive features that existed beyond language and religion: the legal tradition (Napoleonic law), the ethnic composition (very heterogeneous in the United States), the Church’s institutional structure (highly centralized and authoritarian in Quebec), the ways through which religion was incorporated into

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secular life, the constitutive elements of the nation, and so on. But the discourse of survivance, especially concerned with stirring the common people, would not have found what it needed in these all-too-abstract differences, which were unlikely to instill widespread fear. Finally, the excessive search for distinctive features lapsed into a sort of exceptionalism, undermining any clear view of similarities and real differences (Bouchard 1995b). In examining this “surviving” nationality, it is important once again to state the various forms of exclusion visited upon non-French Canadians. This aspect of Quebec’s past is not unique, inasmuch as every new collectivity of that period achieved integration at the price of exclusion. But this aspect has remained relatively unexplored by social scientists, which should come as no surprise in a society that was itself often the victim of discrimination and marginalization. Remarkably, these exclusions were not motivated mainly by a feeling of superiority or a will to dominate but by their opposite: a minority society’s fear of being rapidly assimilated by the anglophone, first on the North American scale by virtue of a very uneven demographic ratio, then on the Canadian political scene, where the francophone presence has continually lost ground since the last third of the nineteenth century. In this respect, one must recall the now indifferent, now categorically hostile attitude of most of the anglophone provinces towards linguistic and education rights, the federal government’s immigration policies in Western Canada, its centralizing tendencies, and its refusal to give constitutional expression to cultural duality, to the thesis of the two founding peoples so vigorously advocated by the French-Canadian elites. Nonetheless, none of these circumstances exempt us from acknowledging the exclusionary acts committed by the French Canadians themselves in the one province where they were in the majority. Such actions especially targeted Aboriginals, Jews, and Blacks. At times, exclusion assumed very obvious forms (such as discrimination in the workplace or in teaching as well as the clergy’s stance on inter-confessional marriages) and sometimes more symbolic ones. Several instances come to mind: the way selective collective memory favoured francophone actions; the negative portrayal of the foreigner in the novel, in which he holds unsavoury jobs;52 and the unflattering portraits of Aboriginal people, especially in history books. Driven by different motives, other forms of exclusion and discrimination hit women, dissidents, the poor, and persons with disabilities. However, contrary to what happened in English Canada and the United States, francophone

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Quebec did not lapse into eugenics (McLaren 1990). Besides, it was strongly committed to respecting the rights of the English-Quebec minority, in particular in the areas of religion and education. Finally, exclusion was often reciprocal, as one can see from the complex relations between francophone and Irish Catholics (McQuillan 1999). On a more general level, the vision of the New World spread by the elites bordered on a type of alienation of collective consciousness for this vision encouraged French Canadians to interpret their realities on the basis of distorting frames of reference, borrowed from the old world and conceived for the latter. One could cite a hundred examples of such distortions through which French Canadians in a sense developed a self-consciousness by entering into the other’s gaze. Thus, Léon Gérin explains the power of the family unit through the heritage of the old Percheron mentality. Raoul Blanchard and his many FrenchCanadian disciples believed they had found clear-cut human regions in Quebec, somewhat on the French model, as though these were ancient lands with perfectly delineated cultural profiles – whereas this Quebec ecumene was relatively recent; it was not so much structure or sedimentation as process and genesis. Léon Gérin again, but also Gauldrée-Boileau and some others, place the peasant family in a rigid frame of analysis designed for the study of old Malthusian, overpopulated communities, although the habitat under investigation was huge, unstable, brittle, and under settlement, just like any new land. Another example is the high rate of fertility. Although all new populations display this same characteristic, in Quebec it was traditionally and largely explained in terms of the peasants’ lofty cult of the nation’s salvation.53 Throughout this period, studies in folklore deployed huge efforts hinging on questions of heritage and permanence, whereas a founding culture ought from the start to address processes of adaptation, redefinition, borrowing, and invention. The previously mentioned inability to “name” the surrounding country is part of the same phenomenon. At Odds With the New World A final comment brings us briefly back to the disabling double bind that characterized the educated: their difficult relationship with the New World and with popular culture. On the one hand, the choice that most of them made to anchor their intellectual universe in the culture of the metropolis consigned them to a dependency that often

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signified impoverishment: the all-too-exclusive dominance of the French norm provoked servile imitation and suppressed creative energies, boldness of thought and writing, transgressive capacities. On the other hand, their reservations with regard to popular culture distanced them from a vibrant and robust américanité that elsewhere furnished rich material for discursive practices – namely, in arts and literature. Combined, these factors trapped elite culture in a double abstraction and threatened to marginalize it beside the inventions of both the Old and New Worlds. The literary critic G.-A.Vachon (1969) showed that literary fiction before 1840 was superior, at least in originality and inventiveness. This is also the opinion of Maurice Lemire (1970, 1982), for whom most works of the second half of the nineteenth century are an uninteresting, pale shadow of the great French classics. My claim is further confirmed by the way the conservative elites purged the French culture they invoked of its most modern expressions. Locked in their imaginary homeland, the elites were thus captives of the fortifications they themselves had built. Various clues indicate this, such as the difficulty that the educated (even those from the heartland) experienced in portraying the Laurentian physical environment,54 or the duality among various writers (Louis Fréchette, in particular) who were torn between the polished style they applied to their most serious works and the freer, more colourful, language they used in their more familiar and less ambitious writings. The theme and indeed the very reality of exile during this period have to be understood in the same way. Many of the educated were seduced by the idea of emigrating to France, of going back to the beginnings, in order to escape the contradictions of continuity. Several did indeed choose the path of an exile that was intended to be definitive, but rarely was, since France itself did not keep the promise of a mother country. The limits of this essay preclude any lengthier discussion of this matter, which could give rise to a fascinating study. The cases of some famous exiles, such as Clarence Gagnon, those associated with Le Nigog, Alain Grandbois, Alfred Pellan, or Saint-Denys Garneau, are well known. But there are also all the obscure ones, such as Buron or Chopin, as well as generations of students in virtually every discipline of the humanities. Finally, there is the fantasy of exile as an intellectual refuge – both withdrawal and deliverance. This tense universe contrasted with the life of the common people, in town and country. There, of course, the clergy sought to impose its law far beyond the sacred sphere, but there was substantial room for

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resistance in the secular realm. For, if equivocal thinking was the typical feature of the elite culture, eclecticism was the dominant mode among the common people. It had four main components. First, it fed on a certain image of France, sustained by oral tradition, songs, reading, and elementary school. But even if this link with France was acutely felt (at least among the rural elements – we know so little of this in contrast with the city), it remained theoretical and remote, for lack of regular contact. Then there were American influences in the world of work (e.g., workplace culture, trade unionism, and technology), entertainment (e.g., sport, cinema, burlesque theatre, songs, dances, circuses, etc.), diet, architecture, clothing, and other fashions. These filtered through newspapers (in particular advertising, cartoons, and serials), popular almanacs (of which large parts were translated from American works), later through the cinema, the radio, and a lot through the very intense and incessant flux of labour migrations back and forth up until the 1920s. It should be noted that this acculturation conveyed modernizing influences, urban values, and models that accentuated the distance between popular culture and the culture of survivance. In the eyes of the people, it was often the educated themselves who were out of step. Another source of acculturation involved borrowings, within Quebec itself, of cultural features spread by English, Scottish, Irish, German, and other immigrants, while, in the new areas of settlement, contact with Aboriginal people continued. The fourth component resulted from local inventions and adaptations, arising from the vagaries of the everyday and touching on almost all the aspects of collective life, from speech to clothing, to equipment and tools. Starting in the seventeenth century, the ever-accelerating hybridization of the French heritage and its growing estrangement from its roots followed these four paths. Amidst the familiar figures who emerged in this process is a gallery of male characters such as the coureur des bois, the voyageur, the portageur, the jobber, the patenteux, the water bearer, the settler, the habitant, the canayen, the coureux de factries, the uncle from the States, and so on. On the female side, one finds the saintly woman, the mother hen, the créature, the bonne femme, and so on. The repertoire is much narrower for women; the imaginary of new collectivities was mainly masculine. All in all, it is fair to say that men were more imbued with américanité than women, the latter being more constrained by traditional forces. Social and cultural characteristics on another front warrant attention. Some features of rural and urban landscapes reflect a curious mix of

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individualism (e.g., fences and neighourhood rivalries) and communitarianism (e.g., strength of kinship bonds, proximity of dwellings, and mutual aid practices). Families developed original patterns of inheritance that realized an ideal of equality alongside the old tradition of inequality between boys and girls. The continent continued to have an impact on language, particularly in the cities, where French became anglicized. Even among peasants (especially on the pioneer fronts), language drew further and further away from its ancient French roots. This produced a new disquiet among the educated, who had mainly felt the need for vigilance in the cities up to the 1920s. And yet, as recent studies of regional spoken language testify, the popular idiom, in its own way, proved continually creative and more capable than elite culture in creatively naming its environment. Similarly, unlike the educated, who, in the name of threatened nationhood, were quick to fret over the presence of foreigners, the common people proved rather receptive, if not welcoming, towards them (e.g., there was no antiSemitism in the lower-class districts of Montreal, where Jews and French Canadians lived alongside each other; the familiar status of the peddler in the countryside was a curiosity for anyone who came from far away). Another feature was the marked penchant for community affairs, electoral meetings, and the noisy business of local democracy. In this context, there was also resistance to formalities in private life, and this, even during special moments, such as festivities and anniversaries, births, marriages, and deaths. However, there was greater inclination towards ceremony in public life: at church, in processions, during important official visits (e.g., the bishop’s), or local and national commemorations. Finally, since popular culture was less driven by the imperatives of continuity, and also because the urgencies of nationhood and survivance affected it differently, it entertained a more direct and spontaneous relationship with the Laurentian and North American environment. This is evident in the enormous capacity for adaptation and métissage that it displayed in assimilating continental ways without actually severing important moorings to the francophone tradition. In this respect, its trajectory somewhat prefigured the significant turn that intellectual culture itself would take in the second half of the twentieth century. For this is the essential point: against the elites’ traditional French culture, the people were already pitting an original North American francophone culture. Many among the educated criticized this free mingling with America, this familiarity (tutoiement) with the New World. In américanité, the

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educated saw not the fertile soil of an original and rich culture but, rather, the muddied waters of contamination. There are many examples of this stance, notably among the members of the clergy. The Church’s opposition to, and even censorship of, numerous expressions of popular culture are well known: struggles against bad French (including swearing and blasphemies), against degrading customs (charivari, mi-carême, Mardi Gras and the carnival), against vices (consumption of alcohol, gambling, prostitution), against moral lassitude (indecent clothing, “American dances,” pernicious readings), against perverted forms of entertainment (horse racing, travelling circuses, burlesque theatre, entertainers, sports, cinema, and even radio), and against poor musical taste (saucy songs, country music, jazz). Consequently, as mentioned earlier, the living culture of the common people was scarcely carried over into elite culture. Where, for example, in the literary and artistic production of this era, are those notorious public debates conjured up, or the noisy celebrations that accompanied election nights? Or even the numerous voluntary activities (“bees”) that periodically brought together both men and women (not to speak of the home stills, the mi-carêmes, etc.)? The scant exchange between these two universes is an important feature of the French-Canadian collective imaginary of that time. It accounts for the absence of a genuine mythology of the city dweller and the settler in their utter freedom, everyday spontaneity, works and challenges. The novelists who dared to deviate by flirting with realism and naturalism paid a heavy price, as can be seen from the fate meted out to Rodolphe Girard (Marie Calumet, 1904), Albert Laberge (La Scouine, 1918), or Jean-Charles Harvey (Les Demi-civilisés, 1934).55 In 1941, in response to the broad survey undertaken by L’Action nationale (vol. 17, no. 3, 214), a young sociologist (Jean-Charles Falardeau) observed that “our artistic works” are not sufficiently inspired by the French-Canadian “climate.” The contrast with countries such as Australia or the United States could not be more striking. While the stereotypes of cowboys and bushmen celebrated the swaggering qualities of masculinity, the French-Canadian imaginary long conveyed the image of an emasculated settler, with his dubious double: the procreating, devout, and pious mother. In this light, one has to reread beacon works such as La Terre paternelle (Patrice Lacombe 1846), L’Appel de la terre (Damase Potvin 1912) or Menaud, maître-draveur (F.-A. Savard 1937), which turned the settler into a submissive being, a crusader of nationhood coiled up in the clergy’s lap. Or, again, the novel Maria Chapdelaine

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(Hémon 1916), which successfully managed to represent a settlement society – unstable and precarious by definition, exposed to all four winds of the continent – as the perfect symbol of a culture of deep rootedness and memory. Even with the historian François-Xavier Garneau, the bard of le peuple canadien, the people are oddly absent. In lieu of a living portrait, these men of letters engaged in censorship, creating sanitized and saccharine representations that concealed more than they revealed. It is in the light of this that one must view all the elite initiatives to build a substitute popular culture, made up of beautiful (supposedly French) manners, good songs, healthy leisure activities, Catholic trade unionism, and the like. The result was an impoverishment and amputation of popular culture, cut off from the living French tradition, repressed by a French-Canadian elite culture (all too detached from reality), put on trial for its américanité, and limited to expressing itself in half secrecy. Admittedly, there are exceptions to these claims, but these exceptions do not undermine the broad lines of the analysis. Claude Janelle (1999) and his collaborators, for example, have detected subversive elements in tales published in newspapers and journals of the period. But we should not miss the forest for the trees: most of these tales – as Janelle acknowledges for that matter (5–6) – are moralizing, edifying narratives. We would no doubt discover a quite different landscape if we could hear the popular tales that were not subjected to the filter of the written word. In spite of controls and prohibitions, there was no mortification of the popular language; impoverished and censored, it nevertheless survived in its own way, as its resistances, doggedness, and transgressions reveal: “bad” forms of leisure and popular shows prospered; secular trade unions and emigration to the United States grew; swearing and cursing, alcohol consumption, salacious readings, forbidden dances, and visits to bad public places continued; cities attracted many more migrants in Quebec and the United States than did colonization; “buy locally” campaigns failed; the promotion of a high birth rate (la revanche des berceaux) did not halt the decline in fertility. The people preferred the American golden calf to the spiritual ideal being preached to them. Building the State Finally, a word on the evolution of the political sphere. Overall, the years 1840 to 1940 witnessed the predominance of continuity, but they

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also gave rise to important acts of rupture that helped to establish the outlines of a state apparatus in Quebec. However, these episodes took place largely at the pan-Canadian level and must be analyzed primarily on this scale. Indeed, with the Union Act, 1840, and the British North America Act, 1867, the fates of the two (francophone and anglophone) collectivities were politically joined within the Canadian state. Responsible government was established in United Canada in 1848–49, while Confederation, in 1867, transformed Lower Canada into the Province of Quebec; yet, it retained jurisdiction over certain internal matters (e.g., education, civil justice, taxation, the police, roads, etc.). These arrangements officially gave birth to a form of Quebec state, even though it was a far cry from the sovereignty sought thirty years before. Within this framework, French Canadians continued to struggle for more power, first in demanding an end to the colonial bond that still united Canada to Great Britain (Henri Bourassa is particularly associated with this ideological current) and then by highlighting the twoheaded nature of the Canadian state (the two-founding-peoples thesis, the principle of cultural duality). Throughout this whole period, however, the clergy maintained its policy of supporting the Canadian state and its colonial status, in spite of various crises, and even against popular opinion (as it did, for example, by supporting conscription in 1917). At the same time, the idea of an independent Quebec state resurfaced here and there, but very marginally: with the Rouges and the return of Papineau at the end of the 1840s, with Médéric Lanctôt during the 1860s, with Jules-Paul Tardivel and Honoré Mercier (although under very different colours) towards the end of the century, and with Lionel Groulx and his Laurentian project from 1920 to 1930. During the 1930s, the editors of the journal La Nation, as well as Dostaler O’Leary, Wilfred Morin, and some others, waged a similar struggle. Finally, another type of rupture discussed around the midnineteenth century – namely, French Canada’s annexation by the United States – led to nothing. On the whole, then, French Canadians made do with the political framework delineated by Confederation, but they never gave up trying to strengthen their political status. For this reason, it appears excessive to apply to the entire 1840–1940 period (as is sometimes done) André-J. Bélanger’s thesis (1974) that French-Canadian ideologies were apolitical. Apart from the predominant continuism in the political sphere, there is, between 1840 and 1940, one feature in French-Canadian elite culture that stands out: the difficulty in imagining or coherently conceptualizing the New World. With its premises (and its corollaries) of fragility,

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insecurity, and collective powerlessness, the paradigm of survivance checked the unbridled dreaming of the continent. This is a considerable phenomenon, and we have yet to gauge all its implications. Up until the middle of the nineteenth century, French Canada had been engaged in the immense human project of creating the New World; it had participated in the same destiny as had the other collectivities of the Americas; it had engineered a drive towards autonomy: and then, suddenly, it chose to make an about-face and behaved like a very old nation. Several features and cultural changes accompanied this reversal. First, there is the ubiquitous, dominant reference to France as well as the ceaseless reminders of tradition, the celebrations of the past, the symbolism of rootedness and heritage. There is also the long memory going back to Champlain or to Jacques Cartier, but which suddenly forks off towards France, abandoning the path that could have led to Christopher Columbus (which would already have been evidence of a more continental vision). Similarly, genuine utopias embracing and exalting the New World, in order to shape radically innovative, marvellous, extravagant destinies in it, were noticeably absent (or exceptional) during this period. The imagery of the Pays d’en haut and of the North could have furnished rich material here: but the educated refused to portray in all their light and mystery these realms of adventure and liberty, of wildness and conquest, which so fascinated the coureur des bois and fed the minds of the people. Also worth noting is the vigour of antiAmericanism, the lack of curiosity in other new collectivities of the Americas or elsewhere, the indifference towards Tocquevillian themes, and, finally, on the part of historians, the rejection (without any discussion or critical study) of the frontier model, even though this had been, since the end of the nineteenth century, the most common paradigm used just about everywhere to analyze the settlement of the New World and even similar phenomena in the Old World – all this, despite the fact that the development of the Quebec ecumene in the nineteenth century grew by a dozen regions. Let us end with three quotations. The first, which acquired the status of a founding statement, such was the frequency with which it was taken up, is from the most influential historian of the period, FrançoisXavier Garneau. It appears as a watchword, which, in my view, expressed, in its most complete form, the negative, defeatist attitude towards the New World. May French-Canadians (Canadiens) be faithful to themselves … may they not be seduced by the glitter of social or political novelties! They are not

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sufficiently strong to make a career of this matter. (Conclusion of the Histoire du Canada, Quebec, 1859, 3rd edition, vol. 3)

The second quotation is from Lionel Groulx. Following the preceding one by more than a century, it reproduces the exact same sentiment. There is such a thing as historical continuity, that accumulation of ancestral labours which cannot accept … interruption anymore than the smallest creature can, short of incurring grave danger, suffer the stoppage of its vital organs. (L’Histoire du Canada français: Son enseignement, Montréal, 1961, 2–3)

The last extract is from Arthur Buies. He expresses the point of view of some rare thinkers, who, at the time, were not afraid to give the North American continent a second look and to dream of a bolder destiny for French Canadians. We are an ancient people. All is old in Canada, the cities, the countryside, the customs, the language … We speak and live as ancestors do … Lower Canada is the old world in the ancient, the old world that has remained passive at the heart of modern turmoil. (Quoted by G.-A. Vachon 1970, 294)

return to rupture: AMÉRICANITÉ, sovereignty, and continuities (1940–2000) In broad terms, Quebec’s evolution after the Second World War unfolded in an atmosphere dominated by political and cultural rupture, and defined notably by the eroding matrix of survivance. But this return to a dynamic of rupture was accompanied by various elements of continuity with the preceding period; it was also accompanied by a decline and then resurgence of equivocal thinking. More specifically, the major transformations associated with the last half century consisted in (1) attempts to achieve Quebec sovereignty; (2) the blossoming of a new vision of the world and of the New World; (3) a redefinition of relations between elite culture and popular or mass culture; (4) acts of disengagement from France; (5) important reconfigurations in the definition of the nation and its attributes (e.g., symbols, identity, memory, etc.); (6) a growing sensitivity to civil rights and pluralism; (7) a diversification of broad ideological trends in elite culture; and (8) the appearance of new divisions and ambivalences. All these transformations occurred at a time of great flux, replete with sudden developments that should now be mentioned.

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Three Decades of Upheaval: At the Crossroads of the Quiet Revolution We must be wary of one illusion: the period between 1840 and 1940 was also marked by major changes (e.g., vigorous expansion of the ecumene, industrialization, massive importation of foreign capital, growth of trade unionism, urbanization, decline in fertility, etc.). Change, however, occurred in a great rush during the following decades, in the wake of the Great Depression and the Second World War. I have been able to show, for example, that in a region such as the Saguenay, significant changes affected the cultural (specifically religious) models as early as the 1920s (Bouchard 1996b, chap. 19). With respect to our major concern here, social relations were the focus of the most significant developments in Quebec as a whole between 1940 and 1970. The people made their presence felt on the collective scene, primarily through the mediation of the labour movement. Having grown more demanding, the trade unions led strikes that had important consequences on all levels. The disputes in the textile (1937) and asbestos (1949) industries warrant particular mention, but the entire period was filled with struggles. Several hundred strikes took place during the 1940s alone. These episodes did have antecedents in the early twentieth century as Jacques Rouillard has shown (1998), yet they lacked the awakened consciousness and the repercussions that typified the 1940s. In this context, the elites had to learn gradually to reckon with a new actor. Henceforth, the people were no longer the submissive and orderly peasantry but the day labourers and workers of the cities, capable of wrath and solidarity. Another actor also appeared on the social landscape: the middle classes. A different elite, with a new vision of society, would emerge from this milieu. As for the liberal professions and the clergy, their social position was more or less eroded by the advance of industrial capitalism and the socio-cultural reforms it provoked. Second, the urban world, which prevailed since the 1910s, finally dominated the symbolic field. Modernity spread ever more widely among working people and the middle class through Americanization; it also penetrated society with greater intensity through the European connection and profoundly changed the culture of the elites. In these two ways, it added a driving force to a conjuncture of change that had long since been set in motion within Quebec society. Indeed, in the sphere of the economy, as well as of social relations and collective representations, old contradictions and imbalances called for general reform of institutions. This was the third form of change (and the last chronologically): the institutional expression of changes already in

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effect at the base of society, both in everyday life and in social structures, especially the new forms of economic production that had spread across the continent. This last episode was especially the result of the Quiet Revolution during the early 1960s. Two important issues emerge from this depiction of the changes that occurred from the 1940s on. First, one should be skeptical of any strictly institutional analysis that only looks at the spectacular upheavals linked to the Quiet Revolution. Such an approach would eclipse the long sequence that paved the way for them. It would also miss the fact that these changes were not only the achievement of a dynamic young elite that successfully overthrew old feudal ways. In reality, these upheavals had long been desired and, as it were, prepared at the grassroots. Health and education, the two teats that fed the electoral successes of the Duplessis regime, illustrate this well: elections were won in Quebec by promising hospitals and schools. The building of roads (which led to the city?) was another favourite theme. In short, I believe that the Quiet Revolution was a historical rendez-vous that the people (the working classes and a part of the middle class) reached ahead of a good part of the socio-cultural elites. But in another sense, and I adopt this perspective in what follows, one can also claim that the Quiet Revolution was the outcome of a social rapprochement. Two other factors contributed to this end. First, the culture of the elites itself had already begun to change. Thanks to the cultural renewal in the 1940s, in which the school system had played a part, people’s minds were less averse to américanité. Thanks to some members of the clergy, this context saw the emancipation of several marginal currents that had emerged during the preceding decades. Moreover, and conversely, democratization of education favoured greater access among working people to a new intellectual culture in tune with the continent. Obviously, I am stressing structural factors primarily and reconstructing the picture only very broadly. But on another level, one would also have to introduce much circumstantial data: for example, the fact that the Second World War compelled a whole generation of students to pursue their doctoral studies in the United States rather than in France, or the influence of Radio-Canada, of the 1967 World Fair in Montreal, and so on. A New Vision of the World and of the New World First, a large part of elite culture drew closer to popular culture and even undertook to legitimize the latter’s features by integrating them

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into its discourse. The language of the people, once so decried, was admitted into the novel, poetry, theatre, cinema, and television series. Realism invaded literature; the latter took an interest in the life of the ordinary folk in their everyday experience, without disguise, and particularly in the urban world. This was the case with the novels of Gabrielle Roy and Roger Lemelin (then of Jacques Godbout, André Major, Jacques Ferron, Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, and so many others), the poetry of Gaston Miron and Gérald Godin, the documentaries of Pierre Perrault, and also the songs of Gilles Vigneault and, in painting, the Montreal scenes of Jean-Paul Lemieux in the 1940s. In this ambience of rehabilitating popular culture, the project of a purely Québécois national language resurfaced. In a parallel way, the linguistic standard itself grew more flexible by shifting slightly towards “international French” at the expense of Parisian French. Two paradoxes come to light here. First, Quebec French was deployed as a vehicle for affirming identity at the very moment when it had lost a good number of its most original or traditional features in terms of vocabulary and pronunciation.56 Second, the culture of the people, which for so long had served as an alibi of continuity for the old national literature, was now once again enlisted by elite culture; this time, however, to support the cause of rupture by demonstrating Quebec’s specificity, its new difference. This is the context in which elite culture attained a renewed vision of the continent, largely relieved of ancient loyalties to the mother country. Here one may speak of an elite reconciled with its environment. André Laurendeau (1951, 389) underscored “the need … to remain in tune with the principal facts of our existence.” The theme of américanité (or of nord-américanité) thus made its entry into literary and artistic discourse. The novel began to send its heroes travelling in the United States and let some of its plot unfold there. South America also appeared on the scene, cast in a new kinship of temper, of Latin culture. French Canada, which had now become francophone Quebec, perceived itself once more as a new collectivity. A new face of French Canada and of the other, particularly of the Aboriginal, began to emerge. In this respect, the most advanced position was expressed very recently by Montoya and Thibeault (1999, 24): one ought to reconstruct Quebec culture by linking it to that of Aboriginal people, our genuine ancestors. Without knowing it, perhaps, these two authors thus carried forward an idea already formulated for some years in painting and sculpture (see below). Through these openings, these rediscoveries, a new world vision was taking shape, beyond the familiar horizons of France, England, or the Vatican, beyond Europe itself.

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Patterns of Disengagement The transition that led from dependency to autonomy and affirmation (or from a borrowed culture [culture d’emprunt] to an imprinted culture [culture d’empreinte]) followed several paths. First, with respect to the key vehicles of modernity during the pivotal years (1940–60), one must recall the importance of the Refus global manifesto (1948), of the Hexagone literary movement (1953), of the magazines Cité libre and Liberté (1959), of Pierre de Vadeboncœur’s essay La ligne du risque (1962), of the social sciences faculties in Quebec and Montreal universities, and of ACFAS (the French-Canadian Association for the Advancement of Science) in the scientific world. To the extent that it facilitated the liberation of subjectivity, modernity accelerated the decline of old regionalisms. In this sense, it contributed to the awakening of américanité in various fields of thought. In philosophy, original approaches took shape: they were combined with European and US contributions (Klibansky and Boulad-Ayoub 1998) as well as some categorically American breakaways such as Placide Gaboury (Lapointe 1985). In the sphere of literature, Robert Charbonneau in the 1940s loudly advocated breaking with France. He was followed by several others, supporters of literary autonomy, set against “Parisian elsewherism” (J.-C. Germain). Twenty years later, the old mother country had become for some the bad stepmother, and several intellectuals joined in treating the French language and literature as foreign. Novels (by Marie-Claire Blais, Claude Jasmin, and others) conveyed the frustrations and disenchantment in the Quebec/France relationship. Poetry adopted the same route with Gilles Hénault, Roland Giguère, and Gaston Miron, who announced the end of the “internal exile” (1960). In Parti pris and elsewhere, these sentiments and tendencies were swathed in an anti-colonialist discourse that condemned alienation (Gauvin 1975; Arguin 1985). Gurik (1968), Ducharme (1969), J.-P. Ronfard (1981), and a few others displayed a technique of symbolic liberation that consisted in profaning the masterpieces of metropolitan culture through parody, by plastering them with the least commendable, and simultaneously the most authentic, elements of local culture.57 In the opposite direction, as it were, the authors of Parti pris and others like Michel Tremblay (1968) or Luc Granger (1969) introduced fallen, condemned forms into high culture: lexical or syntactical deformations, vulgar neologisms, anglicisms, impurities, and transgressions. An almost pedagogical intention urged the display of ugliness as a foil in

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order to provoke a reaction of self-censorship (Gauvin 1974, 1975). These two iconoclastic techniques are fairly analogous to the cultural anthropophagy that I address later with respect to Brazil (chapter 4). Some authors wished to create a typically Québécois imaginary, reflecting the original francophonie coming into being. One is reminded of some of Jacques Ferron’s novels (Le Saint-Élias, Le Ciel de Québec), in which the author sought to create a veritable mythology; one also thinks of Couteau sur la table (Jacques Godbout) or La Fille de Christophe Colomb (Réjean Ducharme). These projects were suffused with the sense of recreation linked to a rediscovery of America. This motif recurs in the theme of the country to be built, in the glorification of the wild, in the poetry of new beginnings, as can be seen with Gilles Hénault, Paul-Marie Lapointe, and Anne Hébert (“Our country is in the age of the first days of the world,” preamble to Mystère de la parole). Thanks to québécitude and américanité, this literature managed finally to “name the country,” as the Hexagone poets had it. It was also possible to claim that style itself had evolved, adopting the pragmatic, visual, American way (“don’t tell it, show it”). And beyond the nearby continent, as I have said, some began to explore the other South, that more remote – and also Latin – America. This first occurred in Ringuet’s utterly amazing book (Un monde était leur empire, 1943), a prophetic work, whose legacy, however, was half lost. The author devoted himself to a resolutely pan-American historical reconstruction, the starting point of which was not the European settlement but that of the Aboriginal peoples themselves – a masterful innovation, although not one taken up by the historians. As for the South American horizon, it was subsequently developed by Rina Lasnier (Présence de l’absence), crisscrossed by characters in novels (primarily from Louis Hamelin’s works), and praised by Gilles Thérien (1986), who became the advocate of an awakening inter-American consciousness. Then Bernard Andrès (1990, 179ff.) boldly annexed this new frontier by ranking Quebec literature, from the start, among Latin American literatures. Shortly thereafter, though quite timidly, the Aboriginal returned with a new countenance, more respectful of his otherness, and relieved of his old features (e.g., Ringuet once more, and particularly Yves Thériault, then Robert Lalonde and a few others). Finally, the foreigner, including the Jew, became an established member of the community (Shek 1984). Starting in the 1960s, no one could doubt that a Quebec literature had actually come into existence – in spite of the controversy over its

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date of birth. It even began to hallow its “classics” by inserting them in school curricula and by immortalizing them in prestigious new editions. It remained just as committed on the national and social levels (Shek 1977); this was the era of texts dubbed “poélitiques.” It was also the period of new intersections. The Hexagone group, for example, fought both for the nation and for modernity. Quite paradoxically, it was thus able to marry a part of the once irreducible heritage of the regionalist movement and that of Le Nigog. The term Hexagone, itself, expressed another encounter, this time between France, quite obviously, and the United States. Its founders had, in fact, sought a name that would also evoke an American symbol, in this instance, the Pentagon.58 Then, starting in the 1970s, and even more throughout the following two decades, a cascade of themes, genres, and tempers burst forth in all directions. In the literary world, the theme of the nation henceforth occupied one niche among others, for example exoticism, adventure, migrant literature, science fiction, eroticism, the local and the universal. Theatre was subject to a comparable transformation with Robert Lepage, Michel-Marc Bouchard, and Daniel Danis. Two other features are worthy of mention. First, the spread of amalgamation or syncretism in the discourse of high culture, which, no longer fearful of impurities, freely fed off popular material, even superstitions. Among several others, one could cite Ronfard (“I am … in favour of a theatre as sullied as life”) and especially Jacques Ferron (his character, the Magoua in Le Saint-Élias, is a Québécois, European, and Aboriginal hybrid). The other feature consists in an affirmation of a pessimistic, even defeatist, trend, typical of a “literature of losers” (May 1981): fallen characters, bent under the weight of a shattered destiny, as in Godbout’s Le Couteau sur la table or Le Cassé by Jacques Renaud. They are the anti-heroes of Gratien Gélinas’s theatre. It is also to some extent the universe of the novel in Réjean Ducharme and Marie-Claire Blais’s works, as well as the so-called psychological novels before the 1960s. Was this all “cultural fatigue,” as Hubert Aquin (1962) put it? The murmur of survivance that had lasted too long? Impatience for collective restoration too long delayed? Or moroseness born out of belonging to a peripheral, minority culture, condemned to a fate of secondary importance? The evolution of painting essentially reproduced the same features. Borduas, who bravely blazed almost every path, in a sense sums it all up: renewed figurative painting, abstraction; United States, France, and Japan; openness to the other (including the Aboriginal); Quebec roots

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but also exoticism and, finally, exile. Moreover, one notes an unprecedented social sensibility among several automatists and sculptors such as Robert Roussil and Armand Vaillancourt. Finally, with René Derouin and Pierre-Léon Tétreault, one finds a leap into pre-Colombian savagery, total investment in every dimension of pan-américanité, with all its hybridizations, myths, and legends. Here, the total rejection of the reference to Europe is powerfully expressed to the benefit of the horizontal or “colonial” axis, to quote Derouin, who had set out to find in it “the origin of the continent’s history, the history of our ancestors.”59 Along specific paths and timelines, a similar movement of disengagement from the metropolis and of Americanization was initiated in the social sciences. New trends, born in the 1940s, gradually broke with various aspects of the paradigm of survivance. In 1947, when he established the Institut d’histoire de l’Université Laval in Quebec, Arthur Maheux was inspired by the United States and English Canada, not France. Marcel Trudel, M. Brunet, and Guy Frégault studied in the United States. The latter two, together with M. Seguin, were the precursors of the Quiet Revolution and of neo-nationalism. A continental perspective, which presented Quebec as a North American collectivity and no longer as a reproduction or a legacy of France, inspired new analyses (in G. Frégault, A. Faucher, J.-P. Wallot, G. Paquet, and others).60 National history also broadened the us of the nation by extending it to all Quebec’s population, as shown in Paul-André Linteau et al.’s synthesis (1979, 1986). At the same time, the new historical consciousness pushed into the background the legendary figures of survivance, traditional heroes of Catholic and French settlement (Dollard Desormeaux, among others); in this, it sought to turn away from the old deflating myths, replacing the image of the bent and humbled French Canadian with the combative Québécois in charge of his own destiny. All these reorientations have been fully expressed in the modernist historiography that has dominated the scientific field since the 1970s (Bouchard 1990b). But at the same time, the representation of the nation’s beginnings has been blurred: the actions, heroes, and founding myths have entered a difficult process of redefinition. Many believe, in any case, that the nation’s true foundation is yet to come, with Quebec’s eventual attainment of political sovereignty. The national memory, in the spirit of the broad definition of the nation, is also being rewritten. As to long memory rooted in a very remote past, it has largely renounced its fixation on France as the central point of reference, but without for all that accepting Ringuet, Derouin, and

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Tétreault’s invitation to embrace the Aboriginal narrative or delve into the pre-Colombian past. Here one might speak of a blurring of memory, if not of a memory block. On a parallel track, the study of folklore, once dedicated to the recognition and celebration of French continuities, slowly converted to ethnography and to ethnohistory, thanks to which the question of Quebec culture per se became its main focus. This transition (from the study of self as subject to the study of self as object) is particularly noticeable in the history of architecture and housing, clothing, oral culture in urban settings, and demographic rituals. Historical linguistics followed a similar trajectory, dealing with all words similarly, independently of their origin.61 In sociology, French influences remained very powerful (Fournier 1986; Rocher 1973b), but they yielded to a North-South trend, which has undergone constant renewal since the Second World War. In this respect, the Essais sur le Québec contemporain, edited by Jean-Charles Falardeau and published in 1953 by Presses de l’Université Laval, marks a turning point: it is a founding text of contemporary social science in Quebec. The same applies to geography, which maintained its French links but initiated an important turn between 1960 and 1970 – although L.-E. Hamelin (1984, 103) asserted in the early 1980s that there still was no “specifically Laurentian epistemology” in Quebec. Finally, medical, natural, and applied sciences had already long been incorporated into the broader, North American, networks. All these realignments of knowledge belonged to a general movement of growing intellectual independence, expressed radically in ideology and political action. After the Second World War, Quebec’s elites fully attained a new vision of the New World that spawned projects to reform and reconstruct society, beginning with the state. A century and a half after the Patriotes’ defeat, Quebec would once again strive to engineer the theory – and practice – of its break with the past. The main legacy of all the effervescence that fuelled the Quiet Revolution consists in the will to undo equivocal thinking and to affirm a manifest destiny. French Canadians had been heirs (or “losers”?); henceforth they would be founders. After the recoiling, the uncoiling. (Après le repli, le dépli.) In this context, the Canadian option increasingly lost support. Being identified with the loyalist tradition, with the continuities of survivance and with the old relations of dependency, it could not embody the great dream of America; rather, it posed an obstacle to it. The Royal Commission of Enquiry on Constitutional Problems (1956) had already

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marked an important milestone in this respect. Pro-independence thinking grew more radical in the 1960s with the group Parti pris. At the level of political action as such, there was first Raymond Barbeau’s Alliance laurentienne in 1957, then Raoul Roy’s Action socialiste pour l’indépendence du Québec in 1959, Marcel Chaput and André D’Allemagne’s Rassemblement pour l’indépendence nationale in 1960, subsequently led by Pierre Bourgault, and, finally, René Lévesque’s Parti Québecois (1968). At the same time, and for almost a decade, several small groups calling themselves the FLQ (Front de Libération du Québec) attempted to promote the idea of political and social revolution through violence. The other most important episodes of the period were the election of the Parti Québecois in 1976 and the two referenda on sovereignty (1980, 1995) won by the No camp (the second, by a very slim majority). Simultaneously, new representations of society took shape. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, ruralism lost its last defenders and urban reality supplanted it in public perception. Consciousness of social diversity emerged within intellectual culture. To be sure, such diversity was not a new phenomenon: see regional divisions, class divisions, ethnic boundaries, the broad axes of spatial stratification, and the structure of the gene pool (Bouchard 1990c). On the cultural level, in particular, the French-Canadian elites became aware of the very intense literary and artistic life among other ethnic groups in Quebec, and particularly among immigrants. Together with the end of homogeneity in Quebec, a new perspective on the distinctive characteristics of the nation within its continental setting began to crystallize during this period. In the pages of the newspaper Le Devoir, of which she was the editor and then the publisher, Lise Bissonnette returned to this question on several occasions, insisting on the américanité of the FrancoQuébecois and challenging, on several essential points, the old theme of difference. Finally, radical social thought was on the rise within intellectual culture. A left-wing ideology was voiced in journals (such as Parti pris, Socialisme, and others), in the labour movement, in various activist organizations, and in the FLQ, which included among its members – and this is useful to recall – a number of young and unemployed workers. Pierre Vallières, Pierre Vadeboncœur, Jean-Marc Piotte, Paul Chamberland, Michel Chartrand, and Marcel Rioux were among the most important intellectuals associated with this ideological current, which was mainly triggered by the asbestos strike of 1949. And here again, this time through their social commitment, the signatories of Refus global played a pioneering role.

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Significant shifts also dislodged old representations of nationhood. One of the main shifts was the appearance, during the 1950s, of the term “Québécois,” as well as its rapid spread between 1960 and 1970, at the expense of the old ethnonym Canadien français. Up until the 1980s, the new term was especially used to describe French Canadians from Quebec who wished, in this, to distance themselves from other Canadian francophones. The aim here was to affirm more strongly their territorial attachment, to show that their main relationship was with the Quebec state, and to assert their status as a national majority in the old Laurentie. This shift in identity, of which André Laurendeau had been a precursor, in a sense became official during French Canada’s 1967 estates-general in Montreal (Martel 1997; Frenette 1998).62 Spatially, the nation broke with its pan-Canadian definition and coincided once more with its old base in Lower Canada. The French Canadians of Quebec thereupon moved from a minority status within Canada to a majority status within Quebec. This was the era in which the Government of Quebec began to position itself as the political capital of Canada’s francophone community (Frégault 1976), somewhat as Honoré Mercier had wished in his day. But in the beginning the new name promised more than it really covered for, just like the old one, it excluded non-French Canadians who lived in Quebec. During the 1980s, and even more in the decade that followed, the term “Québécois,” in the minds of most francophones, took on a new resonance that referred to all Quebec citizens. A gradual shift occurred from the old French-Canadian nation to the Quebec nation. However, this reconfiguration of collective identity created a void. For a while, indeed, it seemed that all of Quebec’s ethnic groups retained their identity, save the majority group. The ethnonym French Canadian has thus very recently re-emerged, but in another guise, freed of its old resonances so as to refer to francophones of old stock as a national majority in Quebec. But, since all these reconfigurations are new and still in process, the old and the new French Canadian coexist, as do the old and the new Québécois. This new Quebec nation has abolished the exclusive affiliation to Catholic religion and to origins (“roots”) as the criteria of belonging. Culturally, it has defined itself mainly by reference to French as the official language (a status confirmed by Bill 22, the Official Language Act, 1974) and it embraces under this very broad aegis all the ethnic diversity that characterizes Quebec’s population. It presents itself, therefore, as a specific francophone community, moulded by its old

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and recent North American history (everyone is now writing about the concept of américanité). This collective representation, pioneered by the sociologist Guy Rocher (1973a), advocates elements of continuity with French origins, but it especially highlights an important attempt at redefinition and distantiation from the mother country. Quebec intends, furthermore, to reconcile diversity and identity, and to achieve collective integration through interculturalism, as a form of middle ground between assimilation and ghettoization: thus, it constitutes at once a singular and a plural nation. In respect to this evolution, three other phenomena are noteworthy. First, the redefinition that has taken place since the 1960s offers a rare example of a nationalist upsurge that has generated an opening of the boundaries of nationhood and an emphasis on human rights. Second, it is remarkable that nationalism, hitherto the bearer of continuity, should suddenly have become associated with promoting rupture. Third, from the moment that nationhood regained its Laurentian borders, it became necessary to reconstruct its identity by drawing upon the most authentic Québécois features and symbols. Popular language appeared here as one of the most eloquent markers of distinctiveness. Somewhat paradoxically, a national promotion of the vernacular idiom suddenly took place just as the repression of joual intensified in the wake of Insolences du Frère Untel (1960). Important changes occurred on the legal front as well. The Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, adopted in 1975, enshrined the equality of all citizens before the law. The civic dimension (i.e., democracy and the protection of rights) officially entered the common representation of the nation, occupying an increasingly important position.63 The social dimension developed as well. The development of an urban consciousness in the discourse of the elites gave rise to a greater sensitivity to socio-economic problems and to the inferior condition of French Canadians in relation to anglophones. This became a powerful driving force of the neo-nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s. These are the main tendencies that emerged over the last halfcentury or that, having appeared even before, grew dominant. But it is important to stress that they did not completely erase the heritage of the preceding century, from which several figures survived in one form or another, turning Quebec culture into an increasingly diversified, if not diffuse, world. Moreover, certain structural characteristics associated with the culture of survivance persisted. For example, there was an ongoing sense of the nation’s precariousness, of a threat constantly

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weighing upon it, whereas concern over difference (the notorious “distinctive characteristics”) continued to be expressed in the ceaseless probing of national identity. It resurfaced in the guise of the distinct society and, more recently, of the Quebec model of development. The same may be said of the language front, always as deeply divided between French or international standards and local authenticity. The anti-US discourse lost much of its vigour but did not cease to be heard, either in its traditional form, or through an elitist discourse of modernity, or, again, in a form renewed by leftish thought (in the wake of Pierre Vadeboncœur and Marcel Rioux). Meanwhile, the Quebec/France relationship evolved in the direction already noted, though clearly the old dependency remained, as several analyses show. See André Belleau (1986) on the schism within the cultural codes (between a French “standard” and a socio-cultural Quebec “apparatus”), Gilles Thérien on the impossibility of rupture (1986), or Gilles Marcotte, Jean Éthier Blais, and some others on the tradition of imitation in literary criticism. The modernity that invaded the humanities, fine arts, letters, and social thought also drew on French sources; it thus reconfigured continuity and dependency in new ways. I must, however, hasten to nuance this statement. For certain intellectuals, the borrowings from France are the result of a culture that has reached maturity, and they testify to a spirit of openness that henceforth embraces all of the great cultural capitals, Paris being one. On the other hand, one could also cite several somewhat disenchanted essayists, according to whom intellectual culture in all its manifestation has liberated itself from its dependence on France but has proven incapable of creating a true Quebec imaginary. Other features of the old paradigm of survivance continue to appear, yet in new garb. For example, there is the sense that intellectual culture remains quite poor, mediocre even, that it does not manage to produce masterpieces, that it must be rebuilt (Fernand Dumont, Georges-André Vachon, Jean Royer, Denys Arcand, Jean Larose, Daniel Jacques, Jacques Allard, and many others).64 There are the often famous exiles, more numerous than before, from Robert Roussil to Anne Hébert, and all the others who left, slamming the door, or without completely closing it. There is also the malaise of the intellectuals, uncertain of their status, their legitimacy,65 in particular among writers who ceaselessly take centre stage in their own novels so as to state their doubts, their fragility. Linked to this is the theme of “shameful” writing discussed by André Belleau (1984, 141). Should we place in the same category the poetry of despair and the defeatist novel (of which the traditions

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apparently go back to the end of the nineteenth century)?66 Finally, the concept of the ethnic, French-Canadian nation remains alive, while memory hesitates to anchor the nation’s origins in the continent’s deep past.

conclusion At the end of this survey, one can perhaps better see the plethora of perspectives opened up by the comparative analysis of new collectivities. One realizes, for example, that most of the problems ordinarily dealt with by Quebec historiography fall into the general inquiry presented in the first chapter and that an examination of these issues would benefit from the comparative method. In this respect, my approach has kept most of its promises: it has challenged false uniqueness; foregrounded features truly specific to Quebec’s path; made it possible to see other possible threads in the past that call into question evolutions and historical causalities erroneously perceived as necessary; and, finally, it has emphasized the critical distance that must be preserved between the strictly scientific analysis and the presuppositions of this national culture. In sum, the new-collectivities perspective encourages one to treat Quebec’s genesis not only as the history of a French minority culture in America but also as one of the episodes of the creation of the New World. However, Quebec remains (along with Puerto Rico) one of the few new collectivities not to have achieved political sovereignty. It is also unique in having twice swung back and forth between continuity and rupture in the course of its history. And no other nations have been similarly subjected to so many entangled dependencies, whether simultaneously or successively: economically, politically and culturally on France; in religious terms on the Vatican; economically and culturally on Great Britain and the United States; and politically on Great Britain and Canada. The strong emphasis placed on the past, between the midnineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, is another salient feature. As mentioned in chapter 2, Quebec may have been the place in which the antinomy between elite and popular culture was the most acute. It is most certainly the one in which the conflict over the linguistic standard remained the most painful. It is also the one in which the relationship with the mother country was the most tortured, just like the symbolic relationship with the New World. Throughout its history, Quebec never made powerful allies on whom it could have relied to

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exorcise its feelings of insecurity and to embark on bold collective challenges. Canada, which could have played this role, all too often acted, and was traditionally perceived, as a negative factor. In another respect, Quebec seems to have been particularly affected by the inhibiting effect (the notorious “cultural cringe” that I address in chapter 5 with respect to Australia), generated here by a double force: on the one hand, France’s enduring cultural hegemony, on the other hand, the anglophone’s persistent denigrations. Finally, Quebec is one of the few new collectivities to have suffered a change of colonial power (due to the Cession of 1763) and the only one that was so profoundly marked by it. After more than two centuries, this episode (the effects of which are experienced as an amputation) still haunts the collective consciousness and fuels dreams of reconquest. This theme, which takes various forms, has always been at the heart of francophone Quebec thought: this is another possible avenue of research. One thinks of the poet, Crémazie, hoping for the return of French soldiers; recurring expressions of nostalgia for New France; dreams of collective restoration through settlement; projects of economic and cultural selfaffirmation; rehabilitation of (or through) language; aspirations to political independence, and so on. Let us return for a moment to the relationship between elite and popular culture that for so long established a deep schism within the nation. This rift is of great significance; it incurred a double phenomenon of inhibition/impoverishment, whose legacy, even today, is far from having been entirely eradicated. As I have said, instead of presenting the image of closure after 1840, the nation remained open at both ends, yet in opposing directions. For more than a century, it was woven (tissée) from above as a borrowed culture (culture d’emprunt), while from below, it was interwoven (métissée) as an imprinted culture (culture d’empreinte): on one side, an elite culture of denial, draped in its European heritage; on the other, a popular culture of disavowal, diluting the French tradition in the humours of the continent. The educated sought to overcome the antinomy, either by idealizing the people, or by denouncing them, or again, by seeking to correct them. As for the common people, they felt closer to the economic elites with whom they shared the same relationship to the New World, the same connection to territoriality. An instance of this is visible in the employer/ employee relationship, which was relatively exempt of major, enduring rifts during the greater part of the 1840–1940 period. Indeed, one could suggest that the common people partook of collective life and

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forged their sense of belonging far more through labour relations and the workplace than through the symbols propagated by elite culture. Here one can discern one of the causes of the political continuism that prevailed during this period: the inability among the educated to channel the common people’s américanité into a utopia of rupture and the people’s distrust of notables too removed from their everyday reality. Those amidst the socio-cultural elites who subscribed to a continental vision represented too weak a minority; they proved incapable of mobilizing popular support. A second factor that hindered political emancipation was the very uneven demographic ratio on the continent (at the time of the Cession, for example, New France had 70,000 inhabitants, the thirteen colonies had 1.5 million) and the intense feeling of collective fragility that it always fostered. Here again, there was no powerful external force, such as belonging to the British Empire in the case of Australia or New Zealand, to help compensate for this handicap. A third factor resides in the weight of the four forms of dependency just mentioned, and a fourth lies in the legacy of some major deflating events: the Cession of 1763, the failure of the first radical, national awakening between 1770 and 1780, and the quelling of the 1837–38 Rebellions. There are also strictly social factors such as the inaction of the business bourgeoisie, too bound to big anglophone capital, and the submission of the petite bourgeoisie rooted in the liberal professions. The latter point stands out. In several nineteenthcentury societies, it is the petite bourgeoisie, with its allies in the intellectual class, that carried the fight for secularity, modernization, and national revolution. In Quebec, it rather gave a decisive boost to the conservative cause. In my view, this is a crucial, although little studied, phenomenon of Quebec history between 1840 and 1940. Finally, with the exception of the United States, all the new collectivities that achieved political sovereignty by breaking the colonial tie benefited from favourable circumstances: a weakening metropolis (as in the case of Madrid and Lisbon in the early nineteenth century, and London in the twentieth century) or repeated concessions granted all the more readily in that they served the interests of the metropolis itself as well as those of the colony (we see this later in relation to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). French Canada or Quebec never enjoyed such conditions. In another respect, this comparative sweep of new collectivities leads us to challenge certain received wisdoms concerning the Quebec past. Let us return briefly to an example already discussed in the preceding

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chapter; that is, the governing role in socio-cultural matters that fell to the clergy after 1840. Most historians present this fact as inevitable: the Catholic Church alone had the necessary resources to lead the struggle for survivance. I have expressed my disagreement on this question by arguing for the possibility of alternative scenarios. In fact, it is not enough to say that the clerical leadership was one option among others; one must add that the orientation of the struggle for survivance itself, such as it was conceived and applied (1) was an arbitrary collective choice, dictated largely by the notables’ interests; (2) ended in quasi-failure, even where it appeared to have succeeded (i.e., in the preservation of Quebec as a francophone society). Such a statement would require extensive proof. I confine myself to one argument, drawn from recent history. Quebec’s francophone culture experienced spectacular growth in the second half of the twentieth century, precisely from the moment that it put aside the paradigm of survivance and the socio-cultural environment that supported it (e.g., secularization, growth of the state, democratization of education, erosion of the France/Quebec cultural relation, reconciliation with américanité, prizing the stuff of popular culture, etc.). Wrongly, the question of survivance was long cemented to a politics of continuity and conservatism; the latter saw only the spectre of assimilation in any wish to loosen the tie with France and embrace the New World. This survey has also revealed the blind spots of national memory.67 In this regard, it is useful to re-examine in critical fashion the defensive, defeatist memory inherited from François-Xavier Garneau, which, until recent years, fed historical consciousness with deflating myths. This defeatist proclivity afforded a strong cultural base to the power of the clergy and the conservative petite bourgeoisie. Simultaneously, it stifled the imagination and inhibited collective daring, even while history offered other options, other possible outcomes, as I emphasized earlier. Here too one might speak of a bad choice, this time in terms of memory.68 For, in spite of everything and for all kinds of reasons, this historiographical tradition did not fully echo the very real collective advances: for example, scientific and technological growth, industrialization, urbanization, and the introduction of modernity. Important actors were associated with these great moments of Quebec history. Some, such as Saint-Denys Garneau, Nelligan, Marie-Victorin or Borduas, have recently been rehabilitated by the new collective memory. But many others, even today, remain almost silenced (e.g., French Canadians who won fame in the business world). In the same

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vein, the strong and lengthy French-Canadian missionary tradition in Africa and in Asia has been almost completely omitted; the same goes for French Canadians’ participation in the two world wars. Finally, the most stunning ostracization is that which struck the republican project, put forward between 1770 and 1780 by the activist intellectuals of the post-Conquest era. These distortions are the result of memory games. Spawned by the obsession with difference, they combine with those that were simultaneously spread by false identities, by false representations of peasant society and popular realities in general, by the occlusion of the urban world, by the sum of French cultural transfers to elite culture, and by the blurred vision of the New World. All these facts lead to the conclusion that this society, for about a century, had an often incoherent view of itself and of others both in the past (in its memory) and in the future (in its utopias); it tried too often to bend the reality of the new continent to the Old World’s ways. The French-Canadian society of that time had bad dreams, literally and figuratively. Are there new collectivities that constructed an imaginary as far removed from reality? In addition, foreigners’ perception of Quebec’s reality has been, and continues to be, shaped by the elite culture’s false collective representations. Modernist historiography has been endeavouring to correct these false images since the 1970s. I stress these coordinates or cultural assemblages of the 1840–1940 period because they impinged heavily on the following decades. My thesis is the following: on the one hand, it is true that the greater part of the old heritage dissipated in the second half of the twentieth century; on the other hand, the ambivalence that the changes were intended to resolve nevertheless remained, at least in part. Let us first recall the changes that have taken place since the 1960s. In several ways, as shown above, francophone Quebec was firmly committed, both politically and culturally, to a dynamic of rupture. It replaced or reformed the institutional supports of the old continuism; it distanced itself both from the broad premises and principal corollaries of the paradigm of survivance; it shaped a project of sovereign statehood; it transformed its vision of the world and of the New World in order to better adapt to its environment; and it strove to reduce what I have called equivocal thinking. This first step lasted approximately forty years. However, the 1990s heralded quite a different conjuncture. Indeed, at the end of the journey, the impulse towards cultural rupture and affirmation of a manifest destiny, while not marking an

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about-face, wanes somewhat in intensity. The movement towards political sovereignty appears to be slowing down, but the federalist option is not taking off either. Elite culture has become reconciled to américanité, but with reservations that draw it back to its French connections (Jacques Godbout is one of the intellectuals who best represents this new stance, which is particularly clear in L’Écrivain de province, 1991; Jean Larose is another). Elite culture has mostly taken down the veil of false identities and other major discursive distortions; yet it is struggling to establish another imaginary. Alongside postmodernity’s demands, there are also appeals to the tradition from before the Quiet Revolution. Some representatives of elite culture have been attacked for their collusion with a blindly Americanized and impoverished popular culture. Language divisions persist, and this is all the more significant in that this controversy echoes many other collective contradictions and dead ends, as Lise Gauvin has pointed out (1976). Simultaneously, utopia seems to have vanished from the horizons of discourse. Long memory is still unable to form roots. The Aboriginal has been accepted as a citizen but is not regarded as fully belonging to the nation. National identity is no longer French Canadian (in the old sense), nor is it fully Québécois (in the new, extended meaning of the term). Suddenly, the symbolic machinery associated with the unfolding of the postwar era, with the driving forces of the Quiet Revolution, and with the quest for collective autonomy, appears to have stalled a little: as if there were a return not to continuity and survivance but to equivocal thinking, to ambivalence, if not to confusion.69 The field of allegiances is more fragmented than ever. It would seem as though Quebec has arrived at a crossroads, where all loyalties, all options, old and new, converge: those that had been cast aside, those that had only been half adopted, and those that recent history brought to the surface. In various ways, this plurality of orientations and moods constitutes an impasse, as is evidenced culturally in the deep divisions over linguistic standards and politically by the results of the last referendum (1995), which pitted one-half of the nation against the other. In recent years, the resulting malaise has inspired various discourses. It would be tempting to claim that Quebec society is paying the price today in uncertainty and endless debates for all the choices that it was unable to make in the course of its history – choices it still faces today, though how it will choose among the many possibilities remains completely unpredictable. But this would fail to account for the place that it has nonetheless been carving out for itself since the seventeenth

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century on this American soil. Such a claim would also misjudge the potential for creation and development harboured by the present conjuncture, now freer and more open than ever. In fact, a priori, the current situation is cause neither for despair nor for exhilaration. Rather, it brings out quite sharply the most lasting condition of the French Canadian and, subsequently, Québécois past: a somewhat trapped minority, unable to concretize its grand visions and ambitions, unable to accommodate its dreams in the overly narrow space that it occupies on the continent – in sum, a cramped nation. On several occasions in the past, francophone intellectuals faced with this impasse came to conceive of a new modus vivendi, another future for this new collectivity. These pivotal moments correspond to the watersheds on which I have based my periodization: the post-Conquest, the postRebellion, and the postwar periods. It would appear that the 1990s – or the dawn of the second millennium, if you will – is another one of these watersheds. In this regard, the main difficulty (on which all the others seem to hinge) resides in the malaise of Quebec elite culture. Among the people and the middle classes, there is an American dream with deep roots; but elite culture is reluctant to take it on board, hence its difficulty in tracing a trajectory for the nation. This is coupled with the elite culture’s problem of legitimacy: it is reluctant to present itself as what it is, with its distinctive markers, its ethics and aesthetics. This prevents it from adequately playing its role of leadership and dissemination. In the past, reference to France endowed it with confidence and legitimacy. But that no longer works. The task of rehabilitating elite culture, of founding it anew, is paramount; that is the starting point from which to think through what might emerge from the current state of dispersal. First, a distance must be re-established in order to rehabilitate the status and prerogatives belonging to the function of the intellectual, its discursive originality with respect to popular culture or mass culture. Between the two (or three?) cultural spheres thus delineated, it would then be necessary to set up a process of osmosis, a movement of reciprocity and exchange. Rapprochements and fertile hybridizations can only arise in this fashion. Intellectual life and its demands must be respected; they cannot be subsumed under the banner of a false democratic ideal. André Belleau’s work on literature (1986, 159ff) contains very fine passages on this theme. In Belleau’s view, literature exhibits a form of guilt; in order to be accepted, it censors and diminishes itself, lapses into self-

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mockery, renounces seriousness, and so on. In sum, elite culture is scarcely able to liberate itself from a popular culture that it has so long repressed. Among the current options or cultural tendencies that dominate the scene and are likely to prevail in the short- or mid-term, there is first a very widespread view that the future of this culture, torn between its heritage and its geography, will involve a métissage (“hybridization”) both of its internal differences and European references, and of its local and continental roots. Another position argues that américanité will come to predominate by increasingly marginalizing the French matrix. Yet another position claims that achieving political sovereignty will lead to a reduction of cultural ambiguities by liberating the utopian imagination and mobilizing intellectual energies in the exercise of collective responsibility. This is somewhat the position expressed almost forty years ago by Hubert Aquin (1962). Contrary to this, there is also an enlightened pessimism built around an acknowledgement of failure and identified with the status quo. One could say that this position comes in the wake of J. Le Moyne (1969). Finally, overlapping with these two attitudes, there is what I would call the position of creative disenchantment or committed realism. Intellectuals such as Yvon Rivard (1981, 1998) and Gilles Thérien (1986) are good examples of this. They present a rather gloomy diagnosis of Quebec’s cultural situation and the structural constraints that impede it. But, at the same time, they see a possible exit, a vision of new beginnings at the very heart of the “lucid despair,” the collective “poverty” (Rivard) generated by exclusion both from the New World and the Old – or more precisely, by the double inability to possess the former and to retain the latter. Several intellectuals have more or less embraced one of the many versions of this position. One could, for example, apply to the whole of intellectual culture concepts that have been proposed as ways of characterizing recent literature: exiguity (François Paré) and disquiet (Lise Gauvin).70 This view calls for a reconstruction from the margins, in a kind of cultural “Third World” (Gilles Thérien), rather than the illusory promise of some grand reconciliation between Europe and America. The calls for dépaysement, for the repudiation of tradition, for rebellious thought, and for nomadism are all of a piece (e.g., Charron 1999). Thus, on this view, Quebec’s natural vocation is to reject the wild dreams of both worlds, which it cannot grasp in any case, and to constitute itself as a culture of interstices, to seek its in-between world along winding paths. A third world, indeed, but less by virtue of its

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poverty than of its eccentricity – so that the loss of, and the mourning over, its two European parents will not make it an orphan, eternally condemned to nostalgic and sterile commentary on deprivation or absence, but quite simply a bastard: savage as in the beginning (in the image and in the wake of its Aboriginal and European precursors); quenching its thirst in every spring, both near and far; mixing and dissipating every legacy; and repudiating its real, imaginary, and virtual ancestors. In this original position, it would create for itself a unique destiny, careless of ruptures and continuities. Not a bastard of culture, but a culture and, why not, a paradigm of the bastard. In the hollow of its wretchedness, this third world, this “country denuded of ancestors” (Miron), would embed insolence as a mode of positing itself in the world and the New World. It would be its way of finally attaining autonomy, truth, and perhaps universality.

4 The Growth of National Consciousness in Mexico and Latin America

After Quebec, our attention turns to Mexico and Latin America (Map 1). Considering the continent’s diversity, it might appear surprising that this inquiry starts with Mexico and then spills into the whole of Latin America.1 Yet, beyond their important distinguishing features, I believe that the collectivities of this continent shared dreams, problems, and historical experiences that legitimize my approach. Moreover, the act of recognizing elements of a common narrative can, in turn, shed light on particular trajectories. In describing the process whereby European immigrants appropriated these new spaces between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, I use the concept of “Americanization” (the construction of an américanité). No normative connotations are implied here whatsoever. I simply intend to single out the processes that contributed to the creation of representations, identities, and new senses of belonging.

new populations, old civilizations The already well known Spanish Conquest was widely commemorated on the occasion of the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage to America. This huge event launched an original historical process of cultural reproduction from afar stemming from a European base. Essentially, it comprised three elements: (1) a major migratory transfer originating in ancient peoples convinced of their worth and civilizing mission; (2) a poorly known, relatively uninhabited territory that lent itself to settlement projects and various forms of development; and (3) the existence, within these new spaces, of an indigenous population whose culture, ways of life, and material organization were

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Atlantic Ocean

CO XI ME

lf Gu xico e of M

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CUBA

JAM AIC A HO DU NRA S

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

BELIZE GUATEMALA EL SALVADOR

Caribbean GUYANA

VENEZUELA

NICARAGUA

SURINAM

COSTA RICA

Pacific Ocean

PANAMA

FRENCH GUYANA

COLOMBIA

ECUADOR

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BRAZIL

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Map 1

URUGUAY

Latin America

typically regarded as inferior by the new occupiers. Spain and Portugal claimed a vast territory to which, for over four centuries, they were to send a constant stream of immigrants, soon to be joined by many other newcomers (European, African, and Asian). Over time, a new society, a new civilization, took shape. Very early on, however, it split between

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its Iberian allegiances and the appeal of the new continent. On one side, the prestige of European culture and its institutional heritage favoured continuity. On the other, the difficulty of adapting to a new environment, and the need to come to terms with the ubiquity of the indigenous presence, caused a certain drift that led to a parting of the ways. On the whole, and over the long term, it appears that the latter tendency prevailed, although this statement requires many qualifications. The political narrative that characterized the development of Latin American collectivities between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries presents the most spectacular and most indisputable manifestation of a break with the mother countries. Indeed, this period came to a close in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with the birth of some twenty nation-states that severed their ties with their European metropolis (Spain, Portugal, and France).2 There is no precise way of gauging Spanish emigration to America prior to the nineteenth century. According to Magnus Mörner and H. Sims (1985, Table 1), the numbers did not reach 11,000 during the period of between 1500 and 1650. There is no truly reliable estimate for the remainder of the colonial period. On the basis of all the known sources, Claude Morin and Robert McCaa (1996) report that Mexico’s population comprised 62,000 inhabitants of Spanish origin in 1570 and 200,000 non-Indians in 1650. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the number of Whites was estimated at approximately 350,000. Clearly, these benchmarks are very rough; but it must be said that métissage, among other things, seriously hinders this type of statistical analysis. The data on Portuguese emigration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are even more scant, since a large part of the archives was destroyed in 1755 by the Lisbon earthquake.3 We are on more solid ground for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Between 1824 and 1924, about 11 million Europeans reached Latin America (up to 250,000 per year between 1890 and 1914), Argentina having received most (46 percent), followed by Brazil (33 percent). On the whole, it turns out that Spanish immigration was relatively thin, and that, while being proportionately higher, the contribution from other European countries was very unevenly divided. In Argentina, for example, those born abroad represented 30 percent of the population in 1914, compared with 14 percent in the United States in 1910 (Pike 1969). As for Brazil, it received 4.6 million immigrants between 1820 and 1935 (Reinhard et al. 1968).

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As for the Indians, their ethnic and political geography shifted considerably in the course of their long history, and it is impossible to give a fair account of it in a few lines (in Mexico alone, there were at least a dozen Indian cultures or civilizations during the pre-Colombian and colonial period). For the purposes of this essay, I offer a very simplified portrait of the three greatest empires or civilizations: the Aztecs, who occupied almost all of the present territory of Mexico; the Mayans, whose cradle was the Yucatan peninsula but who spread massively into Guatemala and Honduras; and the Incas, in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Throughout the continent, the Indian populations suffered a spectacular decline after the Conquest. In Haiti, as in all of the Caribbean territories, Indians were made virtually extinct. The same may be said of Uruguay, Argentina, and Costa Rica (Walker 1979). In Honduras, their numbers plummeted by 50 percent to 95 percent in one half-century alone, depending on the region (Newson 1986). The decline was even more radical in Brazil. In the case of Mexico, there are rather contradictory estimates of the indigenous population prior to the Conquest (from 11 to 30 million). It seems that the number of Indians fell to approximately one million towards the end of the sixteenth century; subsequently, it rose slowly, reaching at least 3 million towards the end of the eighteenth century. An analogous, but somewhat mitigated, movement is discernible in the Andes: 10 million in 1530, 2.5 million in 1560, 1.5 million in 1590, with renewed growth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That said, in spite of all the losses suffered as a result of wars and epidemics, Indians remained the ethnic majority throughout Latin America until the nineteenth century. At the end of the sixteenth century, for example, the population of Spanish descent did not exceed some 150,000 in the entire hemisphere. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Whites numbered 4 million, only a fifth of the total population.4 In most of the countries, and in varying degrees, there was a Black and Asian population, in addition to those of European and Indian origin. Asians have never been more than a small minority. The opposite is true of Blacks, who were imported from Africa to sustain the slave system. This demographic influx greatly exceeded White immigration: approximately 900,000 new arrivals in the sixteenth century and 2.75 million in the eighteenth century (Reinhard et al. 1968). According to Magnus Mörner (1971), the number of slaves brought just to Brazil since the Conquest has to be reckoned in the millions,

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with a total of 7 million new arrivals for the continent as a whole (other estimates go as high as 15 million for the period stretching from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries). Combined with a high fertility rate, all of this resulted in the rapid growth of Latin America’s overall population, especially from the eighteenth century onwards. The numbers reached 30 million in 1850 and 60 million in 1900. This spectacular rise continued until the twentieth century, thanks to undiminished fertility and to a decrease in mortality: 104 million in 1930, 160 million in 1950, and almost 280 million in 1970. As for Mexico more specifically, from slightly more than a million at the start of the seventeenth century, the total population reached 5 million at the end of the next century, close to 13 million in 1900, and 48 million in 1970. One important element needs to be retained from the demographic data: most of the new countries were very diverse. Their varied origins make this clear: Indians, Africans, Europeans, and Asians. To this diversity, one must add the paradoxical impact of old practices of métissage, which, while they dissolved certain differences, also created several new types: mixtures of Whites and Indians, Whites and Blacks, Indians and Blacks, and other types of “mixed blood.”5 This biological diversity also lent itself to an impressive ethnic patch-work, each continent (Europe in particular) furnishing its share of distinctive languages and customs. The Indian population (among whom several hundred languages were recorded) exhibited considerable biological and cultural heterogeneity. Finally, one must take into account the inevitable social divisions that deepened as a result of the colonial economy: the aristocracy of royal administrators, the Creole bourgeoisie,6 the castas,7 and so forth. It is scarcely possible to produce statistics that reflect this diversity. Suffice it to recall that, at the end of the eighteenth century, the populations of Latin America comprised 20 percent Whites, 26 percent Métis, 8 percent Blacks, and 46 percent Indians.8 In Brazil, where the Blacks were in the majority for a long time, there were also Turks, Japanese, Syrians, and Russians, just as in Argentina. In Peru, in the middle of the twentieth century, Whites represented only 1 percent of the population. They were also very much in the minority in Venezuela where, during the same era, the pardos constituted more than 70 percent of the population (Lombardi 1976, 1982). The same applies to Bolivia, the most “Indian” country of the continent (Klein 1982), along with Guatemala, Ecuador, and Peru, and also one of the most multiethnic, along with Surinam (Dew 1978). Finally, Mexico was no different from the others: 60 percent of its population was Indian and 20 percent

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was White at the end of the eighteenth century. The percentage of Indians dropped to approximately 33 percent a century later, and to 10 percent to 15 percent during the first half of the twentieth century, a decline corresponding to a rise among the various kinds of people of mixed race. In this context of highly diverse ethnicity and double economic dependency (on the indigenous peoples, who provided the bulk of the workforce in agriculture, industry, and mining, and on the European colonial powers), members of the Creole class undertook to become an elite, spokespersons authorized to develop overall representations of the collectivity, to forge its identity, to define its orientation, and to rule over its destiny.

the creation of a new world It is difficult to recapitulate in a few pages the complex processes that slowly laid the ground for a political break between the Latin American elites and their mother countries, a break that occurred alongside a cultural appropriation of the continent. Clearly, I must take shortcuts, while trying not to distort this huge cultural and political shift. Political Emancipation The frustrations and, subsequently, the ambitions conceived and pursued over several centuries by the Creole elite (the plural form would apply here equally well) constitute the main driving force of the process of political, economic, and cultural separation from the Iberian capitals. Derived from the Spanish word criollo, the notion of creolism appeared for the first time, it would seem, in 1567 in Peru; it is linked to the disgruntlement of the descendants of the conquerors, who saw themselves as cheated of the Conquest’s economic legacy as well as of favours granted by the royal administration and the Church (public office, military leadership, Church hierarchy, etc.). By definition, the Creole was an ambiguous being. As Bolivar has it, he was neither European nor Indian but half-way between the two (cited in Lynch 1973, 24–25). American by birth, but Spanish by virtue of the law, his awkward duality induced him, on the one hand, to struggle with the Indians over land ownership, and, on the other, compelled him to defend his position constantly against the interference of the metropolis. In the territories governed by Madrid, the new Spanish immigrants

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controlled trade, while monopolizing honours and public office. The hardest blow dealt to the Creoles was perhaps the withdrawal of the encomiendas. The encomiendas were an institution comparable to the European seigniory; those who held them benefited from the forced labour performed by the indigenous people in exchange for material and religious aid. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Creoles secured the renewal of this privilege (they had requested that it be permanent). One century later, however, the monarchy put an end to it. In 1549, Charles V had already decreed that the people of mixed race could not hold public office without a royal permit. The king had also instituted the rule that pure blood was a condition of nobility. Throughout the whole colonial period, only four out of 170 viceroys were of Creole origin. This ratio was 14 to 602 for the captainsgeneral, governors, and presidents, and 105 to 706 for the bishops and archbishops (Morse 1964, 136). Starting in the sixteenth century, these conditions favoured the birth of a class consciousness fuelled by repeated humiliations and shared marginality, and strengthened by the reaction against royal nepotism. Bernard Lavallé (1980) explains that the colonial population consisted of two types of Spaniards: those whose fortune or business was inextricably tied to the continent (the holders of encomiendas, for example) and who were in some sense bound to become rooted; and the others, the newcomers, whose aim was to return as swiftly as possible to the old country, once they had made their fortune, or to continue their climb up the ladder of the metropolitan administration. Economic and political interests drove some to bond with the continent, others to distance themselves from it. During the second half of the eighteenth century, this duality became more pronounced as Madrid began its second Conquest of Latin America, reacting to the commercial threat posed by competition from other powerful European countries, especially England. The tightening of controls and the protectionist policy imposed by the Spanish bureaucracy, particularly during the reign of Charles III (1759–88), weakened Creole economic power and stirred resentment against the mother country. Thus, for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there have been references to specifically Creole patriotism and Creole “national” (would it be more prudent to say “proto-national”?) sentiment,9 which did not culminate in a formal project of political separation but were expressed in an extensive series of protests and appeals.10

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It is only at the beginning of the nineteenth century – specifically between 1808 and 1830 – that most of the countries of Latin America achieved political emancipation,11 as a result of complex processes. For the sake of argument, I only mention the main contributing factors. Popular activism can be identified almost everywhere; but it assumed much larger proportions in certain countries that were the scene of genuine uprisings. This is the case with Mexico, with the insurrections of 1810–11 and 1813–15, led by the populist priests Miguel Hidalgo and José Maria Morelos; these uprisings aimed to protect the interests of the small Creole landowners. In Venezuela, the uprisings occurred over a fifteen-year period (in fact, until 1830, when the country separated from Colombia). On the whole, however, the people were a rather secondary actor in the continent’s political emancipation. Essentially, the independence movements were led by the elites, who were able to profit from the fall of Spain and Portugal, which had been invaded by Napoleon’s armies in 1807–08.12 Portugal’s case is particularly striking: the court and the government left Lisbon for Rio de Janeiro; Brazil became, in a sense, Portugal’s new legitimate national territory. In 1822, upon the king’s return to his capital, it declared its independence, without any great trauma.13 As for Spain, the regime was severely compromised by the king’s forced abdication. In sum, these independence movements resulted in important political reconfigurations but did not deliver any real social changes in the short term. Almost everywhere, the revolutions (abolition of slavery, agrarian reform, democratization of education, etc.) were yet to come, following comparable paths and processes. Political sovereignty was achieved by conservative elements in the Creole population, allied with the intellectuals and a substantial part of the army. The big landowners put an end to Iberian hegemony and its exactions. By gaining political power, they also endowed themselves with the means to maintain their hold over a workforce made up of Indians and Black slaves. Liberal ideas and policies only triumphed later.14 By the second half of the eighteenth century, however, the Creole elite had been influenced by the Enlightenment and had founded its political thought on the arguments it discovered there.15 Finally, it seems that national sentiment inspired one part of the 1808–30 agitation, particularly the aspects that most closely touched the common people. This feeling was embodied in, and stimulated by, great leaders: José de San Martin in Argentina; Francisco Miranda and Simon Bolívar in Gran Colombia (which, in

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fact, engendered Venezuela, Ecuador, and Colombia); and Servando Mier, Miguel Hidalgo, and José Maria Morelos in Mexico.16 In this respect, it is worth recalling the examples of Haiti and Cuba, where a kind of nationalism seems to have fuelled the anti-imperialist struggles (José Antonio Saco, José Marti). In Venezuela, too, according to John V. Lombardi (1982), the uprising at the end of the 1820s – the fourth since 1810 – was explicitly inspired by nationalism. Similarly, it seems quite well established that national aspirations were one of the driving forces of the independence movement in Mexico (Brading 1985, 1991). This said, it is equally true that struggles for political emancipation especially generated specifically nationalist ideologies that gained in intensity and popularity over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, most scholars agree that the political liberation of the Latin American countries in the first quarter of the nineteenth century was, in large part, the result of developments in Europe; it would be wrong to regard it only as the culmination of a long internal process.17 As Henri Favre puts it (1996), in Latin America, the state to a certain extent preceded the nation. However that may be, starting in 1830, political independence was an established, irreversible fact, which would generate major chain reactions leading to reproduction in difference. Moreover, it would be wrong to neglect the extensive socio-cultural work unfolding since the sixteenth century, which contributed powerfully to establishing a Creole américanité. In that sense, with respect to Latin America, one can speak of a drawn-out emancipation that followed several paths. Creole Américanité The américanité discussed here first crystallized during the colonial period; it occurred primarily through the Creoles’ initiative, within cultural practices of rupture, renewal, and appropriation. On this matter, and in what follows, I focus on the case of Mexico, since it is one of the oldest and best documented. But, beyond the continent’s internal diversity, I also search outside of Mexico for converging features that prove the existence of a common denominator and of a variety of elements belonging to a pan-American cultural narrative. In so doing, I also apply the differentiation thesis to Latin America, with all the requisite nuances. The beginning of the colonial era at first saw the expression of a culture of continuity borne by the conquistadors and the first colonial

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administrators. As shown by the earliest place names, the Spanish sought to create a new Spain in America (such was the first name given to Mexico). Contemporary Colombia was part of what was called New Grenada; Venezuela was New Andalusia and San Domingo Hispaniola. Similarly, there were dreams of Eldorado, the Noble Savage, the Fountain of Youth, the Sierra de la Plata (the Mountain of Silver), the City of the Caesars, the Amazons, and the River Plate. But these were the dreams of Europeans who extended their fantasies, old obsessions, and dashed ideals beyond the Atlantic; these were thus predatory dreams, which created a colonial bond, and not founding dreams, which could have given rise to a country.18 A number of the first Spanish Americans celebrated the Conquest as a providential act destined to spread the model of Catholic Europe abroad (Lafaye 1984). But this episode was short-lived; the Americanization of the utopia was not far off. For in Europe itself, disenchantment and the critique of the old continent was gaining ground (see Thomas More, Erasmus, Montaigne, and, later, Rousseau). At its inception, Creole thought fed off this discourse of disillusionment to carry out its own critique of Spanish civilization, absolute monarchy, religious intolerance, and imperialism. Criticism was levelled, in particular, at the violence that the conquistadors inflicted on the Indians, which gave rise to the theme of the Black Legend that Bartolomé de Las Casas coined in Mexico in the midsixteenth century.19 This critical attitude towards the metropolis quite logically went hand-in-hand with a fervent attachment to the continent and its deep roots. But, there too, it partly consisted in a reaction to currents in European thought that denigrated the Americas and their inhabitants. The representatives of the Spanish administration refused to consider the Indians as human beings. In the eighteenth century, this perception was shaped by European historians, scientists, and philosophers such as Georges Buffon, Cornélius de Pauw, Abbot Guillaume Raynal, William Robertson, and Wilhelm Humboldt. They argued that the physical characteristics of the New World caused a decline in all living species. In the Indian and in people of mixed race in particular, these physical deficiencies were said to have been coupled with intellectual and moral degeneracy.20 In Latin America, this tradition of thinking continued into the nineteenth century and even into the twentieth century, taking the form of a dichotomy that pitted civilization against barbarism. Several authors relied on this opposition to portray the cultural dynamic of the new continent in terms of a constantly renewed

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opposition between the European forces of progress and Enlightenment, on one side, and the resistance of popular culture stemming from américanité (e.g., Sarmiento in Argentina, Espinosa in Peru, inter alia),21 on the other. The very first intellectual projects in support of the Indians were those of missionaries, who, as of the 1520s,22 established themselves in Mexico with the intention of converting the indigenous peoples, believing that they, too, belonged to the divine plan. In this respect, Vasco de Quiroga, Pedro de Gante, Bartolomé de Las Casas, and Bernardino de Sahagún were pioneers. In the sixteenth century, Sahagún, Diego de Landa, and Bernabé Cobo were the authors of the first ethnographic studies of the main Indian civilizations of the Americas (Aztecs, Mayans, Incas). Las Casas also left several writings in defence of the Indians. With time, many names came to be associated with this intellectual current: F.J. Clavijero (who celebrated the pre-Colombian past on the same level as Greek and Roman Antiquity), S.-T. de Mier, Benito Feijóo, Don Fernando de Alva, and others (Picon-Salas 1971; Brading 1991, etc.). More important still, through growing contacts and missionary deeds, Catholicism embedded itself within Indianity, giving rise to various forms of syncretism. Thus, official religion grew more continentalist: when, in 1711, the Virgin appeared in the Mayan villages of Chiapas, it was said that she had defended Indians against the colonial system and had exhorted them to rise up in protest. The Creoles embraced these representations, which were the basis of the earliest Indigenism. It is remarkable that in Mexico, as elsewhere in Latin America, the oldest expressions of the national sentiment or idea included Indianity as an essential ingredient.23 These are the roots of the national identities that blossomed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on the basis of state intervention.24 The notion of appropriation aptly characterizes the Creoles’ involvement in processes of borrowing, métissage, and cultural integration. In everyday life, they incorporated many Indian and, at times, African elements. On the biological level, they claimed to be of mixed race; slowly, the métis became the authentic figure of américanité and finally superseded the Creole. In the religious sphere, attempts were made to bridge Catholicism and indigenous religions by tracing them back to distant common roots. Finally, with respect to memory, Indianity and its deep past became a source of identification, giving substance to a tradition, an imagined continuity.25 As the Venezuelan Arturo Uslar Pietri reminds us, the model (or paradigm) of hybridity is central to the search for

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collective identity in Latin America.26 All these topics are particularly salient in Mexican history, but they also affected the cultural past of most Latin American countries.27 The symbolic gains were the same everywhere: autonomy, awakening of collective identity, and national self-affirmation. I revisit this subject more intensively in a later section. At this point, suffice it to recall that, in spite of its growth in the course of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, this first national sentiment (a kind of proto-nationalism, as it were) was not really the soil out of which the independence movements of the early nineteenth century first grew. To be sure, the (cultural) nation had already acquired a certain prominence, here and there, in the colonial era. Thus, as Arturo Uslar Pietri has it (1992, 313–21), the Venezuelan nation was forged during the eighteenth century. David A. Brading (1985) speaks of a Creole nationalism forming in Mexico in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. According to Gordon K. Lewis (1983), the antiimperialist struggle led by the Creoles in Cuba and in Haiti in the eighteenth century was also the expression of a nationality, underpinned by an emerging culture that incorporated African, White, and Indian elements. Moreover, according to Benedict Anderson’s wellknown thesis (1991), nationalism reached Latin America before Europe. But it appears wiser to construe these tendencies as the roots of the cultural nation rather than as its political foundations. It is within this perspective that one must situate the insurgents of Caracas, who, towards the end of the eighteenth century, came close to establishing the preliminary form of a republic; or the (in this case) victorious battle of the Argentinians of Buenos Aires against the English invasions of 1806–07; or again, as noted above, Hidalgo and Morelos’ insurrections in Mexico in 1810–13. It was especially after the birth of the republics that nationalism took shape as a matrix, as an organizing principle of collective thought and action. Conflicts against neighbouring countries, reactions against Indian insurrections or even civil wars often acted as triggers. More generally, nationalism also offered itself as a rallying ground, which, by ending internal divisions,28 would serve to counter the social and political instability arising from independence movements. And more important still, as I see it, these nationalisms stressed the idea of belonging to the continent and widened even more the nationalist separation from the metropolitan centres.29 In sum, one might say that, during the colonial period, the relationship to nationhood was forged principally within culture and, in particular,

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within religion; with the nineteenth century, it acquired full political and social substance. In passing, I should emphasize the paradoxical character of these political collectivities, which ensured their construction and emancipation on the model of the nation-state, itself borrowed from Europe. Shortly after the Conquest, rootedness in the continent inspired powerful utopian thought among the Creoles. But this time it involved utopias of rupture and appropriation, not Iberian or European dreams. In one sense, the millenarian and missionary projects formed a kind of transition. Figures such as Bartolomé de Las Casas, Vasco de Quiroga, and others illustrate the pioneers’ attempt to create a new order on the continent, based on justice, equality, and hope of the Parousia, the wait for the millennium.30 They were, however, echoing Italian and Spanish millenarisms (Joachim de Flore, Savonarola, Bartoloméo of Pisa, Antonia de Aranda, etc.). By contrast, the small Christian republics (reducciones) established by the Jesuits from the early seventeenth century on in Paraguay (although, once again, derived from European models) belong to an authentic américanité: witness their social content and effort to adapt to the local environment (Cioranescu 1971). Other examples in the same vein include the messianic vision that unfolded in Peru in the seventeenth century; here américanité would inject a new vigour into Catholicism and serve as a springboard in conquering the world (Lavallé 1983). On a decidedly less religious level, it is also worth mentioning the urban mythology that flourished in Mexico during the whole of the colonial period (Aguila 1983), somewhat as in Peru and in Chile; or again, the seventeenth–century Peruvian Creoles who represented their native land in the form of the earthly Paradise (Demelas 1982). The independence movements reignited the dreams of the continent. These were expressed pre-eminently in the ideal of a great Latin American alliance, its most celebrated spokespersons being Miranda (see the theme of Gran Colombia) and Bolívar. The idea outlived them in the second half of the nineteenth century, and it has not completely disappeared today. Specifically national myths crystallized, each in its own way promoting the growth of American identity. Here, a geographical determinism (resting on unlimited resources, favourable climate, etc.) promised a superior outcome. There, an organicist metaphor established the pure, innocent, free, and robust nation. Elsewhere, the new American man would assert his spiritual superiority over his ancestor from the mother country.31 The myth of a Greater Argentina, presented as a model for the whole world, is also exemplary. Similarly, according

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to Octavio Paz (1972), Mexico did not truly complete its cultural break with the old metropolis until the middle of the nineteenth century. At that point, it subscribed to another European tradition, that of rationalism, democracy, and progress, against which post-Renaissance Spain had turned its back because of the Inquisition. It seems that this other tradition, inspired by the Enlightenment, first crystallized in Mexico with the liberal Constitution of 1857 and other reform laws. From then on, as Octavio Paz (1972, 113) has it, Mexico was no longer so much “a tradition to perpetuate as a future to be realized.” The two models of continuity and differentiation could not be expressed more clearly. Note, however, that in this case the cultural break occurred at the price of another borrowing, another dependency, this time with respect to Europe as a whole. Still in the utopian vein, I should also mention the Arielist dream,32 which was strongly opposed to the United States; as in the nineteenth century, it asserted the spiritual orientation and moral superiority of Latin American civilization. Finally, in most of the Latin American countries, there were echoes of the great project of mixing races, of fusing cultures and traditions.33 This grand idea has continued to be expressed in various ways up until the present day. Biological versions of it include the Cosmic Race thesis of the Mexican, José Vasconcelos (1881–1957), or the ideal of racial democracy in Brazil (Gilberto Freyre), in Cuba (Fernando Ortiz), in Venezuela (Carlos Siso, Rafael Castro), and elsewhere. Similarly, in Brazil, there was Euclides da Cunha’s utopia of new beginnings (Rebellion in the Backlands, 1904), which portrayed the desire to recover the purity of origins through the racial mixing of Whites and Indians; in a comparable way, Darcy Ribeiro’s more recent The Savage Utopia (1982) concerns the retrieval of the lost innocence and egalitarianism of the pre-Colombian peoples. The cultural appropriation of the continent can be seen in two other areas. First, new types of customs and rituals emerged that derived from various borrowings, inventions, and adaptations. The Creole elite’s assertion of collective identity was reinforced by linguistic differentiation, which distanced it from Castillian Spanish, particularly on the level of pronunciation. To be sure, there were debates over the appropriateness of this linguistic disengagement, as in Mexico at the beginning of the nineteenth century, for example (Aguila 1980). But, on the whole, the question was quickly resolved, and the language of the continent was not a source of anguish or humiliation when compared to those of Madrid or Lisbon. In Brazil, José de Alencar (Iracema,

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1865) was a pioneer of what came to be perceived as the national language. It is widely acknowledged that Brazilian Portuguese acquired its autonomy towards the end of the nineteenth century (e.g., the first official dictionary, modelled on spoken Brazilian, also appeared in this period) and that the last metropolitan taboos died with the Modernist movement of the 1920s. On another level, the lands of the New World have continually been explored since the sixteenth century, their particularities noted and named; actions, events, and memorable things have constantly been put in writing, immersed in legend; they have nourished the imaginary to give rise to a tradition.34 And then, there were all the borrowings from Indian civilization: those that the Creoles deliberately adopted, since they sought to distinguish themselves from the Spanish of the Iberian Peninsula, and those that permeated everyday life, such as food, clothing, dwellings, and so on. Here again, language served as a strong mooring to the continent; the indigenous names of places, fruits, birds, and other wild animals were incorporated into the mental repertoire of Whites and, subsequently, of people of every background. It seems that language and, in a more general sense, the culture of the common people, were even more affected by this phenomenon, in particular in the countryside. Far from the big cities, the population was less in contact with the residual aspects of Europe’s metropolitan spirit and institutions. In almost every new collectivity, a widening chasm developed between the worlds of the Europeanized capitals and those of the provinces and regions. In the latter, a wild américanité flourished, directly in touch with the life of the continent and with Indianity. In the La Plata countries, this feature appears to have been most pronounced. From this perspective, the gaucho and the caudillo assume a symbolic value as figures of américanité. In its original meaning, gaucho referred to nomadic and marginal people, often outlaws belonging to the great plains of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. In the broad sense, this term eventually encompassed all rural workers. Born out of a Spanish, Indian, and African racial mix, the gaucho inhabited the wild stretches of the pampa, making a living there through his work, in the greatest freedom of thought and manners. Popular culture was strongly imbued with his rugged, whimsical, and rebellious nature, which fuelled many a legend. At the antipodes of Europeanism, the caudillo represented another figure of collective identity. The name was reserved for those unofficial, local leaders, godfathers of sorts, who drew their power from personal ties of dependency with their immediate social environment. This power, which could stretch over entire regions

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and beyond,35 was wielded arbitrarily, in a spirit and style reminiscent of primitive feudalism. The roots of this power can even be traced back to the time of the Conquest; but, certainly, the system of caudillos enjoyed unprecedented growth in the nineteenth century, thanks to the political and social instability that followed the independence movements. By filling an institutional vacuum in areas underdeveloped and neglected by the metropolitan centres, this system reinforced the socio-cultural split (the antinomy?) between the elites and the people. Conversely, américanité was also being constructed within intellectual culture, particularly in literature. Starting in the seventeenth century, literary works in Mexico, Brazil, and Peru exhibited a utopian rapture and constituted a first form of symbolic appropriation.36 In the eighteenth century, even while European borrowings were still the norm, literature with a native tinge began to spread everywhere (e.g., Rusticatio Mexicana by Rafael Landivar, 1731–93). But the true emancipation was to come in the following century, in spite of the still very strong European influence. Thanks to its sensitivity to local colour and custom, romanticism indulged in the contemplation of landscapes and in representing national tempers. One thinks, for example, of José Maria de Heredia in Cuba, Esteban Etcheverria in Argentina, Ricardo Palma in Peru, and others. Similarly, José de Alencar in Brazil, Andrés Bello in Venezuela, Altamirano in Mexico, and José Victorino Lastarria in Chile, were pioneers of a national literature. With the generation of modernist writers,37 disengagement from Spain was achieved at the end of the nineteenth century, preparing the ground for the typically Latin American novel that would emerge in the 1920s and 1930s,38 suffused with populism, Indianism, and naturalism. On this same question, and in this same time frame, we must also consider the influence of the cannibal myth in Brazil. Here may be found the original idea of ingesting the other, absorbing his virtues, and taking revenge on him through self-emancipation. Applied to literature, this idea led Brazilian writers of the nineteenth century to identify with the maneating Tupinambas, the traditional Indian enemies of the imperialist Portuguese. This theme at first produced a very European, somewhat innocuous imagery in the nineteenth century, in the vein of Chateaubriand’s Natchez. As of the 1920s, a far more aggressive symbolism developed, this time directed primarily at Europe and, in particular, at France (São Paulo’s Week of Modern Art in 1922, Revista de antropofagia from 1928–1929, Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagite Manifesto). This metaphor, which shaped Brazilianity, is still alive today: all that is imposed as “other” should be eaten, devoured, that is, denied, and

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thus transcended: “Tupi or not Tupi,” wrote Andrade (Stegagno Picchio 1988; Moser 1992, 1994). In some of her writings, Zilà Bernd (among others) vindicates her Indian ancestry in the manner of the anthropophagists, referring to them as “our ancestors, the Tupinambis” (Bernd 1996, 34). Thus, once again, Indianity (but here in the guise of the Evil Savage) acts as a vehicle of American emancipation. Finally, through an anthropophagist process, the Brazilian writer liberates himself once and for all of his dependency on Portuguese as a language of the metropolis. Following parallel paths and periodizations, this work of appropriation (or reappropriation) is also visible in other creative fields such as theatre, music, painting, sculpture, and architecture. The bounds of this essay do not allow for a detailed illustration of this claim. In many ways, however, elite culture was open to the forms and experiences of popular culture. In Mexico, for example, baroque and rococo styles are more than simply transpositions of Spanish forms; they carry the imprint of local creativity and, notably, of Indian influence. Religious art is a good example of this: the baroque style of church vaults was clearly altered through contact with indigenous art.39 In Brazil, the painter José Ferraz de Alméida Junior innovated in the last decades of the nineteenth century by filling his pictures with references to people of modest means, with scenes of everyday life in the hinterland of São Paulo. His portrait of the lumberjack in 1884 was the symbol of a civilization that was turning its back on the coast and on Europe. In the wake of the anthropophagist myth, there is also Villa-Lobos’s music (e.g., his Bachianas Brasileiras are a hybrid of Bach and Brazilian folklore) or Latin American jazz, the bossa nova. In Brazil, again, popular symbols informed numerous icons of américanité that fed the imaginary (e.g., the pistolero, the sertanejo, the cangaceiro, the caboclo, the samba, etc.). Similarly, negritude played a significant role in the formation of national cultures. Wherever Blacks were in Latin America, Creole intellectuals ended up appropriating their traditions (e.g., dance, music, festivities, religious rites, arts and crafts) in order to fuel their quest for an original and authentically American identity (Andrews 1998). Américanité: An Unfinished Project The foregoing shows that the cultural evolution of Latin American collectivities since the sixteenth century certainly fits, on the whole, into the model of reproduction through differentiation rather than

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into the model of continuity. But it is no less certain that this general trajectory appears fragmented at various points. It suffered failures and was accompanied by doubts, ambiguities, and contradictions that still have not been fully overcome. This other facet of the Latin American past – and present – leads one to believe that the américanité that has been built up over five centuries on this continent remains fragile, teeming with tensions, and, I dare say, incomplete. First, elements of continuity clearly persist in the Iberian heritage. One thinks immediately of the old linguistic and religious traditions but also of the numerous borrowings that constantly nourished the elite culture of Latin America (O’Gorman 1961, and others). Based on a study of sixty-three nineteenth-century historians, E. Bradford Burns (1978) also showed that the European affiliation and the rejection of Indianity during that period constituted dominant features of Latin American historiography. According to the author, these features are still visible today in diluted form. A fairly widespread opinion has it that Latin American collectivities effectively broke ties with their mother countries but experienced great difficulty in establishing a substitute model. An extremely diverse population, political and social instability, violence that always permeated collective life, an inability to establish lasting democracies, and assaults by American imperialism are among the most frequently cited causes. It is said that a cultural vacuum and an identity crisis ensued; this America is still in the making. Such is the conclusion drawn by authors such as Gerhard Masur (1967), Stephen Clissold (1966), and Carlos Rangel (1987). According to Rangel, the history of Latin America has, until recently, been marked by defeat; it has been unable to endow itself with epics. Like many others, Rangel attaches great importance to Bolivar’s disillusioned remarks at the end of his life (“All those who worked to liberate America merely ploughed the ocean,” etc.). Two contemporary witnesses vividly exemplify this frame of mind. The first is Mexican writer Octavio Paz (1972, especially chap. 6), winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, who has offered a rather pessimistic view of the solitude, masks, and uncertainty of Latin American (and especially Mexican) identity. In referring to his country, Paz deplores the failure of the great social projects of the nineteenth century and the paucity of national culture, which has proven unable to innovate on the basis of many European borrowings.40 The second is the Venezuelan novelist Arturo Ulsar Pietri (1992), who revisits the theme of cultural poverty (notably in literature) and angst with respect

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to collective identity (referring, for example, to a continent that has several names and consequently has none). He claims that Latin America has, indeed, broken ties with Europe but has proven incapable of developing its own civilization; its history is a long quest for identity, endlessly starting anew. Uslar Pietri sees the core of the problem in the conflict between elitist ideals and popular culture’s “caudillist” resistance. But, according to him, there are two reasons for hope: a new literature is emerging, borne by social concerns, and likely to bridge the gap between these two cultures. Deeper still, the old dynamic of confluence and métissage, the quintessential feature of Latin américanité, will end up suppressing all these tensions that have hitherto diluted the continent’s promises. There are similar strains in Zilà Bernd (1986, 1996), who discusses the continent’s cultural alienation, and especially in Juan Liscano (1987), who mentions the confusion of the Latin American being and the sad fate of a culture condemned to imitation, still ailing from its break with Europe. Indeed, in referring particularly to the nineteenth century, several authors discern a complex mix of continuity and rupture, and an inability to direct national collectivities along a lasting path. In Venezuela, the elites barely managed to agree on founding myths (Lombardi 1976). In Argentina, more than elsewhere perhaps, the elites and the common people have never been able to rally around a project of collective reconstruction. In Brazil, Thomas Skidmore (1974, 1990) has shown that the cultural equilibria were always fragile. In Peru, as elsewhere, the intellectuals were long torn between the will to disengage from Europe and the fear of Indian “barbarism” or “primitivism” (Lavallé 1983). And in Colombia, according to Peter Wade (1993), the break was never fully achieved; due to its deep ethnic diversity, one section of the elites despaired of building a true nation based only on what the continent provided, hence the constant temptation to build on the old Hispanic heritage. Clearly, class interests were among the factors driving this tendency. In several countries, cultural emancipation from the colonial metropolis gave rise to other borrowings, to other European dependencies, particularly in the nineteenth century; in other words, rupture here reactivated continuity through displacement. The Brazilian elites present the most spectacular example of this. They literally changed mother countries in the second half of the nineteenth century, replacing Portugal with France. But there is also Argentina, which partly reEuropeanized itself as well from the mid-nineteenth century on, as did

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Mexico under the reign of Porfirio Diaz. Examples of this include modernism in literature (the Parnassians, the Symbolists), liberalism in political thought, and, particularly, positivism in the social sciences (Comte principally, but also Darwin and Spencer). In Mexico, for example, there was something almost paradoxical about the hegemony of this intellectual trend applied to the building of a new and autonomous nation. After so many social and political upheavals, positivism offered hope of restoration in the form of social engineering. But this came at a price: the new religion of science also taught the triumph of reason and civilization over barbarism; consequently, the cultural split between the elites and the common people, between elite culture and Indianity was reignited. These significant reservations are not enough to call into question the model of differentiation. In many cases, European ideas (e.g., democracy) did not succeed in taking root in Latin American soil (Miró Quesada 1991). In other cases, only the elites – or a section of them – incorporated these ideas; the rest of the “nation” did not follow suit. Incomplete, uncertain as it may be, américanité is nonetheless a fact of politics and culture, at least as a horizon. A tradition has been established, which celebrates its founding acts, and Indianity continues to impinge heavily on collective definitions. Just about everywhere, the twentieth century consolidated the sense of belonging to the continent and, in every sense of the word, restored the pre-Colombian past. In Mexico, monuments more readily celebrate the memory of Cuauhtémoc than that of Cortés. Even the old bearers of continuity, such as religion and language, drifted away from Europe.41 Finally, the admission of failures pertains mainly to the utopias, to the grandest social and cultural projects. And this admission is only voiced by one section of the elites. The other part, just like the mass of the population, sees itself as the original product of a long process of métissage and cultural confluence, which has turned Latin America into the crucible of a unique civilization, on the verge of taking off.42

obstacles to identity: fiction to the rescue of the nation We have seen how Brazilian literary figures of the twentieth century used the anthropophagist metaphor to sublimate the sentiment of dependency on Europe. This case illustrates the extraordinary capacity of new collectivities to overcome seemingly hopeless situations through

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symbolic arrangements. I now dwell for a moment on two instances in which Latin American cultures faced an impasse or contradiction that was overcome through discursive strategies sanctioned by the authority of myth. I also show how science and ideology readily work hand in hand to adjust empirical reality to the creed of the nation. Above all, the two examples show the obstacles that new collectivities may face in the search for an identity. Diversity versus the Nation Throughout Latin American history, and especially from the era of independence movements on, the idea of the nation (with its presuppositions of unity and cohesion, if not of uniformity) collided with its opposite: an enormous diversity of races, ethnic groups, and classes, let alone the sometimes incompatible character of various ideologies and world visions. Creole thought had difficulty coming to terms with this reality, which in some countries simply stymied projects of national identity. This was the case in Argentina during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century; the country was irrevocably divided between two models of the nation – the populist vision of the gauchos and the very Europeanized elitism of the liberals.43 I have already mentioned the sense of failure experienced by Bolivar at the end of his life in relation to Gran Colombia. Since the twentieth century, other countries have revealed the fragility of their national consensus: in Peru, the real citizen was now Inca, now of mixed race, and now the White (Pike 1969); Brazil battled with all types of centrifugal forces – socio-economic, racial, and cultural (Stepan 1969); and in Mexico, Indianity has constantly been a problem (Favre 1971). Ever grappling with this issue, the elites have conceived of various ways of solving it. Remarkably, each of the proposed solutions invariably consisted in eliminating diversity. Acts of genocide against Indian tribes were among the most radical means of eliminating difference, in particular in Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, and Brazil (e.g., the Indian “slave” hunt in the hinterland during the seventeenth century and atrocities committed in the nineteenth century by the coffee planters conquering the forest). The same applies to all the forms of physical violence meted out against minority or marginal groups (e.g., the kind practised in the nineteenth century in Argentina against the Black slaves who were drafted into the army and chained in the front lines of the infantry during battles).

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Here one could also cite Liberals’ (or supposed Liberals’) temptation to marginalize and even exterminate Indians, people of mixed race, and gauchos – see, for example, Sarmiento in Argentina (Shumway 1991, chap. 4). A second approach advocated demographic attrition through compulsory programs to reduce Indian fertility. A third was to bring about social homogenization by eliminating inequalities through revolution. The Peruvian Gonzáles Prada (1848–1918) seems to have pioneered this formula; subsequently, Marxists of all hues committed themselves to his idea. Sharing in the same ideal, Liberal ideology proposed a much more moderate version: the declaration of citizens’ equality would lead one day to an equalization of their socio-economic condition. Cultural assimilation through missionary action and education constituted a fourth avenue. It was borrowed as early as the sixteenth century from Mexico; the first missionaries strove to Christianize and “Latinize” the indigenous peoples by way of the sermon and the school. But from the late sixteenth century on, the colonial system made its own conception prevail: the Indian had to be excluded from European culture and kept in his natural inferiority. It is only in the nineteenth century that large-scale attempts at assimilation resumed. By the middle of the century, for example, the Mexican press spread the idea that Indian inferiority was not innate but acquired, that education could remedy it. This view flourished again in Mexico in the context of the Revolution, at the beginning of the twentieth century, and later again, after 1940, in the discourse of anthropologists who proposed a full integration of Indians into White and mixed-race society. Finally, in all Latin American countries, there is evidence of several forms of symbolic and legal exclusion, such as the fact that the various attributes of citizenship were granted fairly late. The Blacks in Brazil, who for a long time were in the majority, were only freed from slavery in 1888. They finally appeared in historiography at the end of the century and in literature as of the 1920s; their right to vote was seriously restricted until the middle of the twentieth century. In spite of the official discourse of racial democracy, they are still victimized today by the stigmas of racial inferiority. That said, it is in two other ways that the Latin American educated class truly exhibited originality in its efforts to reduce difference by suppressing otherness. The first appeared in the area of religion. As of the sixteenth century, Catholic missionaries established a historical filiation between primitive Christianity and Indian religions. According to these theories, Indians were descendants of the Hebrews (i.e., the

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wandering tribes of Israel), their religions represented degraded forms of Catholicism, and the Latin American continent was the site of the Earthly Paradise. Creoles and Indians were thus brothers in reality, united in the struggle against the imperialist Peninsula.44 These views were revived by the Dominican Servando Teresa de Mier in the late eighteenth century. Missionaries also made numerous attempts either to foreground or to institute practices and features common to the two religious universes. In the beginning, the Church sought to erase the distinctive signs of Indian religions (e.g., destruction of holy objects and of temples). But it soon became apparent that paganism was ineradicable. The attempt was then made to practise substitution through syncretism. Monks planted crosses and built temples on ancient Indian religious sites. They disseminated images of saints, made use of the historiography of miracles and apparitions, yielded to Indians’ taste for paintings, pictures, theatrical performances, and open-air celebrations (the noted atriums particularly suited the Indians, who were not accustomed to the interior of churches). Preachers also banked on the messianic ideas of redemption, of spiritual and social liberation, to which the destitute indigenous people were receptive.45 These examples of amalgamation are not specific to the Mexican past. The history of the majority of Latin American countries provides evidence of this. In Brazil, notably, Catholic saints were identified with divinities of African origin (the orixas). Iemanja was conflated with the Virgin Mary, Oxala with Jesus, and so on. In reality, one could argue that there was a double syncretism: on the one hand, within the three great African religions (candomblé, macumba, umbanda), on the other hand, between the latter and Christianity. The Indians absorbed several features of Catholicism. They were partial to millenarian visions, which recalled their expectancy myths; they adopted God, the Trinity, and his saints by inserting them, however, into their pantheon; the crucifixion of Christ held meaning for them, since they recognized in it another human sacrifice; in their own way, they also made use of churches where they would hide their amulets.46 The syncretism that resulted from all these practices rendered the thesis of common origins all the more attractive. At any rate, the troubling resemblances discerned between Christian and Indian religions could not lie: how else to explain the existence among indigenous people of rites and symbols such as the cross, confession, fasting, baptism, marriage, circumcision? Or beliefs such as eternal life (the separation of body and soul)?47

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Remarkably, beyond granting the Creole a feeling of shared belonging with the Indian, these convergences on the religious level fulfilled another equally important function: by situating indigenous people within the heritage of the old Christian tradition, it was established that their conversion occurred well before the Conquest. The indigenous past, like that of all of America, thus acquired its own legitimacy, and, as it were by ricochet, the Creole was equally liberated from the moral precedence claimed by the Iberian Peninsula. Henceforth, the Creole could devote himself to his destiny on the continent, without fear of degeneration. This is an important founding myth of Latin American civilization. Two events in particular illustrate this search for the self through the other, this creation of unity in diversity within the realm of the imaginary. First, there is the fusion that occurred in Mexico between the Indian goddess, Tonantzin, and the Virgin of Guadalupe. In 1531, the Holy Virgin was said to have appeared before an Aztec shepherd on the hill of Tepeyac, the very site of a sanctuary dedicated to the cult of Tonantzin. The location was subsequently the site of numerous miracles and pilgrimages, as recorded in Sahagún’s writings towards the end of the sixteenth century. Apparitions among the Indians subsequently multiplied. The cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe spread. As time went by, thanks to the Church’s preaching, the Virgin replaced Tonantzin, but without truly supplanting her since, in reality, the latter was the paganized vestige of the primitive Virgin. De Mier, in 1794, and Carlos Maria de Bustamante, in the early nineteenth century, reactivated the myth of Tonantzin/Guadalupe in Mexico, which by that time had spread all over Latin America (Taylor 1996). Visions of the Virgin continued, giving rise to more sites of pilgrimage in several countries and strengthening a cult, the influence of which extended beyond tribes, races, ethnic groups, and classes (Brading 2001). Everywhere, but particularly in Mexico, this symbol served as a national cement or even as a “continental paradigm” (D. Irarrazaval). The Tonantzin/Guadalupe tandem had its masculine counterpart in the form of a link between Saint Thomas the Apostle and the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. These two threads, which emanated from the same source, followed a parallel course; the second, however, was far more modest than the first. The idea took shape once again among the Franciscan and Dominican missionaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was said that the god whose return the Aztecs awaited was, indeed, Saint Thomas the Apostle, who had long ago come to convert the Indians. The latter portrayed him as a man of

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white skin with a beard. According to other versions, the evangelist was rather a missionary who had come during the Middle Ages – perhaps a Viking in the tenth century. In the end, these divergences matter little. Until the nineteenth century, this belief furnished a powerful basis for national sentiment, and, in addition, it convinced the Creoles of their spiritual autonomy in relation to Spain.48 In order to counter the heterogeneity of the continent’s populations, Creole thought proved very creative on another level – that of race. The idea emerged towards the mid-nineteenth century in Mexico and gradually spread during the decades that followed: the only way to (definitively) reduce the gap between the Indian and the White man would be to eradicate the former biologically by fusing him with the latter through métissage.49 In short, the Indian was to be eliminated both biologically and culturally. From then on, racial mixing was glorified; it became a national theme and even a founding myth. People of mixed race became the dominant symbol of the original and superior Mexican, well-endowed with all that contributed to his making. This program claimed to be enlightened by science, but it departed quite liberally from it on two points. First, the virtues of racial fusion were being preached even while European science – highly respected by the Porfirian elites – was at the time exclusively bent on racial purity and segregation.50 Moreover, it was explained with the greatest candour that the new race, forged through fusion, would be White (the Indian “trait” was thus recessive?). A period of transition of one or two centuries was anticipated, after which the process would be completed; Mexicans would have assimilated Indianity without, however, displaying its phenotype. Concretely, there remained the task of recruiting the army of workers willing to devote themselves to this great national task of métissage (or of “whitening” – blanqueamento). A vast program of European immigration was conceived (which had no real follow-up), in which there were marked preferences, a kind of hierarchy instituted among the races. Germans were ranked first, Spaniards, not surprisingly, last.51 The myth outlived the Díaz regime and, in the early twentieth century, in an epoch of revolution, reached an apotheosis in the publication of José Vasconcelos’s La Raza Cósmica (1925). The fusion of peoples and races was presented as the authentic Spanish legacy in America, and it was proposed as an ideal for the entire continent.52 The myth spread to Brazil, where it became firmly embedded between 1880 and 1930; there, too, it arose from a will to whiten races through immigration. It then inspired the ideology of racial democracy, that is,

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an egalitarian fusion of the three great races: European, Indian, and African. In addition to eliminating biological barriers, métissage would also eliminate social and cultural cleavages. The idea was given shape following the Week of Modern Art by G. Freyre (1974, first edition in 1933). It was recently rekindled by J. Amado (1976) and D. Ribeiro (1982). But there again, since the White man is held to be superior, métissage is often identified with the whitening of the population.53 These ideas were very popular in Venezuela, where they inspired a policy of immigration privileging Whites.54 The same may be said of Colombia (Wade 1993), Cuba (Helg 1990; Lamore 1980), Peru (Pike 1969), Bolivia, and so on. Over the centuries, métissage did, indeed, progress in several Latin American countries. But the elites’ wishes no doubt played an insignificant role therein. The causes were more practical. For example, when colonization began, the scarcity of White women was a powerful cause of intermarriage. Later, proximity created by shared poverty was another cause, as was, just as enduringly, the simple demographic weight of Indianity. In fact, beyond their explicit immediate objectives, the now innocent, now very interested tropes of Creole discourse mostly expressed the need for belonging, for integration, for community. The Creoles wished to shape the latter by linking it to common origins, on the one hand, and to a future full of promise, on the other. Yet, the great founding utopias hardly kept their promises: unlike the United States, Latin America was unable truly to concretize its great dreams of development; in large part, it did not go beyond the glorification of the paradigm of biological, social, and cultural amalgamation.55 As previously noted, it also experienced great difficulty in creating its own identity. In this respect, one might say that Latin America was more successful in its disengagement from Iberia than in its engagement with America. As for the construction of the past, we shall see that it also suffered many adversities, in spite of a great display of ingenuity. Borrowed Memory In a general sense, the recourse to historiography in Latin America was dictated by the same drives that any other Western collectivity faced in situations of change causing instability and uncertainty: the need to dramatize a common experience defined by solidarity and cohesion; to fuel a feeling of identity based on this common experience; to

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establish founding myths that would act as cultural landmarks; to grant itself the most ancient possible roots, a legitimacy moulded out of an ancient tradition, through which the nation transcends individuals and generations. It is worth noting the importance and intensity of the historiographical debates in several of these countries, notably after the independence movements (and especially in Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, and Peru). These movements had launched a new era by creating national spaces; but plans for symbolically and politically organizing these spaces were yet to be conceived. Or, more accurately, such projects existed, but in various versions, which contradicted each other and divided the nations. Historiography assigned itself the task of reconciling them, and, since this role was eminently political, it is not surprising that the vast majority of historians were recruited from the political class itself and from among the senior levels of the state administration (Vallenilla 1991). With respect to the quest for legitimacy as such, we should also bear in mind that these collectivities needed legitimacy all the more in that they had constantly to defend themselves as autonomous bodies before an arrogant Spain, empowered by its rich and venerable cultural tradition. In Mexico, the works of Servando de Mier and of Carlos María de Bustamante best embodied the historiographical approach that solved the conundrum of long memory by simply appropriating the very ancient indigenous past. Writing in the first half of the nineteenth century, both condemned the Conquest, that barbarous act that virtually destroyed the great pre-Colombian civilizations: indeed, the Mexican nation had existed for several centuries, it had been humiliated by Spain and the colonial system, but it had finally regained its freedom. Clearly, this line of thinking was the extension of the Creole thought of the colonial era. Since the sixteenth century, religious figures in particular had sought to reduce the gap between Catholicism and Indian religions by seeking shared origins. Thus, Creole consciousness flowed into the age-old indigenous line of continuity and the Conquest was thus abolished, as were the Iberian claims to cultural superiority on the continent. Had not the Franciscan Juan de Torquemada (Monarquía Indiana, 1615) demonstrated that the true founders of New Spain were not the conquistadors but the missionary Brothers? In this respect, Mier was slightly more circumspect, speaking of “our mothers who were the Indians … [and of] our fathers the Conquerors.” This rearranging of historical consciousness included another advantage: by grafting

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themselves onto the lineage of Indianity, the Creoles cleared themselves of the infamy of the Conquest and of the Black Legend, which, by that token, pertained exclusively to the metropolis. The Indigenist tradition in historiography continued in the twentieth century with the Indo-Americanist theories of Peruvians Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre and José Carlos Mariátegui. It had had many precursors in the Andean countries during the nineteenth century: avengers of the Indians defeated by the Spanish, the Creoles had portrayed themselves as the heirs of the Incas (Ocampo Lopez 1983; Demelas 1982). There were exceptions: in Brazil, for example, the historical image of the Indian remained controversial.56 On the whole, not only was the Indian rehabilitated, he was the object of a true apology. For Torquemada, the Aztec empire was to Mexico what Rome was to Italy. Others evoked Athens and the Egypt of the Pharaohs. One can guess that such assumptions inspired quite flexible ethnological reconstructions of indigenous life; but the essential idea was preserved (Reyes Garcia 1994): through this discursive strategy, these young collectivities could nonetheless enjoy a long memory. In Mexico, the national culture was strongly imbued with the deep memory of Indianity. Thus, a very great number of Mexicans of Spanish origin today proclaim their native lineage, claiming not the Spanish but the Aztecs as distant ancestors. The prestige of this ancient civilization clearly facilitated a shift in collective identity. In the long run, however, the strategies of historiographical discourse in the service of social and political goals were not equally successful everywhere. According to the most pessimistic observers (e.g., Morse 1964), the overall record is even rather negative: in their view, Latin America was incapable on the whole of dialectically marrying the two components of its cultural heritage – Iberian and indigenous – and it never overcame the contradictions of this heritage.57 This divided, tormented memory was the symbolic product of the endless social and political conflicts that plagued the continent. Whatever the global record, it is obvious that countries such as Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia (more than 150 uprisings since independence), Peru (Pike 1969), Chile (Woll 1982), and particularly Argentina failed in their attempts to establish a long-lasting consensus about rich founding myths. In respect to Peru, F.B. Pike notes that the writing of national history is a constant civil war. Finally, in the already cited case of Argentina, the situation was certainly made more difficult by the great diversity and exceptional breadth of immigration since the second half of the nineteenth century.58

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quebec/latin america What conclusions does this overview of Latin America allow in comparison with the Quebec past? First, it must be said that the task is complicated by the somewhat shifting character of the comparative object itself. Quite clearly, taken as a whole, the history of European settlement in Latin America followed a relatively linear course (despite setbacks, divisions, and hesitations), which fits both culturally and politically into the model of differentiation and rupture. In contrast, Quebec’s narrative followed a broken path, split between continuity and rupture. Consequently, depending on the phase of Quebec history, one is struck now by differences with Latin America, now by similarities. Quebec’s most significant moment of contrast to Mexico and other Latin American countries occurred during its second continuist phase (1840–1940). For a century, political sovereignty was a marginal item on the collective agenda. Quebec elites no longer formulated genuine utopias of separation and of new American beginnings based on a foundational event. They rather succeeded in imposing an image that turned the settler into a submissive figure, sublimated through his ties to the Catholic religion, to his language, and to his old French traditions – a stereotype in utter contrast with the free and arrogant gaucho of the pampa. The elites also sought to keep their distance from the distinctive spoken idiom that developed among the common people, preferring to conform to the classical language of the mother country. There again, the contrast with the Latin American nations is striking. These comments can be applied to the whole relationship between intellectual and popular culture. In literature, for example, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American authors proved to be decidedly more open to the realities of the common people than were their French-Canadian counterparts. It is only recently, with the blossoming of Québécois literature in the 1960s and 1970s, that things really changed in this area. More generally, Quebec writers have taken longer to embrace hybridizing genres, norms, and cultures; they have taken longer to profane models and to celebrate amalgams and “impurities” in the spirit of anthropophagy. Finally, and still on the side of differences, language was never a divisive factor or a matter of collective angst in Latin American national cultures as it was and continues to be in Quebec. The linguistic standard of Spain or of Portugal was challenged for more than a century, yet such a break did not give rise to a lasting trauma. The spoken idiom,

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with its creative forms and improprieties, its mixed Iberian, African, and Indian legacies, was thus officially legitimized. In the same vein, ethnography (or folklore) served to fuel national identities and was thus mobilized for the purposes of cultural separation. The opposite was the case in Quebec, where so-called traditional popular culture was long given precedence, in the interests of continuity, to demonstrate the persistence and strength of old French culture. Another difference arises from the fact that, in Quebec, Aboriginal peoples were relatively few in number, in all likelihood between 20,000 and 25,000 in the seventeenth century, and approximately 80,000 in 1990. Distributed over more or less confined areas, they lived mostly on the margins of society, and, once the military threat was eliminated after 1812, they no longer could impinge directly on the fate of the White population. In Quebec’s overall history, and without denying the significance of numerous cultural transfers, it does not appear that the Aboriginal referent was as powerful a cause of Americanization as it was in Mexico, for example. Until the middle of the twentieth century, Aboriginal peoples scarcely featured in the reconstructions of the national past, except as extras. Often treated with contempt, they were simply excluded from Quebec nationhood. In their own way, historical works produced during this continuist phase resolved the problem of origins confronting new collectivities: the French-Canadian nation was rooted in France’s long and glorious history and in the epic battles it fought to remain faithful to it. Inspired by these images, which it helped to consolidate, the nationalism that was being vindicated thus served the paradigm of continuity. All throughout this period, it inspired an anti-US discourse, which attacked the great republic’s materialistic, irreligious, and decadent civilization. There again, Quebec differs slightly from Latin America, and especially Mexico, where anti-US discourse tended rather to denounce economic imperialism. As for similarities, and still with respect to the 1840 to 1940 period, they show up first in the processes of symbolic appropriation, which, in spite of, and somewhat unbeknownst to the elites, were also at work among the people. Differentiation was taking place in language, in the expressions of oral culture, in rituals, in architectural forms, in clothing styles, and elsewhere. The similarities also stood out in discursive strategies aimed at reducing diversity. As homogeneous as FrenchCanadian nationhood was (especially when compared to Latin American diversity), the elites did not take well to the schism within nationhood

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introduced by popular culture. But, just as Mexico’s religions found a basis for unity in a common origin, so the culture of the elites and that of the French-Canadian people were supposed to fuse through their remote French roots. Other features have their equivalents in Latin America, but to a lesser degree, perhaps. This is the case with the agonistic relationship between elite and popular culture, in which the former reprimanded and corrected the latter for being too insensitive to the sorry state of national identity and to the urgency of building it up. But apart from certain countries such as Venezuela and Argentina,59 where it assumed quite exacerbated forms, this feature cannot be presented as truly typical of Latin America as a whole. All things considered, the similarities are far more significant when one compares Latin America with Quebec during its second phase of differentiation and rupture, that is, since the 1940s. However, one must not pay heed to the details of the two chronologies: very long in one case, very hurried in the other. Taking that into account, the parallelism between the two narratives is striking: in its own way, and in abbreviated form, Quebec’s recent history reproduces the broad trends of Latin America’s past. This is evident in the disengagement from Europe that affected ideology, literature (Bernd 1986), and the arts – albeit at uneven rates from one sphere of social thought and aesthetic creation to another. This is also apparent in the way the elites became reconciled with américanité; in the newly learned lesson about diversity, which henceforth would be an integral part of the “territorial nation”; and in the reorientation of the new nationalism, which became a vehicle of separation, self-affirmation, and collective reconstruction. But the failure or the partial failure of the great utopias of the past also sowed doubt. Moreover, in Latin America as in Quebec, the distance assumed in relation to Europe created a cultural void that the promises of américanité have not yet filled: witness all the appeals advocating the creation of a genuine tradition, a richer national culture, and a more robust identity. Remarkably, on both sides, one quite often finds that this persistent collective concern for the self is precisely a constitutive element of identity. In this light, it is particularly interesting to observe Quebec’s current evolution: in full transition, newly set on its path towards rupture, seeking to generate for itself an American discourse and to create new utopias that will once again launch it towards the perennial goal of political sovereignty. But this work of reinvention does not erase the feeling of great cultural fragility; it comes at the

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price of an increasingly uncertain identity that has somewhat lost its bearings in relation to the old and the new continent. This said, an important question surfaces from this comparison between Quebec and Latin America: out of all the collectivities considered here, how does one explain that Quebec was one of the few that did not attain political independence?60 The answer to this question requires a fresh re-examination of two significant dispiriting events (for others, of course, they may have been founding moments), the Cession of 1763 and the failure of the 1837–38 Rebellion – to which I would add the century of continuism that followed. Certain factors stand out immediately: for instance, the Latin American countries realized their independence by taking advantage of the weakened, if not decadent, state of their metropolitan masters. By comparison, after 1760, Quebec became a part of an empire in full flourish. But before proceeding with this re-examination, we should flesh out and refine the historian’s perspective by way of a comparative journey through other new collectivities of America and elsewhere.

conclusion The lessons learned from this first exercise are important. First, they confirm that, for new collectivities, there is more than one model of reproduction from afar. Moreover, Quebec’s history has already taught us that a collectivity can change models in the course of its history. Comparison introduces another fundamental fact: the traditional anxieties of Quebec are not specific to it, far from it. After five centuries, Latin America is still probing its own identity; quite strangely, these old américanités still appear incomplete and hesitant today. Do founding cultures typically experience a difficult rebirth, even when they have successfully disengaged from the metropolis? We have also seen, in both instances, the significance of socio-cultural splitting (elites/ common people; metropolis/hinterland) as an obstacle to national identity. Finally, Indianity also appeared as a pivotal, albeit ambiguous, factor. In Latin America, it was an essential ground, a leaven of Creole américanité: in Quebec, it played a less important role in this respect, due to its low demographic weight and because it was excluded (literally and figuratively) from the nation. But in both cases, Indianity did not cease to torment the nation, either because it threatened its cohesion on the inside or made it feel guilty before the world outside.

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It is also worth noting the remarkable acts of emancipation that occurred through borrowing (well illustrated by the history of Latin American countries), which show how a national culture can relinquish its metropolitan links and attain a unique identity, either by reworking and reappropriating elements of its heritage or by drawing on other borrowings. This overview has provided numerous examples of this somewhat paradoxical phenomenon. The cultural features that have been the object of such transfers include Castillian Spanish and Portuguese languages (and even the French language, in the case of the Haitian and Brazilian elites), Judaeo-Christian myths and the Catholic religion, Enlightenment ideals (rationalism, democracy, progress, etc.), the model of the nation-state, romanticism, the baroque, positivism, and modernism (the Parnassian School, symbolism, and the like). These examples bring out the complexity of the processes of appropriation and differentiation, which can subtly link rupture and continuity. Two other features are worthy of mention. First, the processes of disengagement and identification appear quite impervious to the (conservative or liberal) leanings of the ideologies that act as their vehicles. We saw, for example, that the nation (and nationalism) is linked to continuity as much as it is to rupture. We also saw (notably in Argentina with Sarmiento) the European-style party of Enlightenment cheapen democratic values. Furthermore, it turns out that the collective discourse of self or of the other is not always troubled by the contradictions that it spawns. Thus, if the appropriation of the Indian past and of Indigenism in general granted Creole culture credibility in the face of Spain, it also posed the problem of the exploitation of Indians by Whites: the principle of cultural parity with the indigenous peoples in no way involved a reappraisal of their inferior economic status. Sometimes, the survival of the fittest and, more generally, what was called social Darwinism were invoked defensively. Where Indians were included in the nation, they were also at times prohibited from speaking Spanish. It was argued that the fusion of races would produce a new, superior being, who would be the perfect synthesis of each – but his skin would be white. Still on the subject of processes of disengagement, one last phenomenon calls for our attention: lateral shifts that appear as necessary preludes to rupture, as though they marked a stage on the way to its fulfillment. This is the case in Mexico, which turned away from Spain and towards France, England, and Germany prior to withdrawing into its own américanité. It is also the case in Brazil, which, in a first instance,

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replaced Portugal by France, to the point of alienating itself again (this time in a form of “gallomania”), before committing itself to Brazilianization throughout the twentieth century (Garcia 1993). In the case of Quebec, at least one analogy can be identified in the forced replacement of Paris by London after 1760 and in the two failed movements of rupture that followed almost immediately. On another level, this portion of my essay has perhaps shown that the story of Latin American collectivities reveals a sufficient number of common narratives to justify a global appraisal of this hemisphere. This appraisal remains partial, of course, but is made no less credible by shared problems, situations, contradictions, and imaginaries. The following common themes and events stood out in this chapter: the evolving relations with the metropolitan centres (rupture/continuity); the symbolic appropriation of new territories (e.g., the great utopias); modalities of attaining political independence; the difficulty of establishing democracy and stable civil societies; the problematic relationship with Indianity and its ideological evasions (i.e., religious syncretism and racial fusion); the emergence of the national idea as a representation of new political communities; and the determining role of the Creole elites in this regard.

5 Political Emancipation and National Identity in Australia

First a word to signpost our journey. The concept of oceanity refers at once to the direction and to the outcome of the symbolic appropriation of the Australian continent; in this sense, oceanity constitutes a reference point diametrically opposed to the European pole, since it is constructed at the latter’s expense. The concept ends up embracing all the attempts to create an authentic national identity, sometimes known as Australianity. In discussing the European pole, I will frequently refer to the British mother country. Strictly speaking, one should distinguish between England and the other parts of the United Kingdom; however, since the reference to Great Britain as a whole is all too common in Australian writings, I do not do this. Similarly, it is certain that, as a symbol, Britain at times refers to the monarchy and to parliamentary institutions, at times even more to culture and traditions, and again, at times, to the Empire. In this latter case, when the need arises, I am specific. In a first section, after briefly recalling the important dates, the principal events and some statistics concerning Australian history, I reconstruct the political narrative (essentially, the erosion of the colonial tie, the building of the state and its components); in a second section, I trace the cultural evolution (the symbolic appropriation of the new continent in elite and popular culture); in a third section, I analyze the national narrative (the attempts at producing a collective definition of Australia and all that pertains to identity); and, in a last instance, I discuss the construction of memory, along with all the referents pertaining to collective identity.

historical retrospective Let us first briefly set the scene. Opinions are divided over the true motives that led Great Britain in 1788 to create another colony on the

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other side of the world, 16,000 kilometres from its shores. According to a long-held view, London’s only goal was to find an outlet for its convicts, given that the thirteen colonies of North America (which had become the United States) no longer wished to fulfill this role after 1776.1 In spite of the significant transportation costs, it appears that this solution proved less onerous than the other option, which consisted in holding prisoners on British soil (Lewis 1988). Besides, the Australian continent had already begun to be surveyed by the Spanish and the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, then by the Dutch (e.g., Tasman’s journeys in the 1640s), and finally by James Cook in the 1770s. According to the past twenty years of Australian historiography, the decision to establish a penal colony there was also dictated, over the long run, by the plan to create a genuine society on the new continent, which would support the British economy with its exports of raw material.2 It has also been argued that the plan harboured military objectives, since Great Britain wished to limit Dutch, German, and French commercial expansionism in the Pacific. Consisting in eleven ships and carrying more than 700 common law prisoners (three-quarters of whom were men), the First Fleet left Plymouth in May 1787 under Captain Arthur Philip’s command and reached Botany Bay in January 1788 (see Map 2). A few days later, the fleet moved slightly northward to found a settlement in Port Jackson, the current site of Sidney and the cradle of the State of New South Wales. The transportation of convicts to one or the other of the Australian colonies (i.e., to the future states)3 continued until 1868. In total, approximately 160,000 persons (10 percent to 20 percent of them women) were thus deported. It is estimated that two-thirds were of English birth, the majority of the others being from Ireland. Almost all of the prisoners were manual workers, agricultural labourers and urban day labourers forming the largest contingent. Only a few (3 percent according to Rudé 1978) were social agitators or political prisoners. Once there, the deportees were subjected to forced labour in the penal colony or placed in the service of large livestock farms where they long constituted the bulk of the workforce. Several repentant convicts were ultimately freed (the emancipists) and entered the labour market. Some of these men (most were men) sought out the wide, open spaces of the interior (outback), beyond the Blue Mountains and the Great Dividing Range. In 1793, the first free settlers from Great Britain began to arrive in Australia, but they remained very few in number until the 1830s. From 1832 on, support programs stimulated this type of immigration, which,

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INDONESIA

Darwin

Indian Ocean

Pacific Ocean

Cairns NORTHERN TERRITORY QUEENSLAND WESTERN AUSTRALIA

Brisbane SOUTH AUSTRALIA NEW SOUTH WALES

Adelaide

Perth

Sydney Botany Bay VICTORIA Canberra Ballarat Melbourne

South Indian Ocean

Port Phillip TASMANIA

Map 2

Hobart

Australia

within some twenty years, attracted approximately 150,000 persons. But the percentage of deportees remained significant throughout the whole settlement period, as is shown by statistics from New South Wales and Tasmania: from 30 percent to 35 percent between 1805 and 1819, approximately 43 percent in 1828, and nearly 40 percent in 1835 (Sherington 1980, 24). However, to be specific, Western Australia, which was officially created in 1829, did not receive convicts before 1849, and the colonies of South Australia and Victoria (established, respectively, in 1836 and in 1851) hardly received any. The sixth and last colony, Queensland, was established in 1859. Settlement, supported primarily by the livestock economy, fishing (whale and seal), and mining, grew from Sydney towards the north initially (Queensland), then towards the south and the west (Victoria, Southern Australia, and Western Australia). The island of Tasmania, which received its first deportees in 1803, became a colony in 1825. For more than twenty years, the occupation of land was confined to the coast, since the Blue Mountains barred access to the interior. But in 1813, a serious drought made the conquest of new pastures imperative and a passageway was discovered. Nonetheless, occupying these vast

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spaces was always difficult, given a dearth of navigable rivers and streams. Even today, more than 80 percent of the population lives on approximately 1 percent of the territory, and there is a massive concentration on the coasts (over 90 percent of the country’s population). The population rose from 5,000 in 1800 to 1 million in 1858, to 4 million in 1905, to 10 million in 1959, and to 19 million in 1999. Growth was particularly rapid during the 1830s, with the rise in socalled free immigration, and during the 1850s, due to the gold rushes. The first decades of the twentieth century were equally spectacular from this point of view. Throughout the nineteenth century, a high fertility rate remained the principal cause of growth. The demographic transition, triggered by the generalization of contraceptive practices, occurred between 1879 and 1911 (Hicks 1974, 1975; Quiggin 1988). From that point on, immigration played a more determining role in growth. But it remained a fundamental component of demographic history and of Australian collective life. There were more than a quarter of a million newcomers between 1831 and 1850 alone, almost 150,000 between 1861 and 1890, and 870,000 between 1900 and 1930.4 Towards the 1860s, more than 60 percent of the total population was born outside of Australia. Most of the immigrants came from Great Britain, 1.75 million of them arriving between 1850 and 1914 (Bythell 1988). This migratory trend prevailed up until the middle of the twentieth century, and we shall see the extent to which it impinged on the cultural and national fate of Australia. Far less numerous, indigenous Australians constituted an equally important entity, politically and symbolically. They had inhabited the Australian territory for more than 40,000 years at the point when the Whites arrived. Their number was then approximately 300,000: some suggest the number was closer to 1 million and some claim even more (Butlin 1993). After 1788, their numbers declined radically (93,000 in 1901 and 71,000 in 1921), then gradually regained ground. In the 1990s, it was estimated that the number of indigenous people (individuals identifying themselves as full-blood or of mixed race) was approximately 350,000 – about 2.7 percent of the country’s population.5 Their spectacular demographic decline in the nineteenth century is ascribed principally to the violence directly or indirectly inflicted upon them by Whites. It took a long time for the new occupants to cross this country (or this continent, as the Australians often say) of 7.6 million square kilometres, with its 20,000 kilometres of coast, and to explore its interior

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deserts, its fantastic landscapes, its entire rich flora and fauna: an infinite variety of eucalyptus, 1,500 species of fish, more than 60 species of parrots, and so forth. The explorers discovered the ancient paintings of the Aborigines in the caves or on the rock faces of the Kimberleys, the marvels of Ayers Rock, the dried-up rivers, the huge savannas, and the quasi-tropical forests of Tasmania. In some particularly desolate regions, torrid heat and water shortages were a serious problem, given infrequent precipitation. These places were known to be uninviting. People often quote Adam Lindsay London’s remark that the flowers there were without perfume and the birds never sang. Nonetheless, this ever so vast territory harboured many resources: fisheries, agriculture in the irrigated zones, and, especially, livestock farming, which began expanding dramatically. In New South Wales, the British government had at first wished to recreate a sort of rural bourgeoisie, modelled on the “gentry” and based on large-scale holdings. But several Australian leaders (notably, J. Dunmore Lang and, later, Peter Papineau, Charles Thatcher, and others) advocated a system of small holdings. Large-scale herding carried the day during the first half of the nineteenth century, however, thanks in part to the aridity of the soil (up to ten acres of pasture on average were needed per sheep). The mother country was thus able to supply its textile industry cheaply,6 and the ex-convicts who wished to settle outside of the cities often had no other recourse but to get hired in the large farms of the interior. This system, which helped spawn a type of rural proletariat, links up somewhat paradoxically with the thinking of an influential essayist, the Englishman E.G. Wakefield, who, in 1829, published A Letter from Sydney and Sketch of a Proposal for Colonizing Australasia. Advocating the establishment of a class of small landholders, Wakefield showed, however, the advantage of preventing too-easy access to landed property: this ensured the constant availability to the economy of a cheap labour pool and, especially, held speculators and simple adventurers at bay. At first glance, the high cost of the land obviously matched these ideas; but in reality it favoured the establishment of an aristocracy of big landowners. This said, in colonies such as Victoria and South Australia, the idea of a class of small farmers stood up better than it did in New South Wales; hence the great regional diversity of early Australia.7 With the influx of immigrants generated by the mining developments of the 1850s, new land grants became necessary. This time, the

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colonial administrations wished to allot new lands in small plots,8 notably to draw greater revenues from them. This orientation was in keeping with popular aspirations, which some have perceived as the first sign in Australia of a democratic spirit, highly sensitive to the fate of the meek, the exploited, the marginalized, and those whom the social system had rejected, be it through the penal system or in the divisions created by large holdings. But, once again, the ideal of a class of small property holders was largely put in check; those who were already affluent awarded themselves the largest and best concessions. In New South Wales, the battle between large and small farmers (or between squatters and selectors) crystallized around the Land Selection Acts of 1861, promoted by the premier, John Robertson. Give or take a few nuances, a similar scenario prevailed in other colonies. All these landgranting practices in the hinterland finally provoked the emergence of a highly unequal social structure, which, as we shall see, impinged heavily on the shape of the country’s culture and identity.9 The mining industry, mentioned earlier, made a spectacular entrance in the 1850s and then in the 1880s, during two gold rushes. In fact, the six colonies, each in turn, attracted attention for their goldbearing deposits; but the events that left the deepest mark occurred in Victoria (1851–58) and later in Western Australia (1882–1900). These discoveries spawned a feverish activity that led to a rise in immigration and stimulated the economy. Similarly, and in the wake of the gold rushes, the mining industry became diversified with the discovery of other deposits (copper, tin, iron, coal, etc.). Financial and commercial activity associated with these developments became concentrated in the coastal cities, whose growth occurred rapidly as of the first third of the nineteenth century. This growth rate accelerated again during the 1860–1900 period, which was the golden age of urbanization in Australia. Factories, construction and transportation (railways in particular), and the rapid rise in population were among the main growth factors. It has been argued that, contrary to the European model, the Australian urban centres were not the outcome of the development of the countryside; instead, they were its governing forces (Neutze 1985). By the end of the nineteenth century, Australia had become one of the most urbanized countries in the world. I need to revisit this phenomenon, since it is the site of a great paradox: in spite of its remarkable unfolding, this urban reality took several decades to find its proper place in the collective imaginary.

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political emancipation: inching towards sovereignty The construction of the Australian state, such as it exists today, is the product of a long evolution in the relationship that tied the six colonies (and the Commonwealth of Australia that they formed in 1901) to Great Britain. The history of this relationship, as I have suggested, must be written from two perspectives. First, it is the history of a slow disengagement from the metropolis, a drift that, following a long succession of events, gradually shifted the reference points from Great Britain and Europe to Oceania and Asia. But it is equally the somewhat paradoxical history of an oft-reiterated, manifold dependency and fidelity, which, however, ended up dissipating. This path of rupture within continuity, if I may use such an expression, is remarkable in that it does not consist of a transcendent founding act, a clear-cut symbol of heroism and conquest that could serve as a collective rallying point. Nor, as we see later on, does it include a strong mythical discourse of origins. Insofar as the birth of the nation occurred in a fragmentary, incremental way, today its founders’ names are often even forgotten. The Timeline of Rupture and Continuity In a first instance, I also present two timelines in parallel fashion: that of colonial, or British continuity and that of emancipation. This, perhaps slightly artificial, procedure will better illuminate the intertwined nature of the two threads and the whole complexity of Australian political history.10 Acts of rupture, of national emancipation

Acts of Continuity, Signs of the surviving colonial tie

1804 Aborted uprising of Irish convicts.

1788 on The governor, who is only accountable to London, wields all powers. Great Britain exercises total control over the new colony. 1800 on Gradual establishment of the first elements of a local administration, as yet devoid of any decision-making power.

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Acts of Continuity, Signs of the surviving colonial tie

1808 Rebellion against Governor Bligh, who is deposed. A largely circumstantial, collective act, the ideological content of which is, however, unclear. 1814 New South Wales obtains a court of appeal. 1820–30 Freedom of the press and jury trials obtained. Growing opposition to the deportation of convicts. Signs of discontent with London’s highly authoritarian policy. 1820–40 Egalitarian movement supporting a system of small rural property holders. On the political level, it generates more autonomistic aspirations, supported by Governors Bourque and Gipps. 1825 Executive council in Tasmania, then in other colonies throughout the following decades. 1835 The Australian Patriotic Association created in New South Wales. 1836 After having visited the colony, Charles Darwin concludes that Great Britain failed to create a replica of itself there.

1820–40 The class of big property holders, who support the colonial tie, readily outflanks a first egalitarian movement.

1840 First competition aimed at adopting a national anthem (to replace “God Save the Queen/King”).

1840 Challenged, “God Save the Queen/King” remains the official anthem of the Australian colonies.

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Acts of rupture, of national emancipation

Acts of Continuity, Signs of the surviving colonial tie

1840–60 Various plans to federate the colonies. Attempts to bring prisoner deportation to an end (Anti-Transportation League). 1842 Elected though not responsible Legislative Assembly granted to New South Wales (Constitution Act). Measure extended to other colonies in 1850 (Australian Colonies Government Act). 1844 on New South Wales demands responsible government. 1850 John Dunmore Lang founds the Australian League, which seeks Australia’s independence. 1788–1850 Gradual establishment of a public administration separate from Great Britain (finances, education, land management, etc.) (Davidson 1991). 1853 Successful opposition to the Wentworth plan aiming to create an English-style House of Lords. 1854 Eureka Rebellion at Ballarat (Victoria). The miners confront the government’s army. Mythical event, one of the first symbols of the emerging nation.

1840–60 The AntiTransportation League fails. Projects of an Imperial Federation.

1850 Defeat of the Australian League. 1850 on (Defeated) opposition to the granting of responsible government to the colonies.

Political Emancipation and National Identity in Australia

Acts of rupture, of national emancipation 1855 Responsible government granted to New South Wales and to Victoria as well as to South Australia and to Tasmania (1856), later to Queensland (1860) and to Western Australia (1890). 1868 Prisoner deportation stops. End of penal society. All Australians (save the Aboriginals?) are free subjects. 1870 Last British troops leave Australia. 1871 Launch of the Australian Natives Association, which fights for Australian identity, emancipated from imperial symbolism. 1884–85 Strong opposition to sending Australian soldiers to Sudan in aid of Great Britain. 1885 The Federal Council of Australasia is created, prefiguring the Commonwealth of 1900. It fails.

1887 The Republican Union (then League) is created. It advocates severing the colonial tie. A rather marginal movement.

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Acts of Continuity, Signs of the surviving colonial tie

1860 on The class of large property owners resists a second egalitarian movement inspired by the example of the Yeomen.

1885 New South Wales sends a contingent of more than 700 men to Sudan to give military support to London’s imperial policy. During these and the following years: the imperial federation movement wields considerable influence; it seeks to integrate Australia into the Empire (e.g., the Imperial Federation League [1885–91]). Regional branches are created. Some of these survive until the middle of the twentieth century (in London: the Round Table Group).

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Acts of rupture, of national emancipation

Acts of Continuity, Signs of the surviving colonial tie

1888–1915 The Australian government’s legislation during this period reveals the formation of a distinctive national identity (Clark 1981).

1899–1902 Involvement in the Boer War in South Africa (16,500 men enlisted) at Britain’s side. 1900 Involvement in the Boxer War in China to support Great Britain and other European countries. 1800–1900 During all these years, the word “home” refers to Great Britain (where many Australians dream of ending their days). In politics, the expression used is “home government.” 1901 Commonwealth Act: result of a compromise between opposing tendencies: contains numerous elements of loyalty towards Great Britain, which retains significant powers and its entire symbolic array (e.g., viceroy, national anthem, monarchical references, etc.). As in the earlier federation projects, many Australians construe the union of the colonies as a means of drawing closer to the Empire and to London. 1901 White Australia Policy. Affirmation of collective identity, which, admittedly, strengthens Australian nationhood but also the whole legacy of British race and culture. 1905 Institution of Empire Day.

1901 Unification of the six Australian colonies by virtue of the Commonwealth Act, which takes effect 1 January. One of the nation’s founding acts (the main one, perhaps). Some union projects had failed before (1849, 1885). Australia comprises six member states. It becomes a dominion. 1901 White Australia Policy (Immigration Restriction Bill). Racist policy in immigration. Vindication of a national identity. 1903 High Court created. But the (London) Privy Council remains the highest court of appeal.

Political Emancipation and National Identity in Australia

Acts of rupture, of national emancipation 1908–13 Creation of a naval fleet intended to replace the Royal Navy. 1910–11 Beginning of a land army. 1911 Institution of Australia Day (in response to Empire Day). 1914–18 Involvement in the First World War is an occasion of national affirmation (ANZAC, Gallipoli). Another major founding act of the Australian nation. 1916–17 Negative results of two referenda on conscription. 1918 on After the war, London does not recognize the merit that Australia believes it displayed on the battlefield; this provokes a strong anti-British backlash. 1920 on Criticism of the Empire in economic and intellectual circles. Empire Day falls out of public favour.

1923 Imperial conference in London. Elements of autonomy in foreign policy. 1926 Balfour Declaration, then proclamation in London of the Statute of Westminster (1931).

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Acts of Continuity, Signs of the surviving colonial tie

1914–18 Significant involvement in the First World War, at Great Britain’s side and under its command (60,000 dead).

1920 on Failure of Australian naval policy, deemed too costly. The imperial fleet prevails once more. London comes close to enlisting Australia (without consultation) in another conflict in the Dardanelles. The Australian marines collaborate in British operations in China.

1930 on With respect to foreign affairs, Australia is still dependent on London, which takes important decisions without consultation.

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Acts of rupture, of national emancipation

Acts of Continuity, Signs of the surviving colonial tie

1931 I.A. Isaacs becomes the first native governor general of Australia. 1931 End of the British Empire. The Commonwealth is created.

1931 Given its British sensibilities, Australia delays ratification of the Statute of Westminster. 1932 In New South Wales, the British governor, Philip Game, is unhappy with the policies implemented by Prime Minister Jack Lang and dismisses him. 1939–45 Australia participates massively in the Second World War, in support of Great Britain (975,000 soldiers, 34,000 dead).11

1939–45 Australia adopts economic policies contrary to the interest of Great Britain (Tsokhas 1994). 1942 Ratification of the Statute of Westminster confers legal autonomy on Australia in matters of international law. The fall of Singapore causes Australia to turn to the United States to guarantee its defence. 1945 Definitive separation of all the Australian and British armed forces. 1945 on Australia displays increasing independence in conducting its external affairs. Confrontations with Great Britain. 1948 First law of citizenship. Up until then, all Australians had been British subjects. 1949 (Short-lived) attempt to institute an Australian passport.

1950 Return to British passport. 1950 on Reinforced pro-British sentiment under Menzies. The majority of governors general and lieutenant-governors are still British.

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Acts of rupture, of national emancipation 1951 anzus Treaty. Military cooperation (and protection) pact between Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Britain is excluded from it. 1950–1960 Various institutions become “Australianized”: the “Church of England” becomes the “Anglican Church in Australia”; the “British Medical Association” becomes the “Australian Medical Association”; etc. 1960–70 English system of measurements is abandoned in favour of the metric system. 1960 on Continuing decline of Empire Day (Queen Victoria’s birthday) and concomitant rise of ANZAC Day (memory of First World War Australian heroes). 1965 Decline of imperial vestiges in Asia: withdrawal of the last governor general of Malaysia.

1966 English currency is abandoned. Introduction of the Australian dollar. 1967 Restrictions introduced to the right to appeal to the Privy Council in London. 1969 All the inhabitants of the country become Australian citizens. Definitive implementation of Australian passport (as of 1972, with no reference to Great Britain).

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Acts of Continuity, Signs of the surviving colonial tie

1955 Controversy over the national anthem: Menzies government confirms status quo. 1955 Out of solidarity with Great Britain, Australia participates in military operations in Malaysia. 1960–70 Failure of various plans to secure a flag more closely identified with Australia.

1963 Australia participates, at Britain’s side, in military operations in Borneo. 1965 On the occasion of Churchill’s death, a Churchill Fund is created to which Australians contribute more (per capita) than the British themselves (Butts 1970, 101).

1970 ff. The main Australian institutions (courts, school system, friendly societies, etc.) still reproduce the British model.

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Acts of rupture, of national emancipation

Acts of Continuity, Signs of the surviving colonial tie 1975 The governor general dismisses Gough Whitlam’s Labor (and nationalist) government.

1984 New citizenship law, abolishing privileges hitherto granted to British subjects. 1984 “Advance Australia Fair” becomes the national anthem of Australia, replacing “God Save the Queen.” 1986 Australia Act. End of appeals lodged with the London Privy Council; Australian courts are henceforward sovereign. 1990ff. Closer ties with Asian countries. Strong republican ambitions. Referendum projected for 1999 on the transformation of the country into a republic.

1995 The Howard government checks the foreign policy of integration with Asia, stressing once more relations with Great Britain, the European continent, and the Western hemisphere. 1998 The presence of British culture and symbols remains very important.12 1999 Negative response to the referendum proposing the conversion of the country into a republic.

Clearly, this reconstruction remains partial and somewhat clumsy as an indicator of continuity and rupture. A more detailed presentation, at the level of transactions and less official initiatives within everyday Australian-British political life, would better represent the halting, hesitant pace of the drawn-out movement of disengagement. Here are some examples of the episodes I deliberately left out of the chart so as not to overload it. In 1887, the Jubilee Celebration of Queen Victoria generated acute dissension between London and the six colonies. In

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1887–88, the Australian colonies’ opposition to Chinese immigration annoyed China and adversely affected Great Britain’s interests there; a compromise was reached. During the same period, as Germany appeared to be on the verge of annexing a part of New Guinea, Queensland worried about this military presence and declared the coveted territory to be a British possession. Embarrassed yet again, London had difficulty re-establishing the status quo. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Australia’s racist immigration policy once again sparked a crisis. This time, it was India that displayed its displeasure. Since the Empire was multi-ethnic, London opposed these discriminatory measures in principle, particularly when they annoyed its commercial partners. Here too, Great Britain had to put pressure on Australian leaders. In the same vein, it is also worth noting the legal dispute over British commercial navigation in Australian territorial waters. The conflict was resolved in 1921, when Australia’s jurisdiction prevailed over London’s. But within a year, and without consultation, London almost involved Australia in a military incident against the Turks in Asia Minor. Admittedly, seen from this vantage point, the timeline somewhat blurs the dynamic of the broad historical forces, and it becomes practically impossible to understand the movement that drives the erosion of the colonial tie over the long term. These episodes remain meaningful, however. Let us now grapple with the ideas, agents, and factors that determined the shape of the timeline. Ideas, Actors, and Structures Most authors agree that Australian intellectual history did not give rise to the production of major ideological systems or to original social thought. If this is so, then one is tempted to see this culture’s deep dependency on British tradition as a primary factor. Moreover, it has often been pointed out (wrongly or rightly) that the pragmatism inherent in the Australian temperament did not predispose it towards speculative projects, hence the prejudice from which (Australian) intellectual life is said to have perennially suffered.13 Whatever the case, the socio-political and cultural life of Australia is no less wrought of ideas and beliefs; in their name, generations of leaders sought to build the nation, while struggling mightily with each other. These ideas were connected to currents of thought, to class interests and to class oppositions that have to be addressed to the extent that they reveal the driving elements of a twofold evolution in the colonial

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relationship, torn, as we have seen, between emancipation and fidelity to the mother country. In this latter sense, the colonial (or imperial) status quo found support among the business elites, who were traditionally very British in mentality and manners, great admirers and imitators of the gentry, and moreover very economically dependent on London. This was as true of the urban industrialists and bankers as of the owners of big sheep farms who sold almost all their products to Great Britain. The upper ranks of the civil service shared these views, especially during the nineteenth century (Neale 1972, chap. 5). In general, one can say that the urban elites were very attached to the Empire and to Europe, in part to shield themselves from the reputation for philistinism that dogged Australians very early on (Hamer 1990, chap. 3). Certain intellectuals, notably those who participated in the Round Table Group (Foster 1983), hardly felt any affinity with the rugged spirit of the bush, where a feeling of Australian identity and independence flourished. London tropism was so pronounced among some representatives of the elites that they were constantly the butt of sarcasm.14 In addition, the prestige and legitimacy they derived from their loyalty to the Crown and to the glorious Empire drowned out all feeling of alienation or subordination among many of them. Finally, the colonial tie proffered a military security that most Australians experienced as a cruel necessity in the Pacific. This brings us to the most material sources of ideologies and political choices. The military factor must indeed be considered first. With China, Japan, and Russia as neighbours, Australia felt a deep sense of insecurity. Up until the second half of the twentieth century, the fear of being invaded (in particular by Japan) was a constant of national political life. Traditionally, Great Britain, with its imposing naval power, provided the much-desired protection. Second, Australia’s economy was long dependent on London for imports, commercial outlets, capital, and technology. On different levels, other factors encouraged continuity. Immigration, which was largely English, Scottish, and Irish until the Second World War, is a case in point. Moreover, Australians felt very isolated culturally in their Asiatic environment and experienced an acute need to maintain their ties with European civilization, and especially with the prestigious British tradition. Finally, Australia’s close-knit tie to the Empire made it a part of one of history’s greatest deployments of economic and military power.

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The combination of all of these factors no doubt makes it possible to explain one of the most fascinating episodes of Australia’s past – namely, the reversal that followed the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 and parallel vestiges of the colonial bond. The history of the colonies after the granting of responsible governments and the first gold rush seemed to lead inexorably towards political independence, especially after the sequence of events that culminated in the merging of the six colonies. Culturally as well, as we shall see, the collective identity and nationalism had never been so strong. But since Loyalism reemerged, the first years of the twentieth century did not keep these promises. The economic difficulties at the end of the century,15 aggravated by the great drought of 1896 and by Japan’s assertion of its military power, recalled how important it was to be able to call on Britain for assistance. Simultaneously, the euphoria over national identity was perhaps somewhat dampened by Lane’s defeat in Paraguay, where he had attempted to transplant the Australian dream. Furthermore, successful involvement in the military expedition in South Africa fanned imperial pride and the vision of a great world power. However, the backlash that followed the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia shows most clearly the heterogeneity of the ideological narratives that led up to it. For some, the merging of the colonies was an important step in the direction of autonomy. For others, it placed Australia in a better position to be a more active partner within the Empire. Everyone rejoiced in the Commonwealth therefore and, for somewhat opposing reasons, derived from it an equal national pride. After all, these dreams were not truly contradictory, given the geopolitical constraints that weighed upon Australia. A focus on emancipation rather than continuity brings to light an equally coherent, but nonetheless quite different, way of discussing the history of the country. We have seen that the Australian past can be viewed in terms of a gradual separation as well as of continuity. This second perspective also opens onto a rich analysis of ideas, actors, and factors. As we have seen, the timeline of events marking disengagement begins quite early in Australia’s history and, until recently, forms an uninterrupted narrative. Nonetheless, it would be futile to search for signs of a great revolutionary ideology that vigorously and persistently orchestrated and sustained all acts of rupture by directing them towards the supreme goal of independence. Nationalist feelings, yes, along with strong regionalisms; strategic alliances of different interests; hostile views

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of London, of the monarchy, and of the Empire; sources of disquiet; shifts in mood and conjuncture; but no genuine systems of thought or unifying and lasting utopias such as those found in the history of the United States, for example, or in the national liberation struggles in Latin America. There is no Australian Jefferson, Bolívar, O’Connell, or Papineau. According to W.G. McMinn (1979, chap. 3), the advent of responsible government in New South Wales is better explained by the confluence of tendencies and circumstances, of personalities, ambitions and frustrations, than by the efficacy of a strong, highly articulate and militant ideology. Similarly, it would be unrealistic to seek to account for the formation of the Commonwealth by regarding it as the culminating point of a long struggle for democracy – even if such aspirations clearly did exist in Australia during the nineteenth century. The abrupt mode is not in the Australian political tradition, which tends more or less towards the orchestrated or programmed sequence of small victories unfolding at key junctures. The timeline of ruptures presented earlier speaks volumes in this respect. It can be substantiated in multiple ways. Thus, the prisoners deported to Australia and their immediate descendants nurtured a feeling of hostility towards Great Britain for decades, perceiving themselves as victims of injustice and intolerance. This feeling was channelled into various events where Australia’s interests conflicted with those of the mother country (Neal 1991; Kercher 1997). Various authors have also shown how the population of New South Wales (and particularly the representatives of convicts and liberated men) throughout the first half of the nineteenth century deployed the legal institutions of the metropolis and all the philosophy that underpinned it (Magna Carta, Bill of Rights, etc.) to its own benefit in order to obtain more freedoms. The power to take legal action was obtained first, then the courts were used to reduce the discretionary power of the governors, the military, and the big land owners. The pragmatic use of the judicial system made it an instrument for modifying power relations. In the same vein, the efficient action of certain liberal administrators, even though they were on London’s payroll, contributed to advancing the cause of the colonies. For example, Governor Macquarie (1809–21) on several occasions defended the interests of New South Wales against those of Great Britain. This was also true of Governor Richard Bourque, who sided with the small property owners in the 1830s against the aims of the metropolis on issues relating to the occupation of Crown lands. To a slightly lesser degree perhaps, this was equally the case of George Grey, who was

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governor of South Australia between 1841 and 1845. During the same era, W.C. Wentworth was among the local politicians of New South Wales. His name is associated with Australian “affirmationism” and the struggle for responsible government. He was another example of a militant liberal, at least in the first part of his career.16 As we see in more detail in another section, a powerful cultural ferment that fuelled the symbolism of collective identity and nationalist aspirations also runs through the whole history of the Australian people. In this respect, it is first necessary to mention that a large part of the population felt a strong attachment to the continent even though it was so austere and so many had been discouraged by it. Yet, its very immensity, the freedom it offered, the marvels and resources discovered within it, combined with those of the imagination, all contributed to a feeling of belonging. Those factors combined with the enthusiasm of the explorer and the pioneer, so characteristic of new collectivities. This attitude was expressed by numerous figures throughout Australia’s history, right up to the present day: the feeling of being a young society on a new territory, with a great future, on the threshold of a promisefilled destiny. Among some, these perceptions combined with a critical stance towards old Europe, with its string of wars and horrors.17 The whole nationalist current, especially from the second half of the nineteenth century on, proceeded in the same direction, touching both the political class and the common people. What might be called “Australianity” developed quite early on in the lowest social strata, among migrants in the bush (bushmen, bushrangers, gold diggers, and all proletarians of the outback), as well as among urban workers. Starting in the 1870s, the trade union movement became the herald of these representations, which the Labor Party (that took off in early 1890s) subsequently introduced into the highest levels of political life. According to J.B. Hirst (1984), Australian Labor had a much broader working-class base than its British ancestor, hence the power that it embodied in affirming national identity. In addition to trade union strength, the popular base of Australian nationalism throughout the nineteenth century comprised convicts, freed men, and their descendants, who preserved the memory of the deportations and of anti-British resentment (Hughes 1987). There were also the Irish nationals who had brought to Australia their old enmity towards London.18 To these may be added the British trade union activists, who had also been expelled and exiled to Australia, and all the other marginalized elements (Dissenters, Chartists, Fenians, etc.) who contributed

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to feeding radical thought. From the early twentieth century on, nationalism broadened its social base by reaching out to the middle class, which gradually became an important actor in the promotion of Australianity. Finally, the Catholic Church contributed indirectly to the development of an Australian political culture. In its efforts to unify Catholics of diverse origins, it believed that a strong sense of belonging to the new continent could be an effective common denominator (O’Farrell 1968).19 On another level, structural and conjunctural factors contributed to reinforcing the dynamic of disengagement (rupture). These factors are numerous and varied, and it would be difficult to provide a detailed account of the way they combined with each other. Such a task exceeds the objectives of this essay and, as in the preceding section, I shall simply recall several essential facts. First, on the demographic level, even though people of British origin have always made up the majority of Australia’s population, their relative weight has never ceased to diminish. Throughout the nineteenth century, the proportion of Australians born in Great Britain fell by half, dropping from 52.4 percent in 1851 to 25.3 percent in 1891 (Sherington 1980, 59). In the twentieth century, especially from the 1940s on, this continuous decline combined with a significant diversification of immigrants’ places of origin. Thus, Australia had 7.5 million inhabitants in 1947, and 12.5 million in 1969; during the same period, it received 2.5 million immigrants of mainly European, but non-British, origin. In the years that followed, immigrants were increasingly recruited from various Asian and African countries (see below, “The Mutant Nation”), such that by the end of the twentieth century, Australia could no longer be considered – and saw itself less and less as – a replica of Great Britain, or even as a piece of old Europe. The economy followed a similar course. When British financiers pulled their capital out of Australia in the 1890s because of the international economic crisis, Australians became keenly aware of their vulnerability and of the need to restructure the economy so as to make it more self-sufficient, while diversifying its sources of dependency. This concern remained constant throughout the twentieth century, and the last decades were particularly crucial in this respect. By 1970, the United States had become the country’s greatest supplier of tools and heavy machinery. In the same era, Japan was the main importer of Australian products. Between 1972 and 1993, while Great Britain became increasingly integrated into the European economy, the share

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of Australian exports to Asian countries rose from 40 percent to 58 percent (Tweedie 1994). With respect to investments, the United States has been the main source of capital since 1965, whereas Great Britain had been by far the chief supplier ten years before (five times more than the United States). At the same time, as noted above, military considerations have always played a pre-eminent role in arbitrating political relations with the mother country. They have often caused Australia to tighten its links with London, but on various occasions they have also had the opposite effect. In the late nineteenth century, the Australian colonies were anxious about the European (particularly French and German) presence in the Pacific. Also, defence was one of the themes of the first Federal Conference, which, in February 1890, officially launched the operation that led to the colonies’ merger in the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. However, in spite of its ambiguities and rather conservative orientations, we know that, in the long run, the federation clearly opened up Australia’s path to autonomy. In the years that preceded the First World War, concerns of a military kind led to other initiatives (establishment of a naval force as of 1908 and a plan, in 1913, for a national army). In the Pacific, Japan became an increasing threat following its two victories over Russia in 1905. In Europe, Great Britain was preparing to confront Germany. At one point, Australia even contemplated seeking protection from the American fleet instead of the British one (Crowley 1974, 291–93). But the so-called Great War returned things to the status quo. Australia aligned itself once more with the mother country, in spite of important internal divisions. The Second World War changed everything. Australians understood then that Great Britain, increasingly consumed by the urgent situation in Europe, no longer possessed the necessary strength to protect its partners in the Empire, that Australia was, in a sense, left to its own Asiatic fate. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 was a first signal. But it was especially the British defeat in Singapore in 1942, still at the hands of the Japanese, which signalled the end of a world (sealed in 1969 by the withdrawal of British troops east of the Suez Canal). At that point, Australia realized how precarious its situation had become, and it lived, more than ever, in fear of a Japanese attack.20 Finally, the American fleet and air force saved the country. Emerging from this experience, Australia had changed its military guardian for good: it moved from British to American dependency. However, this time the new relation took, at least in theory, the form of a contract based on

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parity. Australia furthermore nursed grievances towards London given the authoritarian way in which the latter had conducted wartime operations, scarcely consulting Australian authorities, and later failing to acknowledge Australians’ contribution at the front, thus repeating what had happened after the First World War.21 Finally, as Geoffrey Blainey has shown (1968), distance strongly affected Australian history. Sixteen thousand kilometres away from Great Britain, the elites long strove to recreate their place of origin. In this sense, the tyranny of distance helped secure the colonial tie politically as well as culturally. But, conversely, it also contributed to transforming and finally eroding this tie. Somewhat in spite of itself, Australia gradually drew sustenance from its own continental reality, from its own experiences, from its geopolitical specificity. Its sense of belonging and its relationships gradually shifted to the Pacific. The country went through a wave of pro-British feeling during the 1950s, with the Menzies government; but it proved superficial and short-lived. By that time, disengagement had become structurally embedded. Emancipation, Australian-Style Taken as a whole, the episodes evoked thus far bring to light a particular style of emancipation, in which the colonial bond slowly crumbles away in an extended sequence of slippages, of movements back and forth, and in which radical turns, traumas, and spectacular breaks are avoided. The political history of this country, as I have stressed, is remarkably free of revolutionary intrigue, head-on contestations, insurrectional thoughts and after-thoughts. It was always made up of two intertwining narratives calibrated in such a way that neither, at any moment, could drive out the other – but also in such a way that one gradually gained at the other’s expense. Reading T.B. Millar (1978), one can see that foreign affairs may be the area in which this dual dynamic surfaced most clearly. Ambivalence is one of the most pronounced features of the Australian past, along with syncretism, restraint, compromise, and pragmatism. Touring Australia after the Second World War, Laurence Olivier was stunned to discover a country at once so different from his own and so similar.22 One must remember that, even now, while no one would doubt Australia’s independence or its political and cultural maturity, the country still retains many traces of its former colonial status: the heritage of language, religion, ideologies, several important institutions, as well as civility. Even politically, Great Britain still remains

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very present: the Queen is still the head of state, represented by the governor general and the governors. The country is still ruled by a constitution enacted as a law by Westminster; the Union Jack retains its place on the national flag, and so on (see above, note 12). In 1966, in his The Australian Legend, Russell Ward (1966, 56) could write that the growth of patriotism in Australia had scarcely affected its attachment to the mother country. And, some years later, another influential historian claimed that Australia had not overcome its dependency on London, that it had not reached the political maturity necessary to become a nation, and that it did not constitute an autonomous society (McQueen 1973). At the same time, a great many authors asserted the opposite. Is it not remarkable that so fundamental a reality should lend itself to such divergent appraisals? One must read this as the sign, among other things, of the ambivalent disengagement noted earlier. There are other instances of ambivalence. Those who, in the 1840s, demanded the abolition of the deportation of convicts and the institution of “free” immigration, officially struggled for a normalization of relations with Great Britain; but in reality, being more “royalist than the Queen,”23 they acted in the name of public morality and simply worried about building a society that would be worthy of their mother country. An analysis of some important political figures of the nineteenth century, including architects of the Commonwealth of Australia, would show the complex nature of these characters, torn between seemingly contradictory motives, ideas, and actions. Among these was Henry Parkes, who arrived in New South Wales in 1839 at the age of twenty-four. Journalist, radical militant, and politician, he was a strong defender of an Australian emergence; at the same time, however, he always remained a fervent defender of British heritage and continuity. The Commonwealth of 1901 itself was another particularly complex episode full of just about everything and its opposite. Its laborious birth was measured out in tumultuous conferences, the outcome of which was quite uncertain. The negotiation of the act gave rise to many conflicts, which the spirit of compromise ultimately resolved. Embedded, at the time, within the opposing aims of the contending groups, these conflicts continued to be reflected in the divergent developments that followed. This being said, the Commonwealth of Australia can in several ways be presented as a break, as the country’s founding event. In spite of its ambiguities, the union of the six colonies constituted a necessary step on the road leading to independence. It granted each of the partners more economic, political, and military strength. It gave

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the new political entity authority over all its internal affairs, including currency, customs, immigration, and defence. It gave birth in the Pacific to an interlocutor endowed with greater legitimacy in London’s eyes. In addition, it was largely inspired by the constitutional history of the United States (Else-Mitchell 1976), and it marked the culmination of economic and social stirrings that, since the gold rush, had spawned the formation of a first middle class, the democratization of the political system (e.g., secret ballot and universal suffrage), the modernization of society, and the growth of nationalism. This whole evolution (brilliantly summarized in Steffin 1983) gave substance to the new collectivity and fed into a feeling of confidence and national belonging. Yet, if one reverses the perspective, the union of the colonies appears in a quite different light. For an authority such as C.M.H. Clark (1981), for example, the Commonwealth of Australia in a sense enshrined the failure of the nineteenth-century nationalist movement and the – at least temporary – triumph of the advocates of a new Britannia in Australia. The victory of the Anglo-Australian continuists was, indeed, evident in several clauses of the Constitution Act, as mentioned earlier (e.g., considerable powers held by London, imitation of British institutions, and the Privy Council’s precedence, etc.), and the new nation was very incomplete in several respects: it did not have a national anthem, army, or navy, and it borrowed most of its rituals from the mother country, whether in the courts, universities, and churches or with regard to civil decorations. Significantly too, the agreement reached between the colonies had to be ratified (in May 1900) by a law of the British Parliament. In short, this constitutional accord can, admittedly, be seen as the Australian nation’s act of emancipation, but it can equally be seen as an act of integration into the Empire, wherein the newly acquired autonomy had, in a sense, been invested. In the same vein, with respect to the ambivalent tendencies associated with Australia’s political past, it is also worth noting the White Policy, adopted in 1901 and only revoked in 1973. As we shall see, this law designed specifically to limit immigration from Asia (especially China) stemmed from a concern to develop the Australian “race” by isolating it from its Asiatic environment; in this way, the policy stressed the country’s singularity in the Pacific and furnished important material for collective identity. But, in the same thrust, it helped reinforce the British heritage and maintain the country within Europe’s orbit. In the same way, participation in the Boer War and in the First World War reaffirmed the colonial tie, although it was also an opportunity for

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self-affirmation from which Australians subsequently derived their nation’s founding myths. In regard to the 1914–18 conflict in particular, H. McQueen (1986, 18, 21, passim) has pointed out that some fervent nationalists advocated their country’s commitment beside Great Britain, hoping precisely that this experience would raise Australians’ self-awareness and fill them with the collective confidence that they lacked. The episode of the Statute of Westminster, passed in London in 1931 but only ratified in 1942 by the Australian Parliament, offers another example of the conservative, incremental approach to breaking the link with Great Britain. Canberra delayed in ratifying the statute for fear of antagonizing Great Britain, from which it still expected adequate military protection. Australia did not move on this until the events of the Pacific War had clearly established that it was time to change guardians, to replace one dependency with another. In a parallel area, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation only relaxed its unrelenting conformity to the British standard in the 1960s, finally allowing the Australian accent to be heard on the air due to a concern with authenticity. However, as S. Alomes believes (1988, 181), it remains likely that this apparent concession to national identity only reproduced an earlier decision by the bbc itself to allow regional accents in some of its programs. Finally, sport was a key arena for the affirmation of the national character, but simultaneously, the sports practised were all borrowed from the British tradition (e.g., cricket, rugby, tennis, football, rowing, etc.) (Vampley and Stoddart 1994). In the light of all these facts, it is possible to view more clearly the way the colonial tie evolved so as to gradually give rise to a state and a feeling of nationhood. A first important characteristic can be found in the divergence between most members of the elite, who generally turned towards the mother country, and the common people, who more readily immersed in the continental reality and identified with its original evolution.24 Several authors (Vance Palmer, Russell Ward, Stephen Alomes, and others) have furthermore emphasized that this first cleavage coincided with a geographical divide: from the end of the nineteenth century on, particularly in New South Wales, cities perpetuated British culture, while, far from town, the rural interior favoured the emergence of a culture cut off from the old heritage and nurtured by the experiences and resonances of the bush. A poem by Henry Lawson is often quoted in this regard. Written in 1892, it pits the “landlords of the cities” against the “Natives of the Land” (Ward 1966, 227). Admittedly, this dichotomy was clearly not absolute: the

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urban working class did not share the vision of the elites, and a very conservative landed bourgeoisie was present in the interior. Another feature consists in disengagement through displacement or substitution. As the experience of other new collectivities shows, a transfer of metropolitan allegiances seems to have the effect of accelerating the awakening of national consciousness and the movement towards independence – as though the fact of repudiating the first dependency subsequently made it easier to reject the new one. Australia experienced a first change of this kind when its participation within the Empire was used to conceal its colonial tie to Great Britain. A second change followed the Second World War, when it placed itself in a double (military and economic) dependency on the United States. A third shift has perhaps been under way since the 1980s, as the dynamic of economic exchanges has progressively integrated the country into its Asiatic environment. The relatively harmonious, almost discrete way in which Australia has cast off most of its colonial status calls attention to the way London has managed relations with this collectivity since the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is indeed absolutely remarkable that the Australian state could have been born without a trace of (or will to) insurrection. This result may in part be attributed to the shrewdness of the British administration, which had probably learned from the American War of Independence. To begin with, out of a spirit of economic liberalism, London granted the colonial elite some autonomy. Second, the integration of the colonies into the Empire (whatever the ultimate aim and conditions of integration were) officially turned them into partners in a great worldwide adventure from which each could extract its share of the glory: did it not bolster the ego to believe that one was associated with a great epic that was spreading liberty, progress, civilization, and wealth around the world, making its unprecedented power felt everywhere and demonstrating the superiority of the British “race”? This may be the main root of the ambivalence of Australia’s political history as well as of that of other British colonies. The imperial horizon covered – and for some transformed, even erased – the colonial tie. Many Australians could thus comfortably cultivate their British and imperial allegiance, while calling themselves nationalists; they were convinced that they were building their country and broadening its sphere of influence, and this, thanks to their membership in the Empire and not in spite of it.25 The Empire’s fate was coupled with that of the new nation: the more powerful the first, the more secure the other’s independence.

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Only an argument of this kind could explain how an Australia, increasingly concerned with its autonomy, could have been so deeply involved in the British/imperial wars. It would be wrong to construe this exclusively as a subterfuge because, in following this path, Australia effectively cast off its colonial status, at least to a large extent, and ensured its own development. Added to what might be called the “Empire’s alibi” was the British administration’s pragmatism, through which the colony’s gains very often served the interests of the metropolis. A few examples will suffice. As of the 1820s, London found it advantageous to slow down deportations in favour of free (“assisted”) immigration, more likely to stimulate the pastoral economy, especially in Southern Australia and in the State of Victoria; with a better workforce, the colonies could better supply the textile industry of the metropolis. Similarly, the federative demands of the 1840–60 period, which are associated with the granting of responsible government, coincided with a new policy in London: henceforth, the latter preferred, for the good of the Empire, to negotiate with real partners (who were in any case not very threatening) rather than with passive and overly dependent societies. The same applies to the Commonwealth of 1901, which Great Britain had itself encouraged and approved in the hope that merging the colonies would turn Australia into a more powerful partner. In the short run, Britain hoped for economic benefits; in addition, it expected that the new Dominion would be able henceforth to contribute more to its own military protection. Great Britain’s decline had begun and its tradition of free trade gradually gave way to protectionism, a consequence of competition from new industrial powers, such as the United States and Germany (Dunn 1984, 77–78). As I said, it must also be added that London had quite clearly learned the lessons of 1776 here too, just as it had had to take note of the 1837–38 Rebellions in Canada. It therefore strove, by pursuing a policy of concessions and compromise in which all the partners (itself included) could reap a benefit, to avoid unwisely fuelling radicalism in the colonies. Finally, thanks to its prestige and power, London could be sure of keeping the upper hand in its relations with its new partner. But one could also show that, by moving in such a way as to avert too blunt a confrontation with the metropolis, Australia itself paralleled London’s moderate administration. The institutional tinkering that rather effectively replaced the revolutionary way furnishes several examples of this. Witness, for instance, the curious plan put forward

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in the 1960s to eliminate the position of governor general and to have an administrator fulfill exactly the same duties, with no more power, but with no link to London, all the while keeping the monarchy’s symbolism intact. In short, the ambivalent history of Australian disengagement (“the world’s slowest revolution,” as it was sometimes described) is the product of a very complex and delicate process in which imperial and local nationalisms constantly intersected: that is, a conservative, pro-British narrative and another one that pushed for autonomy. Over the long term, the latter finally won out, but its realization owes nothing to determinism or to any more or less mechanical scenario.26 It would be futile, indeed, to seek the invisible hand that engineered the emergence of the Australian state in installments over two hundred years. A summary of the elements presented in the preceding pages highlights the following factors: The gradual decline of Great Britain’s economic and military power compelled it to adopt a conciliatory policy towards its colonies. • The structural evolution of the world economy wrested Australia from its dependency on Britain by drawing it first to the side of the United States and then to the side of Asia. • The integration of the colonies as partners in the Empire turned the latter into a powerful alibi, which allowed radical Australian nationalism to be contained until the Second World War. But the British Commonwealth of 1931 did not keep the Empire’s promises, and Australia’s ethnic diversification after 1945 eroded the tradition of fidelity to the British heritage. •

In the remainder of the analysis, we must bear in mind that this method of protracted, or graduated, emancipation had two major consequences for the collective imaginary. First, Australian consciousness lacked the symbolic staple that a heroic and transcendent founding act would have afforded, and from which it would have created a vibrant mythology. Second, because of London’s policy of conciliation, nationalism was never really translated into a political movement seeking a radical break; it was contained principally within the social (egalitarian aspirations) and cultural (the quest for collective identity) spheres. It has been necessary to lay out this history in order to bring out the conditions under which the symbolic appropriation of the continent

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and the formation of nationhood unfolded. These events are the focus of the three parts that follow.

the symbolic appropriation of the continent After the political narrative, we come to the cultural narrative and, more precisely, to: (1) the ways and images by which the people and the elites perceive themselves and their relation to the continent;27 (2) the establishment of putatively shared references, which draw now on the New World and now on the Old; and finally (3) the attempts at defining what the future of this collectivity might be, all of which are most often expressed in the form of utopia. Considered from this angle, the culture of the new collectivity aims to place its occupants in a symbiotic relation with their environment, to create resonances and empathy between them, and simultaneously to establish a sense of belonging and solidarity. In a first instance, this symbolic work was achieved within language, although here, the elites generally took pains to reproduce the British standard and British manner. It was among the people especially that departures from the norm of the mother country first appeared in words, sounds, and meanings. The phenomenon was reported as early as the 1820s by members of the elites, who were indignant and sought in vain to stem this “degradation” (Clark 1972). Towards the end of the century, Australian English was sufficiently differentiated to be invoked as a mark of collective identity. It was at that time that a few novelists began to write in the language of the people. During the same period, the language began to be studied for itself, in a positive spirit inspired by European philosophy (Turner 1966, chap. 2). These facts show that the legitimization of popular speech had begun quite early among members of the intelligentsia (admittedly a minority of them). In 1924, the Australian Oxford Pocket Dictionary appeared under the editorship of Grahame Johnston. Later, in the 1940s, S.J. Baker demonstrated in numerous publications that the Australian language displayed great originality and had won its autonomy. This conclusion was then nuanced, notably in 1966 by Ramson, who stressed that British norms maintained a considerable hold in Australia. Here again, it is clearly necessary to take into account the antinomy between the elites and the common people. It was during these years that the language

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of the latter made two important gains: first, in 1956, it was heard for the first time in the theatre, then, during the 1960s, as I have already mentioned, it went on the air. The unfolding symbolic conquest of the continent followed the great explorations of the nineteenth century and the peregrinations of the bushrangers, often former convicts, who roamed the hinterland wherever they could find work in large ranches, in mining (as gold diggers), or in the kangaroo hunt.28 From the 1850s on, this environment produced the noted ballads that were to become one of the most popular genres in Australian culture. This quite remarkable phenomenon has been studied by numerous scholars, in particular V. Palmer (1954, chap. 3) and R. Ward (1966). According to these authors, the ballads and other songs expressed the soul of the people for the first time, capturing the features and gestures of everyday life in the bush and the mine, as well as the wayfaring life in a hostile setting that placed men (the bush was a predominantly male universe) on an equal footing of poverty and fostered solidarity for the sake of survival. Andrew “Banjo” Paterson, who was, at the turn of the century, one of the most prolific composers (Semmler 1977), is also the author of the song “Waltzing Matilda” (1895), which very quickly established itself as a national symbol and several times almost became Australia’s official national anthem.29 Its lyrics express the bushman’s ruggedness and irreverence towards all authority. Love of freedom, fearlessness, pragmatism, aversion to privilege, solidarity with peers (the “swells,” “chums,” and “old hands”), caustic humour, unruliness, the sense of equality, a good dose of skepticism, and extreme virility bordering on misogyny – such are the most celebrated mythic features of the bush dweller and, by extension, of the Australian people. Legendary figures have exemplified this stereotype: Ned Kelly (the most famous of all, a kind of Robin Hood), Ben Hall, Daniel Morgan, Sydney Bob, and others, all highwaymen and heroes of the bush.30 A powerful imaginary took root in this environment, which was conducive to adventure and (no doubt in equal measure) spinning yarns. Feeding off it was an oral culture that would soon become part of the emerging national literature. Indeed, several authors situate in the last quarter of the nineteenth century the birth of a true continental literature characterized by a high degree of autonomy and serving uniquely Australian themes, the source of original creations. Scholars underscore the very conventional character of literary productions prior to this period; they too easily bowed before the British standard and were content to imitate both

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the style and themes of their models.31 The writers of the time described even the landscapes in the cold language of the Enlightenment, while carefully avoiding any disclosure of the subject’s emotion (Heseltine 1986, 4ff). It has been argued that this literature was already old at birth. In a poem written in 1832, W.C. Wentworth spoke of Australia as a “new Britannia in another World.” The following year, the poet T.K. Hervey expressed a similar vision in relation to Tasmania. Also noticeable among the writers of the period was a type of contempt for the local world as material for literary creation, a sentiment reflected in the choice of heroes, settings, and plots. The intellectuals were easily prone to an inferiority complex, which made them treat these writings as quite inferior to those of the mother country. Later, this type of defeatist attitude was referred to as the “cultural cringe,” “that disease of the Australian mind” (Phillips 1958, 92; also Clark 1972; Jordan 1989). Note, however, the important role already played by the Australian press, which was much closer to lived experiences and better at conveying the feelings of everyday life: the pioneers’ freedom, the distress associated with the hardships of life in the bush, the fears aroused by an unknown continent. Some writers also showed signs of developing Australian roots and a new sense of belonging. It was this feeling, no doubt, that underpinned the indignant reaction provoked among the literati by the acute satire of Australian life published in mid-century by the British author W.M. Thackeray (Nedeljkovic 1982, 72–77). Finally, in spite of its name, the magazine Empire, published in the 1850s, brought together several writers sympathetic to the idea of an independent Australia (C. Harpur, H. Parkes, H. Kendall, etc.). It is especially from the 1880s on that a national literature truly expressed itself for the first time, culminating in the ferment of the nineties. The literary movement that arose then was particularly important from the point of view that concerns us, not only through the style, themes, and characters that typified it and the representations that it disseminated, but also because of the mission that its members attributed to literature, both as a component and as proof of nationhood. Here the historical material is considerable and, in keeping with my overall approach, I only examine the most significant elements. The publication in 1881 of a poem by G.H. Gibson (“Sam Holt”) is often presented as the first act of a literature in search of Australian authenticity, just as a novel by Rolf Boldrewood (Robbery under Arms) is said to have marked the birth, also in 1881, of the “noble bushman.” Some

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other names emerge from among this generation that marked the period between 1880 and 1910 and that spoke to the local public rather than to British readers: Henry Lawson (reputed especially for his many short stories), Andrew B. Paterson (The Man from Snowy River, 1896), Joseph Furphy (Such Is Life, 1903), Bernard O’Dowds (The Bush, 1912), Francis Adams (The Australians, 1893), and A.G. Stephens (works of literary criticism). Finally, the Bulletin, a weekly founded in Sydney in 1880, was the main vehicle and promoter of the new literary genre (its print run was 80,000 copies at the end of the 1880s). Most of these authors used a simple, direct language, close to the people and stripped of artifice. As behooved the realist style, their writing was laconic and anecdotal. They expressed the values and sensibility of the people as they imagined them through the stereotypes of the bushmen. These representations had a lasting effect on Australian culture, which is doubly paradoxical. First, the bush itself was deeply transformed at the beginning of the twentieth century with the deployment of the railway and telecommunications. On the other hand, this mythology seems to have spread to the urban working class and even to the middle classes. Consequently, in spite of Australia’s very high degree of urbanization (two-thirds of the population already lived in towns in 1890), its first genuine national consciousness granted a disproportionately large space to the mythology of the bush. Some say that this phenomenon can be explained by the socializing values that it conveyed and that were taken up by the labour movement. In addition, this nationalism in search of distinctiveness was more easily fuelled by the fantasy world of wilderness life than by the conformism of Australian cities, overly faithful replicas of the British model. According to many authors, a specifically Australian literature nested in the excitement of a national imaginary imbued with populist references. To borrow an idea expressed by several writers, a literary tradition was born that claimed that British values and models were unsuited to founding the cultural life of the “new” continent.32 It is in this spirit that the tradition of so-called radical social nationalism, opposed to Great Britain and the Empire, would crystallize. Another credo of this ideological and literary current glorified the youth of the continent and the promise of an original and brilliant future in the New World. Moreover, this idea would outlive the legendary period of the nineties; in fact, it reverberates throughout the twentieth century, and in periods as dark as the Depression of the 1930s (e.g., Stephensen 1936).

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Yet, in the minds of some, the project of a national literature had not carried the day – far from it. According to a more aristocratic notion, literature could only arise on the site of ruins, from the maturity and rich material of an ancient history, teeming with heroic deeds and dramatic moments. In 1879, the American novelist Henry James wrote: “the flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep … it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature … it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion” (quoted by White 1981, 59). Also, various authors, B. Kiernan among others (1971, chap. 7), challenged the existence of a veritable literary tradition from the late nineteenth century on, just as they questioned the mythology of the nineties itself.33 Most scholars agree, however, that this literary ferment died away early in the twentieth century, followed by an eclipse that lasted until the 1930s. Then a renaissance began in the novel, later in poetry (1940–50), and, subsequently, in theatre (1960–70). According to A.A. Phillips (1958), the conditions of a national literature had not even gelled yet in the 1950s. It is precisely in this period that Patrick White (1958) denounced the “Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions” (quoted in Dutton and Harris 1968, 157). Alan Lawson (1983) believes, on the contrary, that literature was born precisely at that moment and that the 1950s marks the turning point of Australian literary history. On the other hand, according to D.M. Cullity (1972) and J. Docker (1974, 1978), it did not emerge before 1970. All these discrepancies reveal the great complexity and uncertainty of Australian literary consciousness. In fact, we see the same duality and ambiguity here that we detected in Australia’s political and national allegiances, in which traditions of local and imperial fidelity intermingled. First, literature’s date of birth shifts depending on the tradition to which one refers. More generally still, the reference to other European norms (French, German, etc.) introduces new criteria and different periodizations. Ambivalence has long divided the field of the novel and has also deeply marked the experience of several authors. In fact, this was apparent even in the nineties. H. McQueen (1986, 117), for example, recalls that “Waltzing Maltida” was not widely disseminated until 1932 because it was deemed irreverent. But its influence spread from then on, partly because it was in a sense made legitimate by an eminent music professor of Trinity College who was visiting Australia. It must also be stressed that, even when novels of the bush were in their golden age, highly pro-British, conformist writers, such as Chistopher Brennan, continued to shine.

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Literary life then went through cycles. After 1910, the field of the novel, while waxing more discreet, grew more diverse, and the interwar period witnessed the growth of a very internationalist trend. Towards the end of this period, the nationalist spirit flourished again with Vance Palmer, K.S. Pritchard, F. Davison, and the Jindyworobaks group (see below) opposed by the Angry Penguins group. This current continued during the 1940s; the nationalist fever scarcely abated thereafter but still found expression in various modes and tendencies. Over and above the movements that divided the literary field, a number of writers felt torn by the Australia/Great Britain (or Europe) duality. The call of freedom on the new continent pulled them in one direction; nostalgia for the Old World, the feeling of exile, pulled them in the other. Among a great many others, Henry Handel Richardson’s novel (The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, 1917) illustrates this tension vividly. Right up to the 1960s and 1970s, in spite of its moments of passion for the new continent, Australian literature never renounced its connection to Europe; it expressed this either in a deliberate display of loyalty or in repressed infatuation.34 The preceding remarks have largely focused on the novel. According to historians of poetry (e.g., Kramer 1981, and his collaborators), that literary journey appears even more hesitant, even slower in adjusting itself to the continent. It is not even certain that Australian poets managed to establish an original tradition. H.P. Heseltine (1986) claims that the same may be said of theatre until the 1960s, a period of great national effervescence. As for painting, it followed a course rather similar to that of the novel. From the mid-nineteenth century on, it contributed – as did oral tradition – to fuelling the Australian legend, capturing for posterity remarkable events such as the fire at Port Phillip (Victoria) in February 1851 (immortalized by William Strutt in 1864) or the floods in New South Wales in 1890. But, painting, like the novel, experienced its national revolution at the end of the nineteenth century, largely with the Heidelberg painters (T. Roberts, A. Streeton, C. Conder, J. Ashton, and some others).35 For the first time, Australian landscapes and figures drawn from everyday life were the objects of original representations, unburdened of the European tradition. This is all the more remarkable in that these painters had been strongly influenced by various European currents. Here is another example of what I call disengagement through borrowing; it consists in simply taking hold of the norm, the foreign style, of making it, in a sense, one’s own, rather than of defending oneself against it in an

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uncertain struggle.36 The Heidelberg painters managed to achieve this so well that they contributed powerfully to the construction of the rural mythology intended for the townsfolk. Subsequently, painting followed other routes, even disappearing from view, if one is to believe the authors of the collective led by Peter Coleman (1962), who see it resurfacing only at the time of the Second World War. But others, such as Donald Horne (1972), emphasize the 1960s instead, whereas Bernard Smith (1971, vii) seeks to identify in this dynamism the influence of the European tradition. Clearly, uncertainty and ambivalence rule here as well. A word on architecture: in creating Australianity, it too displays a specific trajectory, punctuated by forward and backward moves. Here as elsewhere, the British models dominated for the greater part of the nineteenth century. But from mid-century on, waves of immigrants to the state of Victoria brought by the gold rush (the number of newcomers quadrupled in less than six years), tapped other influences, other pictorial techniques. Important elements of a vernacular style then appeared (Lewis 1977). In New South Wales as well, new traditions were brought in by German and Canadian immigrants, and by American gold prospectors. At the end of the nineteenth century, the nationalist current had reached the field of architecture and forms considered typically Australian were born, inspired, however, by European (e.g., art nouveau, Queen Anne) and American models (the Romanesque) (Irving 1985). Others, such as D.L. Johnson (1980), believe that these were simple adaptations and not an original style. Innovations occurred towards 1915–20, particularly in the bungalow, under the influence of creators such as W. Burley Griffin, L. Wilkinson, and J. Horbury Hunt. But genuine maturity was only attained in the mid-twentieth century. This is also the view of Miles Lewis (1994) and Geoffrey Serle (1973), who stress the founding role of Harry Seidler. These brief comments on the evolution of the artistic and literary fields are only intended to draw attention to the plurality and diversity of routes and narratives (timelines, conjunctures, influences, and styles) through which the symbolic appropriation of the continent unfolded within elite culture.37 There is enough material here for various sophisticated comparative studies that would exhibit and explain the specificity and dynamic of each genre. After all, has not art been presented as the “principal means by which ‘Australia’ has been invented and created” (Thomas 1988, 11)? Perhaps, even more than in the other fields of intellectual life, the creative works are both

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acts of national consciousness in search of authentic identity and its manifestations in very articulate and explicit figurations. In the case of Australia, this quest for authenticity in the New World faced the adversities of remoteness, on the one hand, and the sense of inferiority (the “cultural cringe,” to use A.A. Phillips’ expression) produced by the selfassurance and opulence of British cultural life, on the other. However, with some variations, literature and the arts faced a similar situation in all the new collectivities; differences arose especially from the pace and mode of disengagement and (symbolic) appropriation.38 In this respect, Australian elite culture appears to distinguish itself by the acuity and persistence of its ambivalence and ambiguities. Conscious as I am of all that I have left out, my all-too-cursory discussion of symbolic appropriation must end here. Over and above high culture, one ought to explore all the acts of inscription – or territorialization, to borrow a term from the French geographer Claude Raffestin (1980) – practiced within the popular culture of bushmen and workers. This would involve retracing the deviations, the inventiveness of daily life in games, sports, dance, rituals, regular holidays, and in clothing (e.g., sheep-skin moccasins, kangaroo-skin jackets, the cabbage tree hat, and the akubra). In addition, there is the whole issue of the formation of regionalisms: those that almost compromised the merging of the six colonies in the Commonwealth of 1901, but also those that arose from local identities, in urban districts, as well as in remote areas of settlement. From all those relations woven with the environment over time, an ethnicity emerged; that is, a set of more or less arbitrary signs (e.g., customs, speech, clothing, institutions, etc.) through which members of a collectivity recognize each other and secure recognition.39

visions of the future Typically, the Australian imaginary has been marked by relatively little utopian thinking, if, by utopia, one means exuberant dreaming, which, in spite of (or due to?) being unreasonable, is built on a very rational (often even scientific) model and seeks either to express a collectivity’s most naive hopes or to propose a great triumphant fate, while always relying more heavily on horizons, directions, and ends than on means and ways. Totalizing by nature and turned towards a distant future, utopia is the counterpart, in the future, of founding memory. To assert that it comes to terms easily with its distance and even with its break

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from immediate reality is to say very little: in fact, this distance is a characteristic, if not the condition, of utopia, which fulfills a compensatory, as much as an exploratory, function; more than a blueprint, it produces a faint sketch of a beyond, an elsewhere. In this respect, utopian thought is another mode of symbolic appropriation of an environment, another way of inscribing a collectivity in time and space. The conquest of the New World engendered or reactivated great European utopias, inspired now by a desire for redemption, now by an appetite for power.40 The collective imaginaries of the United States and Latin America also gave rise to grand, this time continental, utopias. In Australia, there is first of all a utopia of continuity, expressed throughout the nineteenth century and, until recently, in a discourse of fidelity to Great Britain; Australia’s mission, in this regard, is to reproduce the British model, “a new Britannia” in the Pacific. A version of this can be found in the ideal of the Empire, embodied in the first projects of an imperial federation in the 1840s and surviving until the mid-twentieth century. In this respect, it is no exaggeration to speak of an imperial utopia that promised a grandiose destiny for the new continent and that was long able to attract the support of a large part of Australia’s high society, enticed by the splendours of British power and civilization throughout the world. Smacking somewhat of Fourierism (Metcalf 1995), the radical nationalist utopia advocated a clear break by appealing to the working and middle classes. It thus acted as a counterweight to the imperial vision from the end of the nineteenth century on. It had antecedents in a tradition of discontent and protest born out of former convicts’ resentment towards Great Britain, a tradition to which Irish immigration added its historic grievances. The same may be said of the sundry radicals and dissidents who fled their country during the nineteenth century in search of a land of liberty and equality, believing they had found it in Australia.41 These fundamental social values were also supported by the ideal of small peasant property, which appeared between 1840 and 1860 and re-emerged towards the end of the century (e.g., Horace Tucker, The New Arcadia, 1894, and some others). These values also drew on legends of the bush and the gold rush. The convergence of all these aspirations with the nascent labour movement provided the main material of radical utopia. It is known that literary figures contributed greatly to shaping them. In this respect, journals such as the Bulletin and the Boomerang played an important role in spreading the ideas of young writers keen to build a superior society; these men were defenders of

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rights and democracy, foes of the system of privilege that they associated with Great Britain. William Lane, A.H. Adams, H.B. Higgins, A. Harris, H. George, Bellamy, and others were very active on this score.42 This said, in spite of all the generosity it displayed, this outlook was no less racist and discriminatory: the society it advocated was essentially masculine and reserved for Whites. This project of social construction presented another important trait: it was decidedly non-religious. It called for a radical separation of religion and civil society. This too was a legacy of the penal past. In the minds of the deportees, the Church was associated with the metropolitan power and carried the stigmas of its abuses and arbitrary violence. Finally, the social utopia substantially permeated the ideology of the trade union movement, which became an important collective actor in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It also penetrated the Australian Labor Party, which took power for the first time in 1904 and was re-elected several times thereafter. These two currents (social-radical and imperial) represent by far the two main threads of utopian thought in Australia, the one associated primarily with the middle and working classes, the other with the bourgeoisie. Besides them, there are fragments of dreams that never developed deep roots, or episodes of daring, without lasting consequences. This was the case of an idea that appeared in the early days of settlement and resurfaced on several occasions subsequently. According to it, the Australian climate would engender a physically, if not intellectually, superior race (Crowley 1974, 79ff). The idea was later resurrected in reaction to certain metropolitan writings that claimed that the British “race” (a superior race if ever there were one) had begun to degenerate in Australia. It was thus necessary to demonstrate that, on the contrary, this precious heritage would still prosper on the new continent. According to R. White (1981, 70–79), this explains the importance that Australians ascribed very early on to athletic performances and to military bravery (e.g., some like to boast that Australian soldiers had proven themselves superior to the British during the Boer War). In the nineteenth century, there was also a myth inspired by the development of the northern territories. It painted a shimmering picture of limitless wealth but was followed by disillusionment. In the same era, some entertained the project of an Australian empire in the Pacific, in which several islands would have become colonies. Australia actually governed Papouasia and part of New Guinea for several years, but the Pacific dream went no further. An urban utopia, mixed with

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boosterism, also appeared from the mid-nineteenth century on. Victoria was to become the New York of the other hemisphere, and Australia a sort of replica of the United States: rich, powerful, dynamic, and highly civilized (White 1981, 50; Hamer 1990). On the whole, however, the urban utopia largely blended with the imperial dream and the cult of Great Britain. Finally, there was William Lane’s project. Writer (The Working Man’s Paradise, 1892), journalist, essayist, and militant socialist, Lane conceived the idea of creating a new Australia in Paraguay, modelled on a radical-social utopia and based on equality and democracy – but here again, reserved for the White race only. He left Adelaide with several hundred of the faithful in July 1893 on a small sailing boat that brought them to Paraguay where two colonies were founded, but the project did not go beyond this. I should add that this utopia was an admission of a national failure at its very inception; it is precisely because the project of a New Australia seemed to him to have failed that Lane resolved to start afresh elsewhere (Walker 1976; Souter 1981). Although radical-social and imperial utopias exerted an enduring ideological influence, and although the feeling of building a new collectivity bound for a brilliant future appeared relatively early on, the overall fact remains that the utopian dream is not a salient feature of Australian intellectual history. For example, even the two major utopias only held sway for a limited time. The first began to recede after the fervour of the nineties, to the point that various authors have recently pondered its true impact. As for the imperial utopia, the fate of which has perhaps been less controversial, it fell short of inspiring a major intellectual current that could have found expression in the classics of Australian culture. It should no doubt be pointed out that realism, and even pragmatism, have always been valued in this culture, exercising a type of censorship of naive thinking. The perpetual disquiet born of distance and isolation in the Asiatic world may have had a similar effect, just like the harsh reality of this desert country, which presented a perennial challenge to survival.43 Finally, the very conditions of settlement amidst violence, coercion, and shame stifled the glorified mythology of beginnings and its symbolic heritage. The new Arcadia or the Land of Salvation, refuge for the poor, were somewhat evoked between the 1830s and the 1850s; but they were primarily the product of British propaganda, intended to stimulate emigration to the new colonies. As I. Turner has remarked (1968, Introduction), the self-made man and the El Dorado of social mobility (“from log cabin to White

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House”) were not sustainable in Australia. The origins and harshness of the continent (its stretches of desert and its climatic disparities) were no doubt factors in this. It is significant that social utopia highlighted solidarity so considerably: it was the primordial condition of survival in the penal institutions and in the colonies. These same circumstances partly account for Australian-style democracy, the first to institute the secret ballot. But the process that led to it was long and uncertain, moving from the convict to the emancipist (released prisoner), then to the bushman, the worker, and the citizen. Here, once more, and contrary to the United States, for example, there are no great theorists or famous political figures who embodied noble humanitarian ideas or great ideological systems that could generally be seen as the cradle of Australian society. In reality, and that is another important feature of utopian thinking in this country, collective representations drew upon two sources that never merged. On the one hand, they borrowed their dream of empire from Great Britain, from the colonizing metropolis; on the other hand, they fed on the populist, somewhat aggressive, mythology of the hinterland. But these two dreams, these two divergent myths, were never truly reconciled, even though they converged quite a bit. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Australia is still negotiating a form of compromise between, or a merging of, these two legacies. Finally, it is worth noting another quite remarkable feature of Australian utopian thinking: its virtual lack of religious references. The three main churches were the Roman Catholic Church (almost exclusively Irish), the Presbyterian Church (primarily Scottish), and the Church of England. Their numbers, in relative terms, remained quite stable: around 25 percent to 30 percent, 9 percent to 12 percent, and 60 percent to 65 percent of the population, respectively. In itself, this division does not furnish an explanation of the phenomenon. It is best to turn to the initial modes of settlement and invoke, as I have previously done, the antipathy or the reservations generated by the religious authorities, who were lumped in with the metropolitan and colonial administration. This might account, at least in part, for the lay character of the radical-social utopia. With respect to the imperial utopia, the question remains. Whatever the case, this is an original trait of Australian cultural history, which stands out in comparison with other new collectivities, such as Quebec, the United States, and the Latin American countries.

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the mutant nation In simplifying a reality that is ever complex and elusive, one could say that, in most Western societies, the national narrative unfolds in a constant dialectic with culture and politics. It draws from the former the symbolic material that feeds the representations of the collectivity; and these representations are sometimes promoted as official definitions. But it is unlikely that the process is ever innocent inasmuch as it maintains a direct relationship (at least de facto) with the political; for these representations and definitions are always mobilized, if not hijacked, either to guide or to justify, or even to disguise, state (or ruling-class) strategies and decisions. For the purposes of my analysis, it does not appear useful to expound further on the meaning of the term “national.” As explained in the first chapter, the meaning varies too much from one collectivity to another and from one period to another. At times, it emphasizes ethnic realities such as language or religion; at times it stresses territory or history; at other times, it underscores a set of supposedly shared values or ethnographic, physical, and other features. It would appear more judicious simply to set out to discover the Australian meaning of the term as intellectuals shaped and reshaped it over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Australia was born of various elements of a European society that were transported to an Asiatic setting. Based on this initial move, how did the new population come to perceive itself as a nation? What aspirations, what tensions and concerns, did it invest in this idea? I show that representations of the nation evolved along two now familiar paths: one stems from a movement to break away (rupture) and affirmed the existence or the emergence of a new entity detached from the mother country; the other adhered to a spirit of continuity in which the collectivity’s originality was acknowledged, yet only as a specific incarnation of Britain within the Empire. Following the conclusions of the preceding sections on political and cultural narratives, one could argue that Australian national history continually oscillated between two horizons, slowly drifting towards separation. But either way, the national idea was plagued by significant divisions and contradictions, which its advocates sought to overcome as best they could. In the first instance, I review the various features or representations deployed to characterize, both successively and simultaneously, this collectivity in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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Then, for each of the configurations presented, I seek to delineate as precisely as possible its associated social background. The exercise should foreground the whole complexity and plurality of the Australian national imaginary. Indeed, there is not only a succession but also a parallelism, if not a rivalry, between the main representations of the nation. We show how the gradual diversification of this population in the course of the twentieth century jolted the national consciousness, producing either rebuffs and exclusionary responses or various attempts at compromise and reconciliation. Constructions of the Nation First and foremost, the ambiguity surrounding the nation’s date of birth is in itself very revealing. At first glance, 1788 seems a likely candidate. However, the emergence of a feeling of nationhood was compromised by the fact that the ruling class was ashamed of its origins. Most intellectuals, wealthy landowners, and shopkeepers and managers were reluctant to be identified with Australia’s penal past. They preferred to short-circuit these supposedly less-than-glorious beginnings and to profess an attachment to Britain’s great civilization. This no doubt sheds lights on the many accounts by nineteenth-century visitors who voiced their surprise at finding on this lost continent a bourgeoisie that was even more “British” than the British themselves. Nevertheless, it would seem that a proto-national sense of identity had crystallized among the prisoners themselves and, in particular, among their immediate descendants (Ward 1966; Roe 1971). Some regard this early solidarity as the cradle of the nation. For others (e.g., Nadel 1957), the nation was only born in the middle of the century, when responsible government was granted. Voices at the time appealed for the adoption of common objectives and the creation of a genuine national culture rising above material interests and giving cohesion to the emerging nation. Irish resentment and protests against the deportation of criminals fed into this current of opinion, heralded by the Australian Era newspaper. For others, Australia was truly born at the Eureka conflict at Balarat (Victoria) in 1854. This rebellion of miners against the government police represented the people’s first self-vindication against metropolitan power and, consequently, the first contestation of the colonial tie as well as the founding act of Australian democracy. However, according to a majority of analysts, the barricades of Eureka were but a premonition, a pre-figurative event, bereft of an immediate

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sequel. In their view, the nation was born during the 1880s and 1890s (the famous nineties), punctuated by the celebration of the centenary of 1788; the Commonwealth of 1901 was its official confirmation. A poem by J.B. Stephens, published in 1877 (“The Dominion of Australia”), was perhaps the first sign of this. At that time, most of the adult population had been born on the new continent. The exploration of the great open spaces was almost complete, and a railway line linked the main parts of the country. It was in the bush, however, that the nation took shape through the “stony hills and sandy plains, bare rocks and rushy swamps” (Alexander Harris). Various writers (Palmer 1954; Crawford 1955; Davison 1978) have explained that it could scarcely have been otherwise; the city’s heterogeneity and British leanings did not offer much material for a myth of original identity. Besides, during these times of economic crisis, Australian cities appeared to many as a site of misery from which they wished to turn away, and even as a symbol of decadent Europe; the outback was thus more readily idealized. But this bush nation, this country born of the hinterland and extending to the working class, remained fragile. In continuing to expand, urban life ended up eroding this imaginary. Besides, after the turn of the century, the myth of the nineties cooled off. In some eyes, the two world wars truly brought the nation into being. In the First World War, to begin with, Australian troops fighting alongside soldiers from Britain, France, and New Zealand won renown in a tragic confrontation against the Turks in the famous episode of Gallipoli (Dardanelles) in 1915. On a strictly military level, the operation was rather a failure; the attackers had to retreat, 8,000 died and almost 20,000 were wounded on the Australian side. Symbolically, the repercussions were enormous. It was felt that Gallipoli had showcased the nation in arms, facing its destiny, displaying utter fearlessness. Finally, under these tragic conditions, the Australian had revealed his true nature to others and to himself. From that moment on, ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) became a popular symbol of the cradle of the nation. But for others, the failure at Gallipoli casts a dark shadow over the myth; in their eyes, it would be more appropriate to identify the nation’s birth with the Second World War, where the Australians clearly won even more renown (e.g., McLachlan 1989).44 Finally, many observers declare that the nation is in the process of being born now, in the midst of multicultural ethnic mixing and the symbolic reconfigurations it entails. The quest for Australia’s date of birth thus brings out an important aspect of uncertainty and ambiguity.

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This becomes even clearer as one turns to the materials and archetypes put forward to fuel the discourse of national identity. There was the idea of a new race. In 1877, Marcus Clarke’s rather facetious pamphlet (The Future Australian Race) provoked serious commentary, which surprised even the author. And towards the end of the century, according to R. White (1981, chap. 5), a certain number of intellectuals readily believed that there was a truly Australian physical type. This was also the view of V. Palmer (1954, 32–33ff.), who based his opinion on a collection of nineteenth-century accounts. Closely tied to this is the image of the Australian as a man endowed with exceptional vitality: rugged, powerful, intrepid, full of endurance. I have already mentioned the importance of sport in Australian society; since the end of the nineteenth century, it has been heavily invested with symbolism, contributing greatly to collective identity.45 The same no doubt applies to the stereotype of the hearty drinker, long associated with the man of the people.46 These features, which expressed the masculinity of the national character, are partly a reaction to the intellectual elitism of the cities that emulated the British spirit; they are also partly a result of the over-representation of men within the Australian population (two men per woman in 1840) until the mid-nineteenth century, if not beyond. This brings us to the representation of Australianity that stemmed from the myth of the nineties. Here one must recall all the features already noted (materialism, ruggedness, independence, solidarity, egalitarianism, etc.), which were attributed first to the bushman, then to the common people, and finally to all Australians. The idea underlying this symbolic configuration, supported by a number of intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is that the culture of the outback took on a foundational value for the entire nation but without faithfully reflecting its reality. The lasting portrait of what was called the dinkum aussie is summed up in mateship, the deep feeling that develops among men “who are thrown together by some emergency in an unfriendly environment and have become of one blood in facing it” (Horne 1972, 32).47 The roots of this mythical representation have been found, in turn (or simultaneously), (1) in the adversity of the natural setting – an obstacle, if there ever was one – to the survival of a highly dispersed population; (2) in the violence of the penal system, against which prisoners had to know how to defend themselves; (3) in the very uneven social relationship created by big landed property in the hinterland; and (4) in the gold diggers’ determination. In

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their own way, each of these experiences has been seen as contributing to shaping the disposition exhibited in the radical-social utopia, where (following the title of a work by William Lane) the young nation is presented as the working man’s paradise. Solidarity and union militancy were two of its main expressions. Famous strikes serve as points of reference here: a virtual general strike in 1890 and strikes in the sheep (1891) and mining industries (1929, 1949), and so on. The labour movement is thus regarded as having succeeded in disciplining the development of capitalism by imposing major compromises. This representation is coupled with the view that the social struggles sharpened the sense of democracy already present in the dinkum’s egalitarian aspirations.48 Indeed, the Australians were the first to introduce the secret ballot (1856).49 According to historian William Keith Hancock, there was a typically Australian democratic tradition, collectivist in character and quite different from the individualist democracy of Tudor inspiration. This would explain the electoral successes of the Australian Labor Party, founded in 1890, and the country’s progressive social legislation. Melbourne’s construction trades were the first to win the eight-hour working day (in 1856) and Australia was the first country to elect a Labor Government. The leitmotif “fair go” reflects the spirit of this radical nationalism, with its resonances of equity, social justice, and a caring state. Nonetheless, this culture of solidarity and equity coexisted with the most flagrant discrimination. First, it never paid any attention to Aborigines. Second, women – save for the right to vote, which was recognized quite early on – were also excluded from it. Many authors have shown that mateship, in its various forms and manifestations, smacked strongly of misogyny.50 The other significant form of exclusion targeted non-British immigrants, non-Europeans, and especially Asians. It is indeed remarkable that radical social thought was so profoundly imbued with xenophobia and even racism. Until the 1940s, this feature seems to have been part of the dominant way of thinking in Australia: the Australian nation was commonly identified with the British “race.” Founded in 1871, the very influential Australian Natives’ Association only accepted as members Whites born in the country. At a time when, for obvious economic reasons, London promoted the free movement of labour between the Empire’s colonies, the association, on the contrary, favoured isolation and exclusion, and that is why it supported the Commonwealth project (Blackton 1958). East Asians were the first to feel the brunt of this concern with preserving the

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White race. The rioters of 1860–61 in the gold mines of New South Wales (Burrangong Riots) were already hostile to Chinese workers. And, at the dawn of the Second World War, fear of the “yellow peril” once again prompted the government to substantially increase the country’s population through far more open immigration; a more populated Australia, stronger economically and militarily, would be able to counter the danger from the north. According to R. Nile (1994), this feeling is still alive.51 One of the most enduring and formal expressions of Australian racism is represented by the White Policy, an immigration scheme instituted in 1901 and only officially abrogated in 1973, which made it almost impossible for non-Europeans to enter the country. The racist component within representations of the nation waned after the 1940s but did not disappear. There were even important resurgences, notably in the 1980s and in 1997–98. It must be recalled that Australians of British birth or of (more or less distant) British descent still represented approximately three-quarters of the population at that time and that their attachment to their roots still remained powerful. In the same period, Humphrey McQueen (1986) vigorously denounced this racist vision of the nation, showing its origins and evolution throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For McQueen, the yellow peril, not anti-colonial and anti-British sentiment, was the principal driving force of Australian nationalism. He built his case by surveying practically all of the intellectual landscape, including the history of the labour movement, political ideologies, and literature (e.g., Bernard Dowd, A.H. Adams, Henry Lawson, etc.). After the country opened up to diversified immigration, reference to the nation as a new (white, Anglo-Saxon) Britannia grew less and less adequate, and new versions, if not alternative visions, were born. Thanks to the prosperity that followed the First World War, mass consumption grew at a spectacular rate in Australia, invading the domestic sphere and private life. While the still very popular image of the digger flourished, a new facet of individualism, associated with the middle class, appeared in the form of the small bungalow and suburban life.52 In this context, which placed comfort, family, leisure, and materialism on the highest rung, the Holden motor car, manufactured in the country by General Motors, became one of the nation’s new symbols, representing what was then called the Australian way of life (Taussig 1987). This poorly defined notion henceforth represented the cultural model to which immigrants had to conform. I believe that it fills an

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important place in the history of Australian national representations: for the first time, a stereotype of the nation seemed to be under formal construction outside of ethnicity. However, the attempt was ephemeral. From the 1970s on, economic difficulties thwarted the model, which, in any event, excluded the less privileged from the start. In addition, it became evident that assimilation in the Australian way of life ultimately did not differ much from the traditional model of assimilation in White, Anglo-Saxon society.53 This is the context that saw the appearance of the idea that the nation’s essential trait, the real source of its originality, resided in its ethnic diversity. Australian multiculturalism was born.54 Contrary to most other societies, Australia was deemed capable of welcoming a large range of cultural imports and of facilitating their coexistence by perpetuating their particularities. This was henceforth the source of its most distinctive characteristic. This new orientation prepared another, even more recent one; namely, Australia’s Asiatic destiny. Widening its circle still further, the nation thus prepared to embrace its geography fully at the expense of its history. But we shall see that, even today, this turn is far from given. This swift overview of the main representations or symbolic content of the nation calls for three immediate comments. First, popular culture seems to have impinged heavily on this imaginary, perhaps to a degree never attained in any other new collectivity. Its contents and symbols seem to have massively penetrated high culture. In 1829 already, in his Letter from Sydney, Wakefield noted that fashions and manners spread from the bottom up in Australia, unlike in the old countries. This was also the view of Russell Ward and A.A. Phillips (1958, 41–42): “the common man … beat the gentleman”). In fact, this feature was so pronounced that it created the impression – among Australians, as among a number of foreign observers – that high culture (intellectual life, fine arts, and letters) was the butt of a kind of contempt, that it was marginalized and impoverished. Consider, among many others, the well-known testimony of Francis Adams (there is as much culture in Australia as there are snakes in Ireland) and D.H. Lawrence (he said that the more he learned about Australian democracy, the more he hated it, having encountered nothing as worthless, as vulgar, etc.).55 Second, and this remark is not unrelated to the previous one, the imperial vision of the nation did not inspire many famous texts; its mythology was not established by a great literary tradition, as was the case with radical social thought. This may in part be

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explained by the fact that the imperial idea was primarily associated with the most conservative and aristocratic fringe of the intellectual elite, the one that, for this very reason, targeted a British public and remained close to London circles. Consequently, the British and imperial vision of the nation was hardly explained or translated to Australians themselves in a language (and in genres) accessible to the common people and middle classes, and likely to inspire their support. Third, in spite of the confidence apparently exuded by the various national representations I have surveyed, the entire history of this quest for collective identity is shot through with great uncertainty, causing the intellectual elites to judge themselves severely, to put down their own works (regarding them as inferior to those of the mother country), and the manners and language of the people. This too is an expression of the cultural cringe. This inferiority complex has generated three types of reactions, depending on the period. The first led to denouncing the vulgarity of Australian culture and proclaiming its (as it were) structural inferiority.56 The second reaction consisted in appeals to build the national culture according to different scenarios geared specifically to filling the original vacuum. This was the case with an essay by P.R. Stephensen (1936), which proposed a veritable program for developing intellectual life from a nationalist perspective. One is equally reminded of the stirrings of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, when the same theme resurfaced, this time endorsed by government subsidy policies aimed at stimulating the life of the arts and letters, always according to the goal of cultural reconstruction and collective identity (Horne 1972, 244– 46; Rickard 1988). There were also more naive projects, such as large photo-albums showing that Australia was as beautiful as England. In them, we discover that, despite its reputed aridity, some parts of Australia receive more rain than do several regions of the mother country (Smith and White 1970, among others). Finally, others sought to show that the feeling of inferiority was not justified, that Australian culture equals any other, that the cringers are masochists (Thompson 1994a, chap. 10), and that a rich intellectual tradition has been in existence since the nineteenth century (Phillips 1958). In concluding this section, I recall some basic shifts that occurred during the last half century and that appear to be virtually irreversible: from White Australia to multiculturalism, from European allegiance to Asiatic integration, from the populist ethic to the eclecticism of the middle classes. At the same time, mateship is in decline. For fifteen

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years, with the growth of feminist thought, representations of the nation have been undergoing a redefinition based on a critique of the Russell Ward-type masculine vision. Similarly, a complete rethinking of the relations with indigenous peoples has been undertaken. On another level, the kaleidoscope of visions and national goals, as I have summarily reconstituted them, brings out the ephemeral and almost artificial nature of these discursive constructions. In the light of such fluidity, it would be risky to defend an essentialist (“primordialist”) concept of the nation. Even the reference to the famous British tradition is polysemic and lends itself to nuances and subtle variations, depending on the context and the speaker: now it invokes the rich intellectual heritage of the metropolis, now the monarchy, the Parliament, or the Empire, while the English, the Welsh, the Scottish, and sometimes even the Irish are readily effaced. Humphrey McQueen may have been right: xenophobia and racism have, indeed, occupied a substantial place in the very diverse, often opposed representations and ideologies surveyed above. Up until the mid-twentieth century, these two traits seem to be the principal common denominators of Australian national thought and culture. Also significant are virtual gaps (e.g. religion, the city), silences (the myth of the self-made man, of social mobility), and inconsistencies (e.g., socio-economic inequalities in relation to the egalitarian myth). And the symbolic fragility that appears to be the culminating point of two centuries of history is somewhat surprising. I tackle this question later on; but first I must mention the elements of diversity and adversity that have held the nation in check throughout its history and that have impelled the intellectuals to devise symbolic strategies as a response. Diversity versus the Nation Every Australian nation-building project has shared a concern with representing a unified, coherent, and integrated collectivity. But this premise was only reached through many contortions, since the symbolic arsenal of nationhood was constantly being contradicted by significant elements of diversity and division within the population. Here, we enter what G.S.J. Barclay (1987, 5) has called “the exploration of unifying myths and disunifying realities.” Until the mid-twentieth century, common sense portrayed the Australian population as fundamentally homogeneous, cemented by its British heritage. Throughout that era, the percentage of Australians of British origin or descent reached

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more than 80 percent (95 percent according to J. Jupp 1994, chap. 4), and most other inhabitants were of European descent. In their own way, these figures show the effectiveness of the White Policy. In addition, the annual number of immigrants had declined since the beginning of the century and elements of diversity had been marginalized, at least in the collective consciousness, if not in reality. In 1901, Germans represented 1 percent of all newcomers, the largest contingent of non-British immigrants. Yet, during the second half of the nineteenth century, the gold rushes and mining developments had attracted a rather heterogeneous group of immigrants. There were Germans in Tasmania, Kanakas and Scandinavians in Queensland, and some African and Melanesian slaves in New South Wales and Queensland. But the strong pressure either to assimilate the immigrants or to restrict their numbers radically limited the impact of immigration.57 In 1911, Australia’s population included only 45,000 Asians and 10,000 people from other Pacific islands (Macintyre 1947, 136). The number of Chinese had dropped from 22,000 in 1911 to 9,000 in 1947 (Choi 1975, 42–43; Sherington 1980, 119). On the religious level, I have already indicated that the Protestant Churches were the most numerous: but their relations with the Roman Catholic Church never grew acrimonious. On the other hand, regionalism was always very pronounced, and the political life of the country was always racked by the struggle between the federal government and the member states, with their demands for decentralization. However, these local allegiances never seriously threatened national unity, even in the case of Queensland, where the push for autonomy was strongest.58 The Aborigines represented the most long-lasting and haunting sign of diversity. Throughout its history, Australia has come up against the Aboriginal fact. The Aborigines have occupied the continent for 40,000 or 50,000 years; they constituted a dispersed and diversified population (several hundred languages and dialects), living as nomads within certain territorial boundaries. Because of this, they were dangerous and vulnerable to the Whites’ land grabs: dangerous, because their relation to space thwarted the new mode of exploiting the earth; vulnerable, because isolated tribes could not resist the organized advance of colonization. From approximately 300,000 at the end of the eighteenth century,59 the number of Aborigines had plummeted to less than 100,000 a century later and to 75,000 to 80,000 between 1930 and 1940. Subsequently, there was spectacular growth, up to 84,000 in 1961, 160,000 in 1981 (Armitage 1995, tables 2.1, 2.2), and

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approximately 350,000 during the 1990s (that is, around 2 percent of the Australian population). The new way of counting the Aborigines since 1967 makes the whole comparison with previous years somewhat risky: instead of estimating as before the share of Aboriginal ancestry (e.g., half-caste, full-blood), statisticians rely on the self-description of those concerned. This factor introduces an important element of uncertainty into the statistics compiled in recent years. In any event, even if one relies on the least moderate figures, the indigenous population remains a tiny minority today: between 1 percent and 3 percent of the total population in all six states combined, going up to a third in the Northern Territory. These low percentages have still sufficed to guarantee a substantial symbolic presence that has always haunted Australia’s sense of identity and, over recent decades, even contributed to destabilizing it. Another important source of heterogeneity stems from the increase and diversification of immigration after the Second World War. The misfortunes suffered during this conflict, in particular the bombing of Darwin by the Japanese in February 1942 and their incursion into New Guinea, left the Australians ever more anxious about the Asian military threat. Moreover, the rapid demographic growth in these countries (China especially) increased the fear of massive immigration. Finally, the 1940s launched a long cycle of economic development, and Australia was soon grappling with a pressing need for workers. For all these reasons, the 1930s slogan “populate or perish” took on a new meaning, and the solution appeared to be found in a substantial increase in immigration. This reorientation may therefore be more the result of economic and military considerations than of a genuine cultural and social choice.60 In 1947, a massive immigration program was instituted. In the short term, it mainly drew on the large number of war refugees (e.g., Eastern Europe, the Baltic states) and on immigrants from less developed countries (e.g., from southern Europe, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc.). Throughout the following half century, this policy never weakened; the Liberal (Fraser) government even increased the immigration quotas between 1976 and 1978. More than 5 million newcomers arrived during this period and the country’s population rose from 7 to 18 million. No other country in the world has matched Australia’s performance in this regard (i.e., in number of immigrants per capita). Just between 1945 and 1964, for example, Australia welcomed more immigrants than during the entire 1860–1945 period. The figures are no less remarkable when it

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comes to the diversification of the immigrant population. Initially, the program aimed to attract primarily British immigrants (in a 10 to 1 ratio, according to Minister Caldwell’s commitment in 1947). But the objective proved unrealistic; between 1947 and 1952, only half of the landed immigrants came from Great Britain. This proportion diminished regularly thereafter: 42 percent from 1947 to 1969, 29 percent from 1970 to 1981, and in the order of 15 percent for recent years. At the same time, the percentage of immigrants from Asia and Oceania rose dramatically; 2.6 percent from 1947 to 1969 and more than 50 percent in 1996. Consequently, the number of Asians living in Australia doubled between 1985 and 1995. In 1994 and 1995, approximately 70 percent of newcomers came from non-Anglophone countries. Finally, over the whole 1945–96 period, more than 150 countries and 80 ethnic groups contributed to this migratory influx. Consequently, 1990s Australia displayed important elements of heterogeneity, which, in one way or another, challenge the constructions of the imaginary hitherto advanced to represent and characterize the nation. In the early 1990s, for example, half of the inhabitants of Perth (population 1 million) had at least one parent born abroad. Apart from the already mentioned divisions (Whites/Aborigines, regionalisms, etc.), most recent immigrants have not been assimilated. In 2000, non-anglophone immigrants and their children represented 20 percent of the population, while all non-anglophone Australians (both immigrants and those born in Australia) made up 40 percent of the population. Today, about a hundred ethnic groups speaking as many languages live in Australia. Henceforth, there are three main lines of division: British/non-British, Europeans/Aborigines, and Whites/Non-Whites.61 The next section examines how, since the nineteenth century, Australian elites have sought, through symbolic or other means, to iron out or by-pass the signs of cultural and ethnic diversity that undermined their claims to collective identity. The Nation versus Diversity In Australia, as in many countries, the national idea was traditionally governed by a search for, and an affirmation of, homogeneity. Compounded with this was the feeling that Australian culture, an extension of the British “race,” had been imperiled by its Asian environment. Until recently, the elites aimed to protect this legacy, resorting to a

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range of measures from brute force to reconfigurations of the imaginary; in this they sought to reduce ethnic elements that were refractory by their mere difference. Women were the first victims. They only with great difficulty obtained the right to vote and to sit in Parliament, even though Australia was a pioneer in this area. Southern Australia was the first state to pass a law to this effect (1894) and Victoria the last (1908). The federal government did so in 1902. On the cultural level, representations of identity were deeply imbued with masculine symbols (e.g., the mystique of the bush or the heroes of ANZAC and Gallipoli) from the early settlement days until the 1960s (Tyler 1984). Even the model of the Australian way of life established man’s predominant role as property owner, as peaceful, hard-working citizen, as dutiful provider for his family. From 1901 on, the White Australia Policy slowed immigration from Asia, Africa, and the Pacific Islands.62 Even non-British Europeans were subject to restrictions. In fact, a rather arbitrary linguistic test made it possible to exclude almost anyone. This law found support in the entire population, including the trade unions. As a political figure declared in 1901, the young nation had to be built on the hardest and whitest marble (Tanner 1978, 239). The minister of labour and immigration claimed that “two Wongs don’t make a White.” Profoundly racist caricatures were regularly published in the newspapers. In 1907, the famous Bulletin changed its motto from “Australia for Australians” to “Australia for Whites.” The new banner was not abolished until 1960. The trade union movement, which sought to protect the prerogatives of the local workforce, strongly endorsed this law, which made it rather impervious to international worker solidarity. The farmers followed suit.63 The White Australia Policy was buttressed by other legislative measures from 1920 to 1930, and it remained the centrepiece of the Australian state in matters of immigration until the 1960s. It was not officially abolished until 1973. Even in 1948, the new citizenship act still privileged British nationals at the expense of other Europeans. Beyond its practical impact on the selection of newcomers, the Australian law explicitly asserted the superiority of the British race and the concern to preserve its purity by avoiding contamination by inferior races.64 These views betray a mix of xenophobia, racism, and eugenics, the rationalization of which was found in so-called social Darwinism (a travesty of Darwin’s thought, as we know).65 The White Australia Policy targeted Asians primarily. They had been the object of racist attacks since the 1840s; the Chinese in particular

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had already been the target of several discriminatory laws prior to 1900. They had nevertheless continued to be admitted to the country because of pressure from wealthy landowners and industrialists who wanted a docile and cheap workforce (Choi 1975). Racist practices have also been detected in regard to Jews, Italians, Slavs, and Germans (Fischer 1989). During this whole period, Australians expected that immigrants would be completely assimilated into the country’s culture: that they would bring their knowledge and ability to work but renounce their cultural or ethnic heritage in favour of Anglo-conformity. This sentiment prevailed until the mid-twentieth century (Caiger 1953), and signs of it persisted right through to the 1960s. Yet, it was the Aborigines who most pricked and tormented the national conscience. They were also the most callously treated in the context of often violent operations aimed at reducing their difference either through assimilation or exclusion (if not outright extermination). Right from the earliest days of settlement, the continent was decreed a Terra Nullius. The British thus considered themselves legally authorized to occupy it at their discretion, as though it were uninhabited (King 1986; Reynolds 1987). The tenuousness of this rationalization was offset by the profound belief that these peoples, due to their barbarity, were not worthy of exercising property rights on lands that they were clearly unable to exploit. Australia was thus the only new collectivity to refuse to recognize indigenous peoples’ property rights or to sign treaties with them. Some intellectuals or notables regarded the Aborigines as the missing link between man and ape. Nevertheless, attempts were made, by missionaries and philanthropic societies primarily, to integrate them into “civilization” (for example, settling them on farms, sending them to school, converting them to Christianity), but it was soon found that these initiatives were futile: the Natives were closer to beasts than men, lacking the faculties of reason and judgment (as a High Court judge declared at the beginning of the twentieth century). The acts of violence, discrimination, and exclusion that marked the life of these tribes until the 1950s have generated an immense literature in recent decades, and the main facts are now quite well established. Epidemics and malnutrition, there as elsewhere, caused many deaths. Compounded with that were murderous attacks by Whites. With the establishment of reservations, starting in 1840, the Aborigines were hunted and forcibly transplanted. The recalcitrant ones were often shot. On the Island of Tasmania, most of the 7,000 to 8,000 Aborigines were exterminated. At times, the latter led counter-

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attacks, to which the Whites responded with punitive expeditions, examples of which were reported in remote regions until 1930. Across the country, various tribes have no more descendants today. The violence perpetrated included kidnappings (women were particularly targeted), murders of children born of White and indigenous parents, and deportations. It is estimated that, since the end of the nineteenth century, some 10,000 children were forcibly kidnapped, removed from their families, and placed in institutions with a view to being assimilated. In referring to all these atrocities, several authors have spoken of genocide.66 Parallel to the violent acts, numerous forms of discrimination and exclusion have been reported. Prior to the 1960s, and by virtue of the 1901 Constitution, the Aborigines were bereft of citizenship, not authorized to vote, and not counted in the census. They were excluded from government social-assistance programs, and were underpaid when they worked outside of the reservations. But that did not happen a lot: in 1935, for example, only about 10,000 Aborigines had jobs connected to the national economy. The continued decline of the indigenous population made its eventual extinction foreseeable; that, at least, was the view of a large number of Australian leaders (McGregor 1997). But it turned out that this occurrence was continually deferred, and, with the demographic resurgence of the 1930s and 1940s, it became obvious that the indigenous problem would not be eliminated in this fashion. From then on, methods of authoritarian (sometimes brutal) assimilation were once more adopted. This reversal began in the 1940s. By virtue of the new policy, children where kidnapped from their families to be educated in boarding schools. To force the adults to leave the reservations, shops were closed, services disrupted, and buildings allowed to deteriorate. Mandatory assimilation measures were particularly draconian in Queensland and in Western Australia. In the Northern Territory, by virtue of a eugenics program, indigenous women had already been subjected to systematic métissage with Europeans in order to eradicate the features of the Aboriginal race.67 Exclusion also took on more discrete, often symbolic, but no less revealing forms. I have already mentioned the transition that, in the course of the nineteenth century, transformed the Aborigines from the status of noble savages, capable of being civilized, to the status of brutes, animals, subjects of an inferior race, all this packaged either in pseudoDarwinism or in a biblical outlook that turned the Aborigine into an

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embodiment of original sin, unabsolved by Christianity. B. Smith (1971) has shown how this transformation can be reconstructed with the help of pictoral representations. But this type of inquiry is hindered by the scarcity of materials. Indigenous art and culture, although rich and complex, has long been denigrated and marginalized. As for Australian painters of the late nineteenth century, notably those of the Heidelberg School, they excluded Aborigines from their canvasses (as well as other ethnic minorities and women). In the same era, the head of the State of New South Wales declared: “We [are] the original Australian people” (quoted by Spillman 1997, 31). Up until 1945–50, indigenous people were absent from films. Only in the 1960s did they really make their appearance in historiography.68 However, the major economic, political and social transformations that followed the Second World War were accompanied by a radical revision of culture itself. A new attitude crystallized in relation to immigrants. The break with the racist past, however, was gradual. At first, despite the lifting of some restrictions in matters of immigration, a hierarchy was maintained, which placed the British, other Europeans, Asians, and Blacks in a top-down order. Then the Citizenship Act, 1948, recognized that new citizens could keep their cultural traits. Even if the White Policy was only abolished in 1973, its main arrangements gradually grew obsolete during the 1950s and 1960s, as did the measures of assimilation. In the mid-1960s, for example, the Assimilation Branch of the Ministry of Immigration became the Citizenship Branch. The new trend appeared in many other areas, such as the novel, cinema, and school programs. It is significant that historians or cultural sociologists (the first was perhaps Coleman 1962) began to write about Australian civilization rather than about the nation or the national culture. These rearrangements paved the way for multiculturalism, an idea that Australia borrowed from Canada, where it appeared officially in 1971 as a matter of national policy. In 1973, Whitlam’s Labor government published a first document heralding this reversal (A Multicultural Society for the Future). In the years that followed, various measures were adopted in this spirit (e.g., multilingualism in certain media, the establishment of so-called ethnic schools, and the fight against discrimination towards immigrants or racial minorities). The Galbally Report, published in 1978, was another important step, notably because it placed emphasis on a program of social assistance. Another milestone was laid down in 1989, when multiculturalism was officially raised to the status of an official policy of the Australian state. The latter recognized the

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right of every ethnic group in the country to perpetuate its distinctive culture and committed itself to helping them reach that end. Henceforth, immigrants became integrated into civic society and, in principle, ethnicity was no longer an official representation of the nation. This policy, for which the leaders of ethnic communities had fought vigorously, never won much enthusiasm from the silent majority. In general, Australian intellectuals gave their support; it was unacceptable in their eyes to postulate the superiority of one culture over the others, which was what the policy of forced assimilation did. As for the political parties, they courted the ethnic clientele and, at a time of intensifying trade with the Asian countries, they were anxious not to offend their partners through discriminatory domestic policies towards their nationals.69 This last issue belongs to another turning point within a long cultural narrative. During a good deal of their history, the majority of Australians perceived themselves as belonging to a European nation transposed to the Pacific. First, it took them a while to be reconciled with this so distant and inhospitable continent. Then, they progressively relaxed their relationship with Great Britain and Europe, repatriating, as it were, their allegiances, their cultural references. The 1970s saw them enter another stage, which entailed cultural integration into their Oceanic and Asiatic environment. This context gave rise to the idea of a reconciliation and even fusion between the two great civilizations, the East and the West. In this matter, one might speak of a kind of Eurasian (the word is used sporadically) utopia advocating a synthesis of the two traditions, “a search of the best in two worlds,” as R. Smith and O. White have it (1970, 79). Such a vision is perfectly represented in D. Malouf’s novel (1993): following a difficult path, its heroes nevertheless end up discovering the Southern (austral) as well as indigenous component of their identity. Although far from rallying the whole intellectual class, this idea has important antecedents in the realignment of international trade and the revision of political allegiances since the Second World War.70 In 1963, the international organization known as the Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE) revised the classification of Australia, henceforth regarding it as an Asiatic country (Horne 1972, 229). A cultural shift began in the same direction. Still completely ignored in 1970, Oceania would gradually be integrated into the national field of vision. More concretely, there have been moves to bring Australian and Asia closer. The teaching of Asian history and languages has entered Australian school curricula. Many bilateral associations, with humanitarian and other goals, have been created. Cities have been twinned.

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The media have become more attentive and have devoted more space to news from China and Japan. Some academic journals also dedicated several issues to this subject. As B. Bennett (1994, 1968) has emphasized, it was felt that there was a need for a new paradigm that would integrate, in an interactive fashion, the great mythologies of the Asian/ Pacific region. But will this need ever be filled? It was quickly realized that important cultural differences (in particular with regard to human rights) hindered Australia’s Asian calling. This realization generated various attempts at locating values common to the two civilizations. Relying on works of ancient history, essayists asserted that Europe and Asia had already been quite culturally close and very dependent on one another. In an enthusiastic speech delivered in 1995 in Singapore, ex-prime minister Paul Keating, defeated in 1996, declared that mateship belonged to the traditional values celebrated in Asia. According to another more pragmatic and more radical outlook, since Australia’s economy belongs to the Asiatic world, it would be simpler to integrate Australian into Asian culture through a vigorous assimilation program. The conjuncture that had led to multiculturalism would contribute powerfully, and in parallel fashion, to a very important reversal in relations with indigenous peoples. Without going into great detail, I should stress that the latter acquired the right to vote federally in 1962, the member states following suit shortly after. In 1965, a tribunal instituted equal pay for indigenous workers in the livestock industry. In 1967, indigenous peoples obtained the right to citizenship through a referendum and made their entry into the federal census. Discriminatory laws were abrogated and social assistance programs were extended to the whole population. That year also marks the end of the assimilation policy. In 1971, the first Aborigine was elected to Parliament. The following year, the Whitlam government added a series of measures that gave Aborigines even more powers, placing them henceforth in a position to negotiate economic development projects, planned on their lands by the Whites. Other legislative concessions followed (in 1976, 1985, 1988–90) in response to growing activism, both among a minority of Whites and among indigenous peoples. In 1992, as mentioned earlier, the highest court in the country abolished the notorious principle of Terra Nullius (the Mabo ruling).71 In 1995, another High Court ruling authorized an Aborigine to reclaim his property rights on a land once occupied by his ancestors. Changes no less substantial were felt on the cultural level, at least among the elites. Inspired by C.D. Rowley’s (1970, 1971a, 1971b)

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pioneering studies, several (especially academic) works have been published calling for the abandonment of the traditional view and denouncing the treatment inflicted on indigenous peoples by Europeans since the early days of settlement. For a number of observers, Australia was not colonized but, in fact, conquered by the Whites. R.M. Berndt (1972) proposed an expansion of national identity to incorporate the Aborigines within it. Several books published on the occasion of the bicentenary in 1988 promoted indigenous culture, and art in particular, not only ethnographically but also aesthetically. Shortly thereafter, another important book (Hodge and Mishra 1991) denounced the destruction of indigenous culture by the Whites, appealed for its restoration, and even asserted its superiority in terms of authenticity (e.g., the nature of the relationship to the land, the conception of the world, the individual’s situation in relation to others, etc.). Other writers, similarly, called for a new type of social contract, a new republic, in order to erase the racist past (e.g., Pearson 1994).72 Then, just when all these tendencies were coming to a head, as a new balance of identities appeared to be coming about for good, everything was called into question. First, it is important to stress that, as one can readily guess, all these overtures – towards indigenous peoples, immigrants, ethnic groups, and Asian countries – did not win everyone’s support from day one. But open opposition remained restrained, almost marginal. Throughout the 1980s, influential voices spoke out, in particular that of G. Blainey (1984), to criticize the new path Australia had adopted, especially Asian immigration.73 A New Right developed around this issue. Its spokespersons wrote in publications such as Quadrant, the Australian, and the Bulletin. They opposed the new immigration policy. The rapprochement with the Aborigines was deemed impossible due to an incompatibility of values, traditions, economic and social structures, and legal standards. Multiculturalism was attacked, accused of imperiling social cohesion and national unity. Contradictions were also underscored: how to reconcile the preservation of ethnic traditions with equal opportunity in employment? Or cultural fragmentation with social integration? Australia’s Asian turn was also taken to task: the nation could find itself in a dangerous in-between position, having cut off its ties with the West, while having failed its rapprochement with the East. For some, the spectre of the yellow peril had been reborn. For others, efforts to harmonize the Australian nation with the civilizations of Asia threatened the survival of the ancient European and even Judaeo-Christian

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heritage. Periods of high unemployment (during the mid-1980s, for example) increased friction. The backlash became more acute after the 1996 election of the Liberal Party led by John Howard.74 Immigration, racial questions, ethnic relations, and multiculturalism became burning issues. Relations with indigenous peoples hardened after the Mabo ruling of 1992 and that of 1995. Yielding to the reaction, the Howard government pushed through a restrictive bill, which, after having been rejected by the Senate, precipitated a political crisis in the spring of 1998. Due to the disarray created by all these episodes, ultra-conservative tribunes, such as Members of Parliament Pauline Hanson and Graham Campbell (of the One Nation Party), multiplied verbal attacks reeking of racism. The axis, which had traditionally pitted the nationalist middle and working classes against the pro-British elites, has now shifted. The new cleavage henceforth appears to oppose the conservative masses and an elite more concerned with opening up to the international scene.

collective memory and the quest for identity An overview of the perspectives that have successively governed the construction of national memory constitutes the best introduction to the current stirrings and disquiet over questions of identity. We see that attempts to represent the Australian past produce the same divergences and the same confusion as current attempts to portray nationhood and to establish a direction for the future. One critical comment is necessary from the outset. When one compares Australia with other new collectivities such as Quebec, English Canada, the United States, and various Latin American countries (including Argentina and Mexico), one gets the sense that, with the exception of recent years, memory in Australia does not appear to have occupied a central and constant place in reflections on the country’s condition and progress. References to the past are certainly numerous, but their purpose is less to summon up the memory of a founding dream, a great collective tradition, an inestimable work to be pursued than to celebrate episodes that were deemed outstanding. This is but a hypothesis: I do not claim that the following remarks are based on a rigorous demonstration. This caveat aside, one can only be struck by the extent of the structural obstacles that have thwarted the historiographic project and

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that, in some cases, have led to a real suppression, a silencing of memory. My point is as follows: in different ways, the penal origins of the country and the ill-treatment of the Aborigines instilled shame in those who came after and stained the memory of the country’s origins. This malaise at the heart of the historical consciousness could have been overcome through the celebration of great founding moments drawn from a national mythology. But the Australian past scarcely has any, a point that certain intellectuals have lamented and that we have also observed with respect to the incremental process of political disengagement, the construction of the state without glorious feats.75 Finally, a state of fragmentation and uncertainty, typical of present Australian society, inhibits the search for an organizing principle that would allow for a coherent shaping of the past. I briefly discuss each of these claims. Shameful Memory Australia’s origins as a penal colony have always been known, either through old chronicles and travellers’ accounts or through oral tradition and family memory. Yet, this type of beginning, which is scarcely glorious in itself, threw the representation of the nation into disrepute. As of the first half of the nineteenth century, contemporaries expressed the disgust that these deported criminals produced in them and the distress that they experienced at the idea that a nation must eternally acknowledge such ancestors (White 1981, 22–24). Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the colonies that had not received any prisoners (e.g., Victoria, Southern Australia) considered themselves for that reason to be superior to the others. This feeling has endured. In 1972 still, while speaking at a prestigious venue (the Octagon Lectures), M.N. Austin (1972) evoked “the degrading circumstances of our first beginnings.” Others mentioned with envy the pilgrims of the Mayflower, of whom each American wished to be a descendant. In this spirit, the Australians’ feeling of inferiority has also been ascribed to the opprobrium of their beginnings.76 This shame has been so acute that various attempts have been made to bypass the memory of the nation’s origins. A first strategy was to practise amnesia. Changes of toponymy in 1814 (from New Holland to Australia), 1820 (from Van Diemen’s Land to Tasmania), and 1859 (from Moreton Bay District to Queensland) expressed a desire to dissociate Australians from the penal stigmas, the stereotypes of the

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godless and lawless criminal-settler. There are also accounts of families that, having gained respectability, destroyed the documents that could have established an all-too direct filiation with some deported ancestors or an embarrassing association with anti-Aboriginal atrocities. Historians of the late nineteenth century simply evaded the period of the penal colony by focusing on constitutional episodes and economic development (Trainor 1994, chap. 14). Up until the mid-twentieth century, if not slightly beyond, the blemishes of the nation’s beginnings were mainly passed over in silence in school instruction and in historiography. J.M. Ward (1963) found a tendency among past historians to avoid the theme of the nation’s formation entirely; history and biography (or autobiography) focused on recent times. Other authors, making forays into the nineteenth century, began their narrative with some remarkable event that occurred after the early settlement period: the Eureka uprising, for example, or the granting of responsible government. Some of the first major works on the founding era were written by non-Australians. Another way of avoiding the issue consisted in defusing the penal syndrome by softening the features of the convicts. In this vein, some stressed that the criminal antecedents of the deportees had been exaggerated to the point where they had become a myth (Palmer 1954; Sturma 1983) and that the deportees belonged to the working class and not to the criminal classes (Oxley 1996). In addition, it is argued that the rehabilitated prisoners, once liberated, had become good citizens, honest workers, good husbands and fathers (Hughes 1987; Beatty 1962). For others, features that were in fact typical of the working class in every Western country were wrongly attributed only to the convicts. Several writers (Robinson 1988; Robson 1965) have emphasized that the deported women were essentially victims of the judicial system, many of them later becoming “family builders,” agents of social stabilization. The children of the convicts were also held to be very moral, quite superior to their parents in any case: that is, the original defects were not hereditary. Finally, it was underscored that Australia’s beginnings also included the so-called free settlers, the respectable families, the businessmen, the notables: these were the true founders, the authentic ancestors of today’s Australia. At any rate, it is pointed out that Australia, in keeping with the British government’s view, had to be from the start much more than a penal colony: a dynamic economy, a responsible society, another Great Britain in the Pacific.77

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Hence, a so-called revisionist history proposes to reinterpret Australia’s genesis no longer on the basis of its penal mission and origins but as an expansion of the Empire, as a great collective adventure, the promise of which has been kept by its history. This elitist and triumphalist vision of the past embeds Australian memory in the long history of Great Britain and Europe. But it appears to garner little support, at least among intellectuals. More or less parallel to these strategies of memory, a third approach offered a more radical option: to break the “pact of silence,” to recognize the sullied origins in all their ugliness, to admit to the errors committed, and thus to find freedom from a memory of shame. This initiative of rehabilitation and reappropriation of the past was begun in the 1960s; a work by C.M.H. Clark (1962) played a determining role in this regard, as did, somewhat later, those of J.B. Hirst (1983) and R. Hughes (1987). After several years of the same therapy, it seems, indeed, that the skeleton of the penal origins has finally been removed from the closets of national memory. The same, however, cannot be said of the indigenous issue. The way they have been treated since 1788 by the Europeans and their descendants produced a great malaise among Australian elites, which, over recent decades, has developed into a crisis of conscience. There too, a number of works have been published to acknowledge and denounce the mistakes that were committed.78 As portrayed by several historians and anthropologists, the British were no longer conquerors but invaders, despoilers: the real barbarians, in a sense. Several researchers have thus been studying the country’s settlement from the Aboriginal perspective, placing indigenous peoples at centre stage. The Aborigines became the first (some even say the only “original”) Australians. Others, in a slightly more traditional perspective, strive to show how indigenous peoples contributed to the development of the country; thus, they integrate the Aboriginal past into national history. But the intensity and persistence of this memory work betrays a disquiet that is far from having been appeased, as the evolution of the indigenous debate in Australia today shows. Finally, at the margins (or athwart) the trends I have just mentioned, another current tends to reinterpret the Australian past within a feminist framework. The result is a new vision of national history that restores woman’s place and role as an independent citizen, closely involved in collective life, in history in the making (e.g., Grimshaw et al. 1994).

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In Search of Events and Founding Myths As I have indicated, some intellectuals have long deplored the fact that the Australian past lacks the great epic episodes that could strengthen its consciousness of its collective identity; that it is a country without a history, which shrinks away from myth (“the non-event past”), which attained political sovereignty quietly, through gradual negotiation; a country lacking in internal wars, social or political revolutions, largescale catastrophes that would have marked out the past with glorious, brilliant events overshadowing its dubious deeds. Furthermore, we know how difficult it is even to pinpoint the country’s date of birth: each Australian state has its founding celebration. Besides, according to some, the country’s origin coincides with the distant beginnings of Aboriginal settlement. Governor Phillip has been mocked for decreeing the foundation of New South Wales before an assembly of slovenly soldiers after a long night of carousing and shortly after having established the first prisoner camps. This is indeed the impression conveyed by Watkin Tench’s description in 1789 (A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay): the first to arrive certainly did not experience the exalted feeling of a great unfolding adventure. In an often lustreless course of events, the national consciousness had to be content with a few rather modest episodes that were soon to be heavily laden with symbols. It especially capitalized on foreign events in which Australians won renown. Among the first set of episodes, attention has focused on the Eureka rebellion, responsible government, the Commonwealth of 1901, the bushrangers’ and gold diggers’ opposition to the big landowners, the exploration of the continent, the spectacular growth of the cities, or even the labour movement and the egalitarian ideal. The second set of events consists essentially of military actions: involvement in the Sudan War, the Boer War, the Boxer War, and, especially, the First World War and the Second World War. But of all these acts wrapped in legend, Gallipoli is the one, no doubt, that had the greatest impact on collective consciousness: the heroism displayed by the Australian soldiers underscored the nation’s valour and, at last, diverted attention away from its beginnings.79 It is also noteworthy that none of these discursive initiatives emphasizes an event directed against the mother country. However, most of these symbolic moves were only partial successes, if not categorical failures; for the deconstructive initiatives were also

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vigorous. For example, it has been demonstrated that small peasant property always occupied a very important place in the rural history of the country, which tended to relativize the anti-monopolistic struggles (Pike 1962). Many works have shown that women were also present in the bush, subject to the same type of life as the bushman, and just as resistant to the adversity of the outback. Even the glorious acts of Gallipoli have been revised by some authors who have called into question the unfolding of events, the motivations, and the behaviour of the actors (Aspinall-Oglander 1929–32; Bennett 1994; etc.). Other myths, without being objects of criticism, never inspired much popular enthusiasm; such is the case with regard to the urban utopia and even of the Commonwealth, whose main architects are practically unknown today. The difficulties associated with official commemorations and national holidays attest, in their own way, to the crisis of memory. Already in 1888, the first centenary scarcely won unanimity; the celebration was surrounded by controversy, notably over the space to be granted to both national and imperial symbols (Trainor 1994, chap. 6). The Bulletin, for example, boycotted the festivities, suggesting that Australia’s birth be rather associated with the Eureka uprising, the first act of independence. The bicentenary was also marked by controversy. Every doubt and disagreement plaguing collective memory seemed to manifest itself on that occasion. A protest movement adopted the slogan: “White Australia has a black past.”80 Many observers concluded that the event had simply failed to recreate a national memory (e.g., Cochrane and Goodman 1988). As for the national holiday, it is officially celebrated on 26 January to recall the arrival of the First Fleet at Botany Bay in 1788. In 1888, the six colonies agreed to turn it into a national event. But the colonies other than New South Wales lost interest in it and instituted their own holidays marking their own beginnings. Even in New South Wales, the national holiday never aroused any enthusiasm. The vacation and collective (mainly sports-related) events were appreciated, but the symbolic content remained without impact, either because it had had nothing to do with the political independence of the country or because it awoke a memory of shame – in spite of precautions taken not to mention the convicts. In reality, ANZAC Day, which recalls the Gallipoli landing on 25 April 1915, has long been more successful than 26 January. Several suggestions have been made over the last decades to reactivate this holiday. Some have

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proposed to celebrate instead the arrival of the Aborigines on the continent. Others have suggested simply renouncing all commemorations and turning the holiday towards the future (Inglis 1967). In several respects, this last proposal reveals much about the Australian state of mind and what I have been calling the silencing of memory. As T. Griffiths shows (1987), national consciousness remained orphaned for a long while. There are a number of accounts, from the mid-nineteenth century on, that illustrate this inability to embrace the past.81 The splendours of British and imperial history offered a convenient distraction. At the same time, they secured the symbolic comfort of a long memory, from which the national consciousness derived the confidence it so needed (Fletcher 1994, 1997). But, as we have seen, this escape valve was not available to all, in particular to those who, out of frustration or for any other reason, denied the mother country and gave themselves over to the new nation. For all of these, the past was a doubly blocked horizon, cut off both from the long history of Europe and the short history of the continent. A more radical position was voiced on several occasions, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century. It consisted in wiping memory clean, starting over again from scratch, and projecting the imaginary into the future. There are expressions to this effect in 1850 (“we have to commence and to carry out everything for ourselves” [Hamer 1990, 68]) and, later, in the Bulletin. According to the latter, Australia had neither vestige, nor tradition, nor past: everything had to be invented. The idea of creating a representation of the Australian from the Aboriginal perspective stems from an innovative cultural movement. To be sure, only a segment of the intellectual class (mainly anthropologists, literary figures, and artists) supports this initiative for the moment, but it reveals much about the explorations and realignments under way. It rests on the full appropriation of Australian historical, as well as social and spatial, realities. On the one hand, the outback, with its marvels and natural riches, becomes once more a mythical place where the collective soul projects and redefines itself. It is no longer the rugged land of rebellious bushrangers but the heart of the reinvented continent, bearer of a new spirituality. On the other hand, this is the land of the Aborigines and is at one with their culture: it is suffused with Dreamtime, it shares both in the latter’s purity and permanence, it evokes the distant origins of deep Australia with which the White man communes. Here the break with Europe is achieved fully;

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another great civilizing adventure finally takes over from the exhausted British heritage. It is easy to see the functions of this paradigm, which ties together the main threads of the Australian mental universe. First, it grants the nation an authentic, long memory; Australia is no longer a continent of contested tradition, drifting away from Europe. Then it reconciles the first occupants with the newcomers by establishing a path of continental continuity. Simultaneously, it promises to counter the disenchantment and cynicism of the postmodern nation. Finally, against the shattering of identity provoked by multiculturalism, it proposes a site of reconstruction on neutral ground, a new reference point, beyond the diversity of conditions, beliefs, and ethnicities.82 It remains to be seen what will come out of this initiative, which, in the end, proposes a scarcely renewed version of the Noble Savage. For the moment, the vision of the past that it conveys belongs to a quite heterogeneous historiographical field in search of a consensus that the multicultural mosaic has apparently denied.83 If it is true that historical science is built from the present, how could one project into the past a cohesion that does not exist today?84 Note, however, that in spite of the obstacles it encountered, Australian national memory has nonetheless achieved its autonomy by liberating itself from its British roots, whose grip was felt until the midtwentieth century and beyond. According to an old view, the most important thing in the history of an empire was the history of the mother country, not that of its offshoots. An Identity Void? Today, the uncertainty that characterizes the representation both of the nation and of the past reflects Australia’s difficulty in defining itself collectively, in recognizing itself in sufficiently common and galvanizing symbols, such as the now-sidelined ethnic and British connection. Multicultural Australia, which is now part of Oceania, is in search of an identity. In a preceding section, I surveyed the attempts made to redirect the definition of the nation away from Aboriginal tropism and towards métissage and the call of Asia. The country’s recent transformation shows that none of these versions is widely accepted, save perhaps the republican ideal. The very abundance of the proposals put forward attests to this malaise over collective identity. There has been a precedent to the idea of feeding the nation’s soul (a “new dreaming”) with the outback and

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the Aboriginal past. Indeed, the postmodern utopia of the Noble Savage seems to have emerged towards the end of the 1930s with the literary movement of the Jindyworobaks, of which R. Ingamells (1938) is the best-known representative. The Jindies poets proposed a fusion of the European tradition with Aboriginal culture. The journal Walkabout (1934–74) pursued more or less the same line of thinking. But one can question the real potential of this idea as a future matrix of national identity. Even in the academic and artistic circles in which it flourishes,85 it runs into severe criticism (e.g., Lattas 1991), being accused of projecting both an idyllic vision of indigenous people and an excessively dark portrait of Australian culture. Some have underscored the impasse to which this leads in terms of identity: those of European descent (still in the majority today) no longer know how to identify themselves except as “non-Aborigines.” Indigenous peoples, for their part, dislike this view, which they perceive as a renewed and refined form of exploitation, a symbolic recolonization. As for multiculturalism, it represents an alternative scheme in a double capacity, although in a contradictory way: on the one hand, it fragments national identity and consolidates each of its ethnic components; on the other, it implicitly asserts that diversity is henceforth the essence of Australian identity. In both cases, it marks the improbability and perhaps the impossibility of a strong feeling of belonging, sustained by a shared culture. In addition, multiculturalism itself has recently come under attack, and its future as a national policy is perhaps not as certain as it appears. On another level, the Asiatic path is now strewn with cultural pitfalls, given the so-called clash of civilizations (and also because economic difficulties in the main Asian countries during the 1990s have altered the order of priorities). The greater part of the Australian population hardly recognizes itself in the traditions, values, and symbols of the East. On the whole, Australia’s Asian turn appears to have been first and foremost, and perhaps exclusively, economic. By contrast, the old British connection is more worn than ever. Its cultural influence remains important, but it is clearly unsuitable as the foundation of a feeling of nationhood. Efforts in recent years to unite Australians around one vision, one appraisal of their landscapes and cultural heritage, have generated results, to be sure, but in a minor key. Thus the impressions produced by the many (magnificent) books of photographs (devoted to architecture, painting, landscapes, works and people, etc.) are effective extensions of the symbolization of collective identity; however, these cannot replace the latter when it is wanting.86 In sum, according to a widespread (and

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perhaps excessively pessimistic) view among many analysts, Australia has until recently sought in vain to develop a standardizing political and cultural discourse, and, in the absence of identity, 19 million individualities are all that remains, each directing his or her fate in his or her own way. Three features encapsulated the state of the Australian nation at the end of the twentieth century. First: persistent disagreement and controversy over old questions that have failed to be resolved. Is there a national literature? Australian painting and architecture? Ought the British (and European heritage) to be rescued? Ought Aborigines to be integrated in the same capacity as other ethnic groups or ought they to have a separate status, outside of the nation? Ought one to persist in ordering collective memory or should efforts be invested instead in imagining and planning the future? The second feature, linked to the first, is uncertainty, the sense of fragility and even of a void in terms of collective identity, the most salient manifestations of which can be found in the fine arts, literature, social sciences, and political discourse. According to R. Nile (1994, viii), uncertainty is all that Australians are certain of today. For many, the obsession with collective identity has become a school of skepticism and cynicism: the nation is only held together by its geography. The third feature is the belief that national identity must be invented, that it is a constant effort of questioning and renewal; this is even regarded as one of the best established Australian traditions. One idea presented for discussion advocates no less than to put an end to the nation-state and to renounce national identity.87 At the same time, we see an exploration of the idea of multiple, fragmented identities (Hudson and Bolton 1997, chap. 1). Another, very recent, path is in fact an extension of the old Australian aspiration to complete autonomy for the country. A number of people believe that the republican ideal (combined with a charter of rights) could finally seal the gaps of nationhood and allow Australians permanently to overcome both the old cultural cringe and the crisis of collective identity that has weighed upon them for two or three decades. Note in passing, the highly, if not strictly, symbolic nature of the objective. For, by erasing the last signs of the old British hold on the country, the passage to a full-fledged republic would result, in the end, not in granting Australia increased power but simply in renaming the power that it already wields. The dream was rekindled in February 1998 by a constitutional conference that agreed upon a series of steps designed to grant Australia the status of republic exactly one hundred years after the

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founding of the Commonwealth. But the referendum of 5 November 1999 put a stop to this process, at least for now.

conclusion The highlights of the Australian path can be summed up as follows. First, it represents the fascinating history of a most radical transplantation: a piece of Europe thrown into Oceania, into an Asiatic environment characterized from the outset by an extremely unbalanced demographic relationship and an apparently insurmountable cultural barrier. This turned Australia into a nation torn between its history and its geography, ever in search of a cultural equation that would reconcile the European tradition and the Asiatic future. After more than two centuries of history, this other Great Divide, which still has not been crossed, has overshadowed all of collective life. We saw this in the political arena, divided between those who were faithful to Britain and/or the Empire and the architects of an autonomous collectivity, inventing its own destiny. We also found signs of this chasm in elite culture, torn between the superior standards of the mother country and the somewhat makeshift and rugged “authenticity” of the continent. Finally, it dominates the entire history of nation-building, Australianity being either (or all at once?) an Oceanic form of the great British civilization or an original creation, permanently liberated from Europe. Politically, we saw a process of gradual emancipation within continuity; sovereignty was achieved incrementally, through an unfolding sequence of small acts of disengagement. This past is remarkably free of spectacular breaks, as much as it is of great founding ideologies. Both from the perspective of the metropolis and that of the new society, the colonial tie was handled pragmatically, in a manner that successfully married opposing interests and prevented excesses in one direction or another. Australian radical thought, for example, did not encounter conjunctures suitable for revolutionary upheavals. In the long term, however, the colonial tie disintegrated just the same under the combined impact of belonging to the new continent, the increasingly sharp sense of collective identity, the growth of non-British immigration, and the weakening economic and military power of Great Britain, which was itself increasingly committed to its own European future. On the whole, Australia’s political and national consciousness tended to mirror the evolution of its economy, which gradually became integrated into the Asian region.

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But there is nothing linear in this decolonization process, which in its forward and backward moves encompassed many ambiguities and ambivalences: distance, on the one hand, slackens the ties with the mother country, but, on the other, it tightens them, provoking a reaction against isolation; the White Policy both preserves the British heritage and stimulates national identity; the governor general has the double mission of reaffirming the imperial link and of furthering the union of the old colonies within the Commonwealth; the Empire itself marries the old British loyalties with the will to assert and extend the influence of the nation; participation in the two world wars directly serves London’s interests, while whipping up Australian pride. We have seen that disengagement was strongly pushed from below by the working people of the cities and the bush, in opposition to business and to part of the intellectual and political elites. The antinomy evident here reproduces the divide in national culture. It, too, developed on the basis of two parallel and somewhat irreducible narratives: that of intellectual (written) culture and that of popular (oral) culture. But we have seen that this duality was not impermeable. Significant segments of intellectual culture shaped the everyday life of the lower classes; this was especially the case of literature from the late nineteenth century on. Three other features typified the formation of Australian national culture, in tandem with the erosion of its dependency on the mother country: first, the feeling of inferiority (the cultural cringe), which persisted until the late twentieth century; second, the pursuance of a process of liberation through displacement or substitution, where military dependency shifted from Great Britain to the United States (economic dependency followed the same path, subsequently switching to Asia). Third, the development of the nation and of collective identity was achieved at the expense of cultural diversity. On this score, Australia deployed just about every conceivable tactic: physical violence, deportation, socio-economic marginalization, symbolic exclusion, and so on. The deep divide and the ambiguities to which I have pointed in Australia’s political and cultural history reappear in the utopias in which imperial visions exist alongside radical social aspirations. But both the former and the latter long exhibit the same racism and are marked by the same lack of religious references. The representations of the nation reproduce all these features. The uncertainty surrounding the moment of its birth is telling, as is the succession of stereotypes that it conveys, moving from the new British race to the bushman, from

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the working man’s paradise to the Empire’s intrepid fighter, finally ending towards the close of the century with the polysemy and uncertainty (once again) of multiculturalism. Compounded with this are the attempts at reconciling the Aboriginal fact at the heart of a reconfigured nation, in which the contours of identity are however increasingly blurred. Today, Australia is in search of a new symbolic frontier that neither the Asian horizon nor the Dreamtime appear likely to provide. Australia will perhaps find it one day in a full actualization of the republican myth. In sum, in its conversion from exclusion to inclusion, Australian consciousness has paid a price in cohesion and density. In return, however, the nation is in the process of liberating itself from its shameful memory; it needs only a new utopia to light up and reorganize its past. On the whole, Australia offers a perfect example of emancipation achieved by slippage and erosion, as opposed to models of disengagement through confrontation and radical breaks. Many familiar processes and features appear here. Depending on the narrative in question – be it politics, literature, theatre, architecture, or spoken language – the building of the nation follows different timetables. It also develops, in equal measure one might say, by drawing upon competing visions and projects. The national culture is created through borrowings from the mother country’s economic, educational, legal, and other institutions, from her literary genres, everyday customs, and sports. The landscape supplies the symbolic material of collective identity. The institution of literature is achieved only after a long process. The vast open spaces of the interior give rise to a mythology of the land and a legendary national type (the bushman). The nation, long given to exclusionary and discriminatory practices, opens up to the imperatives of citizenship. Finally, dependency on the mother country is accompanied by a deep feeling of cultural inferiority that is difficult to overcome (e.g., the hold of the European norm, self-denigration, repeated calls for cultural reform and reconstruction, etc.) A word on the contradictory character of the ideological architecture that was supposed to structure the Australian national imaginary. I skip over some rather episodic paradoxes, such as the vigorous celebration of ANZAC and military heroism even while, on two occasions, the country had expressed in a referendum its refusal to go to war. The two most important, and also most illuminating, contradictions concern egalitarian aspirations and the democratic spirit. The first is all the more remarkable in that the passion for equality tolerated very great

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disparities reflected in the class structure, making it one of the most powerful myths in the Australian imaginary, according to E. Thompson (1994b). As for the democratic ideal, it outlived old traditions of exclusion that particularly affected Aborigines, Asians, and women88 – as though democracy could only prevail in a culturally homogeneous society. Similarly, some claimed that Australian political life had always been controlled by an oligarchy of magistrates who had taken over the state (Davidson 1991). Given these conditions, it is difficult to deny the quasi-strategic dimension of these egalitarian and democratic ideologies. To be sure, they corresponded to deep beliefs in a large part of the population.89 But they also had the effect, if not the function, of occluding in the imaginary that which they should have eliminated in reality: that is, inequality and exclusion. A comparison between Australia and Quebec first calls attention to many important similarities, some of which prompt us to rethink traits hitherto held to be unique to Quebec. Ruralist mythology is one of these. It is utterly remarkable that, in spite of Australia’s early and intense urbanization, national culture has long continued to feed off the symbolism of the outback. This has been likened to “rural fundamentalism” (Glynn 1970, 78). To be sure, it is easy to find points of differentiation. For example, the imagery of the bush was at one and the same time tinged with realism and very preoccupied with authenticity; it valued the bushman’s most rugged and sometimes least commendable features (the very features that Quebec’s elites ordinarily condemned: recalcitrant temperament, independence, rebelliousness, and the like). It was thus in close synchrony with popular culture. The strong similarities nevertheless call for a reexamination of Quebec’s ruralist ideologies and of the analyses that have been put forth to explain them (e.g., the reaction to the Cession of 1763, a lack of professional opportunities, etc.). The two societies also shared a permanent worry about their survival that shaped several features of the national culture. In the case of Australia, it was the Asian (in particular, Japanese and Chinese) peril, the age-old fear of an invasion; in the case of Quebec, it was the weight of the anglophone and Protestant presence on the North American continent. In both cases, the elites were firmly convinced of the nation’s fragility and of the unique nature of its history. On both sides, to varying degrees, they assumed positions of retreat and pondered their identities a great deal. To a great extent, the national identities evolved in a similar way. Preoccupied with homogeneity and survival, they defined themselves

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until the mid-twentieth century with reference to the cultural heritage of the mother country, excluding ethnic groups that did not belong to it, notably the Aborigines. Then, in recent decades, the nation’s circle widened to make room for diversity, as citizenship began to take precedence over ethnicity (e.g., multiculturalism in Australia, interculturalism in Quebec). In both cases, the diversity paradigm now prevails; it is at work today even in a retrospective sense in the realm of memory, where some seek to find antecedents, to discover the distant roots of ethnic pluralism, now the main thread of national history. But in each collectivity, the end of exclusions has marked the beginning of an uncertainty with respect to collective identity, as national consciousness seeks new landmarks. Everywhere, some people are saying that it is time to forget the past, that the nation has to be reinvented. From Quebec’s point of view, it is useful to note that Australia also had its Grande Noirceur. The Communist witch hunt was powerfully present there. Even Manning Clark, a very reputed historian, was considered a traitor to his country because he was a sympathizer of Soviet communism. Censorship in literary matters raged from the 1920s to the 1960s. In 1958, the list of prohibited books in the country still comprised 178 titles, one of which was Lady Chatterley’s Lover (D.H. Lawrence). Nabokov’s Lolita was equally blacklisted (McQueen 1984, 98; Coleman 1974). For his part, J.F. Williams (1995) has shown that an isolationist and very conservative current, which was hostile to modernity, prevailed among the elites between the two world wars. Another striking parallel lies in the cultural stirrings of the 1960s. Australia, like Quebec, experienced a spectacular renaissance at that time in the arts, letters, and intellectual life as a whole. Also, as in Quebec, this transformation was accompanied by a twofold opening. Towards the outside first, a new curiosity surfaced on the international level, beyond the relationship with the mother country. Second, national identity annexed new areas for itself; popular language, with its characters and sensibility, became even more present in the novel and in poetry, and it made its appearance in theatre (Michel Tremblay’s Belles Sœurs invariably comes to mind). The changes that have occurred since the mid-twentieth century in inter-ethnic relations, national consciousness, and intellectual culture have precipitated a reconstruction of memory. In Australia, a new generation has striven to come to terms with the guilty conscience over the treatment of indigenous peoples, with the shame over Australia’s origins, and with the legacy of the White Policy. In Quebec, a similar

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process unfolded in the modernist historiography that has held sway since the 1960s and 1970s. In the latter case, the challenge was mainly to dispel the old stereotypes of a ruralist, priest-ridden Quebec, averse to progress and exclusively focused on its roots. Let us consider one last feature that is present in the history of these two new collectivities. Unlike the United States, where it was made into an invasive national myth, neither Quebec nor Australia articulated a powerful discourse of the self-made man. The myth of victorious individualism expressed in social climbing is relatively absent in the imaginary associated with elite culture, just as studies of social mobility are quite undeveloped in history and in sociology. This observation brings us to the heart of culture and its connection with the social. But, to understand it well, it is necessary to describe its genesis, to return to the origins of settlement, to reconstruct the formation of communities, to locate the experiences that marked the imaginary in a lasting way and shaped culture. This is a difficult undertaking, which I discuss later on. The same observation applies to each of the features mentioned hitherto. It is necessary to delve deeper and, in each case, to enlarge the inquiry in a twofold direction: on one side, to penetrate further into the history and collective life of each society; on the other, to seek on the international level the interplay of conjunctures and interactions that has, in one way or another, marked the path of each particular country. The same can be said of the differences between the two countries, which also prompt us to take a fresh look at certain aspects of the Quebec past. Politically, Australia won its independence following a jagged historical course. The building of the Canadian state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries enabled Quebec to acquire certain powers, those associated with the status of a province; but its efforts to go beyond that have until now failed. In this respect, one must bear in mind that Quebec has been dependent on not one but two metropolitan powers (Great Britain and France). There is an important difference here between Quebec and Australia. In the latter, the waves of nationalism often resulted in – and sometimes were explicitly intended to produce – a weakening of the colonial tie. It was quite another matter in Quebec, where, between the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the nationalist upheavals tended rather to affirm the cultural link with France, without necessarily calling political structures into question. As for the processes of symbolic appropriation, there is also a significant difference in the sphere of intellectual culture, particularly in literature. At first sight, a strong parallelism seems to prevail: in

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Australia, as in Quebec, the first writers slavishly imitated the models of the mother country, and it took their successors more than a century to liberate themselves from this dependency. We saw in chapter 3 how L. Mailhot (1989–90, 96) described the process as a “rejuvenation” of Quebec literature. C. Hadgraft (1963, 42) observed, almost in the same words, that “the earliest Australian literature was already old.” But, beyond this surprising convergence, there is a significant difference. The excitement that gripped Australian literature in the late nineteenth century was expressed in a great concern with realism and even a vindication of the features of popular culture and everyday life. In Quebec, nothing comparable occurred before the 1940s. The regionalist novel that flourished in the early twentieth century basically stuck to the program of national literature defined by Abbot H.-R. Casgrain in the nineteenth century. Officially, it wished to cleave to local reality; in practice, it was a travesty designed to conform to a moralizing aesthetic serving the Catholic and French tradition. An undertaking aimed at continuity was concealed beneath a show of breaking with the old. With some variations, we can find the same contrast in the fine arts with the Heidelberg school in Australia in the late nineteenth century and a bit later with landscape painting in Quebec. Another element of difference was the place of religion in public life and in the representations of the nation. Highly present in Quebec, religion clearly took a back seat in Australia. It is even strangely absent from utopian thinking and the national imaginary. One explanation lies in the fact that religion was a divisive factor in Australia, given the presence of Protestantism and Catholicism.90 National unity thus required that it be held at bay. It was exactly the contrary in Quebec, where, because there was only one religion, the Church was an element of collective cohesion, a lever of national survivance, which partly explains the Catholic clergy’s ability to wield social power for so long. Another contrast pertains to the sources of nationalism and of the nation itself. In Quebec, cultural demands (of which the elites were the institutionalized brokers) were pivotal from the mid-nineteenth century on. In Australia, the social question was a major source of national consciousness: that is, the struggle of the propertyless against the government, of small owners against the monopolies, and of workers against capitalists. The result was a different collective life and social types than those that existed in Quebec – in the settlement regions, for example. At first glance, the outback and the Quebec ecumene, like the South American pampa or the American Far West, present great similarities as isolated

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and hostile territories that were gradually domesticated. Similarly, the bushman and the French-Canadian habitant share a number of features: averse to formalities, respectful of community values (in spite of a certain individualism), highly attached to egalitarianism, equity, and democracy, and so on. They differ, however, in three important respects. First, culturally, the generalized hegemony of Catholicism in Quebec made for more homogeneous and – one might suggest – more orderly communities. Second, the system of small family farms reinforced this feature, while furthering a form of individualism. By contrast, the bushman was a small wage earner at the mercy of big farmers; he had a greater need to rely on his community and on state protection (“fair go”). These two features led to a third one. In Australia, the egalitarian spirit of the low-wage earners made them activists eager for social change, a disposition soon voiced in the trade union movement. In Quebec, the social conditions of settlement favoured the model of a peasantry, jealous of its property and rather conservative. On the cultural level, another difference resides in the influence of Enlightenment philosophy as a foundation and justification of the national struggle (liberty, democracy, etc.). In Australia, this connection was not made, even if the ideas of the Scottish philosophers were disseminated there. By contrast, in Quebec, by the last third of the eighteenth century, the first intellectuals to conceive of the nation relied on Diderot, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Mably, and others, just as the ideologues of the Patriote movement did several decades later. However – and this seems crucial in several respects – throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and until recent years, the Australian elites constantly relied on the feeling that their society belonged to a new world, filled with promise, and that its youth eclipsed provisional troubles from memory. Even in the worst moments, this feeling sustained collective optimism. There is no equivalent in the history of Quebec prior to the mid-twentieth century. The enthusiasm produced by the grandiose perspectives of the New World was always darkened by the disquiet over survivance, the sense of collective peril inhibiting celebration of the continent. Quebec is a new collectivity that showed signs of old age before reaching adulthood; in the mid-nineteenth century, it indulged in tradition and memory as substitutes for its broken dreams. Other differences between Quebec and Australia have already been discussed in chapter 2; I will not address them here. They relate to the absence of a powerful radical social thought in Quebec prior to the

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1960s; to the scant attention paid to Tocqueville’s questions and assertions in the nineteenth century about democracy as the basis of cohesion in new societies; to the antinomy and distrust that typified the relations between the culture of the elites and that of the common people; to the lack of knowledge about urban culture; to the absence of a pro-Aboriginal intellectual tradition that would have denounced the European invader; to the representation of the country’s origins in continuity with the mother country, cut off from the long Aboriginal past; and to the lack of a current of critical thought about France as a metropolitan power.

6 Other Pathways: Canada, New Zealand, and the United States This chapter offers only a glimpse of three other new collectivities. It gives a bird’s-eye view of these three pathways so as to situate them in relation to the ones previously discussed. Needless to say, I sketch them with fairly broad strokes; my purpose is primarily to establish a few landmarks that suggest a course of action for future analyses. Once again, the inquiry presented in chapter 1 serves as a guide. However, I limit myself to some key questions.

canada: development and impasse of a dual nation-state Canada, as we shall see, resembles Australia and New Zealand in multiple ways. This should not come as a surprise, given the British origins and common past these three countries shared within the Empire and subsequently within the Commonwealth. That said, they differ in important respects. This can be ascribed to particular contexts and to the fact that analogous experiences unfolded differently, fuelling the imaginary in a specific way. State Formation: A Gradual Breaking Away The remarkable thing about Canadian political history is that Canada managed to achieve its independence without actually producing an explicit, comprehensive, mobilizing discourse (in the sense of a prevailing and persistent radical ideological offensive) and without a great heroic and spectacular founding event that would act as a main reference point for the collective imaginary today. The colonial tie was

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broken over a protracted sequence of moments, disengagements spread over more than two centuries, none of which directly challenged Great Britain’s established ascendancy. This paradoxical mix of a radical break within continuity is curious. Although these small cumulative founding steps were to bring about political sovereignty, a certain number of them were not even intended to do so. In certain cases, the metropolitan power itself encouraged them – one thinks of Confederation or the Statute of Westminster. This was also a central aspect of Australia and New Zealand’s political history, in particular the way the vision of the country was tightly bound up with nationalism and imperialism. Let us recall various episodes of this piecemeal disengagement. The emergence and evolution of the British colonies that later entered into contemporary Canada were driven from the start by the paradigm of strict continuity with the metropolitan power. This was no doubt reinforced by the immigration of the Loyalists after the American War of Independence.1 The very first steps in the long road leading to emancipation consisted in the establishment of the Houses of Assembly in Nova Scotia (1758), in Prince Edward Island (1773), in New Brunswick (1784), then in Ontario and in Quebec (1791).2 These first gains were just as much the initiative of the metropolitan power, intent on attracting US settlers to the north, as the result of demands by the colonial peoples themselves. The 1837 Rebellion in Upper Canada, led by the Reformists, expressed a radical will to political independence; but this will was marginal and easily broken. A parallel scenario prevailed in Lower Canada. Responsible government was granted in 1848–49 to United Canada (and to the Atlantic provinces during the following years). With Confederation, or more accurately the British North America (bna) Act passed by Westminster in 1867, Canada was made a dominion and, henceforth, wielded considerable power in its internal affairs. But even in these matters, the metropolitan power retained powerful control mechanisms: each law had to receive royal sanction, none could conflict with imperial laws, the bna Act could not be amended without London’s permission, and so on. Moreover, the monarch remained Canada’s head of state, and the metropolitan power continued to govern external affairs. Once again, this episode was as much an initiative of Great Britain, anxious to strengthen its colonies so as to protect them against their powerful neighbour to the south, as an intrinsically Canadian victory. For the partners brought together under the bna Act, obtaining more power was important even if they remained dependent. One

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might even have thought the movement of emancipation would have quickened as the young elites learned to wield new powers, but it was not to be. On the contrary, the decades that followed were curiously marked by a resurgence of pro-British sentiments, calling for closer ties with the Empire. For many, as I have indicated, fidelity to the Crown and imperial sentiment were not incompatible with an authentically Canadian sense of belonging: since Canada was an integral part of the Empire, the more dynamic and powerful the latter, the stronger was each of its members. In fact, the latter felt great pride in contributing to this great universal enterprise, which strove on all continents in the cause of liberty, order, and progress. Here lies what I have referred to as the Empire’s alibi: the relationship that it created was experienced not as alienation or as a form of exploitation but, rather, as a sense of belonging that exalted all parties concerned. This explains why the history of the relationship between Canada and Great Britain was rarely written in terms of decolonization.3 In 1885, Canada participated unofficially in the war effort in Sudan, where it supported the imperial power, just as it did in 1899 on the occasion of the Boer War (this time, very officially). From 1887 on, it took part in colonial (later called imperial) conferences, where it became both a partner and a servant of the Empire. But, from the end of the century on, it became more assertive, at times opposing London, even if, ultimately, the partnership was pre-eminently intended to support the imperial power. At the 1911 conference, Laurier was able to oppose the creation of an imperial federation, the very year in which Canada negotiated a treaty of reciprocity with the United States. The year before, Parliament in Ottawa had passed a law creating a new Canadian navy and thus putting an end to a long controversy. Instead of subsidizing the British navy, Canada would have its own fleet. But the gesture remained ambiguous because it came with an offer to place the new fleet in the service of London and the Empire. This type of compromise, which in itself was neither a refusal nor complacent submission, is quite representative of the manner in which the CanadaGreat Britain relationship gradually evolved. Throughout the First World War, Canada stood faithfully by Britain’s side. However, the end of the war offered an opportunity to assert itself by participating, at least indirectly, in the peace negotiations and by being a signatory to the Treaty of Versailles. After the war, Canada joined the League of Nations (created in 1919) and grew somewhat closer to the United States, particularly in

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economic terms, so that the Atlantic Triangle began to tilt permanently towards the South. The decade was also marked by the Balfour Declaration in 1926, soon to be enshrined in the Statute of Westminster (1931), through which Canada in practice gained control of its own external affairs. In spite of those advances, the old colonial tie still survived in a number of ways: for example, the preservation of British citizenship and the allegiance to the Crown, the right to appeal the verdicts of Canadian courts to the Privy Council in London, the legal impossibility of amending the bna Act, royal assent to Canadian laws, and so on. Erosion of the relationship of dependency continued nonetheless. Mackenzie King implemented a resolutely continental policy and Canada was again in the spotlight at the imperial conference on the economy in 1937, while the Second World War engendered close military cooperation with the United States. However, Canada’s haste in participating in the war alongside London recalled the survival and strength of old loyalties. The conjuncture created by the 1939–45 conflict prepared the ground for other acts of disengagement, however. Canadians won renown for their participation in the war. This stimulated national pride, just as it had in 1914–18 with the famous Battle of Vimy Ridge. Moreover, Canada acquired confidence and maturity by distinguishing itself in the handling of various international issues. All of this played a big part in the institution of Canadian citizenship in 1946 (since 1914, Canadians had been considered British subjects living in Canada). But, not surprisingly, there are elements of compromise here too. Because it generated so much controversy, concessions had to be made in the bill – notably in favour of British immigrants – out of respect for the mother country (Igartua 1997). The year 1949 was also important in that it marked the end of appeals to the Privy Council in London. In 1952, a person born in Canada became governor general for the first time. The 1960s saw the reform of the immigration law (henceforth purged of preferential treatment in favour of the British), the adoption of the national anthem and of a new, entirely Canadian, flag (1965).4 In 1982, July first became Canada Day (a first attempt at this had failed in 1946). Finally, the Constitution promulgated in 1867 by dint of a British law was repatriated in 1982; it henceforth became possible to amend it without the permission of the imperial power. It has been useful to recall this brief chronology to show the long sequence of moves that Canada made towards political autonomy while

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always respecting British tradition. One might add that, even today, this journey is not over. May twenty-fourth marks a celebration of Queen Victoria; Elizabeth II is still the Queen of Canada and head of state; up until 2006, new Canadians swore allegiance to the Queen in taking the oath of citizenship; the governor general’s position (aided by the lieutenant-governors in the provinces) enjoys strong popular support; the symbols of the monarchy are everywhere (currency, stamps, passports, official portraits of the Queen in public buildings, etc.), and recent surveys show that the anglophone political class remains very attached to the Queen, as does the entire Canadian population (slightly more than half, according to a survey carried out in October 1999, even if this support is weak among francophones).5 This model of colonial disengagement without a coup d’état or spectacular break is the result of a combination of factors involving elements of culture and political tradition, economic interests, class relations, demographic facts, and other issues. As for its causes, I simply make two comments. The first pertains to the political culture, which is rather conservative (in the tradition of Edmund Burke, as has often been noted). With the exception of francophone ideologues (under the influence of Mercier and Bourassa) and of insurrections in Lower Canada and Upper Canada in 1837–38, the history of Canadian ideologies exhibits a strong tradition of fidelity and admiration towards British institutions and British culture. It is true that, over the past half century, this tradition lost some strength, notably because of changes in the country’s ethnic composition and because of the growing cultural influence of the United States. This said, it has been claimed that, even today, the exercise of power in Canada is suffused with a monarchist political philosophy (Smith 1995). A second factor to be underscored is the constant feeling of threat, largely cultural and economic, stemming from the United States. This anxiety, as sharp today as it was in the past, is a powerful driving force in Canadian history. It gave rise to many defensive episodes, inward-looking attitudes, dare one say a survival culture or, in Northrop Frye’s words, a “garrison mentality.” Here one thinks of the motives that inspired the bna Act; the failure of the free trade accord with the United States in 1911; the spirit of national literature and national identity; the constant reminders of distinctiveness;6 the circumstances that spawned the creation of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (1936); the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (Massey Commission 1951); the Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects

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(Gordon Commission 1955–58); the Task Force on Foreign Ownership and the Structure of Canadian Investment (Watkins Report 1968); the control over foreign investment under the Pierre-Eliot Trudeau government; the strong opposition (among anglophone Canadians) to the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement in 1988; and the various attempts to restrict the spread of the American media and so on.7 Remarkably, the majority of the shifts just mentioned reveal significant compromises; these are indicative of a philosophy of accommodation, of a very particular (and ultimately effective) way of operating. But the pattern that emerges concretely from this long piecemeal process clearly does not correspond to a plan, to a persistent will to shape these episodes into a coherent form. It therefore does not have a counterpart in what might have been a true long-term political project.8 To account for this phenomenon, one can, as I have just done, invoke the pragmatic mentality inherited from the British tradition, but how then to explain the path of emancipation, which, despite everything, emerges after the fact from the sum of the constraints, compromises, and choices made over two centuries? Where does one search for the invisible hand that, as it were, orchestrated Canada’s decolonization over the long haul? The historian Harold Innis (1930), originator of the Laurentian School, used the staple theory to develop an economic explanation of Canadian continuity: intensive exports of natural resources established trade networks between Canada and Europe (and, in particular, Great Britain), which, while making commodities flow to Europe, also ensured that individuals, ideas, values, and institutions flowed in the other direction. Due to this structural factor, Canadian culture was constantly being sustained by British and European contributions. This explanation of the persistence of British influence in Canada (later taken up by Donald Creighton) remains valid today; still, it would be useful to introduce other variables, such as the Empire’s enormous prestige and Canada’s financial and commercial dependency as well as its cultural and military insecurity.9 Whatever the case, it is important to recall the need for a second explanation, which, this time, would account for the other facet of this reality; that is, the dynamic of rupture. What are these other factors that governed the centrifugal movement and made it prevail in the long run? Finally, it should be stressed that this Canadian continuity, which took the form of long-term disengagement, was not without occasional rough patches. In addition to the two rebellions, already mentioned, the Little Englanders and the Canada First Movement (although a

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segment of the latter advocated greater autonomy for Canada so that it could better serve the Empire, the authority of which was in no way contested) spring to mind. But one thinks in particular of the political attitudes of French Canadians who, over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tended to promote a Canada that was independent of Great Britain. In this respect, Henri Bourassa features as a dominant figure, but, in reality, he extended and revitalized what may be considered a genuine intellectual tradition in French Canada, of which Pierre E. Trudeau was one of the most recent representatives. In this vein, one could also evoke the great majority of the old FrenchCanadian nationalists who, from the late nineteenth century on, sought to realize the other nation’s aspirations within a Pan-Canadian framework. In their case, the priorities of la survivance and the constitutional struggles pushed fidelity to the monarchy and to the Empire into the background. The duality that ensued in Canadian political life is a fact with which national identity has never come to terms, right up to the present day. Finally, among the other factors that pushed Canada towards a break with Great Britain, I should also mention: (1) the decline of British military power, which encouraged certain partners of the Empire to search for other economic and military allies; (2) the increasing economic dependency on the United States; and (3) the growing proportion of Canadian citizens of non-British origin, a result of more diversified immigration. Original Cultural Dynamics? A word on cultural practices associated with the various social classes, in particular with the elites. The subject is so vast that I can once again only signpost the type of approach to be adopted with a few illustrations. In one way or another, each social class in Canada symbolically appropriated a land of reference so as to fuel its imaginary, to construct its sense of belonging, and to establish patterns of behaviour. As previously mentioned in chapter 1, the aim here is to characterize and periodize these processes in an effort to mark the emergence of new cultural forms that exhibit a differentiation with respect to models inherited from Great Britain or Europe. As for discourse, the evolution of literature is one of the best witnesses of this continental cultural drift. There are important parallels with Quebec in this respect. First, there is great uncertainty concerning the period in which a truly (anglophone) Canadian literature emerged. Certain authors date it from the

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second half or end of the nineteenth century,10 others from much later–notably, after 1945.11 However, most agree that a national literature existed after the First World War, that it remained very tentative for several decades, and that it finally made its mark starting in the 1960s. But on the whole, it suffered a lot and continues to suffer from being squeezed between Europe and the United States, just like francophone literature in Quebec. The anxieties expressed on this question by an author such as Margaret Atwood (Survival, 1972), among others, are reminiscent of the thinking of several Québécois writers. The 1920s were a particularly dynamic time from the point of view of shaping Canadian authenticity in other fields of fiction and social thought. In painting, the work of the Group of Seven was exemplary in this respect. The very explicit intention of these painters was to contribute to the promotion of a Canadian style, which they claimed was then under construction within various spheres of discourse (natural sciences, political philosophy, religion, etc.) and even in business. Most especially, they delighted in the idea that their art in no way lagged behind that of British artists, and they felt an obligation to counter European traditions and influences by casting a new look on Canadian realities. In February 1923, one of them (Lawren Harris) wrote in the Canadian Bookman: We in Canada are only commencing to find ourselves. People from other lands come to us already sustained by rich, stable backgrounds, thinking that these can also sustain us. It is not so. We are about the business of becoming a nation and must ourselves create our common background.

Indeed, from these premises there emerged a manner, if not a style, which made great use of seasons, bucolic landscapes, great expanses of wilderness, and of the immensitude that people liked to see as the matrix of the new identity. Just like its francophone counterpart, Canadian painting would only later discover the colder themes of the city and industry, of work and everyday life.12 One can see how this type of analysis could be extended to other discursive fields in order to draw up and contrast various timelines and conditions of disengagement and symbolic appropriation.13 It becomes evident, for example, that English-Canadian intellectual culture was suffused with Victorian science, which even nourished a kind of utopia of the development of the vast Northern spaces.14 Also, starting in the 1920s, some historians were concerned to write about the Canadian

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past with an original approach, adapted to the particularities of the new countries. Architecture is another, very complex (and also very controversial) genre. It always bore the mark of deep European influences. At the same time, it showed signs of Canadianness quite early on. But mostly, the central issue here is a highly diversified, fragmented universe, varying by region of the country and according to the type of building under consideration, and so on.15 I have highlighted some similarities in the evolution of literature in English Canada and in francophone Quebec. There are others. In the former as in the latter, there are signs of a difficult emancipation from the metropolitan hegemony, of self-deprecation;16 themes of exile and the assertion of difference are omnipresent. The novel comes into social realism mainly from the 1940s on. And there are also great stirrings in the 1960s. These similarities have long caught the attention of analysts who have attributed them either to the same pan-Canadian dynamic (but how then did it surmount the cultural divide?) or to the parallelism of two collective histories that unfolded independently in analogous contexts (which, finally, left the question unanswered). A word on the culture of the common people (both urban and rural). The raw material of ethnography has to be drawn upon here, in order to establish the extent to which this cultural universe represents a specific narrative, given over to américanité (and American influences in particular). The question opens also onto the analysis of tales, songs and myths, rites, symbols and customs, through which one can observe the processes of inventiveness, of borrowing and of adaptation to new spaces. The same applies to the development of local identities and regionalisms. On this front, the main theme to explore is that of an antinomy (similar to that which I mentioned in relation to Quebec and notably Australia) between, on the one hand, elites turned towards Europe and distrustful of the continent and, on the other hand, common people (and middle classes as well) in symbiosis with aspects of the new land.17 Canadian Identities According to an initial view, which was dominant until the 1940s, the Canadian nation was largely identified with the Anglo-Saxon “race,” of which it sought to be an extension in North America. Perceived as homogeneous and superior, this race was coupled with a francophone minority, which, it was believed, would certainly become assimilated, if

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not marginalized, over time. But this ethnocentric goal collided with the French-Canadian vision of a binational Canada, made of two founding peoples by virtue of the 1867 pact. However, with the development of the trans-Canadian economy (e.g., settlement of the West, the National Policy, and the railroads) and the stimulation of national pride following the First World War, a genuine nationality seemed to take shape. This was the period when some insisted that even the climate contributed to building a “Canadian” character. But the anglophone/francophone duality, hardened by the conscription crisis of 1917 and by the French schools affair in Ontario, compromised the development of national identity again. Similarly, participation in the Second World War, as previously mentioned, produced stirrings of collective identity the effect of which was also fleeting. The second conscription crisis recalled the deep division of the nation and, especially, the deep tendencies that would, in the end, check the old dream of Anglo-Saxon nationhood. Shortly after the 1940s, immigration to Canada increased and newcomers were recruited among highly diverse populations. Moreover, the cultural influence of the United States intensified, resulting in two pivotal consequences. First, because of the growing ethnic heterogeneity, one could anticipate the moment when the project of building nationhood on the basis of homogeneity would have to be abandoned. Some even claimed that the very fact of diversity was an essential component of national culture. In this spirit, notions such as “limited, fragmented identities,” or a “community of communities,” were proposed throughout the 1960s (notably by the historian Ramsay Cook). In that era, which also corresponded to a liberalization of immigration policies, a number of anglophones sought to establish bridges with the francophone segment by espousing the concept of the two founding peoples.18 Then the nation started to be reduced to its strictly civic dimension, which was a way of placing ethnicity in brackets and accepting the country’s cultural diversity as one of its permanent features. This was the work of multiculturalism. Henceforth, and especially after the adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, nationhood (or identity) was defined in terms of ideals such as tolerance, mutual respect, and non-violence; the nation was a composite but functional assemblage, bonded by law and universal values. The respective dynamics of its diverse components converged towards the same ends, and that alone was what ultimately mattered. It was necessary to privilege a dynamic, rather than a static, vision of the nation. This new trend was concretized in the political legacy of

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former prime minister Trudeau. Was this the birth of a pan-Canadian, bilingual, and multicultural nation, at last transcending both ancient and recent ethnic divisions? In turn, this new symmetry would be put to a severe test by the growing threat of American culture and by the Free Trade Agreement of 1988. English Canadians’ age-old worries about the United States were suddenly reignited. More than a decade later, Canada still seemed less than comfortable with the new definition of its identity, a definition at times denounced as a skillful contortion of the mind.19 The new secessionist threat embodied in the Quebec referenda of 1980 and 1995 was another source of tension and uncertainty. Once again, this brief reminder comes at the price of a number of nuances. Clearly, the evolution of the nation’s symbolic contents has not been so linear, and loyalty to the Empire was always accompanied by a relationship to the continent (expressed, for example, in the vision of the North). The fact remains that the various formulas proposed since the nineteenth century to blend Canada’s diverse population in the same mould of nationality have, on the whole, failed. This general observation has been expressed by many anglophone intellectuals for some years. The Quebec francophone community has still not found its niche within the Canadian framework. Aboriginal peoples have been neither assimilated nor integrated but simply excluded from the nation (e.g., Indians were not allowed to vote in federal elections until 1960; the Inuit were not allowed to vote until 1950). Women were subjected to a similar fate on several fronts. The annals of exclusion in Canadian history comprise many other chapters: for example, expressions of anti-Semitism, discrimination against Blacks and Asians, eugenicist policies implemented by various provinces during the first half of the twentieth century, suppression of the linguistic and educational rights of French Canadians outside Quebec, discriminatory immigration policies that have been compared to the Australian White Policy (Hawkins 1989), and so on. All of these practices and attitudes began to weaken after the Second World War, however. In this vein, the 1982 Charter represents an outcome that many observers have lauded for its spirit of tolerance and openness. That said, while it effectively inscribed ethnic pluralism in law, the Charter also sounded the knell of the binational model through which francophones had long sought to win recognition within Canada for the particular status of their culture (and, in the case of Quebec, of their society). In sum, the Charter – which Quebec has not yet ratified – opened a door on

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one side and closed a door on the other; it thus intensified one of the main divisions that it claimed to erase. So, while English Canadians strove to repatriate their British allegiances and to consolidate their identity, the French-Canadian nation withdrew into Quebec as the territory and refuge of the francophone community. Today, multicultural policies and the Charter have turned the field of collective Canadian identity into a space that is at once more open and more uncertain than ever, where the most diverse scenarios coexist (some of which still largely deploy symbols of the monarchy), and where, at least symbolically, a sense of great fragility is expressed. The actors occupy roughly three positions: those who worry about a deficit of identity and strive to fill that lacuna; those who resign themselves to this void and learn to live with it; and those who, by contrast, raise it up as a model in the belief that modern liberal (or postmodern?) states can dispense with a collective identity. The projects aimed at constructing the Canadian national past had to face comparable difficulties. First, no one any longer knows how to situate the nation’s origins, which some now identify with the settlement of the “first Canadians” (i.e., Aboriginal peoples) some 10,000 years ago. Its date of birth slips away and dissolves into a long sequence of founding events, none of which appears to be authoritative (e.g., the beginnings of British settlement; the Conquest and the Cession of 1763; the Union Act, 1840; the bna Act, 1867; the First World War; the Statute of Westminster; the 1982 Charter, etc.). Moreover, a double problem of filiation arises: how does one sew together into the same narrative (1) the Indian period and the French period and (2) the French period and the English period? In addition, there is a problem of cohesion stemming not only from components that the “nation” has been unable to integrate completely but also from various regional barriers that always complicated the governing of the country. How then can the distinctiveness and leading thread of Canadian history be represented as a common experience, woven in memory and governed by shared ideals? Historiography has proposed solutions to all these difficulties, at times basing the cohesion of the nation on the complementarity of geography (its core being the Laurentian system), at times reducing it to the anglophone or British past (the “anglo-conformity”), and at other times weaving imaginary threads between its parallel memories. But in the end, and today more than ever, this history is narrated by several voices, to which pluriethnicity (“ethnic history”), which rewrites the past from the immigration matrix, has recently been

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added. Thus, the memory of the mosaic slowly yields to the mosaic of memory. One can see how much more complex the Canadian past has become since the days when A.R.M. Lower wrote Colony to Nation (1946). Quite recently, there also appeared the idea that Aboriginal peoples were the first true Canadians and that the country’s history had to be rewritten. Long memory, until then rooted in the splendours of the British past, resumes its drift towards the depths of the continent. This shift is ordinarily accompanied by a critique of Europeans, presented as invaders, despoilers of a vast territory and of an original civilization. By contrast, from the Anglo-Canadian perspective, this view presents the advantage of undermining the French Canadians’ claims to being the founding people. But to follow the Aboriginal, pre-Colombian logic of memory to its conclusion leads to a dead end: the whole history of the descendants of the Europeans is then reduced to a subordinate, almost marginal, narrative, where the main actors are scarcely nameable (they are referred to only as “non-Native” or “non-Aboriginal”). Not everyone sees the impossible national memory as synonymous with failure. In the mind of a number of intellectuals, the disenchantment surrounding identity must yield to a realistic observation: fragmentation is irreducible; it is the initial datum upon which identity must be reconstructed, not to challenge or occlude it, but to redefine it within a new concept of the nation, henceforth relieved of its organicist claims and its ethnocentric attributes. The 1982 Charter, with its universal legal references, signals the direction to be taken. Has Canada then become the first postmodern nation without memory or identity? Quebec/Canada: Parallels, Divergences, and Paradoxes First one is struck by the number of analogies there are between the historical paths followed by Canada and Quebec. For example: the multiplicity of founding acts; a long period of political and cultural continuity after 1840; an elitist vision of the nation; a survival culture engendered by the feeling of permanent threat on the continent; an anti-American discourse; the need to cultivate a different identity (to the point of inventing distinctive features, should the need arise); symbolic investment in the North as a reservoir of experiences and of national values; an ethnicist concept of identity that slowly came to terms with diversity in the second half of the twentieth century; an ambiguous relationship with the New World; the antinomy between an Americanized popular (or mass) culture and an elite culture in the

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European tradition; the hegemonic cultural influence of the mother country until the Second World War; the difficulty of instituting an original (national) literature; the absence of great urban utopias as worldviews; the vitality of literature and the arts during the 1960s. Also, in both cases, cultural disengagement unfolded along various routes and irregular timelines, depending on the genre or field of social thought and fiction. This is, however, but a first level that has to be superseded to discover the structural incompatibilities, paradoxes, divergent evolutions, and specificities within the development of Canada and Quebec. With respect to the incompatibilities, and in spite of the similarities just mentioned, the aspirations of Quebec francophones and of anglophones remain difficult to reconcile given that, to guarantee their respective survival and development, the former seek a major decentralization of the Canadian state, and even separation, while the latter, on the contrary, feel the need to reinforce the federal state, which protects them, notably against the United States. Moreover, multiculturalism enshrined the Canadian nation’s diversity, but it incurred a political regression for francophone Quebec (as a founding component of the nation-state) by inserting it as only one part of the ethnic mosaic, as opposed to one of the two nations of the Canadian state. As for paradoxes, if Canada’s national identity is uneasily grasped (to the point that some have now given up on it), Canadian nationalism is more vigorous than ever. In a century and a half, Canada has succeeded in achieving political sovereignty and secured its integration and development thanks to a prudent and effective philosophy of accommodation and compromise; but, as Quebec neo-nationalism today threatens to explode it, Canada has become strangely resistant to the compromise that could unravel the crisis. The failure of the Meech Lake Accord in 1990 is a telling example. With respect to differences, the main one resides in the fact that, contrary to Quebec, Canada has achieved political sovereignty. Also, English-Canadian culture does not appear to have experienced a crisis of its national language, with all the ramifications of agonizing dilemmas and traumas, as happened in Quebec. Again, contrary to the latter, Canada’s sense of belonging to the Empire long acted as a counterweight to the menace from the United States. The Canadian and Quebec pasts have rarely been the object of a truly comparative approach. Historians on each side of the divide have most often taken an interest in the other as a problem. For some,

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Quebec has always been, and still remains, the recalcitrant cog, the black sheep of the great Canadian national family. For others, (anglophone) Canada represents the conqueror of the Plains of Abraham, the victor of the Insurrections, the assimilator who often sacrificed the rights and interests of francophones, and so on. This vision of two separate, if not conflicting, pasts is fuelled by many undeniable facts; it also stems from collective visions and divergent senses of belonging that appear difficult to reconcile.20 Scientifically, nonetheless, the complexity of these two national experiences leaves room for other perspectives that could enrich current knowledge, independently of contending political options. I believe that the comparative history of new collectivities is such a perspective. It proposes a context for the joint study of these two societies. At the same time, it guarantees a broadening of perspectives by projecting the analysis onto the background of other new collectivities of the New World in their relations with the Old.

new zealand: the “oldest” of new collectivities? New Zealand could be considered both the most recent and the oldest of new collectivities.21 The most recent because it was touched quite lately by European colonization, that is, towards the 1830s; and the oldest, as it were, since, of all the collectivities of the New World, this one embodied the model of continuity with the mother country most completely and for the longest time. Established at birth as a colony of Great Britain, it long perceived itself as the most faithful, and the most British, of the Empire’s (and later of the Commonwealth’s) peripheral members. New Zealand’s territory was first settled by immigrants from Polynesia at least a thousand years ago and perhaps more (before the beginnings of the Christian era, according to recent estimates). The Maori people, who today represent about 13 percent of the country’s population, are descendants of these first inhabitants. The European presence (Dutch, English, German, French, Spanish, etc.) is relatively old (sixteenth century, it would seem) and contact with the Maori people dates back to the eighteenth century, perhaps even to the seventeenth century, after which the indigenous population began to decline. Some whalers and merchants settled there in the early nineteenth century, but settlement, which was the work of the British, really began during the

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1830s just after an abortive French initiative. Edward Gibbon Wakefield was an important figure in this process. The aim was to alleviate Great Britain’s overpopulation problem as well as to endow that country with an economic outpost in the Pacific. New Zealand never received convicts, however, save the few who managed to escape from Australia. In 1840, London officially took possession of the territory; and in Auckland, Hobson became the first governor of the colony. There the settlement continued under the aegis of the New Zealand Company. Until the middle of the twentieth century, immigration was very predominantly British. Throughout the 1850s, a gold rush somewhat broke this trend, but only temporarily. Immigration was the main source of demographic growth until the 1870s, and subsequently remained very important, contributing approximately 20 percent of the growth during the following century. From one thousand inhabitants in 1840, the total population reached half a million towards the end of the century and close to 3.5 million a century later. Until recently, the country’s economy traditionally relied largely on agricultural exports (first wool, then meat, dairy, fruits and vegetables, and wood). A temperate climate and dense vegetation were propitious for these productions, which gave rise to a rural society divided between an aristocracy of big landowners and medium-sized and small family farms. Unlike Australia, it took time for the urban population to overtake that of the countryside, eventually doing so in the mid-1920s. It was generally spread out in a network of small towns, in keeping with the country’s broken geography – one that inhibited mobility – and with the needs of the rural economy whose products were transported by water to small ports. The 1849 Waitangi treaty, a kind of New Zealand Magna Carta, ranks among the most important events of the country’s political history. It defined relations between the newcomers and the Maori people, and turned the latter into subjects of the Crown. In 1852, the colony was endowed with a constitution, which involved the creation of an elected assembly and of six provinces (Auckland, New Plymouth, Wellington, Nelson, Canterbury, Otago). Responsible government was established in 1854–56, and, in 1907, New Zealand became a dominion, following the example of Canada (1867) and Australia (1900). With the Statute of Westminster, the country became completely independent constitutionally. Other than that, New Zealand’s political timeline, to a great extent, reproduces Australia’s. The two countries’ proximity in a region so remote from Europe resulted in their fates being similar. Yet, beyond

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the analogies, important differences mark their respective paths, which have, on some levels, remained remarkably foreign to each other. New Zealand refused, for example, to join the Australian Commonwealth in 1900; and migration between the two countries remained infrequent (save during the last thirty years of the twentieth century). The Most British of Dominions In the nineteenth century, New Zealand was often spoken of as “the Britain of the South” or the “junior England” (Mark Twain). In the early 1920s, some claimed that it had fully realized its dream of becoming a replica of the “homeland.” Many facts bear witness to this strong tradition of continuity. New Zealand participated in all of Great Britain’s and the Empire’s wars (and subsequently those of the Commonwealth), including the Korean War in 1950–53 and the Falklands War in 1982. During the First World War, contrary to Canada and Australia, it was able to decree conscription without holding a referendum. In 1907, it acquired the status of Dominion, but without having truly requested it. In any case, this constitutional promotion was not accompanied by any additional powers, and the attempts to celebrate Dominion Day as a national holiday failed to the benefit of anzac Day. In the same spirit, the country did not until 1947 recognize the Statute of Westminster (1931), which the political class accused of compromising the Commonwealth and weakening Great Britain. In the 1930s, New Zealand imitated the mother country again by supporting the Munich Agreement. Moreover, while it is true that it supported the League of Nations, it did so primarily because it saw the latter as a way of protecting the Empire against potential aggression. The abolition of the senate in the 1940s resulted from strictly technical constraints, not from some desire to distance the country from the British model. The function of the viceroy (or his female equivalent) still exists, “God Save the Queen” has survived as a national anthem in tandem with “God Defend New Zealand,” the national flag still bears the Union Jack in the upper left-hand corner, and so on. On the whole, what I have called the “imperial alibi” has played out fully in the case of New Zealand, perhaps more than in any other Commonwealth country. Thus, each military engagement at Great Britain’s side inspired New Zealanders with a feeling of confidence and pride that was immediately invested in their role as partner within the Empire and the Commonwealth. Thus, it was the confidence acquired during the Boer War that

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encouraged the colony to refuse Australia’s invitation to join in its federation project. Nationalism led the New Zealanders to choose to follow their own path, not to fuel separatist aspirations but, rather, to pose before London as a more active and worthy ally. This said, New Zealand had its episodes of rupture, but up until the 1960s they were modest, even quite innocuous. This is true of the signing of a commercial agreement with Japan in 1928, of the law instituting New Zealand citizenship in 1948 (until 1974, the new passports retained the words “British subject” on the cover page), of the signing of a military protection agreement with the United States in 1951 (anzus), and of the conversion in 1967 to decimal currency. There have been a few moments of tension between London and Auckland, too, since the mid-nineteenth century, and some expressions of republican or anti-monarchist sentiment (Trainor and Walkinton 1996). But disengagement from Great Britain really took shape in the 1960s and 1970s: for example, the appointment of New-Zealand-born governors general, the introduction of the metric system, the establishment of proportional representation, the redefinition of economic relations with Great Britain, the reorientation of foreign policy, and the promotion of the Republican idea.22 The main reasons for the continuist tradition reside first in the making of New Zealand’s population. Until the 1960s, most immigrants came from Great Britain. New Zealand was a relatively homogeneous society and very attached to its origins. Collective insecurity, due to the country’s small size and to the immediacy of the “yellow peril,” also played a considerable role. This made the close protection from London and the Empire indispensable.23 This military subjection was accompanied by strong economic dependency, Great Britain being by far the main trading partner, both with respect to imported goods and capital exports. In addition, two negative factors that were at the root of an anti-British current in Australia’s history had little if any influence on New Zealand. The colony did not receive convicts but only free immigrants, attached to their mother country. Besides, immigration included relatively few Irish Catholics (around 13 percent versus 25 percent in Australia) intent on perpetuating their enmity towards London in their new homeland. The break that has come about in recent decades is, once again, essentially due, not to a nationalist will to liberation among New Zealanders, but simply to Great Britain’s withdrawal. It had already become evident in the 1940s that the mother country did not intend to continue to offer its Commonwealth

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partners the same military protection as it once had. This encouraged New Zealand (and Australia) to negotiate the anzus treaty with the United States (1951).24 Then, in 1971, Great Britain joined the European Common Market, after two aborted attempts in 1961 and in 1967. This Europeanization of the former colonial power incurred serious consequences for New Zealand. The country felt suddenly destabilized, rejected by its mother country, compelled to redefine old collective allegiances symbolically, economically, and politically. A Culture of Continuity From birth, and for a long while, New Zealand established itself as a direct extension of Great Britain. This tendency was powerfully reinforced by institutions such as language, the churches (e.g., Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, etc.), political and educational institutions, legal frameworks, and sports (e.g., rugby, cricket, horse racing, and tennis). The first utopias, expressed in literature and political discourse, promised to build a renewed, superior Great Britain in Asia, one modelled, if possible, on amplified features of the old country. Besides, in some eyes, New Zealand had an imperial mission to accomplish in the Pacific. The climate would help to create an exceptional British type out of individuals who were already remarkable, given the selection effected from the start among immigrant candidates. Indeed, it was claimed that only the “cream” of British subjects were recruited for the great New Zealand adventure (see the myth of the “best British stock”). This vision compounded with the idea that the new territory was so richly endowed that it could be compared to a pastoral paradise (“God’s own country”). However, this munificent land would only yield its benefits to workers willing to perform the necessary labour. Rooted here was one of the great myths of the country’s socio-cultural history: a prosperous but egalitarian society, attentive to its members’ needs, in particular those of the poorest, dedicated to the work ethic and in harmony with nature. Nineteenth-century literature reproduced these guidelines. Curiously, however, not only did it seek to imitate the Victorian style, but it rarely made reference to local reality – save to reiterate the pastoral myth for the British public. During the last decade of the century, a nationalist awakening was evident among some literary figures gathered around the New Zealand Graphic and Ladies’ Journal (1890–1903) and the New Zealand Literary and Historical Association. But this movement petered

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out, contrary to the one that flourished during the same era in Australia around the Bulletin. In the main, the initial tendencies continued during the first third of the twentieth century. In the field of letters, for example, in spite of increased activity and some dominant figures (e.g., Grossman, Baughan, Satchell, Mander, etc.), it is impossible to speak of a genuine national literature. Imitation of the British style continued, moving from Victorian romanticism to the Georgian style. The same trend prevailed in other creative fields. In painting, however, a movement promoting national art crystallized in the 1920s through the initiative of Christopher Perkins, Ronald Hipkins, and some others (see the journal Art in New Zealand and the National Art Association). In all these cultural productions, reference to New Zealand often took on an ecological hue that expressed a considerable ruralist sensibility, as though the city and industry were transgressions of the natural order.25 But there was nothing resembling Australia’s vigorous, populist mythology of the bush. First of all, the hilly landscape and relatively scattered pattern of settlement did not lend themselves to such a myth. Furthermore, for reasons that can largely be ascribed to the strong tradition of continuity and its attendant mimetism, symbolic material associated with the people does not appear to have significantly penetrated New Zealand’s elite culture; instead, the latter produced a sanitized representation of the new land, emphasizing the family, sedentary life, work and progress, equality, order and morality – not unlike Quebec’s early national literature. This period of New Zealand cultural history, like that which followed it, was dominated by the mother-country complex and by New Zealanders’ inhibition concerning talk about themselves. Some authors (e.g., Phillips 1990) applied the Australian expression “cultural cringe” to this phenomenon. There were traces of this in the regularly expressed view that the details of real New Zealand life were unworthy of historical study or of artistic and literary expression (it has to be remembered that most of the intellectuals, creative artists, and writers dealt with London publishers and addressed the British public). Added to this was the shame surrounding the emergence of an idiom specific to New Zealand (the “colonial twang”), which was shunned by the educated.26 Experiences and real conditions could not be expressed in the manner of the country; this is particularly evident in the artificial literature dedicated to Maori society. The ensuing malaise appears in the great importance ascribed to exile (towards the “homeland”) as a

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thematic motif in the imaginary as well as in the authors’ own life experience (Sinclair 1986, chap. 4; Evans 1990). In its own way, the period from the 1930s to the 1960s marked an important break with preceding decades. Most analysts agree it saw the birth of a true New Zealand literature. The influence of the former colonial power remained very strong though, even among what was referred to as “the Phoenix generation,” a group of literary figures who gathered around the eponymous journal between 1930 and 1940, and sought to integrate national consciousness. Nonetheless, a nationalist current emerged, notably on the left, through the Left Book Club and the journal Tomorrow (“to stop being an exile,” “to discover our own soul”). To some writers of that generation, the main mission was to invent a country that they could narrate. But it was also the most uncertain of missions. For on the level of perceptions, that which rallied everyone was the feeling of disenchantment before what “God’s own country” had become. The founding dream of a pastoral paradise had been shattered and had given way to an exacerbated critical realism: cynicism, moroseness, despair, and the solitude of man before a natural milieu that had been transgressed. Such were the dominant features and themes of this literature (e.g., John Lee, Children of the Poor, 1934; John Mulgan, Man Alone, 1949; James Courage, Fires in the Distance, 1952, etc.). The forest had been sacrificed and Maori culture destroyed, society had become conformist, intolerant, devoid of imagination, and bereft of culture – a new Carthage, according to some. Besides, it was held that the artificial paradise of the bungalow had supplanted the egalitarian utopia and that the country was slipping into increasing isolation. How would intellectual culture flourish in this society, which was unable to come into the world? How could one write the history of a country that did not move? However, other influences surfaced. The nationalist current inspired by Allen Curnow followed the Europeanist Wellington group in the 1950s; then the “Auckland academic poets” represented a return to the local. And, through this effervescence, the cultural relationship with the metropolis underwent several changes. Several novelists introduced the country’s English into their dialogues, even if the language of the bbc remained the norm (in this respect, one speaks of the “received pronunciation,” or rp). After 1950, the novel liberated itself gradually from its dependency on Britain. Some intellectuals also began suggesting that it would be more logical to emulate the United

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States, a new society like New Zealand, and one that shared with New Zealand a whole colonial past.27 It is in that era, too, that young poets united around J.K. Baxter for the first time proposed a redefinition of (“spiritually dead”) New Zealand culture by taking the Maori people as a model. The representation of the past followed an analogous pattern. A “continuist” memory had been established first: a memory of the British heritage and of the Empire’s splendours, which inscribed collective identity in a long, glorious, and apparently imperishable era. This trend essentially monopolized the main sites of dissemination: schools, newspapers, books, and official celebrations. The representation of founding acts (“discovery” of New Zealand by Tasman in 1642; Great Britain’s “annexation” of the territory; the Waitangi Treaty; the arrival of the two shiploads of Scottish settlers in 1842; the occupation of the land; etc.) has to be seen in the light of ensuring continuity with the mother country, a prevailing attitude until the mid-twentieth century. However, by the turn of the century, hints of another paradigm were appearing with William Pember Reeves (The Long White Cloud: Ao Tea Roa, 1898). This involved highlighting the significant episodes of the colony’s past for their own sake: the history of the Maori people, their armed conflicts with the Whites, the promotion of the national territory, the gold rush, the establishment of democracy, and the adoption of very progressive social policies. In the same spirit, the 1920s introduced a growing interest in local history. But this remained marginal, and there was a persistent feeling until the 1930s that New Zealand did not really have a remarkable past, worthy of being celebrated. It was “a land without a past.”28 The decisive changes occurred after the Second World War. The disintegration of the Empire, Great Britain’s military withdrawal from the Pacific, and the new powers exercised in conformity with the Statute of Westminster slowly infused New Zealand with a sense of its autonomy and of a new national identity. In historiography, this feeling was expressed in a critique of the “continuist” vision and its founding myths. Keith Sinclair (1959) played a determining role in this respect. He formulated the idea that the country’s history was rooted in the Polynesian environment; breaking thus with the European long memory, he strove to promote the symbols of a “New Zealandness.” His main objective and his contribution to the country’s culture were to free it from the inhibitions associated with the “continuist” tradition. Finally, the literary figures, once more, opened the way. As of 1940,

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E.H. McCormick (Letters and Art in New Zealand) proposed a nationalist vision of the past. And, in a 1942 poem (“Landfall in Unknown Seas”), Allen Curnow (1962) demolished the old founding myths. A Model Small Nation? Most authors agree that a national identity was born after 1880. The first signs are evident among some poets (e.g., Jessie Mackay, The Spirit of the Rangatira, 1889) and in the Young New Zealand movement (1887). During the 1900s and 1910s, various authors claimed that a real New Zealand temperament existed (its characteristics: superior physique; pragmatic, egalitarian mentality; aversion to hierarchy). But, just as in Australia and English Canada, this awakening of consciousness was combined with imperial loyalties. The young colony aspired to become an ally and even a more accomplished servant of the mother country, loyalty being part of the national character. According to Keith Sinclair and some others, this nationalism found expression in a kind of “super-Britishness.” The distinctive features of nationhood included masculinity and its usual corollaries, encapsulated in the concept of “jokerism”: for example, ruggedness, fights, and drunkenness (Phillips 1987). Sports had pride of place, especially rugby. Several writers have insisted on the important symbolic function fulfilled by the All Blacks team, whose triumphant tours in Great Britain from 1884 on have remained famous (Macdonald 1996; Nauright and Chandler 1996). As elsewhere, the vigour and bravery of the national character found expression in the wars, particularly at Gallipoli in 1915, the memory of which is still celebrated with great pomp today. There was also the stereotype of the small family farm, identified with a mythology of the rural society, a symbol of harmony with nature and the basis of peaceful, orderly, collective life. Moreover, there is a striking dearth of references to religion in the definition of national symbols. It may be that religion, with its diverse denominations, was a potentially divisive factor in New Zealand, as it was in Australia; this ruled it out as a basis of collective cohesion.29 Finally, I wish to emphasize the specifically social content with which these representations were imbued. Starting mostly in the 1890s, under Richard J. Seddon’s Liberal government, New Zealand stood out for its very progressive social policies, notably with the institution of mandatory arbitration in labour disputes (1894), old-age pensions (1898), important public health measures (1900), and free education

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until the end of secondary school (1903). All of these measures were improved in subsequent decades; then came the forty-hour work week (1935), social security measures, and the like. The government had decreed the eight-hour day for wage earners in 1856. In 1877, it instituted mandatory education until the age of fourteen; universal suffrage for men was established in 1879. Women gained the vote in 1893, after two fruitless attempts in 1878 and 1887.30 Women were able to sit in Parliament from 1919 on. It is remarkable, however, that these measures, which were considered avant-garde at the time, were not associated with specifically feminist demands. Most female activists, indeed, did not call into question the social order. They seemed to adjust to their traditional roles and focused their action around moral objectives such as temperance, good manners, and family values. To them, participation in political life seemed a more effective way of fulfilling their mission. It is likely that these conservative trends, hardly menacing in the eyes of the powerful, facilitated their access to suffrage.31 For all these reasons, New Zealand had, by the end of the nineteenth century, acquired the reputation of being “the laboratory of humanity,” “the cradle of the twentieth century,” “a world model of social legislation,” and so on. Indeed its influence was considerable in various countries, including the United States (Coleman 1982). At the same time, it was able to guarantee its citizens one of the highest standards of living in the world.32 In this respect, New Zealand has often been described as an example of “state socialism.” Some of the latter’s characteristics are intriguing, such as the fact that they did not arise out of radical thought or that they were made compatible with liberal individualism. This small “model” nation contained its lot of tensions and contradictions, however, and, until the middle of the twentieth century, its legendary cohesion was achieved at the cost of at times violent discrimination and exclusion. First of all, it is important to stress the elements of ethnic diversity in this officially British and homogeneous nation. The main one, of course, consisted in the Maori people, who represented more than half of the New Zealand population in 1860, 14 percent in 1875, and 5 percent to 6 percent until 1950. There was always a weak Asian presence too (less than 2 percent). But the collective disturbances provoked by this diversity were totally disproportionate to its demographic weight. Various positive deeds in relation to the Maori people ought to be recalled, even though some are deceptive. Thus, the Treaty of Waitangi signed in 1840 between the tribal chiefs and the British government was intended to protect the indigenous people

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against the settlers’ land-grabbing practices. The Maori became Her Majesty’s subjects and received access to the concomitant rights and privileges. The treaty also guaranteed their property rights and their right to develop the land, forests, and fisheries. But it turned out that the New Zealand government refused to recognize the treaty after 1850. Similarly, in the early days of settlement, and in conformity with the myth of the Noble Savage, numerous leaders, administrators, and missionaries were positively disposed towards the indigenous population. On occasion, it was also claimed that the Maori and Whites formed one people, one nation. In 1867, four seats in Parliament were reserved for the Maori people, some of whom entered cabinet between the 1890s and 1940. But these facts scarcely reflect the whole picture. The prevailing policy until the mid-twentieth century, and even slightly beyond, was one of exclusion and forced assimilation. First, there were armed clashes between 1845 and 1872, throughout which the British army brutally repressed the uprisings of the Maori, who were unhappy with the fate of the 1840 treaty. On several occasions, settlers became involved, inflicting cruelty on the indigenous people. In parallel with these violent acts, the New Zealand government appropriated the greater part of the lands and began to develop them without consulting the Maori, infringing upon the Waitangi Treaty.33 The government did not hesitate to violate the rights of the indigenous people, to destroy their institutions and their customs in order to assimilate them at any cost. From 1871 on, the teaching of their language was prohibited in their schools. Between 1920 and 1960, 20 percent to 40 percent of Maori children were removed from their families to be assimilated by the Whites. There were also attempts of a symbolic nature to reduce indigenous otherness. The most remarkable consisted in whitening and even, in some sense, ennobling the Maori by labelling them distant descendants of an Aryan, Indo-European diaspora.34 They thus shared with the Pakehas the same origins, the same national belonging, and the same history. This proximity yielded other (cultural) benefits. Colonization of New Zealand by Whites became legitimate since it united the two branches of the same family. Moreover, raising the Maori above the Aborigines and other Polynesians was a way of elevating the entire New Zealand nation. Finally, the latter also became more presentable in the ever disdainful and intimidating eyes of Great Britain. This founding myth, which lasted well into the twentieth century, was most explicitly articulated in 1885 in the writing of Edward Tregear (The Aryan Maori).

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But there were predecessors (see Belich 1997). Still on the symbolic level, others claimed that the Maori “branch” had lapsed into decadence and that it was in the process of disappearing; providentially, history had undertaken to preserve the memory of a prestigious distant past and to erase the traces of a contemptible present. Finally, some also argued for the elimination of the indigenous people through racial mixing, on the Latin American model. In the case of New Zealand, one cannot speak of a White Policy such as the one that was very officially pursued in Australia to preserve the purity (and privileges) of the white “race.” But elements of such a policy were apparent. Social attitudes were filled with images of the “yellow peril” (at least in relation to China). Anti-Chinese sentiments surfaced in the 1850s during the gold rush. In 1881 and 1899, laws supported by the trade union movement practically brought a halt to Asian immigration. In 1920, the Immigration Restriction Amendment Act was passed. Then there was the propaganda of the White New Zealand League (1925–37), and so on. In fact, it was not until the 1970s that the last traces of this policy were erased.35 The country’s history harbours many other forms of exclusion (women, the handicapped, homosexuals, etc.), but these do not pertain to ethnicity as such, even if they are directly related to a certain idea of the nation (e.g., masculinity, purity, vigour, and morality). Rebuilding the Nation After the Second World War, various factors (some of which have already been mentioned) interfered with the traditional representation of the nation and its socio-cultural foundations. The increasingly active presence of the Maori people (thanks to this demographic resurgence and militancy)36 features among them, as does growing and increasingly diversified immigration (Polynesian, Asian, etc.). Great Britain declined as New Zealand’s hegemonic power (Britain’s military presence in Asia ended, and Britain was integrated into the European Community). As previously stated, many members of New Zealand’s elites experienced this withdrawal as a type of betrayal; an orphan in a crumbling empire, the nation suddenly felt both the lack of any allegiance and the pangs thereof. Closer ties with Asia became imperative, all the more so given that New Zealand, because of its antinuclear beliefs, had withdrawn from anzus in 1984.

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The cultural changes that accompanied these upheavals were expressed in literature, in particular. The 1960s coincided with a proliferation of genres, themes, borrowings (an opening onto modernity, influences stemming from the hippie movement, existentialism, and environmentalism). “Diversification” is the key word here, but uncertainty surrounding identity is equally important; that is, an increasingly blurred image of self within the nation and the universe. The attitude exhibited towards written language is proof of this complex transformation. The British standard survived, but it yielded ground to what might be called international English. At the same time, a rising nationalist current gave legitimacy to New Zealand’s spoken idiom in scholarly and scientific publications. Collective memory also entered a turbulent period. Nationalist historiography (e.g., in the manner of Keith Sinclair) had scarcely established the basis of a New Zealand vision of the past than it was immediately confronted with fragmenting nationhood. The changes of the last half century had made things difficult for the upholders of a classless, cohesive, and homogeneous society. Recent historical practice, when it does not hide behind the alibi of scientificity (e.g., of the kind often embodied by quantitative and social micro-history), projects the image of a discourse in search of meaning, bereft of an organizing principle of knowledge. As stated earlier with reference to other new nations, how does one project onto the past a light, an element of cohesion (the British heritage, the White society, the unique nation, the pastoral dream, continuous progress, etc.) that no longer exists in the present? One of the texts that best illustrates this malaise is J. Phillips’s (1996) account of a museum exhibit meant to represent the national identity of New Zealanders, which, for want of something better, fell into a critical register by constructing its objects in the form of questions. This impasse has affected every aspect of collective memory, including what I have called “long memory.” Traditionally, the latter saw its roots in the British past, but this symbolic connection closed with the shift of the 1960s. This favoured a repatriation of memory, a search for old roots in the local, in this case Polynesian, setting. This example illustrates just one aspect of the many revisions that historiography has had to undertake.37 But it also illuminates the growth of a new paradigm of identity based on the Maori culture. This phenomenon is quite similar to the one I discussed in respect to Australia (see chapter 5). It inspired new reconstructions of the New

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Zealand past (often described as “revisionist,” “historically correct,” and “gone native”), seeking to rebuild national memory in an indigenous perspective.38 It could be said that these reconstructions conform to a three-tiered model that: (1) highlights the culture and presence of the Maori people; (2) bases national history on the Maori/Pakehas duality; and (3) builds bridges between these two narratives by foregrounding elements of a shared past. In this spirit, the Waitangi Treaty has become the founding myth par excellence, a fact reflected since 1973 in its status as national holiday. Finally, as for rebuilding national identity, the dominant model is that of a bicultural or “biracial” society enjoying equal rights and living in harmony. In this spirit, the government finally recognized the Waitangi Treaty in 1975 and set up a tribunal to hear the age-old Maori demands. Very diverse points of view have, however, been expressed on the future of this national model. A number of Pakehas feared excessive demands on the part of the Maori. Others, by contrast, regard biculturalism as another machination aimed at creating the illusion of reparations. Still others, somewhat in the vein of M. Fairburn (1989), believe that the acute individualism of New Zealanders will check any attempt at unification. That is, nevertheless, what the most optimistic dream is about: nothing less than a métissage between the two cultures, and even between the two “races.” After all, is the history of the country, as J. Phillips suggests (1990, 134), not that of a continual blending of very diverse components? And, as we have seen, there are also those who propose to immerse the new nation in the indigenous culture, given the latter’s moral superiority and rich symbolism. Finally, the ideal of the republic also surfaces from time to time. Conclusion The persistent spirit of continuity that marks New Zealand’s past seems to justify fully the title of this overview: New Zealand appears, indeed, to be the oldest new collectivity. Moreover, it displays in the most acute way a phenomenon already noted elsewhere – namely, the paradox of a society that acquired political sovereignty but without having actually produced the discourse of such autonomy (and, I might add, without having truly expressed the will to sovereignty). Great Britain’s European turn in the 1960s vexed some of its old colony’s elites. In this respect, the New Zealand model is in sharp contrast to the American or Haitian ones. That said, collective emancipation through the defection

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or withdrawal of the (former) colonial power nevertheless recalls some aspects of the Latin American experience in the 1810–30 period. Culturally, New Zealand shows signs of what I have called “emancipation through displacement.” Think not only of the anzus and seato treaties but also of the initiative of some literary figures who sought to replace British tradition with US culture as a collective point of reference after the Second World War. With respect to the search for identity, biculturalism, as a path of conciliation and reconciliation between immigrants and indigenous peoples, is a utopia specific to New Zealand and distinct from anything put forward in other new collectivities.39 As elsewhere, this model ran into all the difficulties inherent in arbitrating differences. This was compounded by a sizeable unknown variable: whether or not the indigenous people wish to think their destiny within the model of society conceived by the new occupiers. Finally, another paradox of the crisis of identity is the juxtaposition of a very strong feeling of attachment to New Zealand with a sense of uncertainty that permeates the representations of the self, exhibiting, it would seem, a state of anomie or apathy. This came to light in a comparative study carried out by a team from the Carleton University Survey Centre (Canada). Among the thirty countries studied, New Zealand was ranked first (by far) for the question: “How close do you feel to your country?” (The category “Very close” garnered 55.5 percent of the responses.)40 Finally, the comparison between New Zealand and Quebec reveals that both always experienced a sense of great fragility and that, in both instances, one of the key parameters was their isolation (geographical in one case, linguistic in the other). One is also struck by the similarities that relate to cultural continuism and its numerous corollaries (e.g., inhibition, the alienation of artistic and literary creation, the linguistic malaise, the seductive nature of exile, the recurring sense of cultural poverty and of the absence of an original tradition, an idealized representation of the rural world, etc.). Other similarities are linked to the forms of disengagement that emerged in the twentieth century, except that one would be hard pressed to find on the Quebec side as traumatic a catalyst as Britain’s withdrawal. In both instances, the paradigm of the homogeneous nation is on the wane; there are also various attempts to integrate ethnic diversity into a new national model. Beyond the similarities, it is important to underscore the specificity of New Zealand ruralism. Its ecological and pastoral resonances seem to contrast sharply with the ideological sources that drove French

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Canadian agriculture. In Quebec, the virgin territory was presented as a site of retrenchment, a reserved space, the last best hope of an imperilled nation, a special place in which the traditional values of Church and Country could persist: on the one hand, a type of society to be built to save the environment; on the other, an environment to be promoted in order to preserve a certain type of society. Another difference resides in the fact that New Zealand preceded Quebec by about two decades in subjecting its ideological traditions to a general critique in the twentieth century. In literature, for example, this tendency prevailed during the so-called “provincial” period (1935–65) among New Zealand poets and novelists (see their denunciation of Puritanism, conformism, provincialism, etc.). In Quebec, a similar movement surfaced in rather sparse fashion before the 1950s but did not truly prevail until the 1960s. In the final analysis, when restricted to the main connections, this comparison mostly shows the parallel course of the cultural narratives from the mid-nineteenth century on. Were it not for their different forms of state formation, New Zealand would look like Quebec’s cousin, if not its twin. Clearly, when it comes to the great challenges posed by the present and to wagers over the future, these two collectivities need to be thought of in tandem.

the united states: the two narratives of “america” If New Zealand can be considered the fullest incarnation of the paradigm of continuity, the United States appears as the most consummate instance of the paradigm of rupture. And yet, there are two quite different, seemingly incompatible, ways to narrate the history of this new collectivity. Each grasps something essential about it, and, in this sense, both yield a “true history.” Moreover, they correspond to two visions, to two feelings that today divide the citizens of the United States. The first and most familiar path consists in recalling the principal stages of a great historic adventure, which, starting with a revolutionary break and some guiding ideas, laid down the foundations of a new society; in two centuries, the latter became (both culturally and materially) the richest and most powerful in the world. The second brackets out the cohesion and confidence of this conquering journey, bringing forth doubt, agonizing dilemmas, contradictions, and angst (not to mention fragility). The history of the United States is surprising

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in providing an equally rich basis for either perspective. I give an overview of both: first, the linear narrative (or the conqueror’s journey), and then the inverse narrative (or discontinuity and divisions). The Discourse and Practice of New Beginnings The American national imaginary first stemmed from a critique of old Europe and, more specifically, of England. The Founding Fathers and their precursors denounced the corruption of the old society of privileges, its ideological and religious intolerance, its despotism, and the rigidity of its iniquitous social structures. They also criticized the mother country for having turned away from the civilizing mission associated with the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian legacies. In reaction, and taking up, as it were, the torch of antiquity, the new nation would be created in liberty and by the will of individuals (the social contract). It would be egalitarian, democratic, and pure since its members were citizens (preferably property holders) living by the sweat of their brow. In relation to Europe, it would be a whole creation, an orphan nation, a new “race.” Human civilization was thus being granted a second chance (the myth of the “new Adam,” the “New Jerusalem”). It would thus begin anew by returning, in a sense, to the earliest dreams and times, to the cradle of humanism. This is the meaning of the many references to the great (notably Greek and Roman) civilizations of antiquity that fill the discourse of the Founding Fathers.41 That said, the American dream was embodied as much in great urban utopias as it was in small, idealized rural communities.42 These grandiose goals found concrete expression in acts marking radical breaks: the Revolution and Declaration of Independence (1776), England’s recognition of the new nation (the Treaty of Versailles, 1783), the Constitution (1787–89), and the Bill of Rights (1791). The United States became the first new collectivity to break the colonial tie with its mother country (several years before Haiti), and it did so in glorious style, on the battlefield. These spectacular episodes ended up inspiring and legitimizing other acts of liberation within culture, institutions, and in the area of spatial and societal planning. The consciousness of being founders, the feeling of creating a superior nation without historical precedent, gave substance to a veritable paradigm of new beginnings. Here, there was no cultural cringe but, rather, a providential mission, a “manifest destiny” (as John O’Sullivan of New York declared in 1845). An original model of land

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concessions gave birth to a new social structure and to a new landscape. Settlement was a crucible in which immigrants tore themselves away from their original culture and merged into the dynamic of the New World, thus contributing to building the great nation. Formulated in the late eighteenth century by St. John de Crèvecœur (Letters from an American Farmer, 1782), this idea would later reappear in the celebrated “frontier” mythology (Frederick Jackson Turner) and then in that of the melting pot. As for the national language, it was resolved to retain English, the corrupt language of the old masters, in the belief that the American environment and the noble uses to which it was intended would soon purify it and turn it into a new language. Noah Webster (“The United States must be as independent in literature as they are in politics”) strove to record this evolution in various works published between 1783 and 1828, the date on which he published the first edition of his famous dictionary. Thus, he launched a rich tradition of linguistic nationalism in which others would gain great renown after him (notably H.L. Mencken in the 1920s). Here too, as in other new collectivities, literature undoubtedly yields the clearest evidence of the effort that went into injecting symbolic content into the American “manifest destiny.” In the late eighteenth century, a literary current in New England strove to reproduce the spirit of the founding political acts in order to establish a national literature. The works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and O.W. Holmes belonged to this movement, as did writers such as John Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and Herman Melville, even though they came from other regions of the country. Others, who in their own way embodied the young national literature, included Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman. The latter, perhaps even more than the others, was concerned with creating a language and literary methods that were typically American. In this vein, Walter Channing, in 1815, had already called for a national language. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1837 lecture, “The American Scholar,” was a veritable declaration of independence for American letters. This literature highlighted themes such as the wilderness, the individual, and freedom, but also, in the spirit of the Puritan ethic, the tensions between the self and the collective. Similar efforts of emancipation and self-affirmation appeared in philosophy (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William James), in painting (notably landscape painting, with G.C. Bingham, T. Cole, A. Durand, and the Hudson River

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School), and in the arts in general (see the advocates for a “Native” art, etc.). Well before the Revolution of 1776, shared commercial interests, resistance to England, and wars against the Indians and the French had created an initial sense of unity among the colonies.43 In the 1760s and 1770s, the expression frequently used was “the people of the thirteen colonies.” This notion was crucial. Political sovereignty was, indeed, founded by the people and not by some divine decree, and nothing was to hinder this principle. The same preoccupation inspired the architecture of political institutions, conceived with the aim of thwarting all manner of despotism and of giving power back to the people. But beyond these theoretical considerations, the nation was born amidst a great cultural diversity that prevented it from defining itself more concretely – in ethnic terms, for example. Indeed, the heterogeneity of the thirteen colonies was expressed in several forms: a plurality of religious sects, diverse legal systems (Hoffer 1998), membership in different ethnic communities, and a contrast between Puritan, democratic New England and the aristocratic, slave-owning Southern states (where Blacks were more numerous than Whites). J.P. Greene (1988) has identified four great cultural areas that made up the United States at the end of the eighteenth century. Consequently, the new nation had to define itself in reference to values or ideals that would satisfy the greatest possible number of citizens: the “pursuit of happiness,” liberty, democracy, equality, individual dynamism, progress, the protection of rights, tolerance, and work. The break with England required the definition of such a horizon in order to bring together such diversity. Conversely, the latter had contributed considerably to making the break possible; immigrants of non-British origin, for example, felt little loyalty to the Crown. Religion compounded with this panoply of the new nation’s attributes, yet as a transcendent vision, stripped of doctrinal particularities and of its institutional expressions; it was the religious construed as the nation’s supreme guarantor, raised to its universal meaning, its universal perspective. America’s leaders were always concerned with establishing cohesion and consensus by way of great civic rituals (e.g., the ceremonial side of political life, the Fourth of July celebrations, periodic reminders of great military feats, and the commemoration of founding moments). On the level of ideas and myths, national traditions became suffused with the rallying symbols of the frontier, of the

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melting pot, and of American exceptionalism, all three spread by ideologies, vehicles of mass culture, and the social sciences. At the same time, the nation was also growing stronger in the wars that it periodically waged in “defence” of its interests or its ideals. On the whole, this symbolic and institutional display provided proof of its robustness and fecundity in almost all the areas of collective life: both culturally and materially, it exhibited unprecedented achievements. In addition, and in spite of many mishaps, it showed itself capable of unifying an enormous variety of actors, ideas, beliefs, customs, and interests, while moving them along in the same direction. Indicators of this include the weakness of the tradition of radical thought, whether in the social and political arena or in philosophy,44 and the initiatives that enabled the country to be reunified after the Civil War. The celebration of collective memory played a major role. Amidst all the forms of commemoration, a vigorous national history glorified the founding moments (in particular, the Mayflower pilgrims’ settling at Plymouth), the heroic episodes of the Revolution, the genius of the nation’s architects (Washington and Jefferson mainly, but also Adams, Hamilton, Madison, Franklin, and others), and the conquest of the land. George Bancroft and the supporters of Progressive History during the first half of the twentieth century are among those who most contributed to establishing these representations.45 The discourse of American historiography typically blocked long memory. History began anew, in a sense, with the new nation. This disposition was, for that matter, contained in the message of the Founding Fathers: turn your back on the European past and start from scratch (“the dead have no rights,” wrote Jefferson). One can read this either as the result of a very critical attitude towards the old, sclerotic continent or as a sign of great collective confidence. But the concern with countering diversity and divisions among the thirteen colonies induced a search for symbolic cohesion based on the continent’s realities and promises – hence the emphasis on republican ideals. In other words, the confidence that other new collectivities sought in long memory, the United States found in utopia and in the recent memory of the nation’s own glorious feats. The references to antiquity that I mentioned earlier appear to contradict this claim. Reminders of ancient civilizations were frequent and assumed various forms: Athens and Rome were sources of inspiration in matters of political institutions, law, social thought, rhetoric,

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architecture, and painting; the Puritans believed that they had been chosen by God to occupy the new promised Land and to build a New Jerusalem there; George Washington was compared to Caesar, to Brutus, to Cincinnatus, and even to Moses; and the country’s motto (E Pluribus Unum) was borrowed from Virgil. But this relationship never took the form of a true filiation or appropriation, as happens in the institution of long memory; rather, it was more a matter of vindicating the rank or the status that the new nation assigned itself. Thus, from the outset, it hoisted itself into the company of the great founding civilizations of culture and ideas. The Founding Fathers were presented as interlocutors of the greatest minds (Seneca, Plato, Cicero, Cato, etc.); they emulated or rivalled them but were not their descendants. Thus the United States was built by the strength of remarkable individuals devoted to their ideals, talents, and initiatives, and this gave rise to the most powerful nation in the world. And the American dream continues: that which has been accomplished is great, but the best is yet to come. The Other Story From another perspective, this time focusing on the interstices and margins, we discover the material of a second narrative that scuttles the coherence of the first and makes all the preceding statements subject to revision. That which appeared as a radical break is now veiled in continuities and borrowings. The Puritans did not wish to break with their religious tradition; instead, they wished to live it more thoroughly. In any case, it has often been claimed that their moral severity made them as resistant to New World disorders as to those of the Old World. Various authors, such as M.J. Crawford (1991), have demonstrated the continuity between the notorious religious revivals and awakenings in the United States and similar phenomena in Scotland and in England. E. Marienstras (1988) has made the point that great myths linked to new beginnings were passed down from antiquity all the way to Renaissance Europe. The “discovery” of the New World is precisely what revived them. The US imaginary can thus be seen as an extension of this mythological awakening in European consciousness. Finally, some have argued that many contemporaries experienced the American Revolution as a form of continuity. This would explain why the fourth of July was not instituted as a national holiday until the 1820s (Bodnar 1992). This perspective is at the root of a “derivative

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model” advanced by several historians of the colonial epoch, which strives to show all sorts of filiations between the new and the old country. Later acts of disengagement, in particular in (and by way of) literature, have also been the object of more nuanced views. In fact, behind the gleam of founding masterpieces or the triumphant mythology that surrounds the nineteenth century figureheads, there is introspection, doubt, and withdrawal. Some significant intellectual careers illustrate the European malaise that has ceaselessly tormented part of the intelligentsia. First, there are the famous exiled writers: Henry James, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings, and George Santayana. Disappointed with the New World, each, in his own way, made his way back to the Old World to grow new roots there, as it were. Disenchantment prevailed among others, who had refused the temptation of exile. Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter, 1850) sharply denounced the hypocrisy of American society, formulating a kind of anti-utopia: in it the New World appears already old, vitiated by evil and guilt. In the Great American Novel (1923), William Carlos Williams observed nothing less than the failure of the New World. Finally, uncertainty over identity runs throughout American literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: What is an American? What are the typical features of this new man? In what specific sense can he be described as “exceptional”?46 This disquiet cannot be dissociated from the feeling that the break with the Old World was too brusque and that it was impossible for many to find new roots in the North American continent. This is also the source of another sense of unease – apparent at least until the 1930s – concerning the ability to finally write the famous “great American novel.” In a nutshell, this literature displays a touch of the equivocal discourse that I evoked in the case of Quebec.47 As for the founding ideas of political society, the philosophy that underpinned the first conception of citizenship was clearly drawn from John Locke’s seventeenth-century individualist theory of natural rights and of the social contract. According to M.P. Zuckert (1996), four great intellectual currents joined to give birth to American public culture: British constitutionalism, a religious political philosophy, the theory of natural rights, and the republican spirit. Three of these constitutive elements were extensions of the intellectual traditions of the mother country. One could apply the argument to other regions of culture such as language. While Noah Webster stressed the specificity and the identity-forming capital of American spoken English, another famous linguist (Krapp 1966) highlighted instead its close

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connection with its linguistic origins. Similarly, B. Bailyn (1986) claimed, against both the frontier and melting-pot arguments, that eighteenthcentury American culture cannot be grasped other than in its close connection with Great Britain. There is an important distinction to be made between the ethnographic facts and all that fuels identity, on the one hand, and ideological and political self-assertion, on the other. This is to some extent what H. Tarver (1992) did in relying on numerous reports by contemporaries, including Benjamin Franklin. There are many other examples of continuity and borrowings, right up to recent years, from genealogical memory to architectural traditions or to the planning of national parks in the twentieth century (McClelland 1998). Even though the United States rejected long memory, its beginnings nevertheless belong to a macro-historical pattern. According to the British Enlightenment tradition, the Greeks and Romans had set civilization in motion (the republic, law, democracy, etc.), but Medieval Europe had turned away from this heritage (in England, the Norman Conquest compromised everything). It was up to the United States to take up the cause. This line of reasoning did not establish a true filiation, but at least it instituted a deep historical connection. This distant mooring, in what was deemed to be the cradle of humanity, contributed to producing a sense of security and legitimacy in the young nation. Another way of challenging the optimistic traditional vision of the country is to confront it with its various forms of exclusion and discrimination. This aspect of the American past has been explored in detail in recent decades, and I limit myself here to some very cursory insights. A statute on naturalization passed in 1790 barred non-Whites from citizenship. Indians and Blacks, in particular, were thus prevented from becoming involved in political life (which did not prevent the federal state from forcibly conscripting them into its armies). The status of Indians was only changed in 1887 and then again in 1924 (recognition of citizenship). From the time when settlement began in the thirteen colonies, indigenous peoples had to suffer all manner of outrages: treaty violations, land expropriations, armed attacks, deportations, and so on. The antinomy of barbarism and civilization was exploited fully. Moreover, the Protestant sects did not cultivate the missionary idea as much as did the Roman Catholic Church. Primarily concerned with establishing their model communities, they were less consumed by the universal idea of salvation or redemption of all races. This was compounded with the very widespread belief that the primitive

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environment had precipitated the decline of the Indian “race.” It thus seemed wise to ward against this, by building from scratch, at a distance (Canup 1990). Slavery was another major contradiction in the application of the founding texts, which enshrined the equality of individuals and their natural rights. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, themselves owners of slaves, personally embodied this contradiction.48 Slavery was abolished in 1863, and Blacks attained an elementary form of citizenship in 1868. But these gains did not end discrimination in political life, in the workplace, in schools, in public places, and elsewhere. Where laws did not openly infringe on the rights of Blacks, fraudulent or abusive practices (in the spirit of Jim Crow) did so instead.49 It was not until 1954 that the Supreme Court declared segregation in schools unconstitutional. The right to vote was granted in the 1960s, while state laws still prohibiting marriage between Whites and Afro-Americans were also abolished. In the same vein, there was resistance of all kinds, often of a violent nature, to immigrants and foreigners in general. All throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the nativist movement, in its various incarnations, promoted laws and policies (notably those of 1880– 1920) aimed at restricting or reducing immigration by way of very arbitrary selection criteria.50 In the second half of the nineteenth century, fear of a yellow peril began to develop in the United States, particularly in California, where the Chinese were badly treated. A number of works have shed light on the nation’s slow process of ethnicization and closure,51 a process that was reversed starting in the 1950s and particularly in 1960 (Barkan 1996). A racist vision, based on a biased interpretation of Darwinism, spawned all these actions. Its goal was the protection of White racial supremacy. A veritable eugenicist utopia placed Whites at the apex of the racial hierarchy. Many Whites considered themselves the descendants of a superior race, the Anglo-Saxons or the Teutons, who had been able to resist the Roman conquest and had cultivated in their Germanic forests the values of liberty and democracy. In his day, the historian G. Bancroft had already espoused such a view in celebrating the civilizing mission of AngloSaxons in America and in the world. During the first half of the twentieth century, the myth was translated into eugenic policies (e.g., prohibition of marriage, spatial segregation, contraception or mandatory sterilization, etc.) aimed at social, ethnic, or other groups; these were decreed unsuitable for “reproduction” in the majority of the states of

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the Union. In this way, it was hoped that some of the “degenerates” who threatened to contaminate the superior race would be eliminated.52 In 1907, in order better to direct immigration programs, a Congressional committee had compiled a hierarchical compendium of races, not unlike the one previously produced in Mexico (see chapter 4). Women, to whom the right to vote (federally) was only granted in 1920, were also the object of numerous forms of discrimination in public and private life throughout the country’s history. This and other stories of exclusion that affected various components of the nation are too numerous to recall. I mention but a few: how Blacks and women were long excluded from Fourth of July celebrations (Travers 1997); the repression of German-American culture from the 1910s on; antiSemitism, McCarthyism, and so on. From the 1960s on, however, the rule of Anglo-conformity, attacked from all sides, started to weaken, and the first reforms inspired by cultural pluralism began to appear. The common representations of our first version of American history can be challenged on several other grounds. Among these, there were the legal and ideological apparatuses used to legitimize the appropriation of the land. By definition, the Founding Fathers could not invoke the principle of seniority; that would have entailed enshrining the rights of the Indians, who had occupied the land for much longer. Nor could they claim that they had rights acquired by virtue of the British occupation since the seventeenth century; that would have placed them in the official position of usurpers with respect to the old mother country. The rule of discovery, supposedly derived from a European legal tradition (the existence of which remains dubious), enabled them to overcome these hurdles. It justified the seizure of territories decreed to be unoccupied, even where indigenous tribes, Mexicans, or Blacks had already established settlements. Everything hinged on the definition of “occupation,” of course. The rule allowed the land to be considered free (“empty”) on the mere basis that the inhabitants were not held to be civilized (Nobles 1997, inter alia). One can see why Patricia Seed (1995, 1997) spoke in this regard of a “legal fiction.”53 There were also many cases of violence, where the nation guaranteed not the defence of its fundamental values but, rather, its physical expansion into coveted territories by force of arms. In spite of its great appeal, the notion of a melting pot is very ambiguous. It has most often conjured up an eminently egalitarian and democratic process in which individuals, immigrants, or diverse ethnic groups renounced their initial identity in order to fuse in the same

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crucible, to create a new national culture. Here one recognizes the ideas of de Crèvecœur, R.W. Emerson (the “melting pot”), and F.J. Turner (“frontier”). This outlook was logical in the context of initial settlement or immigration. But with time, a society, a culture crystallized, while immigration continued. Newcomers had to be integrated into an already constituted identity. The melting pot was henceforth no longer synonymous with the crucible or with fusion but with assimilation. According to the official version, this meant assimilation into the universal values that were the new nation’s foundation; according to a more prosaic version, this implied assimilation into the culture of the dominant minority, namely, the WASPs. But in any case, the idea of the melting pot conveyed strong disapproval of immigrants who dared to keep their language, customs, and original ethnic ties. In this sense, it was a powerful mechanism for dispelling otherness. Finally, one must recall that, even with Crèvecœur, the concept was restricted to Europeans: it thus excluded Blacks and Indians. Contrary to what the strength of founding myths would have us believe, democratic values took a while to enter fully into the national creed. At the nation’s very inception, there was sharp opposition between the Federalists, believers in a centralized state, controlled by a type of aristocracy that was distrustful of the people (Hamilton’s party), and the Republicans, who argued for a more democratic structure that nevertheless allowed for significant restrictions in the attribution of the right to vote (it was initially reserved for White men owning property of a certain value) (Kruman 1997). Several authors (including Foner 1988) have thus been able to claim that it is the end of slavery and the pressure exerted by Blacks that compelled the elites to extend democratization during the period of Reconstruction.54 The formation of the federal political apparatus also dates back to then (Bensel 1990). In brief, these developments were not contained in the nation’s founding texts and acts. As for exceptionalism, as a general assertion of American “difference” (and superiority?), the least one can say is that it scarcely endured the test of empirical validation. That, in a way, sums up the various comparative studies that have been carried out since the early 1960s, whether on the quality of democratic life, the treatment of cultural diversity, the extent and rigidity of social cleavages, the contraceptive revolution in the nineteenth century, the conduct of relations with other nation-states, and so forth. There are many other examples of distorted collective representations, which recall the phenomenon of false identities already mentioned in

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connection with Quebec. Memory genuinely gets hijacked when it comes to the nation’s beginnings. Some writers have spoken of a “puritanization” of historical consciousness in this respect. Indeed, according to the received view, the Pilgrim Fathers of 1620, with their dream of redemption through austerity and moral purity, literally determined the fate of the United States. This symbolism then invaded literature, political discourse, and private ethics. Yet, settlement had begun in 1607 in Virginia as a simple commercial initiative: the annals of this are not wholly glorious (e.g., violent means of acquiring wealth, kidnapped orphans, women sold off in auctions, etc.). Before the Revolution, a secular society flourished in Virginia and in Chesapeake Bay; it was governed by a strong spirit of enterprise and competition, and was based on a slave economy (Greene 1988). Which truly founded the nation, then: unfettered capitalism or puritan asceticism? In the same vein, the witch hunt and the conflicts among religious sects were scarcely compatible with the ethic of tolerance; as a pillar of national identity, egalitarianism hardly corresponded to the reality of the Southern states; the melting pot ideals and popular democracy were more inspired by the development of the West in the nineteenth century than by the older history of the North or the South; the division born out of the celebrated break between the United States and Europe was largely reproduced thereafter between the old states of the East and those of the West; most of the so-called founding myths of the nation gradually took hold over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (it was only in the 1850s that a consensus was reached in Philadelphia on how to celebrate the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence; the teaching of national history was only introduced into schools at the end of the nineteenth century; the national anthem as we know it today dates back to 1931; etc.). There are also omissions and silences in the recollection of the past: for example, the failure to recognize the contribution of Afro-American culture to the formation and transformation of the national culture55 and or the influence of Irish immigrants on the process of democratization. Similarly, the Thanksgiving holiday is a gesture of thanks to God for coming to the Pilgrims’ aid during their first months on the continent; but it could just as easily honour the Indians, who enabled the newcomers to survive by teaching them how to fish and hunt as well as how to grow corn, beans, and squash (the symbolic objects of Thanksgiving).56 Then, there are all those contradictions between the values that make up the national creed.57 For example, a principle of aggressive

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appropriation or of conquest and a desire to be part of a great history exist side by side with the moral principle of circularity or eternity inherited from Puritanism. The ascetic ideal also conflicts with the hedonistic desires cultivated by a consumer economy (Daniel Bell [1976] saw this as a real sign of schizophrenia). Individualism contravenes – at least in its ramifications – both egalitarian values and the communitarian ideal underlying the Protestant ethic and the sense of a historic mission (or manifest destiny). According to another version of the same claim, one could say that the strength of patriotic (not to mention nationalist) sentiment contradicts the sacrosanct rule of the free individual, sole master of his own choices. Similarly, the violence omnipresent in American life constantly refutes the utopia of community harmony. Finally, insofar as it was founded on values with a universal scope, rather than on ethnic features, the nation was, in principle, made accessible to a broad range of national groups; but, as we have seen, oppositions and constraints of all kinds ended up thwarting this all-too-generous premise. Finally, this second reading exposes a considerable weakness in American culture, and even in American society. After all, the Civil War almost burst the country asunder in the nineteenth century, and the racial, ethnic, and ideological schisms that still divide it today have helped to perpetuate old anxieties.58 This is clearly evident in the new discourses, which, in recent decades, have muddled the classic view of the country. On the ideological level, the nation was traumatized by the Vietnam War and shaken by the Beat Generation. New pathways and new demands appeared in respect to identity: those of the Latinos from Mexico, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere; those of the Blacks also, as well as other ethnic groups who, through the melting pot process, called into question the still living heritage of Anglo-conformity and, even more, the old European hegemony within culture and institutions. In the 1960s, for example, it was shown that the melting pot had not succeeded in American cities, notably in the New York area (Glazer and Moynihan 1967). Consequently, a shift from the melting pot to the salad bowl has recently been suggested (i.e., a pluralism of identities and attachments). Memory is thereby taken to task, as are school curricula and the whole of public culture. A radical version of multiculturalism has come to threaten the founding myths that had hitherto constituted the cohesion of the nation. The old spectre of fragmentation has resurfaced in new garb, and it has proven quite difficult to conjure away because it is also dressed in the old values upon which the

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nation was formed: tolerance, equality, and liberty. There is good reason to speak of an identity crisis. Compounded with all of the above are recent demographic projections: by 2050, Americans of non-European extraction will make up about half of the total population, while Hispanics will become the majority in a certain number of regions. All this confusion seems to seal the failure of the American dream. This was to some extent the opinion of the historian J. Higham (1989). In his mind, all the great paradigms used to interpret the American past have ultimately failed. Must national cohesion therefore always be rebuilt? Is this the fate awaiting all new collectivities – or founding cultures – that seek to anchor their unity in general ideas rather than in ethnicity? There are suggestive signs of this: the extraordinary fragmentation of the churches (e.g., 220 faiths and 1,200 “religious groups” surveyed in 1990), the growth of minority or ethnic history,59 the temptation of radical relativism in several areas of thought,60 and various forms of socio-cultural disintegration (e.g., 547 “hate groups” counted in 1999, a weak popular vote in the presidential elections, etc.).61 According to W. Zelinsky (1988), the nation no longer depends on its adherence to universal values but solely on the strength of its social organization – what others would call its hegemonic power (Scharz 1995). Conservatives have reacted sharply. One consequence has been the approval by the House of Representatives of a bill instituting English as the country’s official language (at least twenty-five states have passed laws of this kind). There has also been pressure to restrict immigration and to favour immigrants from Northern Europe. This reaction also brought about the failure of the national standards project (see note 59). In another, perhaps more promising, sense, various currents are in search of compromise solutions in the form of a new public culture, or of what is now referred to as civic multiculturalism.62 Law has played a leading role in this. Since the 1970s, several rulings by various courts in the country (including the Supreme Court) have combined the principle of tolerance with the imperatives of unity, marrying the rule of individualism with the community ideal. It was in this spirit, for example, that the affirmative action movement was able to emerge. A “Great American Story”? Although virtually all new collectivities sooner or later achieve their break with the mother country, the road travelled by the United States

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in the New World confirms, as others did before it, that they recover rather poorly from it. Whatever the question under consideration within the US public sphere, it always seems to split immediately into an irreducible duality (Robertson 1980; Wilkinson 1988). In this respect, the confusions of the past and the present coincide. The two narratives that I have rapidly sketched correspond, to be sure, to two interpretations of history, two perspectives on the past. But they are more than that; they stem, in the final analysis, from two modes of collective integration, two ways of inhabiting the social world. This statement could found a new dream, that of a third way that would transcend the other two. To the myth of the “great novel” (already cited) would be added the myth of the “great American story.” And just like the former, the latter would be perpetuated like an unattainable horizon in the form of a tension, like a bridge between the crises of the present and a future that perhaps will keep its promises. But is that not precisely the typically American way of overcoming contradictions? For a chosen people, what could be more normal than to invest in expectation? Thus, the nation is ever under construction, but utopia is also constantly reborn. To conclude, a quick comparative glance at Quebec instantly reveals the extent of the differences in terms of collective cohesion and national consciousness. In referring, for example, to the 1840–1940 period, one might say, somewhat paradoxically, that the FrenchCanadian nation experienced neither the triumphal confidence nor the corrosive divisions of American society. Quebec’s social and political stability was never truly threatened by the quarrels between Conservatives and Liberals or by labour struggles. As for ethnic or cultural heterogeneity, it was clearly much less pronounced than in the United States. Moreover, the French-Canadian nation was delimited and represented in such a manner that the elements of diversity on Quebec soil were in a sense relegated to the collective unconscious. Even today, as national identity is being redefined in Quebec, the situation is not comparable given the stability afforded by the fact that French Canadians make up 80 percent of the population. Finally, in a general way, and up until recently, collective memory has revealed relatively few discrepancies around the great founding themes: the heroic era of New France, the trauma of the Cession, the dashed hope of 1837–38, the domination of French Canadians by anglophones, and the tribulations of the French fact in Canada. It is true that rather sharp controversies appeared in the 1950s and 1960s concerning the consequences of the

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Cession, but modernist historiography subsequently reconstituted quite a large consensus, at least on the more recent past (nineteenth and twentieth centuries.) On the whole, one could even say that these two nations evolved in contrary ways: while one experienced great difficulty in constantly recreating cohesion, the other took a long time, as it were, to escape from it. See, for example, the still persisting stereotypes of the “folk society,” the souche (the old stock), the “introspective” society, the “tightly knit” society, and so on. In other words, in one case the problem stemmed from too much diversity, in the other, from too little. Other differences have to do with highly constrasting models of immigration and integration. Immigration to Quebec was less diversified until the mid-twentieth century; a smaller proportion of newcomers developed roots there; French-Canadian elites made little effort to assimilate them. Similarly, the antinomian relationship between elite and popular culture in Quebec does not appear to have had its equivalent in the United States, where those two universes were more consonant. For example, elite culture and the entire national culture were massively steeped in the frontier myth. The people in general also believed strongly in the great founding myths of the nation and even today remain quite attached to them.63 Religion is another site of difference, a point recalled in chapter 2. This said, parallels can also be drawn. A great feeling of insecurity runs through the history of francophone Quebec (chapter 3). This feeling does not have the same basis as it does in the United States since it concerns the survival of a nation as a cultural minority. It nevertheless generated among the elites certain reactions like those I detected in American elite culture: signs of equivocal thinking, fear of the immigrant, distortions in memory and in the representation of the nation. If, moreover, one considers the French-Canadian past in its more lyrical moments, those that correspond to the great movements of political self-affirmation (the first decades of the nineteenth century and the last decades of the twentieth), it becomes clear that the break was on both occasions conceived on the American model, with the same Republican accents and with sometimes explicit references to the themes of the Founding Fathers. This comparative glimpse calls for one last comment. Far more than the French-Canadian past, the American past draws our attention to the dynamic of opposites in processes of integration and collective reproduction. How was such a collectivity able to survive and grow to

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such an extent? What welded it together in the end? At first glance, one is struck by the strength of the material foundations (e.g., infrastructure, technology, the economy, and military power), on the one hand, and by the weakness of the culture, on the other. This opposition is deceptive, however, for material wealth could only have accrued thanks to certain fundamental and widely held values: equality, liberty, the entrepreneurial spirit, and the work ethic. These all clearly pertain to culture. The American Dream was another, very powerful, cultural force. In one version or another, this myth expressed – and to a great extent still expresses today – the belief that the country offered all kinds of possibilities to citizens who wanted to improve their lot and were willing to work to do so. At the level of identity, of past and present self-representations, today’s culture is admittedly fragile. It is also, apparently, the site of a perpetual crisis of legitimacy; it is constantly in need of repeating to itself its origins and its direction. But for all that, it stays firmly entrenched in some primary values that are not truly at risk: those of liberty, individualism, progress, economic growth, and social mobility. In this respect, there as elsewhere, the myth has done its job – by enabling opposites to coexist, by projecting into the future the unkept promises of the present. The future has become the present’s alibi.

7 Collective Paths, Discursive Strategies: A Model

The forays made throughout the preceding chapters, though very incomplete, have brought to light numerous particularities and convergences in the historical paths under discussion; they have allowed us to uncover surprising recurrences in the discursive strategies that new collectivities deployed to construct and order imaginaries at different times. I now proceed to make sense of each of these recurring tendencies and, in conclusion, ask what we have learned about these routes and representations.

continuity and rupture A first conclusion to draw concerning the ideal types (or, better still, the continuum) of continuity and rupture is that self-differentiation in the sphere of custom appears to have occurred uninterruptedly throughout all the new collectivities, and especially among the people, in spite of the broad trends to which elite culture subscribed. By contrast, empirical observation has shown that continuism in most cases largely prevailed within discursive practices in the early days of settlement but subsequently yielded to a dynamic of rupture. This said, the timeline of this transition, as well as its conditions and degree of intensity, appears to be quite variable and unpredictable. Moreover, it is certain that in each period or stage, elements of rupture and continuity combined with each other. Finally, once achieved, the transition was not irreversible, as we can see from the case of Quebec. Initially, until the Cession of 1763 and beyond, Quebec’s political transformation, like that of its elite culture, was marked by a dynamic of continuity; it shifted to a dynamic of rupture until the 1837–38 Rebellions, before

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swinging back again, for about a century, to a discourse primarily oriented towards continuity; the last half century has been marked by the return to the dynamic of rupture. In comparison, English Canada followed perhaps an equally complex course, but one that is far more uniform in its trajectory. Under the aegis of a discourse long ruled by the paradigm of continuity, Canada nonetheless experienced a slow but continuous political shift that enabled it to build a sovereign state incrementally. However, in doing this, it also perpetuated some ties with the motherland, such that, even today, the Queen of England is considered head of the Canadian state. With some variation, the history of Australia and New Zealand reproduced the broad lines of this model, marrying a discourse of continuity with a practice of inching towards a break. In these three cases, the reality of dependency was softened by the imperial alibi: the feeling (others would say illusion?) of being a fully fledged partner in a great imperial adventure at Great Britain’s side made it possible to suppress and sublimate certain unsavoury aspects of colonial subjugation. The history of these three countries also demonstrates that staggered political emancipation, defined by a fragmented timeline, gives little purchase to the mythical discourse of rupture and founding acts and, thus, deprives the national imaginary of a precious stimulus. The Latin American countries, for their part, virtually all broke the colonial tie between 1808 and 1830, but their cultural emancipation was more difficult and followed a variety of timelines, which makes any cursory encapsulation impossible. Furthermore, if the cultural disengagement from the metropolis was finally achieved, it is not certain that as much can be said of attachment to the continent. In recent decades, many Latin American intellectuals have voiced the idea that the dream of a great pan-American civilization has not been realized. In comparison, South Africa and the former Rhodesia offer a highly original configuration since, in both cases, the Europeans’ descendants were compelled to give way before the power of the indigenous population. From the perspective of the European immigrants, the New World adventure thus resulted in failure there because the first peoples to occupy the land recovered their rights. If one can compare the Blacks to an indigenous population, Haiti and Cuba reproduced this model to some extent and with some variations. In these four cases, one might speak of an inverted break. The example of the United States is particularly interesting. Its history offers perhaps the clearest illustration of the dynamic of

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rupture, both culturally and politically. First, there was a break on the micro-social level, in processes of differentiation on the level of custom, as well as in models of community and ruralist life. Then there was a break in the critique levelled at English society, a society of privilege and intolerance, deemed guilty of having betrayed the divine mission entrusted to it. This rejection combined with a will to build a different society in America, one that was superior, and even unprecedented, based on ideals of equality, democracy, liberty, tolerance, and progress. The political expression of this dream of emancipation and new beginnings was spectacular; witness, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the spread of republican ideologies, the War of Independence, and the drafting of the Constitution. Among the paths examined here, Quebec stands as an exception, for along with Puerto Rico, it is one of the only collectivities that did not achieve political sovereignty. Beyond the factors already mentioned at the end of chapter 3, this underscores the importance of a lever upon which states in formation can depend in their efforts to break free. Great Britain’s former colonies derived great comfort from their connection to the Empire, just as the Latin American countries did in their demographic and cultural presence on the continent. Moreover, at one point or other of their history, all of these countries benefited from favourable circumstances and dispositions in the motherland. Most of the Latin American collectivities obtained their political independence thanks to the vacuum created by the crisis of the monarchy in Spain and Portugal. In the cases of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, their founding acts or moments of disengagement were most often accomplished with the consent of the metropolis, and also to its benefit. As we have seen, the decisive laws were even passed by Westminster. It is remarkable that the Quebec movement for sovereignty did not, at any point in its history, benefit from such support or circumstances. The former mother country remained utterly inactive in this respect (De Gaulle’s famous speech in Montreal in 1967 was an isolated act of a symbolic kind). As for the most significant gains achieved within Canada (the Constitutional Act, 1791; responsible government; Confederation; the Statute of Westminster; etc.), they scarcely contributed to a triumphant memory among most francophone Quebecers, for whom these were largely Anglo-Canadian victories. Finally, the recovery of cultural and social rights through the Quebec Act, 1774, appears to be an exception, but, as we know, these concessions were far from constituting political sovereignty.

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Another point to raise about new collectivities is the uneven timing of emancipation or disengagement within different spheres of elite culture. In this regard, political ideologies do not necessarily evolve in synchrony with literary and artistic disciplines, even though alignments tend to form over the long run. This claim was demonstrated with respect to Quebec on the basis of an examination of the development of literature, painting, theatre, and architecture. On a vaster scale, the history of Latin American countries also confirms this type of asynchrony. Even though political independence was achieved in the early nineteenth century, processes of cultural emancipation spread over more than four centuries. The case of Mexico shows that religion was the site within elite culture where, upon the initiative of the Franciscan missionaries, the first steps were taken towards the symbolic unification that gave rise to the nation. To a lesser degree, perhaps, this discrepancy between the political and cultural also occurred in the United States, where, even in the early twentieth century, the novel, for example, was still not set on firm foundations. By contrast, other societies, such as Australia, New Zealand, and English Canada, appear to have exhibited a higher degree of synchronicity, the cultural nation having developed at about the same pace as the state. These observations are merely by way of illustration. Clearly, it will be necessary to further the analysis of this phenomenon and its repercussions on the whole of the imaginary, if not of collective life. As a prevailing model, continuity was obviously always accompanied by various forms of local appropriation and rupture. It was also much endorsed by the young metropolises of the new collectivity. Their elites did not wish to be outdone by their counterparts of the great European cities, from whom they sensed competition. This attitude impelled them to model themselves on the latter and to repress the expressions of the frontier mentality that were deemed primitive and defiling (i.e., improvisation, disorderliness, lack of refinement). The antinomy between the elites of the New World and the people was simultaneously reinforced. It thus coincided with a spatial cleavage that assumed various forms from one country to another: between the metropolises and the provinces (Argentina), between the coastal area and the outback (Australia), and between Canada (later Lower Canada, then Quebec) and the Pays d’en haut, etc. Another factor that powerfully contributed to continuism was the existence of a great national threat; this helped to reinforce the tie to the mother country and to secure cultural, economic, and military

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protection. In Quebec, anglophone America always represented a danger to the survival of the francophone community. This was aggravated by the risks to which French culture was prone within the Canadian political environment (i.e., assimilation projects, withdrawal of linguistic rights outside of Quebec, and an increasingly unequal political relationship within Confederation). Moreover, while Quebec always aspired to a binational Canada, for half a century it has been merely one of the ten provinces that make up the country.1 In English Canada, the invasive proximity of the United States was always perceived as the main threat, initially on a political and military level (one thinks of the battles of 1775–76 and of 1812 on Canadian soil), then on the economic and cultural fronts. The anxiety over identity and the reticence about continental immersion sharpened given that the two collectivities shared the same language and the same cultural heritage.2 In Australia and in New Zealand, the fear of a Chinese or Japanese invasion (the yellow peril) until recently represented an important parameter of cultural and military policy. In each case, the reaction was similar: the collectivity grew closer to the mother country, reaffirmed the relationship of dependency and loyalty, instilled a defensive attitude in large segments of elite culture, turning survival into a central theme and mobilizing discourse to this end (e.g., rhetoric fell back on tradition, made everything revolve around identity, around distrust of foreigners and of the difference they introduced into national culture, and resorted to diverse forms of ethnic nationalism). Culturally, continuism benefited from another obstacle to disengagement. All new collectivities experienced the greatest difficulty in recreating an intellectual culture from scratch. All new imaginaries faced a dire problem of legitimacy and credibility: how to represent the beauty and truth of a reality, when the gaze remains enslaved to an external norm? This initial tearing away conditioned the entire process of instituting a new discourse. Short of it, the educated were content to plagiarize or lapse into self-deprecation: the history and reality of the new collectivity was deemed insignificant; it only attained a degree of dignity through the metropolitan gaze. The paucity of local production was deplored. Talent was only celebrated if it had first been endorsed by the mother country and so on. Even today, where the cultural break seems to have succeeded (e.g., in the United States and in Mexico), the elites cannot entirely escape the feeling that the imaginary that they set up was not truly up to the standard of the old.

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strategies of disengagement With respect to methods or strategies of cultural emancipation, comparative inquiry reveals several recurring processes. First, there is emancipation through borrowing or reappropriation. In this case, the founding culture achieves its autonomy within the metropolitan culture, which it deliberately makes its own by reworking it, rather than through confrontation in a struggle that appears as though it should never be won given its inequality. In literature, this method is exemplified in the 1920s anthropophagist program of the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade. Australia offers another instance of reappropriation at the end of the nineteenth century: national painting arose through borrowing, largely from German and English models. Many other areas of the fine arts and intellectual life offer similar examples of disengagement through borrowing, which recall the cultural recycling process studied by Walter Moser (1996). It is also quite common for new collectivities that are emancipated in every respect to retain a number of the mother country’s institutions, its religious traditions, its official language, and so on. But in each case, this material has been renamed, reinvested in another field of identity so that it can truly express the experiences, emotions, indeed the “soul,” of the new collectivity. Another method of disengagement consists in profanation. It somewhat resembles the anthropophagist metaphor, insofar as the latter consists in killing and dismembering the other; but the analogy stops there. Profanation is an essentially iconoclastic process through which one culture overcomes its inferiority complex by trashing the symbols of its dependency. There are traces of this in two Quebec plays from the time of the Quiet Revolution: Réjean Ducharme’s Le Cid Maghané (1968) and Robert Gurik’s Hamlet, Prince du Québec. Through satire and subversion, these two plays offer a degrading and vandalized version of two great European classics, dragging them, as it were, in the mud of local culture, in this case, everyday popular culture in its unbridled eclecticism, its wild and lewd creativity, its linguistic and aesthetic transgressions. Some other plays from the contemporary Quebec repertoire belong, in part, to the same genre (notably, Le Chant du sink by Jean Barbeau. Bernard Andrès (1990, 115–26) has shown the same method at work in the novels of Jacques Godbout, Jacques Ferron, and others. Finally, a variant of profanation consists in “slumming”: here, the high culture incorporates fallen and reprobate elements into its own discourse – awkward or vulgar neologisms, borrowings from the

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dominant language, and so on.3 It may, however, also consist in assimilating a local culture, that of the indigenous people, for example. This is the case of Walt Whitman’s poetry in the United States; in a sense, he claimed the barbarism of the New World so as to pit it against the civilization of the Old World.4 Emancipation can also occur through transition or lateral displacement. In this case, prior to asserting or achieving its full autonomy, the new collectivity passes through a preliminary stage: it engages in an initial process of pulling up roots by turning to another metropolis outright. This is what transpired in Brazil during the second half of the nineteenth century, when the elites simply substituted France for Portugal as a cultural metropolis, choosing to turn it, henceforth, into the source of their borrowings, imitations, and dependency. In the nineteenth century, Porfirian Mexico experienced a similar reversal in dropping its old Spanish connections in favour of Europe (France, England, and Germany), before withdrawing massively into its américanité in the nineteenth century. In the same vein, consider the case of Australia, which, after the Second World War, turned to the United States to ensure the military security and economic support that Great Britain could no longer provide. It is undeniable that this shift hastened the erosion of the old cultural relationship with the mother country. The subsequent realignment of commercial exchanges, this time favouring the large Asian countries, had a similar impact. Finally, in Quebec, the substitution of one metropolis for another imposed by the Cession of 1763 created among francophones the conditions for an awakening of national consciousness. The changes that occurred in the structure of metropolitan power (i.e., language, religion, institutions, rights, and privileges) essentially made the colonial tie more visible. This heightened consciousness contributed to the creation of a climate of protest expressed in the attempt at a break in the 1770s and 1780s, and then in the Rebellions of 1837–38.5 I believe that my concept of lateral displacement corresponds quite closely to the notion of “detour” put forth by E. Glissant (1981) in order to account for certain types of emancipation in Caribbean literatures. Cultural disengagement (rupture) can be accelerated by a fourth method, that of diversion. The latter occurs when, in order to reject a conflictual alternative or to avoid two irreconcilable symbols or allegiances, a third form is invented from scratch with a view to bridging or dismissing the others. In every instance, the aim is to skirt a perilous symbolic site, which has become uninhabitable, by inventing a neutral

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ground. The effect of this operation is to distance the founding culture further from its European heritage. Thus, faced with the traditions and adversarial relations inherited from British and Irish history, the Australian Catholic Church preferred to distance itself from these tensions in a conciliatory spirit. With time, this line of behaviour led it to break with certain symbols or customs that were too bound up with old divisions. In Canada and in Australia, the idea of turning Aboriginal peoples (often unbeknownst to them and, at times, in spite of them) into the country’s true founding peoples is part of the same pattern: independently of its intrinsic scientific merit, this measure had the advantage of equally dismissing all the other candidates claiming to be the founding people.6 There is another, quite common example: if two public holidays (e.g., anniversaries) evoke competing symbols, there is a strong tendency to create a third one in the hope that it will eclipse the first two. Cementing national identity by capitalizing to the utmost on the virtues of landscape can be another way of diverting attention away from certain divisions that thwart the nation-building project and consigning to oblivion elements of the heritage that have grown too unwieldy. Two other strategies of cultural emancipation are worthy of mention. First, there is syncretism, or hybridization, in which the new culture must arise out of the fusion of all contributions and legacies, however mixed and contradictory. This metaphor of the founding mix, conceived to escape from exile and alienation, is mainly associated with Latin American literatures. According to Zilà Bernd (1995, chaps 1–2), it can lead to an original pattern that avoids binary oppositions, a sort of culture of interstices, which, from one author to the other, has engendered notions of a “third way,” “in-betweenness,” “beyond the pale,” and “crossed identities.” As for the other method, it refers to the “bastard” paradigm that I have already discussed in relation to Quebec. This is a form of anthropophagy, which consists in turning against oneself; the founding culture sustains itself not on the wealth of others but, rather, on its own poverty, on its real or imaginary lacks, through quiet and voracious subversion. At the core of its accepted exile, the culture finds its new base, a zero point, which is not that of US-style opulence but of destitution. Some have ancestors, others change their ancestry; some choose to have none and draw from all origins, nativestyle. There are traces of this paradigm in other new collectivities, in (English) Canada, for example. The journalist Richard Gwyn recently discussed the agonizing dilemmas and controversies surrounding

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Canadian founding myths and the whole question of long filiations. His solution? Canadians, he wrote, should consider themselves a nation of “mutts,” entirely created, autonomous from birth.7 In the same vein, one could evoke all those who, in Quebec, Canada, or elsewhere, having been asked through surveys to define themselves in relation to identity and memory, reply that they do not know how to define themselves, have no genuine identity, and are scarcely troubled over it. The effectiveness of all these stratagems has proven very uneven. Suffice it to look at the fragile and uncertain nature of founding cultures, which I have already underscored in raising the general problem of the legitimacy of new intellectual cultures. In its own way, the difficult institution of New World literatures also recalls this. Indeed, most of these remain frail and have difficulty in measuring up to Europe, even as they proclaim their independence and maturity. To be sure, as several have stressed (notably, O. Paz 1991, 10–11), languages were not merely transplanted from Europe to its colonies. Far from being passive receptacles, the latter were involved in the operation; they inflected it in various ways, by naming their reality and their experience, by countering with negations, and refusals, and by endowing words with new meaning. A process of emancipation ensued; some scholars have sought to account for it by identifying stages and a common unfolding towards a same state of mastery or independence.8 Somewhat paradoxically, it is said in this vein that New World literatures are born old, in sterile imitation of European classics, but that, with time, they end up growing young. Without challenging the general relevance of these models or analyses, it is also worth underlining the significant share of uncertainty, ambiguity, and heterogeneity that nonetheless persists, as can be seen precisely in American literature, which is so often presented as an example of emancipation. Some authors have expressed their ambivalence about, or even disenchantment with, the New World as a horizon of rebirth. Others, and not the least of them, have simply broken off ties with America in order to reconnect with Europe. And, beyond the continental confidence and triumphalism of a Walt Whitman or a Longfellow, a sense of degradation and failure is forever being expressed. In its own way, is this not the message of the relentless quest for the “great American novel,” which will finally fulfill within literature the promises of the New World? It is tempting to make a generalization: founding cultures that succeed in breaking away recover rather poorly from it, as is evident almost everywhere in the presence of introspective discourse and in

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the persistent doubt about identity.9 From this angle, Quebec appears as a sort of archetype: not only has it still not established its destiny within the New World, it has not even selected the language in which to express it.

national identity: countering diversity The New World offered a conducive context for awakening concerns over identity. Immigrants confronted at once their own ethnic diversity, and the growing otherness of the Old World and of the indigenous presence. From this point of view, collectivities such as New Zealand and, especially, Australia represent borderline cases to the extent that their culture was – and still largely remains – the site of four divisions or cultural encounters: Whites/Aboriginals, Europeans/Asians, British/ Australians, and elites/common people. To varying degrees, however, all the new collectivities reproduced this type of pattern. In most cases, the quest for identity was conducted on the ground of ethnicity and, understandably, it ran into enormous difficulties: indeed, attempts were made to replace or blend diversity within an ensemble of cultural features normally inherited from the mother country (e.g., language, religion, customs, etc.). In this respect, the United States distinguished itself quite early on by officially basing its national unity on shared (universal) values and on some major political ideas. In every case, however, religion was mobilized by the founding cultures as an element of national cohesion when the conditions lent themselves to it, that is, when it was not itself a real or potential ground of division, as was the case primarily in Australia (Inglis 1967). But in Quebec, the United States, and Latin America, it was a powerful instrument to create cohesion and pull together the nation. Given these homogenizing premises, the national idea was incompatible with the heterogeneity of new collectivities, as previously mentioned, hence the need to apply a whole range of strategies to reduce this diversity. Some were symbolic, others much less so. Our comparative journey has foregrounded the following ones: 1 Physical elimination of the Other through war, genocide, expulsion, deportation, eugenics. This is the type of treatment meted out, for example, to the Aboriginal peoples of Tasmania (Australia) and to many tribes in Argentina, Brazil, and the United States. The deportation of the francophones from Acadia in the mid-eighteenth

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century by the British occupier and their dispersal in several countries stems from the same strategy. Forced sterilization of some subpopulations is another version of the same thing. Marginalization, on a cultural, social, legal, spatial, or other basis. The nation is reduced to only those said to be the founding people, in this case the European occupier. All of the Aboriginal peoples of the new collectivities, the Blacks in the United States, Brazil, and elsewhere, the Asians in Australia until the mid-twentieth century, and so on were subjected to this. The strategy applies to other forms of exclusion – that of women, for example. Forced cultural integration or assimilation. This model continued to prevail until the mid-twentieth century in most collectivities; it worked to erase the ethnic antecedents of Aboriginals as well as of future immigrants, who were deemed non-founders. Métissage (in the narrow, biological sense). At one time or another, most Latin American countries made it the key of their national integration (the cosmic race, racial democracy, etc.). One thinks in particular of Mexico (Creoles/Indians) or Brazil (Whites/Indians/ Blacks.) In practice, however, these projects of racial fusion stem from the dominant ethnic group’s eugenics rather than from a genuinely liberal or egalitarian spirit. Biculturalism. This involves reducing or weakening cultural dualism by making each of two sections of the population share certain features belonging to the other. Canada in the 1960s furnishes an example of this idea that did not, however, get concretized. Pure and simple occlusion of the elements of diversity in the official national discourse. Traces of this are everywhere. Search for – and, if necessary, invention of – resemblances between two peoples. It consists of detecting similarities in physical features, social forms, traditions, and shared values. The search for – and, if necessary, invention of – common origins. Contrary to the preceding item, this strategy does not erase diversity but renders it more tolerable by creating the feeling of a kinship born of history. National belonging is thus legitimized given that apparently irreducible differences are henceforth perceived as the product of specific developments based on a same point of temporal origin (normally, a very remote era). The development of neutral grounds (no man’s land). The idea is to construct images of identity that serve as rallying points by transcending all of the competing symbols. This is very close to the

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strategy of diversion already mentioned. The myths of the frontier and of the melting pot in the United States are two illustrations of this; the republican ideal in Australia during the 1990s is another. The same applies to proposals aiming to align national culture with Aboriginal culture (more or less raised up as a model) as a way of transcending the conflict of ethnic particularisms. Attempts to base identity on universal features or values are part of the same process. Ethnic diversity is thus held back from the public sphere in the name of fundamental ideals inspired by human rights, by humanism. This trend appeared in the course of the last decades, notably in Canada and in Australia, as a way of overcoming the national identity crisis linked to rising and diversifying immigration. 10 Cultural métissage. Under the banner of syncretism and amalgamation, this strategy aims to produce a complete fusion of all of the ethnic components of the nation (through education, mixed marriages, and the like), with a view to creating a new culture, distinct from its constitutive elements. This can be seen in the United States and in several Latin American countries. 11 Other techniques: great commemorative celebrations underscoring the anniversary of the nation’s birth,10 the institution of public traditions associated with the state or political life, the environmental expression of the nation in vast urban and architectural developments (e.g., parks, monuments, buildings, public squares, etc.), quite in the vein analyzed by E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (1983). All of these displays, which are intended to reflect the grandeur and permanence of national solidarity, can also act as substitutes for it: thus, the more nations feel fragile and culturally bereft, the more they tend to project themselves with splendour and vigour.11

long memory The ability to reclaim very ancient origins confers considerable confidence and moral authority on the nation. Founding cultures, most of which face a symbolic deficit, are precisely the most wanting in this respect. They need to establish and exhibit the transcendent nature of the nation, even while lacking longevity. In more general terms, how does the function (and fiction) of memory work within a new collectivity? Observation shows that New World nations have tended to opt for three major options in order to overcome this problem that they face with respect to long memory. The first consists of borrowing the

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mother country’s past and, in a sense, its memory. Broadly speaking, that is what Quebec did until the mid-twentieth century (and slightly beyond), construing its heroic past in America as an extension of France’s history and civilizing mission, which stretches back many thousands of years. Much the same thing occurred in English Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. But it is clear that this path is only open to cultures involved in a dynamic of continuity. A second option, more related to the dynamics of rupture, leads the new collectivity to appropriate the historicity of the Aboriginal population. This strategy consists in a sense of repudiating one’s ancestors so as to adopt others. Mexico borrowed the Indian past to grant itself strength in the face of Spanish culture, to counter the authority that the latter claimed over the improvised nations of the Americas. As a result of this shift, the eighteenth and nineteenth century Creoles began to recognize the Mayas and, especially, the Aztecs as their true ancestors, a view shared today by the majority of Mexicans, both White and of mixed race. The nation’s logic of identity thus moves from filiation to affiliation. A similar phenomenon occurs in Peru. But the Mexicans and Peruvians were not, for all that, the first people to have granted themselves the privilege of choosing their ancestors. Many others preceded them on this path. In order to reaffirm their identity before the invasive presence of Greek civilization, the Roman notables, after the Elder Cato (third century to second century BC), suddenly declared themselves descendants of the Sabines. A little later, Virgil (Aeneid) chose, just as gratuitously, to establish that all Romans were descended from the Trojans. In the same vein, a common representation has the whole Jewish nation emerging from Egypt with Moses, whereas this is in all likelihood only true of some tribes.12 In Canada and in Australia, historiography currently appears to be engaged in a similar process. For ten or fifteen years, a number of works have presented Aboriginal peoples as the first Canadians and indigenous peoples as the first (and the most authentic) Australians. Archaeology is at times complicit in projects of memory, the purpose of which is to mark the emerging nation’s imprints very far back in time.13 According to a third option, which embodies an even more radical break, the founding culture decrees a type of zero-time of memory. History begins anew with the emerging collectivity; the collective imaginary projects itself into the future, exchanging long memory for utopia. This conception flourishes in conditions where the nation is born of a spectacular founding act that enables a clear reconfiguration of

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time. The history of the United States reproduces this model best, at least in its broad lines. A strong drive to break with the old, combined with great collective confidence, established the belief that the new society was superior to all that came before. The paradigm of the “bastard” evoked earlier also has a place in this third option, even though its cultural roots are quite different. There are other examples of new collectivities whose memory does not go back beyond their beginnings in the New World, but they are quite different from the two preceding ones. In delineating these founding cultures, which, for various reasons, confined themselves to short-term memory, one could speak of a memory block. Thus, due to its origins as a penal colony, due also to the ill treatment inflicted on the Aborigines, Australia was long ashamed of its origins. This guilty conscience caused it for a time to confine its memories to the recent past. Resentment towards Great Britain, acutely felt among the convicts and their descendants (in particular the Irish), had a similar effect. Similarly, it is possible to argue that contemporary Brazil does not really possess a long memory. Yet, three paths could have enabled the nation to accede to a distant past. They correspond to its three major, constitutive ethnic components: the Portuguese, the African, and the Indian. But none of these symbolic channels appears to unify the national imaginary. In the first case, the rather negative feeling towards the old metropolis is, undoubtedly, a determining factor. In the two other cases, it appears that resistance of a racist nature thwarted a collective appropriation of ancient African and Indian roots. However this may be, in lieu of a long memory, Brazilian history is made to begin with the arrival of the Europeans. To substantiate this representation, emphasis is placed on the early métissage that fused the three founding races to produce a highly different entity. The intensity of this fusion was thought to make long memory irrelevant: the latter would simply have lost its way along tortuous and meaningless pathways. Finally, today’s Quebec offers a third example of a memory block. On one hand, the French filiation has diminished in intensity in recent years; on the other, the Aboriginal filiation does not have a great appeal. From the point of view of long memory, contemporary historical consciousness appears to wallow in great uncertainty. Some recent signs suggest that another model is surfacing, which simply construes today’s francophones as the descendants of New France’s Canadiens. It would be a way of giving voice to the muteness of recent years, without truly overcoming the problem. But the possibility that Quebec will also end

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up renouncing long memory should not be discounted. In its case, the situation is complicated by the fact that, for many Quebecers, the true foundation of the nation (access to political independence) is yet to come; it does not belong to the past but to the future. For them, it is in some sense the way in which this will occur that will blaze the path of memory. Founding cultures may find themselves suddenly trapped by their own strategies of memory regarding Aboriginal peoples. In considering the various representations of the relationship between Whites (or Europeans) and Aboriginal peoples and the shifts to which they gave rise in the history of new collectivities, one comes up with the following logical sequence. In a first instance, Whites record the history of their acts in the New World from a European perspective, starting from the moment of their first settlement. The presence of Aboriginal peoples is noted, but the latter are completely excluded from the we with which this first narrative is concerned. Then, the Whites embark on a long process of symbolic integration. Soon, they are presented as the first inhabitants of the national territory. The thesis of Aboriginal racial inferiority gradually gives way to the model of ethnic duality. Later, Aboriginal peoples are granted the status of founders of the nation, to which they henceforth belong. At another stage, they become the most authentic members of the nation due to their seniority and because they have managed to preserve their culture symbiotically with the land. At this point, and very logically, the Whites may be induced to conclude that national history must be rewritten, this time from the Aboriginal point of view. Europeans are then no longer pioneers or founders but invaders, pillagers. At the end of the sequence, the former conquerors have thus excluded themselves from their own history and identity. They no longer even know how to name themselves; given very diverse immigration, they are no longer only Europeans or only Whites; they have become non-Aboriginal, and it is in this way that the media increasingly portrays them in their relations with Aboriginal peoples. This sequence of steps is not necessarily chronological and even less predetermined, but it may help to situate each founding culture. For example, Australia seems furthest along; Canada and New Zealand are close behind. In this context, it is significant that expressions such as “non-Aborigines,” or “non-Natives,” are frequently used to refer to the descendants of Europeans. Further back, the United States and Quebec occupy a shared position; Aboriginal peoples are recognized here as the first occupants but (with some exceptions) not

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as founders of the nation, and it is not even clear that they truly belong to it. Finally, in collectivities such as Mexico, Peru, or Brazil, the antinomy appears to have been transcended in symbolic terms, at least in the official discourse. With respect to new collectivities, it emerges from the above that memory games (jeux de mémoire) are perhaps even more important than are the sites of memory (Pierre Nora’s Les lieux de mémoire). First, these populations are, to varying degrees, experiencing an identity crisis today, and they are all imbued with a sense of their fragility in one way or another. Besides, they have a relatively short past, and most of them remain convinced of their immaturity in relation to the Old World; hence the impression of a history that still is not set, of dust that has yet to settle. Finally, especially where ethnic diversity is very pronounced, the founding cultures have to deal with competing memories on top of the familiar pattern defined by the major ideological and political divisions. These comments offer one way into the comparative study of national historiographies in the New World and in the Old.14

the cunning of discourse The symbolic patterns that I have identified in the content and evolving shape of national culture direct our attention to strategies of discourse. A few examples that largely relate to identity and memory have helped us see the flexibility and inventiveness of discursive practices in their various modes of expression (e.g., fine arts, literature, ideology, historiography, etc.). One could extend the exercise by showing how, through legal sleight of hand, European immigrants legitimized their – often violent – seizure of New World territories that were most often already occupied by Aboriginal peoples. Clearly, it was impossible for the newcomers to base their claims on long-standing tenure of the land, hence the necessity of an alternative discourse. Australia thus had the Terra Nullius doctrine, inspired by the British theory of unoccupied land and of “eminent domain.” A slightly different formula prevailed in the United States, namely, the “Christian Discovery” rule, made famous by Judge John Marshall in the 1820s and 1830s, and presented as a complement of the land treaty practices. In Latin America, the Spanish model (inspired by an alleged natural law) was based on a hypothetical donation contract between the original (if necessary, fictitious) owners of the land (seqores naturales) and the new occupants. In New France, alliances and agreements of a commercial kind supported the

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fur trade, but the appropriation of lands in the Saint Lawrence Valley (admittedly, quite deserted in the seventeenth century) was decreed unilaterally. In each case, in exchange for mere trinkets, the legal fiction sanctioned, for a long time, the institution of an unequal economic and social relationship. Moreover, implementing these strategies often demanded that European legal traditions pertaining to property and trade be amended, skirted, or simply ignored. Another field where discourse demonstrated its inventiveness is that of language choice. In almost every founding culture, the educated sooner or later concluded that an original and autonomous literature could only arise if it were based on a true national language. Several strategies were put forward to ensure this primordial condition, in particular: to develop an original language based on the mother country’s (the most common proposal); to reject the language of the country of origin in order to adopt the Aboriginal language (Latin America); to resort to an ancient language to be used by the elites, such as Hebrew, Greek, and Latin (United States); to create a new language from various sources (Quebec, Latin America); and so on.15 On this question, Quebec is one of the rare founding cultures that has yet to make its choice, being deeply torn between various versions of Parisian, international, and Québécois French. Many other subjects could be discussed in the same vein, (e.g., theories justifying the inferior condition imputed to Aboriginal peoples, arguments that served to disqualify or glorify the common people, the faces of the immigrant, and the features attributed to inherited customs depending on whether they were represented from the point of view of continuity or rupture). This type of analysis opens the door to what one could call a grammar of discourse or a semantics of the national imaginary. Comparison reveals that, when it is thrust against the same obstacles, elite culture tends to invent the same strategies (and sometimes the same subterfuges), at times making discourse almost predictable. I have illustrated this already with several examples linked to strategies of cultural disengagement (versions of anthropophagy or profanation, of diversion – or no man’s land), modes of legitimizing the national idea in the context of diversity, and the institution of long memory. Let us come back here for a moment to the problem of the nation confronted with seemingly irreducible and heterogeneous elements. As mentioned above, a frequently used strategy consisted of homogenizing different representations of a shared origin. A first example is the history of Mexico in the colonial era. Concerned that the conversion of Indians

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was progressing at a poor rate, missionaries began to claim that the Indians’ religions were not to be condemned since they too were of Christian origin. It was just that this separate branch had ended up deteriorating and becoming profane as a result of its long neglect by the Church. Where once there had seemed to be two separate universes, it would henceforth be legitimate to recognize two branches of the same tree. Other versions, along slightly different paths, came to the same conclusion; that is, they sought to incorporate Indian culture into Western civilization – witness arguments that presented indigenous peoples as descendants of the Vikings or of a tribe of Israel. A second example of the same strategy is provided by the cultural history of francophone Quebec in the second half of the nineteenth century. In chapter 3, I evoked the situation of the educated, who, in their eagerness to perpetuate and strengthen the new national culture (which had become French Canadian), worried that it would be torn between a learned and very refined European culture (which they embodied) and a popular culture that was too slovenly for their taste, too sullied by continental promiscuity. However, they overcame this difficulty by “discovering” that each was an extension of the same heritage, each stemming from the oldest and most authentic French culture. Suddenly, there were not two refractory elements, but two complementary components of the same ancient heritage. Once again, the nation’s homogeneity and cohesion were safe. Another example, spawned by Canadian history, has to do with the attempts by some anglophone intellectuals to reconcile the notion of “nation” with the country’s ethnic diversity, especially the old anglophone-francophone duality. One of these attempts tended, towards the end of the nineteenth century, to show that the French Canadians and the English Canadians were, in reality, close relatives since the two “races” shared a common origin in distant Teutonic tribes. Still with respect to Canada, some intellectuals link Aboriginal peoples and the descendants of the Europeans by recalling that the latter, just like the former, have distant ancestors who are comparable to “Natives” (in this case, the barbarians who once invaded Western Europe).16 Australia’s history presents a similar episode. The increased integration of the Australian economy into the greater Pacific region during the 1970s and 1980s produced a discourse intended to show that this reorientation was not dictated by opportunism but, rather, conformed to the inclination of history and culture. Here again, some intellectuals strove to show that the alleged discordances in values and traditions between

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the two continents (massively underscored in the “Asian values” debate) concealed a great proximity, if not a common destiny: the West and the East had already, in the distant past, sustained very close relations, and, in the final analysis, these two spheres had common roots, reflected today in several similar features.17 Briefly, here are some other examples of this same strategy. The Maori people were long perceived as the descendants of an IndoEuropean race, just like the Pakehas. During the era of New France, Aboriginal peoples were sometimes construed as descendants of one of Israel’s lost tribes, following the example of the Aztecs and the Mayas in Mexico. François-Xavier Garneau tempered the trauma of 1763 and of the change of metropolis by recalling that, in some sense, Great Britain was the old French mother country: was not the English nation, after all, the daughter of “that noble race that marched behind William the Conqueror and whose spirit, subsequently rooted in England, turned this small island into one of the first nations of the world[?]”18 Another discursive strategy can be applied when, in the presence of two competing ethnic entities, the spokespersons of the nation claim to blend them, while, in reality, they continue to sanction and perpetuate the domination of one by the other. By virtue of this strategy, it is not a synthesis of these elements that is produced but, rather, an unequal articulation, which is a type of assimilation by the dominant culture. In other words, the result is not fusion, but “in-fusion.” Here are some examples. In the second half of the nineteenth century, many Mexican intellectuals advocated a vast program of métissage to blend the White and Indian races. The new racial synthesis, it was promised, would be quite different from its constitutive elements and especially superior to each of them. But contrary to all expectation, and in complete disregard for the laws of genetics (of which these intellectuals, passionately interested in European culture and science, were quite informed), it was also argued that this racial synthesis, this “cosmic race,” would be White. In slightly the same way, in a novel published in Canada in 1945 (The Two Solitudes), Hugh MacLennan sought to contribute to bringing English Canadians and French Canadians closer by creating a main character intended to unite the essential qualities of both ethnic groups and thereby overcome their opposition. This said, it did not appear contradictory to the author that his hero, whose mother tongue was French, was deeply anglicized. Similarly, the tricentenary of the founding of Quebec City in 1908 gave rise to important celebrations, staged in such a way as to display the “blending of races”

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(Nelles 1996). But the symbolism deployed for this purpose visibly tended to be one-sided. The British Empire was presented as the natural context for this reconciliation. Moreover, the Plains of Abraham, the very place where the English army had defeated the French in 1759, was presented as the symbol par excellence of the fusion of the two races. For good measure, it was recalled that the French troops had also won an (inconsequential) victory over the English, shortly after the decisive confrontation that changed the course of history for the francophones. There too, an imbalance compromised the symbolism of this fusion. Finally, in the United States, the inclusion of Native characters (Squanto, Hiawatha, Pocahontas, and Tecumseh) among the great heroic figures of the national past belongs in part to the strategy of in-fusion, at least insofar as the eminent qualities recognized in the great Indian chiefs corresponded to the most classic Western and American values. Élise Marienstras (1998) has shown that this apparent cultural opening masked a recuperation of the Indian (in his most remarkable attributes), coopting him for the Christian and British tradition. Finally, still in the United States, the “melting pot” can also be seen as another figure of in-fusion. The analysis of discursive practices also reveals distortions and false representations that can at times be detected with the help of empirical facts. The most familiar example is that of the ruralist mythologies, briefly mentioned in chapter 2. Thus, the (francophone) Quebec imaginary largely occluded urban reality until the 1930s and 1940s.19 Similarly, until the mid-twentieth century, the representations of the nation in Australia were massively fuelled by the life of virility and rebelliousness in the bush (outback), even though most of the population had been concentrated in the coastal cities since the end of the nineteenth century. A comparable symbolism is apparent in the history of the United States, either in the Crèvecœur and Jefferson tradition (the egalitarian ideal of the small property owner, free and independent, the yeoman), or in the conquering spirit of the wilderness and the frontier, or again in pastoral myth-making in a reaction to the urban problem (e.g., Burns 1989). A broad current in Mexican literature was also strongly imbued with a rural mystique during the first half of the twentieth century, and New Zealand long nourished an ecological vision of its land. Ruralism, it turns out, was a constant in the history of founding cultures, but it served very different causes by acting as the bearer of specific, and at times contending, values that, in their own ways, fed into the national imaginary. In this sense, it

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points to a promising area for comparative inquiry. In the Quebec context, in particular, most of the analyses of ruralist (or agriculturalist) ideology are surprisingly wanting, usually reducing it to an irrational flight from modernity – which, no doubt, is what it was, among other things. A study based on comparison would first liberate this ideology from the type of shame it henceforth bears in historical (if not collective) consciousness; it would especially highlight meticulously both the quite diverse symbolic contents that this ideology conveyed and the exact functions that it fulfilled within the French-Canadian imaginary. This would afford a better understanding of the attention that it generated and of the reasons for its longevity. Somewhat in the same vein, one is struck by the virtual ubiquity of contradictions and the important compensatory and unifying functions that they seem to fulfill in the construction of the imaginary. Very unequal societies, such as the United States or Australia, raised egalitarian values to the status of a dogma. The United States also went furthest both in its ideal of Puritan austerity and in the enjoyment of material pleasures (consumerism). The myth of racial democracy and of the socio-cultural mix is at the heart of Brazil’s national identity; the latter, however, remains an extremely hierarchical and fragmented society, in particular along racial lines (Marx 1998). The Mexican creoles culturally appropriated Indianity, which they fully integrated into the nation, without in anyway altering the exploitative social relationship that they sustained with the Indian. The French-Canadian educated classes appropriated popular culture but, at the same time, never ceased to fight it. There are discrepancies virtually everywhere between the actual beginnings and their widely disseminated mythical representations, between the ethnic composition of the nation and its definition, and so on. These examples and many others suggest the hypothesis that certain national cultures did not succeed in surviving in spite of their contradictions but, rather, because of them. Indeed, it appears that, in certain instances, contradictions can establish functional tensions and, in the end, prove to be conduits of cohesion and growth. How otherwise to explain their remarkable ability to persist in the long run? Nineteenth- and twentieth-century European history also provides telling examples: suffice it to mention the very complex connections between the sacred and the profane, between the movement towards universality and the cult of singularity, or again, between liberalism, democracy, nationalism, the legacy of the Enlightenment, and imperialism. To be sure, not all of these contradictions are functional:

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some are corrosive; they introduce divisions and thwart action. One can assume that the latter are less likely to survive. It is worth recalling here that, as representation, myth’s relationship with “reality” is not about “truth,” but about symbolic effectiveness, the capacity to reconcile contrary elements in a lasting fashion. Nor are the artifices of intellectual culture innocent; they are always motivated by some profit to be attained, most often linked to a social relationship or to the strengthening of a political position. By identifying themselves with Indianity, the Mexican Creoles cleared themselves of the atrocities linked to the Black Legend. By ascribing Christian origins to the Aztec religion, they shielded themselves against the accusation of barbarism levelled by European intellectuals. In fusing popular culture with the old French tradition, the French-Canadian educated classes constructed a unified ground for the nation, which they defended and claimed in the face of the anglophone. In being granted a Caucasian ascendancy (in a sense, a way of whitening them), the Maori were turned into a race superior to the Aborigines and made worthy of an alliance with the Whites. Furthermore, this offered a justification of nineteenth-century colonialism, which had effected the union of two long-separated segments of the same human family. Who could henceforward doubt the homogeneity and legitimacy of the New Zealand nation?

the crisis of national identity Beyond their many singular features, the collective paths I have studied in this book appear to converge in their most recent sequence. There are signs everywhere of an identity crisis, which is quickening the sense of collective frailty and instilling in a number of people the idea that the national culture must be rebuilt or reinvented. For various reasons, the old frameworks of symbolic integration are subject to tensions that are driving them towards reform. Some of the most pivotal factors include: the rise and diversification of immigration since the Second World War; the awakening of old communitarian identities believed to be permanently extinguished or marginalized; the difficult relationship with Aboriginal peoples, who have been granted citizenship but who are not seen as fully belonging to the nation; the increasingly acute consciousness of human rights; the weakening of the nation-state in the context of globalization; the exhaustion and at times failure of

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the great national utopias; the declining purchase of founding myths and narratives; and the denunciation of ethnicism on the basis of the principle of cultural relativism. In one way or another, most of the new collectivities have ended up abandoning the paradigm of homogeneity and adopting that of diversity as a way of conceptualizing themselves. To varying degrees, they now face the same difficulty: how to recreate symbolic cohesion within otherness, while guided by the imperatives of law and the new sociology of intercultural relations? Or: how to rebuild identity without ethnocism, the nation without fiction, solidarity without homogeneity, belonging without intolerance? This difficulty is on the rise because postmodernity has become embedded in several collectivities; consequently, fine arts, literature, and religion no longer willingly serve the national imaginary. The new identity thus would have to be rebuilt largely without the help of fiction and without the sanction of transcendence. Under these conditions, efforts to reshape the old distinctive traits and to grant them renewed foundations prove scarcely effective. This is evident in Canada, where the anglophone press from time to time recalls the main characteristics that underpin Canadian uniqueness in relation to the United States: attachment to the monarchy, a “prudent” democracy that avoids populist excesses, a sharper social sensibility (values of compassion, solidarity, and justice), a healthier relationship to the environment, a greater respect for diversity, and so on. But for various reasons, some of these symbols scarcely appeal to Quebec francophones. They leave Aboriginal peoples quite indifferent, and it is not certain that they enter deeply into the culture of ethnic minorities or of new Canadians. In Quebec itself, French Canadians have ceased to ascribe to the new Quebec nation the features with which they had typically identified themselves. Indeed, they have ceased to do so all the more easily in that they no longer recognize these traits as their own. Of late, young nations have thus gradually turned to new strategies in the attempt to refashion their symbolic unity. They have sought, for example, to: 1 Base identity on values regarded as universal (respect for life, nonviolence, tolerance, rights, democracy, etc.). Distinctiveness arises from the particular ardour with which these values are promoted collectively. All the new collectivities involved in the transition between what are commonly (and to some extent improperly) called the ethnic nation and the civic nation rely on this kind of outlook.

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Its most immediate expression is the rule of law. In some respects, the rule of the market at times plays an analogous role, albeit on another level. Feed identity with references to geography, which becomes a neutral symbolic site (a no man’s land), a space of conciliation or reconciliation beyond all manner of divisions, a glorification of territory or landscape (in painting, photography, documentary, etc.), legends of the first exploration and settlement (museums, prestige publications, and historical reconstructions), encouragement to travel (car tours, hiking, etc.), and the mystique surrounding the environment. This strategy especially suits collectivities that are remarkably wellendowed in this respect; for example, Canada, the United States, Australia, and Brazil (the great open spaces, the marvels of nature, getting away from it all). Turn towards Aboriginal peoples to borrow from them the fresh morality and symbolic capital that their age-old tradition is said to have preserved; rely on these borrowings, considered beneficial to the whole of society, to nourish and renew national culture, in the hope (1) of overcoming the irreducible disparity of traditions and feelings of belonging associated with multi-ethnicity; (2) of dispelling the disenchantment born of modernity’s and stresses; (3) of restoring a harmonious relationship with the land. Australia offers the most eloquent example of this initiative. According to a certain number of that country’s intellectuals, industrial society introduced materialism and destroyed the Western soul. However, the Aboriginals of the bush, somewhat protected by the exclusion to which they have been subjected since the end of the eighteenth century, have remained at one with nature and with their ancestors, and have been able to preserve intact a spirituality that is glaringly lacking among Whites. Hence the idea of emulating the indigenous soul. The idea of national identity must yield to the reality of multiple, fragmented, limited, and parallel identities. In short, diversity itself is the essence of (or the substitute for?) identity. This idea is gaining ground in several collectivities. It has entered political discourse in Canada and Australia. State that the democratic process of searching for identities, of symbolic construction and reconstruction, replaces identity and is even superior to it. Identity is not innate; it is not about heritage but about adaptation. It must thus constantly be invented. That is why it

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is in perpetual motion and embraces sundry and even contradictory elements. The crisis of identity is the result of denying this reality. 6 Decree that postmodern nations simply do not need an identity, neither a singular nor a plural one. This idea seems, however, to flourish especially where all attempts to restore identity have failed. It is too soon to know what will become of all these strategies of symbolic reconfiguration. To what extent will legal rules or relatively abstract ideals prove sufficient in the long run as new foundations of collective cohesion and as means of sustaining the capacity for civic mobilization and movements of solidarity in the name of social projects? Whatever the answer, here again, new collectivities display both their fragility and their flexibility: fragility because they have been incapable of countering cultural diversity with the vigour of a vibrant national tradition and a national norm; flexibility, one could even say creativity, to the extent that they have been able to conceive of original paths to accommodate the nation’s heterogeneity. In addition to the ad hoc strategies of recent years, which I have just evoked, there are also the models of métissage and racial democracy in Latin America, of multiculturalism in Australia and English Canada, of interculturalism in Quebec, and of biculturalism in New Zealand. We know that these formulas have had uneven and limited success; suffice it to mention the pervasive Aboriginal impasse or, in Canada, the francophone problem. Still, the fragility of new collectivities, in particular the doubt that they always harboured about themselves, has created conditions conducive to compromises over identity.

Conclusion

This essay in comparative history has led me to consider the collective imaginary as a social fact, the transformations of which are directly or indirectly linked to other social facts. In turn, the study of these changes themselves not only discloses the logic of discourse but also the social dynamic to which it belongs and of which it is an important driving force. In this sense, the cultural and social are two sides of a common history. I have chosen to give priority to the first because of the question that served as my point of departure: self-representations are constituted and survive on the margins of empirical facts; they distort and transgress these facts. So too, self-representations have the ability to feed off contradictions, showing how discursive practices work, while simultaneously revealing the limits of their autonomy. Hence, the rationale for comparing the ways in which the imaginaries are formed and transformed within these new collectivities. This process has not only enabled me to foreground a great variety of patterns and configurations in the pathways I have studied but also to discover common features and constants within this profusion of elements. Simultaneously, I have also attempted to explain particularities and to articulate the logic underpinning recurring tendencies. Such an analytical journey calls for some concluding remarks. Let me dispel a possible misunderstanding. My attempt to build a model in the previous chapter does not stem from an evolutionist postulate, much less from a deterministic one. It is important to bear in mind that the paths of evolution described are neither linear nor irreversible, despite the many parallels and convergences I found in them. Witness the three reversals that occurred in Quebec’s history (between continuity and political rupture); see also the rejection of

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the republican model by a majority of Australians in November 1999. In addition, the comparative history of new collectivities does not aim to produce knowledge that would make their future predictable; rather, it seeks to itemize the various sequences of events or scenarios that can begin to take shape and prevail in this or that situation. When a combination of circumstances places a collectivity in a narrow strait, the number of ways out or the range of possible outcomes is not unlimited; comparative analysis allows one to draw up a partial inventory of them. Implicitly, it is understood here that there will always be scenarios that are not actualized and that the scholar cannot anticipate. However, this compendium is an instrument not unlike a road map; at no time does it enable one to predict the road that a collectivity will choose; but, once such a choice has been made, the collectivity’s position can be pinpointed, and it becomes possible to recognize the options or the paths that are open to it. In other words, knowledge resulting from comparative history furnishes points of reference that are potentially useful to those who seek a better understanding of the tendencies and movements of the present. Among the analyses I have suggested, several examples come to mind: the evolving relations with the old mother countries, expressions of the fragile and threatened nation, ways of reducing ethno-cultural differences, the challenge of legitimizing intellectual culture, strategies of long memory, the symbolic integration of the Aboriginal (the pitfalls of memory, the crisis of belonging, etc.), the search for new utopias, attempts at reconstructing the imaginary, and solutions for the current crisis of identity. In a slightly similar way, knowing the operations of intellectual culture can benefit the present and, thus, render public discourse more intelligible and more transparent in all its forms of expression as well as in its various dimensions: its driving force, its aims, its arguments, the symbols it deploys, or its actual content. In other words, such knowledge can facilitate recognition of the text and the pretext. Critical consciousness can reap a benefit here, not by radically rejecting all that pertains to the imaginary, but by serving its reconstruction. For, in the end, this is the task in the current conjuncture: to rebuild intellectual culture, to consolidate the conditions of a new discourse, and to recreate meaning and solidarity within disenchanted or alienated societies in the new mass culture. On another level, my analyses of New World collectivities open the way to other comparisons, this time with the Old World. For example, with respect to the nation-state’s reactions to cultural diversity and to

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its contested traditions of collective identity, I have shown in the previous chapter the fragility and flexibility of founding cultures. I have identified therein the conditions that favour a questioning of the old and a search for compromises. By contrast, one could argue that the old nations of Europe (notably France), buoyed by their long and prestigious past, are more resistant to redefinitions. Perhaps the respect that is due to great civilizations and their achievements inspires dutiful fidelity in the form of resistance. On this point, two other reasons lead me to believe that the New World is different than the Old. First, the relation of dependency, which for so long subjected the founding cultures to their mother country, made them passive and ill-disposed to change (mostly those that adhere to the continuity pattern). Traditionally, fashions and standards came from Europe and were changed somewhat artificially, depending on the development and whims of the metropolis. This situation also thwarted the growth of strong collective traditions in the nations of the periphery, making them more disposed to changes of direction. The type of relationship between the nation (in its cultural dimension) and the state is another important fact. In new collectivities, these two entities developed in parallel fashion, following specific trajectories, in a context of settlement and colonial dependency. For this reason, I argue that the relationship that binds them is less narrow and less rigid than is that in the Old World nationstates. That is another factor that predisposes them to flexibility. Having said this, the theme of national identities in crisis or in need of reconstruction has begun to penetrate the nations of Europe; this is particularly evident in Germany. There, too, recently arrived ethnic groups are starting to make their voices heard. Moreover, the consolidation of the European Union during the last two decades has created a new framework of belonging for member-nations, which impels them to review the matrix of their collective identity and awakens them to a sense of cultural fragility. Consequently, reactions, concerns, and controversies are appearing that strangely recall the reality of the new collectivities. Once again, the field of comparative thought extends from the New World to the Old. In even more general terms, the contrasts between the two universes tend perhaps to be exaggerated. Thus, in spite of the considerable work of self-differentiation achieved since the time of their formation, the new collectivities continue to share fundamental features with their mother societies. This is quite evident in the deep similarities that persist between old and new collectivities in their relations to the environment, to the sacred, to the

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state, and to the Other. The only exceptions, seemingly, are the Latin American nations; there, due to its exceptional demographic impact, Indianity impinged powerfully on worldviews and social practices. Superficial changes aside, it would seem that the descendants of Europeans, enraptured by the dream of a New World, only managed in the end to recreate an enlarged and awkward replica of the Old. Ultimately, the cleverly preserved illusion of the contrary and the hopelessly resisted feeling of inferiority that dogs it are perhaps the main distinctive markers of founding cultures. Let us return to the specifics of my inquiry. The comparative overview has shown us astonishing parallels in the cultural history of new collectivities: dark periods (grandes noirceurs) between 1920 and 1960 in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, and Quebec; “Quiet Revolutions” just about everywhere; cultural ferment in the 1960s, fuelled by a return to popular culture and folklore, and driven by a quest for authenticity, roots, and so on. These episodes have most often been seen and analyzed through local lenses as outcomes stemming from a nation’s particular dynamic. On this point, comparison has fulfilled one of its principal functions, namely, to dispel false uniqueness, to open national histories to each other and to connect them to international, even global, perspectives. The main question, henceforth, is as follows: what constitutes these long and large conjunctures, and how do they evolve? National consciousness apparently fails to grasp them; yet, they govern the plot upon which such consciousness feeds. Here one clearly sees the need to change lenses and to expand comparative history into a macro-historical approach. Our journey has also shown the nation in a state of flux. As expected, we witnessed national identities shifting unceasingly, adapting to new conjunctures, or simply remaking themselves through negotiation. We noted that the nation at times followed the creation of the state (as in several Latin American countries) and sometimes preceded it (as in Quebec, Cuba, or Puerto Rico.) We also saw the nation take on board very eclectic elements and define itself in relation either to ethnic features and a heritage or to values and ideologies. At times, it willingly serves incompatible ends: racism and ethnicity, cultural survival, popular solidarity, and anti-imperialism. We found it siding now with despotism and repression, now with liberty and democracy, supporting both the elites and the people – as in nineteenth-century Argentina, where the liberal Sarmiento, a man of the Enlightenment, cast the Indians (as well as the Mestizos and the pampa gauchos) out of the

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nation (he went as far as advocating their extermination); meanwhile Rosas’s nationalist party defended them. In Europe, the nation was born in the same bed as democracy; but it also spawned murderous wars and provided the framework for the largest colonial movements of history. In short, as a concept and as a historical phenomenon, the nation is multifaceted and versatile, quite difficult to define. Its most general dimension appears to consist in the claim made by elites at a given point in a collectivity’s history: through it, they declare the existence of a community (homogeneity, identity, memory), which they strive to create, at times, from scratch;1 in the same thrust, they designate themselves the nation’s spokespersons and appoint themselves governors of its destiny. Beyond this original datum, one must look at the unpredictable patterns arising out of the nation’s unique incarnations. Ultimately, the nation’s changing character calls upon us to widen the analytical angle, to lend more heed to social relationships and, in particular, to the power relations that drive it. Finally, along the way, I have encountered several lines of inquiry that one could usefully explore further. For example, one would wish to examine the reference to the Enlightenment, which surfaces unevenly from one collectivity to another (less present in English Canada and in Australia, it is in the front line of anti-colonial thought in the United States and in Quebec), and the varying ways in which it is deployed, either to support a movement of rupture or to check it. This is the case with liberalism, which is very close to the republican ideology in the United States and was long restricted to laissez-faire capitalism in Quebec and in several Latin American countries. Democracy, wherever it prevailed, also took on quite varied forms, at times very close to the people (i.e., in the United States) and at other times at a distance from them (i.e., in Canada). Similarly, the notion of race has served different functions depending on the collectivity and, at times, on the period. In the United States, it provided a foundation for a social hierarchy within the nation; in Australia, it was an instrument of exclusion, defining the limits of national belonging. On other fronts, there is much to learn about the vicissitudes of radical thought: why does it take root firmly here, while scarcely appearing elsewhere? What of the forms of peasant property and their ideological, cultural, social, and geographical origins (why the small family farm? Why large holdings?)? I should also mention the temptation of exile as a category of elite culture, or the opposition between the sedentary and the nomadic, which constitutes the counterpart of the category of exile

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within popular culture. There is also the development of oral culture and of custom in general. Starting in the early settlement period, an extended erosion of the mother country’s traditions within these social forms sets in. It is soon combined with a redeployment contingent on invention, adaptation, and borrowing within the new continent.2 Finally, the theme of anti-intellectualism has surfaced almost everywhere; but again, serious work would be required to foreground its origins and permutations. On a more fundamental level, which touches upon the building of the imaginary and the consolidation of the nation, it is necessary to return to the different social and cultural patterns that emerged from the settlement experience. Here, the disparity stems first from the particularities of institutional contexts, from geographical constraints, economic structures, and traditions. But it also resides substantially in the very different ways in which each collectivity has represented its experience and has fed its imaginary. My inquiry has shown the extent to which similar experiences have lent themselves to different mythologies. Suffice it to compare the archetypes of the bushman, the frontier man, or the gaucho with that of the French-Canadian colon; while the former embodied triumphant self-affirmation, wild freedom, physical strength, and resistance, the latter – with some exceptions – personified punctuality, moderation, submission, devotion, and abnegation. And yet, many signs suggest that the reality of the people in francophone Quebec shared numerous features with other collectivities. One can only speculate about the long-term repercussions that such a distortion may have had both on attitudes and behaviour. At the same time, all of this draws attention once more to the highly variable nature of the relations that developed in the nations of the New World between elite culture and the culture of the common people (rural or urban). That said, quite apart from the distortions just mentioned, it seems that there is bound to be friction within these relations insofar as elite culture in the new collectivities pursues two objectives that are difficult to reconcile. On the one hand, to anchor national identity in a tradition, it must appropriate the substance of the seemingly timeless culture of the people; on the other hand, the proximity thus achieved hinders the emancipatory and civilizing efforts that elite culture deploys in order to rival its colonial counterpart. Finally, and with respect to integration per se, it is tempting to think that today’s nations, in the face of tensions over collective identity, must reconstitute the cohesion that once characterized them. This illusion

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must be dispelled. In fact, yesterday’s nations only appear harmonious given the degree of authority and even coercion that they exercised. Historical research in recent decades, particularly on the micro-social level, has revealed a whole world of marginalities and retrenchments, of resistances and transgressions behind the official discourse and the façade of public institutions. Superimposed on this – and often rooted in it – were the great divisions carved out by social classes, rural and urban habitats, and generational, religious, and gender conflicts. One of the functions of national culture was precisely to mask these divisions. In sum, the present task is not to restore a wanting collective cohesion by drawing on a model that perhaps never existed but, rather, to conceive of a distinctly different one, based on new foundations. It is clear, for example, that the nation-to-be will have to consent to relatively advanced forms of fragmentation as a corollary of the new aspects of citizenship. It will also have to institute mechanisms for dialogue and flexibility that will make a space for negotiation and action for each of its constitutive elements. Finally, one must anticipate that the very foundations of cohesion and belonging will be subject to a continual process of negotiation. In other words, the nation ought henceforth to be conceived in terms of “co-integration.”

Notes

chapter one 1 In speaking of the population of French origin living within Québec’s present boundaries, I shall use the term “French Canadians” when I wish to draw attention to the oldest stock of French settlement. Otherwise, and particularly with regard to the twentieth century, I will speak of the Québécois, except when referring to a specific ethnic group or minority. 2 On this, my position resembles Benedict Anderson’s (1991), except that my area of analysis stretches beyond the national imaginary in the strict sense. 3 These two dimensions are, needless to say, inextricably linked; the formation of founding cultures cannot be analyzed without reference to the evolution of the colonial tie and the way the state is being built. 4 In 1994, a team of literary critics from the University of Ottawa organized a conference on the theme “Discourses of the New World in Nineteenth-Century French Canada and Latin America.” The proceedings were published under the direction of Couillard and Imbert (1995). 5 See, in particular, Turner’s famous lecture (“The Significance of the Frontier in American History”) delivered in 1893 and reprinted in G.R. Taylor (1972). See also F.J. Turner (1962). 6 Much closer to home, the very recent reunification of the two Germanies illustrates this well. In any case, some prefer to speak of unification in order to further underscore the novelty of the event, which fused two entities that had, it would seem, become quite different from what they had been at the time of their separation after the

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Notes to pages 12–25 Second World War. It is also pointed out that these two collectivities had only been linked since 1870, that they scarcely had the time to fuse into a truly integrated nationality, and so on. I have omitted other features that a number of scholars have linked to new collectivities, but whose specificity, I believe, is much less certain. This is the case with egalitarianism, democracy, flexibility in social hierarchies, and the like. In this respect, when they refer to the project of intellectual and aesthetic construction, semiologists use the blanket term “modelling systems” (e.g., Klinkenberg 1996; Eco 1979; Martinet 1975). I extend to the same scale the notion of discourse, or discursive practices. In quite the same sense, D. Williams (1969) has set forth the concept of “filiastic” and “catalysis” to designate what I call the “continuity” and “rupture” models, in order to characterize the type of relationship established with the parent society. Somewhat in the same way, A. Lawson (1983, 198) evokes “the felt dichotomy between new and old, between here and there, between the cultural inheritance and the immediate experience.” For their part, Santiago and Gazzola (2001) speak, in this case, of a triple cultural negation of the “other” (the latter being either the new, colonized collectivity or the indigenous people). The dominated is threatened in its freedom, its religion, and its language. As it unfolded in nineteenth-century Europe, the nation, according to Gellner (1983), consisted essentially of the union of the state and the Volk. On this question, and with respect to Canada, see, for example, Porter Ladousse (1997). For a striking example of how enriching a feminist view can be for the analysis of nation and nationalism, see Caulfield (2000). In the course of a short, popularizing work (Bouchard and Lacombe 1999), I had the opportunity to summarize some of the leading ideas that underpin the present analysis. The reader will find these views developed here in a much more elaborate form and substantiated with relevant arguments.

chapter two 1 Among others: Rosenau (1992), LaCapra (1985), Ankersmit (1989), Poster (1997).

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2 In spite of all its richness and its will to avoid nihilism, Peter Novick’s (1988) book does not truly succeed in reversing this argument. On the contrary, somewhat paradoxically, it adds to the reigning confusion. Ronald Rudin’s (1997b) book, which deals with important currents in twentieth-century Quebec historiography, leaves one with a comparable impression. 3 Various recent enquiries in comparative history (or studies that have made substantial room for comparison) lead one to believe this. For example: M. Bellavance (Montreal and the Western urban model), Serge Courville (colonial discourse in several former colonies of Great Britain), M. Dagenais (Montreal/Toronto), D. Deslandres (missionary endeavours in the seventeenth century), Yves Gingras (history of science), Paul-André Linteau et al. (Montreal/Barcelona), Ronald Rudin (Quebec/Ireland), Sylvie Taschereau (Montreal/Brussels), B. Young (francophone and anglophone middle classes in Quebec City and Montreal), various projects by the social and cultural sections of the Institut interuniversitaire de recherches sur les populations (irep) (on the theme of nation, rituality, social mobility, etc.). 4 See, among others, Bouchard (1990a, 1995b, 1997b 1997c, 1997d), Gingras (1996a), Bouchard and Lacombe (1999), and Sarra-Bournet (1995). See also the report by the Groupe de travail sur l’enseignement de l’histoire created by the Quebec Ministry of Education (Se souvenir et devenir, 1996). 5 Since then, there have been several co-directors on the Quebec side, but the interest and the number of researchers involved has not decreased. To this day, the project has ten or so conferences and seven books to its credit (the latest publication being Bouchard, Dickinson and Goy 1998). 6 Marc Bloch especially comes to mind. He was a frequent advocate of comparative history (M. Bloch 1963, 1939, 1940). See also Hill and Hill (1980) and Bouchard (1997b). 7 The journal, Comparative Studies in Society and History, was founded there in 1958. 8 In the latter case, the comparison deals with two sets: one contains the targeted variable and the other does not (Mill 1970). 9 See Lamonde (1994, 1997b) and the papers presented at a conference held at the University of Quebec in Trois-Rivières in March 1997. 10 Over the last few years, Michel De Sève (Laval University) and I have been involved in an operation of this kind within the European

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Notes to pages 30–43 research network HISMA (Historical Mobility Analysis). This research program comprises some fifteen national projects. This is the thread that the first sociologists and the nineteenth-century evolutionist anthropologists drew upon, not unlike the European pioneers of comparative history in the early twentieth century (Henri Sée, Louis Davillé, and others). For a more recent discussion of the subject, see Skocpol and Somers (1980). This is the case with the approach adopted by Wallerstein (1974) in his study of the world economy. In the francophone tradition, Simiand (1960) and Bloch (1963) are pioneers of the genre. On this subject, see also Sewell (1967), Grew (1980), and Skocpol and Somers (1980). That is what I did with a team of historians and Quebec and French ethnologists in a comparative project that deployed marriage rituals as an indicator of socio-cultural dynamics (see Bouchard and Segalen 1997). In this connection, Frederick Cooper (1996) contrasts the work of James T. Campbell (1995) with that of George M. Fredrickson (1995), both of which deal with the comparative history of Blacks in the United States and in South Africa. I am grateful to my colleague Jean-Paul Bernard, who kindly drew my attention to this question. See Langlois and Seignobos (1899, 252), Simiand (1960, 104–05). See also Bernard (1998). A similar argument is presented by Bernard Andrès (1990, 181 ff.) in relation to literary history. C.V. Woodward (1968, chap. 1) quite deliberately entitled a text: “The Comparability of American History.” The book in which this appeared showed precisely that the grounds of exceptionalist sentiment were often dubious. On the same subject, see Etzioni and Dubow (1970). With respect to France-Germany studies, see Michel Espagne’s commentary (1994). No one has said it better than T.S. Eliot: “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time” (Little Gidding [London: Faber and Faber, 1942], 15). On this question, see my commentary in Bouchard (1995b). The principal features of this model are as follows: immigrant-pioneers, relatively few in number and of the same origin; a high fertility rate; a limited marriage market; homogeneous elements in the initial genetic pool; the rising frequency of some deleterious genes. On this subject, see G. Bouchard and M. De Braekeleer et al. (1991, chap. 12).

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23 In Quebec, during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, the two ideological families shared the same economic vision of liberalism (private property, free enterprise, laws of the market, material progress). The conservative trend triumphed over the other on the socio-cultural level (tolerance, freedom of expression, secularity). 24 A genuine radical social thought is one rooted in an important segment of society and based on the belief that the foundations of the social order need to be changed for the benefit of the majority and, notably, of the destitute. 25 In Australia, the ideas of Tocqueville were discussed mainly in the 1850s, in the context of plans for a federation and the campaign for responsible government, then in the 1890s, during the discussions leading up to the Commonwealth. 26 Do we know of pictures, tales, legends, novels, or any historical reconstructions that dramatize the proceedings of a municipal council meeting, a public debate, or a recorded vote before the middle of the twentieth century? 27 As an illustration, see Spillman’s (1997) comparative study of some major national celebrations in Australia and in the United States. 28 With the exception of the momentary enthusiasm that surrounded the 1991 celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of parliamentary government in Quebec. 29 In this sense, one could also criticize certain modernist analyses for having replaced the exceptionalism of the old historiography with a sort of mimetism. One could also reproach it for having overestimated if not idealized the modernity of other North American or Atlantic societies. As a result, the bar was set very high for Quebec. Modernist history thus made its task all the more difficult. One could point out that, in response to it, English-Canadian society and the United States long displayed important pre-modern features, a point brought to light by comparative analysis (on this question, see G. Bouchard 1998). 30 Two notable exceptions, among others, are: Faucher (1973, 1975) and Ramirez (1991).

chapter three 1 With respect, for example, to the duality of literary fields, see Hayne (1989). On the long-standing nature of Quebec identity and of the dualist conception of Canada in general, see Kenneth McRoberts’

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Notes to pages 65–72 (1997) survey. In the field of historiography, Carl Berger (1976), studying the construction of memory in Canada, thought it legitimate to retain only anglophone historians, precisely because of the binational reality. The territory under France’s control consisted of three colonies: Acadia, Louisiana, and Canada. Unless indicated otherwise, I am referring to Canada. For detailed studies, see Audet (1980); Lessard and Marquis (1972). On this matter, see primarily Bardet and Charbonneau (1986). Linguists disagree on the factors that might have rendered so quick a process of standardization possible in New France. Some believe that French was dominant from the start; others have concluded instead that there was a very rapid spread, favoured by a variety of circumstances. On this question, see the discussion by Thomas Lavoie (1995) and Chantal Bouchard (1998, chap. 2). On the above, see, among others, Ouellet (1994); Ouellet, Beaulieu, and Tremblay (1997); Mathieu (1985, 1991). I have also drawn on many scattered notes culled from a variety of works. With respect to clothing, for example, see the facts and references provided in a special issue of the journal Cap-aux-Diamants 4, 2 (1988). The latter represented 6 percent to 8 percent of immigrants, perhaps less (Larin 1998). Only 477 of them (Jews and Protestants) have been identified for the whole of New France (Bédard 1978). Marcel Trudel (1960) has counted more than 4,000 for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the 1990 edition of the book pretty much reiterates the same estimates). But that is an overestimate, according even to the author’s own admission in his memoirs. Aboriginal people represented approximately two-thirds of the slaves, the others being Blacks. They were never included in a census, and it is very difficult to know precisely what proportion of the population they represented. According to a study by Thomas Wien, based on the 1744 census of Quebec City (unpublished results transmitted to the author), slaves (Blacks and Aboriginal people) represented approximately 1- percent of the population. Here I am following Cornelius J. Jaenen (especially 1988). It is not possible, in the context of this essay, to offer a more detailed discussion on the subject. Furthermore, there are no recent synoptic works to which one might refer; currently, one must rely on a whole plethora of articles and monographs. See also the Derome site: www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/rl4310/accueil.html.

Notes to pages 73–88

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13 Tocqueville’s letter to his father, 14 August 1831 (cited in Vallée [1973, 81]). 14 On the preceding, see Andrès (1992–93, 1995, 1998, etc.). See also Vachon (1969). 15 In 1830, the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada passed a law abolishing all legal disqualifications hitherto imposed on Jews and, in the process, set a precedent in the British Empire. A similar law was passed in England in 1859. 16 This may seem surprising for a mostly francophone nation; but several Patriote spokesmen (L.-J. Papineau, D.-B. Viger, Parent, and others such as F. de Sales Laterrière) were very critical of metropolitan France for the way it had governed Canada. 17 See, for example, a speech given by Papineau on June 14, 1850, the text of which can be found in Lamonde and Larin (1998, 569–73). 18 On this point, I rely on the works of Yvan Lamonde and Bernard Andrès, mentioned earlier, as well as on personal discussions with the authors. 19 References to the United States were numerous, notably in Le Canadien, as exemplified in Micheline Cambon and Christine Tellier’s research at the Department of French Studies of the University of Montreal. 20 On this subject, see, among others, Lamonde (1996), Lamonde and Larin (1998), and Couillard (1995). 21 As we see in the course of the chapter, other imaginaries or paradigms appeared during this period. It appears to me that the paradigm of survivance was most dominant, and that is what I seek to demonstrate. But I must stress that interpretations other than my own have been suggested over the last twenty years in Quebec. 22 On this matter, see Linteau and Durocher et al. (1986, parts 1 and 2). 23 This disarticulation, which I consider to be fundamental, has been noted by several authors in recent decades, but it never aroused much interest. Among historians and sociologists, Jean-Charles Falardeau (1953, 253) appears to have been the first to state it clearly. It was also discussed by Marcel Rioux (1957, 71), then by Guy Rocher (1973a, 97–8). In the early 1980s, it gave rise to more sustained analyses by Raymond Montpetit (1983), Yvon Lamonde (1984), and Gérard Bouchard (1985–86). Finally, it had already been alluded to before 1950, but in very elliptical fashion, by various observers or essayists such as Olivar Asselin, Édouard Montpetit, Léon Lortie, and André Laurendeau (1951 especially). 24 E.-B. de Saint-Aubin, Revue canadienne (1871): 91–110.

346

Notes to pages 89–102

25 On this, see for example McLaren (1990); Dowbiggin (1997); Pernick (1996). 26 See, among others, two articles that appeared in the Revue canadienne in 1873 (vol. 10, 119–34, 267–78), various pamphlets published by the École sociale populaire, writings by the Jesuit, Louis Lalande, and others. Bruce G. Trigger (1992, 53–4) has gathered several references to similar statements by Benjamin Sulte, Henri Bourassa, and Lionel Groulx. 27 On the institution and celebration of heroic figures, see two titles in particular: Martin (1988); Groulx (1998). 28 The first textbook on good (and bad) French was published in 1841 by Thomas Maguire. 29 Among the many titles to be consulted on the preceding discussion, see Bouthillier and Meynaud (1972); Noël (1990); Poirier (1994); C. Bouchard (1998). 30 Like the one initiated by my colleague, Yvan Lamonde (2000, 2004) of McGill University. 31 Fernand Dumont (1971, 26–7) said he was appalled by the derivative nature of Quebec ideologies in that era (“clothing … borrowed from another history than that of the consciousness of this place [que celle des consciences d’ici]”). 32 L’Action nationale had invited a number of intellectuals to react to various questions concerning the existence of French-Canadian culture, its situation, the conditions of its development, and so on. The comments that were received by the editors were published in several issues during those two years. Numerous figures, among the most influential of the era, appeared amid the authors. 33 It is not possible to reproduce the analysis in detail here. I refer the reader to my book. 34 Œuvres complètes 1 (1873): 368. On the preceding discussion, see also, among several others, Lemire and Saint-Jacques (1996). 35 On the precedence of the French standard in this literary trend, see Beaudet (1991) and Robert’s commentary in Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 46 2 (1992): 289–91. See also Belleau (1986, 171) and Saint-Jacques (1996). 36 On this subject, see Gauvin (1994). Other regionalists, such as Ferland, Desrochers, and Grignon, proved more indulgent with respect to the local language. 37 Ringuet’s response to L’Action nationale’s survey, cited by Jean-Charles Falardeau (March 1941, 216–17).

Notes to pages 104–17

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38 My thanks to Lucie Robert, who pointed me in this direction. 39 Lemire (1982). This critic is the first, perhaps, to have drawn attention to this major phenomenon. 40 According to Lemire (1987, 87). 41 The essays gathered in Bouchard and Lamonde (1995), prefigure this type of analysis. 42 On this theme, see Gingras (1996b). 43 Falardeau (1964, 45–6); Fournier (1986, 57). 44 Revue canadienne 10 (1873): 619–32. 45 On the preceding discussion, see, in particular, Turcotte (1988) and Voisine (1987, 1991). 46 A. Buies, L.-O. David, B. Sulte, N.-E. Dionne, Honoré Beaugrand, and so on. 47 I cannot list all of the sources on which my discussion rests. This would entail citing an excessive number of essays, anthologies, novels, magazines, and newspapers. The main references can be found in Bouchard 1993, 32–4; 1995b. Casgrain, Crémazie, de Gaspé, and other pioneers of the first national literature, were central figures among the leaders of this discursive project. The movement continued in the early twentieth century with the regionalist novel and, later, with the growth of folklore research (M. Barbeau, E.-Z. Massicotte, F.-A. Savard, etc.). 48 Paul-Louis Martin’s recent study (1999), which belongs to an important movement of revision or reinterpretation, is the authoritative work on this issue. 49 More precisely, this process of reflection occurred, but within very restricted circles. For that matter, it needs to be reconstituted on the basis of its numerous remaining archives (reports, missionaries’ memoirs, mostly handwritten). 50 The case was frequent in the Saguenay, in particular (unpublished data gathered by the author). 51 It was simultaneously one of the paths of anti-Semitism within the Catholic Right. Radical social thought, denounced in the name of anti-communism, had, indeed, developed among Montreal Jews at that time (Langlais and Rome 1986, 97ff.; Belkin 1999). An imaginary of the city had taken shape as well among artists and Yiddish-speaking literary figures. 52 On this subject, see the series of articles on the image of the foreigner in literature, published by André Vanasse in 1965 in L’Action nationale. Ramon Hathorn (Guelph University, Ontario) is also working on the (generally negative) perception of Ireland in the French-Canadian novel.

348

Notes to pages 118–44

53 On this, one can find more detailed accounts in Bouchard and Lalou (1993). 54 On this subject, see Marcotte (1989, 105–6). 55 Aurélien Boivin (1998) has briefly analyzed these three cases. 56 As Chantal Bouchard (1998, 51) points out on the basis of several studies. 57 On this matter, see also Andrès (1990, 115–26). 58 Jacques Godbout, personal communication. 59 Interview given to Spirale, January- February 1999, 5. 60 On this, see Bouchard (1990a). 61 Examples include, among others, work carried out by the Gaston Bergeron and Claude Poirier team at Laval University; the MartelLaganière group at the University of Sherbrooke; Thomas Lavoie and his collaborators at the University of Quebec in Chicoutimi. 62 I must mention, however, a prefigurative event that occurred in 1947, when the Fédération des Sociétés Saint-Jean Baptiste du Québec was founded. Until then, the Fédération had embraced all the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Societies of Canada and the United States. In 1972, the Fédération became the Mouvement national des Québécois and become involved in the struggle for political sovereignty. At the same time, most of the regional Saint-Jean-Baptiste Societies became national in scope. 63 On this subject, see Bariteau (1998); Seymour (1999); Bouchard (1999). 64 The most recent claims, in this regard, can be found in Montoya and Thibeault’s (1999) collection. 65 Fernand Dumont (1997) offers one of the most explicit and revealing accounts of this. 66 “The truer it grows, the more our literature darkens with grief” (Le Moyne 1969, 95)./0BH/ 67 Others have been discussed by Rudin (1997b), from a perspective that differs from my own. 68 On this subject, see also, in relation to the history of literature, Andrès’ analysis (1999, especially 33). 69 Some intellectuals praise it on the political level. Létourneau (1998, 1999), for example, sees the real tradition, the salutary and creative vocation of the Québécois people, in its inability to choose one direction or another on matters pertaining to Quebec/Canada relations. “Canadianité,” in this view, is the site of “a bounty of goodness” and of a “virtuous reciprocity” (1999), and the attempts to reduce the existing political ambiguities would be deleterious. Latouche’s (1979, chap. 1)

Notes to pages 146–52

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thinking is completely different. To be sure, he also refers to the ambiguity as a central, even structural, parameter of the Quebec political situation, but he seeks to define a way around it, short of being able to abolish it. 70 Disquiet: “a …sense of fragility which transforms immediately into strength,” which “lives from its own paradoxes.” (Gauvin 1994, 119–20)

chapter four 1 I say “Latin America,” although this term seems to occlude the whole Indian and Black reality, which is a serious drawback. But it is difficult to avoid. The notion of South America is too restrictive; it normally designates only the southern part of the continent, in contrast with Central America. My frame of analysis is the human group studied in the monumental Cambridge History of Latin America (Bethell 1984–91), that is, populations south of the United States whose principal language is Spanish, Portuguese, or French. This leaves out the former Spanish possessions in northern Mexico as well as the old Northern European colonies in the Caribbean and in its surrounding area. My account thus focuses on the twenty-odd nations that today comprise most of Latin America. 2 It is quite remarkable, however, that, in general, the political independence movements were not immediately accompanied by economic and social revolutions. These changes occurred later in the nineteenth century and even in the twentieth century. 3 I am omitting some of the astonishingly high numbers that have been proposed (on this subject, see Mörner and Sims 1985, 10ff.). 4 In relation to this and to the above, see Rosenblat (1954, vol.1I, 36, 88); Cook and Borah (1971, 1974, 1979); Sanchez-Albornoz (1974); Armillas (1962); Gibson (1969); Wachtel (1984); Bethell (1984–91, vol. 1, chaps. 2–5; vol. 2, chaps. 1–2. 5 In the Latin American context, mention is made specifically of mulatos (a cross between Blacks and Whites or Indians) and mestizos (between Whites and Indians). But this typology is enriched by a variety of types: zambos or cafusos (Blacks/Indians), pardos (Whites/Indians, Blacks or others), and so on. Angel Rosenblat (1954) believed that he had identified up to fourteen types of mixed-race groupings in Peru and sixteen in Mexico. Already in the eighteenth century, a nomenclature developed by José de Paéz identified fifteen racial types in this population (Berroeta 1994). In Brazil, where the racial “rainbow” is particularly

350

6

7 8 9 10

11

12 13

14

Notes to pages 152–5 rich, a recent survey was able to identify more than 200 terms currently used to refer to racial types or subtypes (Eakin 1997, 115 ff.). In the narrow sense, the term “Creole” refers to the descendants of Spanish conquerors who founded a line in America and who were subsequently more or less marginalized by the metropolis. In the broader sense, the word applies to all the inhabitants of European origin born on the new continent. Additional meanings, varying from country to country, have surfaced in recent years. In Venezuela and in Argentina, for example, to be criollo is to be slightly dark, of mixed race. The Creole is also the opposite of the foreigner, and so on. The first meaning of the term applies here. Broadly speaking, the “mixed bloods” of the underprivileged classes, not including Indians. Figures reported by Uribe (1992). On this subject, see also Chevalier (1977, fig. 8). On this subject, see Brading (1985, 1991), Anderson (1991), Lavallé (1984), Lynch (1973). One example among many others: the demands in favour of prelation, the right of priority that the Creoles claimed they possessed when an administrative position had to be filled in the colony. There are two exceptions: (1) Haiti had already obtained its independence from France in 1804, following a rebellion of Black slaves led by Jean-Jacques Dessalines; and (2) Cuba only became a republic in 1901, following the Spanish-American War. Most of the new countries had been administrative divisions in the colonial empire. A more detailed discussion would account for several aborted attempts to sever the colonial bonds before the nineteenth century – in Peru, for example, in 1544–48 (the revolt of the encomenderos) and in 1780–83 (the Pan-Andean rebellion of Tupac Amaru). Among the many available syntheses on this question, see N.H. Vallenilla (1991) and J. Lynch (1973). At that point, however, the population had to resist a counter-offensive of the Cortes, who sought to restore Brazil’s colonial status. Recall also that, towards the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth century, some fruitless efforts were made to liberate Brazil from Portugal (the Tiradentes Conspiracy, the Alfaiates Rebellion, the inconfidencias, etc.). By and large, this model applies to most of the Latin American countries. On this subject, apart from already cited works of synthesis, see G.P.C. Thompson (1991), G.R. Andrews (1985), and E. Hobsbawm (1995).

Notes to pages 155–9

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15 See primarily J. Lafaye (1984), K. Schnelle (1980), and J.F. Wilhite (1980). 16 For sample readings of these leaders, see G. Arciniegas (1967). 17 On this subject, see, among others, F.-X. Guerra (1992, 1995), M. Canessa de Sanguinetti (1991), G. Masur (1967), and N. Shumway (1991). The reference to the European conjuncture is first of all an allusion to Spain and Portugal’s destabilization under the impact of the Napoleonic invasion, but it is also an allusion to England’s efforts to undermine these two kingdoms, eager as it was, for its own interests, to dismantle the Iberian commercial networks in Latin America. 18 On this matter, see F. Ainsa (1989). Further to the north, there was a similar phenomenon with Jacques Cartier, Champlain, and other discoverers of New France, as we saw in chapter 3. 19 The Brevisima relación de la destrucción de las Indias was published in Seville in 1552. On this subject, see C. Gibson (1971), G. Arciniegas (1969), and J. Liscano (1987). The critical discourse about Spanish culture and societies among Venezuelan intellectuals at the beginning of the nineteenth century is in the same vein (Bélanger 1997). 20 On this subject, see C. Quesada (1982, 1983), B. Lavallé (1984), and D.A. Brading (1985, 17ff.). 21 Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Civilización y barbarie: Vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga (1845); Juan Espinosa, Diccionario para el pueblo: republicario, democrático, moral, política, y filosófico (1855); E.E. Fitz (1991, chap. 10) has shown that this division traversed literatures of the Americas. 22 This concerns primarily Franciscans (starting in 1523–24), Dominicans (1526), Augustins (1533), and Jesuits (1572). 23 See H. Favre (1990, 1994, 1996), D.A. Brading (1985), J.-M. Lemogodeuc (1982), and so on. 24 On this question, see, in particular, J. Lafaye (1974) for Mexico, B. Lavallé (1982, 1983) for Peru, and J. Ocampo López (1983) for Colombia. 25 On this latter point, with respect to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Mexico, see H. Favre (1990). The Indo-Americanist doctrine of V.R. Haya de la Torre is, in this regard, particularly telling. 26 On another level, a more detailed account would show that this cultural transformation favoured the growth of the Creole elite, whose ranks swelled ceaselessly as métissage increased. Through its economic and demographic weight alone, Indianity in a sense dominated the nation, which needed workers and, later, consumers (O’Gorman 1961, 141–42 ff.).

352

Notes to pages 159–64

27 The case of Peru, for example, is not the least interesting. It can be summed up, for the sixteenth century, in the fate of Francisco de Aguirre, initially in the service of Madrid, then a warrior and administrator, increasingly attached to the continent, well-disposed to métissage, and, finally, awaking to a new identity (Birckel 1980). In Brazil, the romantic literature of the second half of the nineteenth century was particularly suffused with the Indianist myth. 28 This aspect has been analyzed by various authors (Masur 1967; Canessa de Sanguinetti 1991; etc.). 29 There are, however, significant exceptions to this, as illustrated for instance by the nineteenth-century liberal leaders in Argentina, especially Domingo F. Sarmiento (1811–88). Contrary to the ones that came before, this nationalism intended to model the young nation on European values and distrusted américanité (Baily 1971, chap. 3; Quattrocchi-Woisson 1992). 30 Here I follow the lead of D.A. Brading (1991, chap. 5), F. Ainsa (1989), J. Lafaye (1974, 1985), and A. Reyes (1960). 31 See M.-D. Demalas (1982) and N. Shumway (1991), among others. 32 The word derives from the novel (Ariel, 1900) by the Uruguayan José Enrique Rodo, which was enormously successful in the whole hemisphere and at a certain point took on the guise of an (other) continental manifesto (Rangel 1987, 94–99). 33 For the second half of the nineteenth century, Venezuela, among many others, especially comes to mind. See W.R. Wright (1990, chap. 3). 34 In this vein, Béatrice Chenot (1980) has shown how, in nineteenthcentury Argentina, travel literature helped to set the representations of the national landscape and the historical roots of an identity. 35 In Argentina, the dictator, Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793–1877), was himself a supercaudillo, like several others who succeeded in transferring the same charismatic and despotic system onto the national level. 36 For example, Gregorio de Matos or Juana Inés de la Cruz (Fitz 1991, chaps. 6–7). 37 José Martí in Cuba, Manuel Gutierrez Najera and Salvador Diaz Miron in Mexico, Ruben Dario in Nicaragua, and so on. 38 On the above, see primarily C. Dumas (1982) and J.L. Martínez (1972). Note also the importance of the regionalist novel (Fitz 1991, chap. 8). 39 Striking illustrations of this are the vault at Santa Maria Church at Tomanzitla (Puebla State, Mexico) and, similarly, the Church of Sïo Francesco in Salvador de Bahia (Brazil). On the same subject, see P. Kelemen (1951), G. Kubler, and M. Soria (1959). According to

Notes to pages 165–73

40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49

50

51 52 53

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Walter Moser (1998), the evolution of the Baroque in Latin America (its Americanization, actually) belongs to what he calls a process of cultural recycling. Other Mexican voices join that of Octavio Paz (e.g., Leopoldo Zea and Samuel Ramos). On this, see Bélanger (1997). See R.M. Morse (1964, 127). For an illustration of this new optimism, perhaps artificially stimulated by the excitement of the 500th anniversary, see Carlos Fuentes (1992). This duality is well illustrated in the works of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (Facundo. Civilización y Barbarie, 1845) and of Ernesto Quesada (La época de Rosas, 1898). On this subject, see also N. Shumway (1991) and D. Quattrocchi-Woisson (1992, 1997). On this subject, see J. Lafaye (1974) and D.A. Brading (1985, 1991). On the above, see Arciniegas (1967), E. Matos Moctezuma (1992), and J. Lafaye (1974). See N. Wachtel (1984), C. Gibson (1984), T. Gomez (1992), S. Gruzinski (1989), M.F. Brown, and E. Fernandez (1991). See R. Ricard (1933), H. Sudhoff (1994), C. Bernand, and S. Gruzinski (1993). On Quetzalcaotl and Saint Thomas, see especially J. Lafaye (1974), B.C. Brundage (1982), and D. Carrasco (1982). The whole issue is presented in H. Favre (1994, 1996). Note that an author such as F.J.-Clavijero (Historia Antigua de México, 1780–81) had already expressed a similar opinion as early as the eighteenth century (Lynch 1973, 31). It is important to stress that liberals were even more responsible for these attempts to eliminate the Indians than conservatives, who needed the Indians for the agricultural workforce. From 1578 (a ban decreed by Philip II) until the end of the eighteenth century, the colonial administration as well had prohibited mixing with the Indians, regarding it as a source of degradation and impoverishment of the White race. On the above, in addition to the already cited article by H. Favre, see also M.S. Stabb (1959) and R. Graham (1990). As shown by C.M. MacLachlan and J.E. Rodriguez (1980), A. Knight (1990), G.R. Andrews (1996), and others. On this question, see S. Clissold (1966), T.E. Skidmore (1990), and W.R. Wright (1990). In 1944, the Brazilian government considered resolving the Black “problem” once and for all by offering a bonus to Whites who would marry an Afro-Brazilian.

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Notes to pages 173–83

54 In 1944, the poet-politician Andrés Eloy Blanco criticized the Americans for not knowing what to do with either coffee or Blacks: they make the first too pale, he claimed, and the second too dark (cited in Wright 1990, 1). 55 Is there not, in fact, a touch of defeatism in this statement by A. Uslar Pietri (1992, 314), which, nonetheless, claims to be a rallying cry: “We, men and peoples, are what we believe we are”? 56 This said, Indianity did manifest itself there; in literature, for example, the works of José de Alencar represent this trend quite well. 57 The result is said to have been an ambiguity with respect to identity, whose trace is also be found in philosophy (Gracia and Jaksic 1984). 58 According to the well-known and oft-repeated aphorism, Argentinians are descended, not from the Spanish or from any particular nation, but from a boat. 59 According to A. Uslar Pietri (1992), the whole history of Venezuela in the nineteenth century was a stage for the conflict between European ideals and the American worldview. Literature, for example, persisted in tacking on to continental life a symbolism that was foreign to it, and in which it could not recognize itself. As the poet Octave Crémazie said in the nineteenth century in relation to Quebec, Venezuela, according to Ulsar Pietri, needed a Fenimore Cooper (321, 342). It is also noteworthy that Ulsar Pietri has often remarked on what he considers to be the anaemic state of Latin American literature and the need to give it substance. Until recent years, this has been a recurring theme in the history of Quebec thought. 60 Puerto Rico, for example, furnishes a compelling parallel with Quebec, both in terms of culture and politics, and, in particular, in its relation to the United States.

chapter five 1 For this reason, it has been said that the American Revolution gave birth to Australia. (Ward 1963). 2 This is indeed what happened, first thanks to London’s mercantilism, then in the context of free trade, and finally at the level of the Empire (Blainey 1968; Hirst 1983; and Dunn 1984). 3 The name, which had existed since the eighteenth century, was officially adopted in 1817; prior to that, the emerging country was referred to as New Holland (the legacy of Dutch exploration in the seventeenth century).

Notes to pages 185–201

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4 Nedeljkovic (1982, 305–6); Walter (1989a, 52); and Pope (1982). 5 These figures must, however, be interpreted with care, since the method of counting Aborigines is problematic (see below). 6 As of 1840, there were 700 sheep farms, with a total of almost 1.5 million sheep. After 1850, wool was the main export; in the late nineteenth century, Australia was the source of about half of European wool imports (Butlin 1994). 7 On this subject, see, among others, Pike (1962) and Weaver (1996). 8 They had just been granted responsible government and thus had jurisdiction over “Crown” lands. 9 On this, see Turner (1968); Gammage (1990); Kociumbas (1992); Shaw (1962); and Alexander (1989). 10 To avoid extending the exercise unduly, I have deliberately omitted some episodes of lesser importance. However, even this incomplete list amply suffices to reveal the very ambiguous relationship between Australia and Great Britain and the way in which it evolved. 11 G. Menzies, the Australian prime minister, declared: “where Great Britain stands, there stand the people of the entire British world” (Macintyre 1947, 325). Another statement by Menzies: “I am British to my bootstraps.” 12 For example: the presence of the Union Jack on the Australian flag; driving on the left side of the road; the staying power of “God Save the Queen” as the “Royal anthem”; celebration of the Queen’s birthday (she remains the head of state, represented by the governor general and his six lieutenant-governors: Australia is still a constitutional monarchy); the awarding of many British decorations; visits by members of the Royal family; the portrait of the Queen on Parliamentary office doors; the official name of the armed forces (e.g., Royal Australian Navy, Royal Australian Air Force); and so on.. 13 In this regard, some scholars speak of anti-intellectualism (Horne 1972, 21–4, 213–16). See also Ward (1963). 14 Towards the end of the nineteenth century, for example, it was said that the typical citizen of Sydney hastened to roll up his trouser bottoms when he heard that it was raining in Piccadilly. 15 Falling prices on the international market precipitated a financial crisis, and British investors withdrew a sizeable amount of the capital they had invested in Australia. 16 All these administrators upheld the (winning) side of the rehabilitated prisoners (emancipists) against those (exclusives) who wished to maintain the privileges of so-called free immigrants.

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Notes to pages 201–12

17 Several echoes of this may be found, for example, among the editors of the Bulletin (John Farrell, among others). 18 Between 1840 and 1910 alone, Ireland provided 30,000 immigrants. The Irish (by birth or descent) represented 23 percent of Australia’s population at the end of the nineteenth century. During the First World War, they were the driving force of the anti-conscriptionist movement. 19 For deeper analyses of the dynamic of social classes in Australia, see Connell and Irving (1992) and McMichael 1985. 20 “Orphan of the Pacific, resignedly awaiting the Japanese attack,” scoffed General Tojo (quoted by Horne 1972, 220). 21 On this, see, among others, Harper (1987), Bell (1988), and Day (1992). 22 In the description he left, he mentions in particular the sacred ritual of toasts to the king, performed on the slightest occasion and to which he had to answer in the name of His Majesty (Olivier 1982, 148). In the same vein, see also Stanner (1953) and the anthology edited by Aughterson (1953). 23 As Hughes has it (1987, 8). 24 On this matter, J. Walter (1989b, 26) spoke of a “rift in the national life.” The phenomenon was also analyzed by Clark (1980). 25 Interestingly, the historian W.K. Hancock (1931) spoke of the “independent Australian Britons.” On this question, see Trainor (1994). 26 Like the one proposed by L. Hartz’s “fragment theory” (1964). The essay by R.N. Rosecrance (1964), which applies Hartz’s approach to Australia, seeks to show that contemporary Australia’s features can be explained essentially through the transplantation of a fragment of British society and its ideological landscape (in this case, the radical, working-class fragment). At its inception, Australia thus only represented a part of the mother country, hence its particularity. This interpretation presents, in my mind, the double flaw of introducing into the analysis an overly mechanical principle and of simplifying an evolution that embraces many dimensions, actors, and factors. Nothing was ever established once and for all in Australia’s cultural and political history, where radical thought was always pitted against other currents (see my critical comments of the Hartz model in chapter 1). 27 In other words, the insertion of self in space, society, and time. 28 These are geographers’ and, especially, surveyors’ famous journeys throughout the interior, where some lost their lives. 29 It ranked second in the competition, which, in 1984, finally designated the national anthem (“Advance Australia Fair”).

Notes to pages 212–26

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30 The “dinkum Aussie” was another facet of the bushranger, and the “larrikin” was his urban counterpart (with a female counterpart: the “donah” or “clinah”). 31 L.J.G. Kramer (1981, 6) underlines “their lack of originality and inventiveness.” Recall that New South Wales General Standing Orders (1802) was the first book published in Australia. 32 On all of the above, see also R. Ward (1966), V. Palmer (1954), L.J.G. Kramer (1981), B. Kiernan (1971), and J. Walter (1989a, chaps. 7–8). 33 In this vein, several authors criticized Russell Ward’s analyses, published for the first time in 1958; for example, J.M. Ward (1963, 241–2, passim) and R. Lawson (1980). 34 On this question, see A.A. Phillips (1953) and J. Wright (1965, Introduction). A Lawson (1983, 196) mentions the “constant looking over the shoulder at the sophisticated Europeans.” 35 Heidelberg was the name of a suburb of Melbourne where these artists gathered to work, hence the name of the group. 36 On this subject, see B. Smith (1971) and L. Astbury (1985). 37 The study of religious history, for example, reveals great conformity with the British churches; even changes are governed by a mimesis of the metropolis (H.R. Jackson 1987). 38 On this subject, and in relation to the literatures of the New World, see the remarks of Z. Bernd (1986) and of E.E. Fitz (1980). 39 The most common Australian symbols that acquired the status of emblems refer to animals (koala, wallaby, kangaroo, dingo, and parakeets), objects (boomerang), trees (the eucalyptus, with its 450 species, and the hevea), and clothing. 40 A reminder of this can be found in F. Dumont (1993, chap. 1). 41 This is the case of the Dissenters, who, with others, found refuge in Southern Australia after having vainly struggled against religious intolerance in Great Britain (on this subject, see D. Pike 1967). Also, see above: “Political Emancipation: Inching towards Sovereignty.” 42 See V. Palmer (1954), M. Nedeljkovic (1982), R. Ward (1966), and I. Turner (1968). 43 Unlike the United States, for example, where, from the start, the settlers were able to take advantage of numerous and powerful waterways, furs, plentiful forests, fertile lands, and minerals. 44 The Battle of Pozières in the North of France in 1916 is also a point of reference, but to a lesser degree. 45 This phenomenon inspired many studies. For example, see W.F. Mandle (1978, chap. 2), G. Caldwell (1982), and B. Stoddart (1988).

358

Notes to pages 226–33

46 A very detailed comparative analysis, based on elaborate statistical data, has been devoted to this subject (A.E. Dingle 1980). The author concluded that the stereotype appears well-founded for the nineteenth century and for the 1960s and 1970s. 47 A lasting portrait, to be sure. It has been said (Rickard 1988, 266) that the ocker of the 1970s was a distant descendant of the bushman. 48 The influence of the London Fabian Society, which spread to Australia between 1890 and 1909 (R. Mathews 1993), has also been documented. 49 On this subject, see A.A. Phillips (1958, 50–71), W.K. Hancock (1931), and A . Brady (1958). 50 G. Dow (1985), J. Conway (1985), E. Thompson (1994b), M. Lake (1992), and so on. On this subject, see the overview presented in G. Stokes (1997, chaps. 4–6). 51 For an overview of the question, see E.M. Andrews (1985). 52 Whose symbolic content had just been reactivated by Australian soldiers on the battlefields of Europe. There, they had renewed the myth of a fighter who was indestructible, ferocious, and courageous but, simultaneously, generous and magnanimous in victory (E. Partridge 1987; P. Yule 1987). 53 A form derived from this configuration has, however, survived in the image of the beach culture, of the leisure society. 54 The expression was apparently used officially for the first time in 1973 by Al Grassby, minister of immigration in the Whitlam government (S. Castles et al. 1988, 4). 55 See G. Nadel (1957, 1), P. Coleman (1962, 1–11), and C.M.H. Clark (1972, 1). 56 This position is represented by R. Boyd (1960), who saw only ugliness, superficiality, incoherence, incompetence, or imitation in Australia: in his view, these were lasting marks of a colonial heritage (see in particular pp. 1–4, 225, chap. 3). 57 Well before the adoption of the White Policy, every colony except Tasmania had already passed laws to bar the Chinese from entering Australia (Markus and Ricklefs 1985). 58 On this subject, see G. Craven (1986) and R. Fitzgerald (1984). 59 Estimates vary a great deal. Some authors speak of 150,000, others of several hundred thousand, perhaps a million. The figure that I give reflects the majority view. 60 This statement concurs with the interpretation proposed by S. Castles et al. (1988) and some others.

Notes to pages 234–42

359

61 The statistical data on immigration and ethnicity are drawn from numerous sources, including: J. Walter (1989a), R. Nile (1994), J. Jing (1994), G.P. Freeman and J. Jupp (1992), and S. Castles et al. (1988). 62 An important collection of papers on immigration in the first half of the twentieth century was published by J. Lack and J. Templeton (1988). 63 See, on this subject, S. Castles et al. (1988), F. Lewins (1978), F. Hawkins (1989), V. Burgmann (1984), and E. Thompson (1994b). 64 These are the terms used in the early twentieth century. See, for example, the collected essays in F.K. Crowley (1974, 207–08, 274, passim). 65 As P. Tort (1996) has correctly shown in his monumental studies on Darwinism. 66 On this, an important body of work could be cited. I confine myself to a few titles: N.G. Butlin (1983), C.D. Rowley (1970), L. Robson (1983, 1991), J. Critchett (1990), and R.M. Bienvenue (1983). I should also mention the important initiative (Stolen Generation) that brings to light and denounces the old kidnapping practices. Finally, a recent collection of essays (Dirkmoses 2004, 167) has drawn attention to what happened on the Queensland frontier, “arguably one of the most violent places on earth during the global spread of Western capitalism in the nineteenth century.” 67 For an account of an experiment conducted by a certain Dr. Cecil Cook in the 1920s, see T. Austin (1990). 68 On the discriminatory and exclusionary practices towards Aborigines in general, see Astbury (1985); A.A. Yengoyan (1997); A. Lattas (1987); T. Griffiths (1987); R. Evans, Saunders, and Cronin (1988); S. Garton (1989); A. Armitage (1995); and so on. 69 The body of work on Australian multiculturalism is enormous. See, among others, Castles et al. (1988), K. Betts (1988), U. Ozolins (1993), W. Senn and G. Capone (1992), and X. Pons (1996). 70 For example, during Indonesia’s independence struggle in 1945–49, Australia took sides with it against Holland. 71 While, nonetheless, maintaining important elements of old privileges, as I. Merle recalls (1998). See also M.A. Stephenson and S. Ranapala (1993). 72 See also, along the same lines, D. Thomas (1988), C. Wilson (1987, chap. 5), D. Mercer (1993), and T.R. Gurr (1985). 73 For some critical perspectives, see J. Collins (1986) and K. Laster (1992). 74 On this, see, for example, P. Sheehan’s (1998) polemical work.

360

Notes to pages 243–55

75 A book by B.H. Fletcher (1997) reports the utterances of various early twentieth-century intellectuals, for whom Australia did not really have a history worthy writing about. 76 A variation of this thesis can be found in M. Dixson (1994) and A. Summers (1994), according to whom the penal past explains, at least in part, the crisis of confidence and the subordinate condition of Australian women in the present era. 77 On this subject, see V. Palmer (1954, chap. 2), A. Frost (1987), and R.J. King (1990). 78 See, for example, the critical reviews presented by P. Corris (1973) and by G. Cowlishaw (1992). See also S. Garton (1989), B. Attwood (1990), and L. Coltheart (1997). 79 The historian C.E.W. Bean (1936–42) devoted the better part of his work to recounting the history of the First World War from an Australian perspective, and he was the first to weave the ANZAC legend. On this subject, see R. White (1981, chap. 8). 80 See C. Healy (1988) and K.S. Inglis (1988). 81 Recall the words of novelist Eric Rolls (1981, 77) in A Million Wild Acres: “So much of Australia’s history took place outside the law that there was more of an attempt to hide it than to record it.” 82 The studies on this subject are proliferating. See H. Reynolds (1994), A. McGrath (1991), and T. Griffiths (1996). 83 Unless to claim quite naively, as some have done, that the principal characteristics of multiculturalism were already present in the early days of settlement, in the composition of the passengers of the First Fleet and in the diversity of the Aborigines. Somehow, the multicultural creed was inscribed in the nation’s origins. See, for example, Bicentennial (1987). 84 For reflections on this subject, see J.A. Moses (1979). 85 See D.J. Tracey (1995) and Hodge and Mishra (1991), among several others. 86 See Australian Heritage Commission (1981), among several others. 87 This is a view that garnered significant support, notably among researchers of the Center for Multicultural Studies at Wollongong. 88 The exclusion that affected the latter continues in memory today: the women’s prison, at Hobart, housed several thousand inmates between 1827 and 1877, that is, during the same period as its male counterpart thrived at Port Arthur (1830–77), a few dozen kilometres away. But while the first has been almost forgotten, the second is commemorated with much emphasis.

Notes to pages 255–68

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89 According to J. McCalman (1997), Australians like to see themselves and like to be seen as “ordinary” folk. 90 In most big cities, for example, there were department stores reserved for Catholics and others for Protestants (G. Melleuish 1997, 59).

chapter six 1 It would, however, be wrong to turn this event into the symbol par excellence (if not the principal cause) of what would later distinguish the political fates of Canada and the United States. On this subject, see J.A. Fellows (1971) and C. Berger (1970, chap. 3). 2 For the sake of convenience, I am using the current names of these old colonies; they are more or less equivalent to the various names used in the past. 3 This is, for example, what emerges from a work by C. Berger (1970), which analyzes the writings of some representatives of imperial (or imperialist?) thought in Canada. 4 These latter two projects, already presented in 1946, died on the order paper in the House of Commons in Ottawa. As for the flag, a first attempt had failed in 1925. 5 Once again, I have had to omit many important nuances in my account. With respect, for example, to political continuity, a more detailed analysis would be more scrupulous in discerning whether there was continuity in relation to the Crown, Great Britain, or the Empire. 6 From which we learn that even the Canadian cowboy was different than his US counterpart (H.A. Dempsey 1995). 7 For an illustration of all of the above, as well as a historical overview of anti-American sentiment in Canada, see J.L. Granatstein (1996). 8 The attachment to British tradition remained quite strong until recent years, with several intellectuals denouncing the country’s continental drift. George Grant’s (1965) book, published after the defeat of the Conservative government in 1963, provides a very good illustration of this. 9 In one sense, the “metropolitan” model, later proposed by J.M. Careless (1954), extended the Laurentian thesis by foregrounding the role of large (European and Canadian) urban centres in disseminating culture. 10 On this view, there is an obvious connection to be established between Reverend Edward Hartley Dewart and Abbé Henri-Raymond Casgrain, who were both pioneers of a “national literature.” 11 Even in the 1970s, R. Clark (1976) was still able to ask whether there truly was a Canadian literature. But from all sides the reply was “yes.”

362

Notes to pages 268–78

12 In fact, the Canadian city had quite early on secured a place on the canvas, but as an object of triumphant celebration, as a symbol of prosperity and material success. On this subject, see D. Farr (1990) and Ring, Vanderhaeghe, and Melnyk (1993). But C. Moisan (1986, 44ff) has underscored the significance of the myths that grew up around the city in the English-Canadian novel after 1945. 13 As I have attempted to do with some colleagues for Quebec’s elite culture (Bouchard and Lamonde 1995). 14 However, this statement calls for some nuances, as is shown by the example of Ontario between 1850 and 1914 (R.A. Jarrell 1988). 15 On this subject, see, among others, A. Gowans (1958) and H. Kalman (1994). 16 “Self-depreciation is our great national habit” (Hutchison 1954, 42). 17 One can see traces of such a cleavage in J.L. Granatstein’s analyses (1996). 18 This attempt at bringing the two nations together was not without precedent. In the early twentieth century, for example, some anglophone historians attempted to show that the two “races” were actually one since they shared distant origins in the Teutonic tribes. In a sense, one can see a similar approach in the geographical theses of the historians R.M. Lower and H.A. Innis: finding its basis in space, the nation achieved a form of integration beyond ethnic diversity; it was therefore not an artificial creation. 19 This can be seen from the number of recent writings on the difference between Canadian and American culture (e.g., Thomas 1993; Smith 1994; McKenna 1993). Recall also the sharp discussions provoked by S.M. Lipset’s work (1989). 20 As shown again recently by Meisel, Rocher, and Silver (1999). 21 To a number of the country’s inhabitants, the name “New Zealand” (which is of Dutch origin) has imperialist connotations as it evokes the European occupation and seems to reject the indigenous component. For this reason, New Zealanders of non-indigenous descent often refer to themselves as Pakehas and use the word Aotearoa to refer to their country (both expressions are borrowed from the Maori language). However, because my study adopts the European point of view, I stick to the old name. 22 In 1994, the first prime minister, Jim Bolger, envisaged the institution of an elected head of state in lieu of the governor general, an idea that did not materialize. On republican thought in New Zealand’s history, see Trainor (1996).

Notes to pages 278–88

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23 According to K. Sinclair (1986, 108), Australia’s proximity was also felt as a threat. 24 In a somewhat similar spirit, New Zealand joined the South East Asia Treaty Organization (seato) in 1954, along with seven other countries. The organization’s goal was to check the advance of Communism. 25 On all of the above, see, in particular, G. Docking (1990), K. Sinclair (1979a, 1979b, 1986), T. Sturm (1991), P. Evans (1990), and J. Belich (1996, 1997). 26 At school, students were taught that “those who talk through the nose think through the nose” (Gordon 1989). Also, on the same subject, see Gordon and Deverson (1998) and Bell and Holmes (1990). 27 Sturm (1991, 161–62) and Sinclair (1986, 249). 28 Here, and in what follows, I rely principally on Sinclair (1979a, 1979b), Moses (1979), Wynn (1984), Olssen (1992), and Phillips (1995). 29 Membership statistics for the period between 1850 and 1950 are as follows: Anglicans (35 percent to 40 percent), Presbyterians (21 percent to 23 percent), Catholics (13 percent to 16 percent), Methodists (7 percent to 11 percent), and so on. 30 Only Wyoming in the United States (1869) appears to have preceded New Zealand on this path. 31 On this subject, see Dalziel (1977), Grimshaw (1987), and Coney (1993). 32 On the above, see in particular Castles (1985) and Hamer (1988). 33 Things worsened after the 1860s. During the preceding twenty years, possession and use of the land had given rise to a number of very complex initiatives and disputes, which have been painstakingly reconstructed by J.C. Weaver (1999). On the whole, however, the harshness displayed by the Whites was not as bad as were the very violent measures to which the settlers in Australia had resorted. 34 There are variations on this; some authors claimed that the Maori people descended from Vikings, from Semites, from one of Israel’s lost tribes, and so on. 35 On the above, see, for example, Huttenback (1976), O’Connor (1968), Leckie (1985), Ip (1990), Brawley (1995), and Gibbons (1992, chap. 12). 36 Two examples of spectacular demonstrations: the Land March of 1975 and the occupation of Bastion Point in 1978. 37 On this subject, see Martin (1989) and Pocock (1992). 38 This is the case of Belich (1996) and Salmond (1991, 1997), among others.

364

Notes to pages 289–98

39 Not to be confused with biculturalism between anglophones and francophones, a proposition discussed in Canada during the 1960s, but shelved by Prime Minister P.-E. Trudeau shortly after the 1968 election. 40 This result is drawn from preliminary data presented in the Literary Review of Canada 7, 4 (1998): 17. 41 The ideas, institutions, and even the language of ancient civilizations were regularly invoked. On several occasions, for example, it was even suggested that the new nation reject European languages – especially English – and adopt Greek or even Hebrew (Haberly 1974). 42 On all of the above, see, among others, Noble (1968), Bailyn (1972), Marienstras (1976, 1988), Richard (1994), Hamer (1990), Luedtke (1992), and Greene (1993). 43 This has been established by various studies, for example, that of R.L. Merritt (1966), based on an analysis of the vocabulary of eighteenth-century newspapers or gazettes. Other authors have stressed the unification achieved by the religious “awakenings,” in particular the First Great Awakening. 44 There were various manifestations of radicalism, to be sure (the Populist Party in 1892–97, attempts to harden the trade union movement and social thought, agrarian movements in the Midwest, religious extremisms, bouts of nativism, etc.), but they were always counterbalanced or contained within certain limits, such that they never precipitated a coup d’état or revolution. 45 History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, 10 vols., 1866. 46 This introspective initiative has generated an important current of research in the social sciences from the 1940s on (e.g., the study of American character, American Studies programs in the universities, and attempts to identify core values). R. Wilkinson (1988, 7), in a review of works on this theme, speaks of an “American character industry.” The First New Nation, by S.M. Lipset (1963), belongs wholly to this tradition. 47 On this theme, see the interesting analyses by Nepveu (1988) and Morency (1997). 48 Of the two, the case of Jefferson is the most troubling. Author of the declaration of independence (“We hold that … all men are created equal,” etc.), he owned until the very end of his life hundreds of slaves that he beat when “necessary” and that he rented or sold. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1784), he wrote that the Black race is inferior to the White race and several times declared his opposition to the mixing of these two races.

Notes to pages 298–305

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49 The studies conducted to illustrate this claim are so numerous that it is difficult to refer to one or several titles in particular. One useful way, among many others, to broach the question is to consult the biography of some of the great Black leaders (e.g., W.E.B. Du Bois or Paul Robeson.) 50 See D. Lacorne’s useful reconstruction (1997, chaps. 4–5). 51 There are several relevant references in D. Lacorne (1997). 52 On this subject, see, among others, Almaguer (1994), Larson (1995), Pernick (1996), Dowbiggin (1997), and Gallagher (1999). 53 In the 1820s, Judge John Marshall became known for shaping the views just mentioned (Hobson 1996). 54 The aphorism, “In God We Trust” (which today graces certain bank notes), also dates back to this era. 55 On this subject, see Mintz and Price (1992) and Piersen (1993). 56 On all of the above, see Kammen (1991), among others. 57 J.H. McElroy (1999) was able to identify twenty-five postulates or distinctive beliefs that constitute the US “ethos.” 58 For an overview, see Kaplan (1998). 59 In this regard, the failure of the “national standards” project intended to consolidate the field of memory in school curricula is very significant (Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn 1998). Also of note are numerous studies that reinterpret the history of the United States through a multicultural frame; they show that society was already segmented and even divided in the eighteenth century and that it has always been thus. For an opposing point of view, see O. and L. Handlin (1986) and the whole tradition of so-called consensual historiography in the 1950s and 1960s (Higham 1989). 60 A sample of this can be seen in Alcoze et al. (1993). The authors proposed a multicultural pedagogical model applied to the teaching of sciences and the history of science. 61 More detailed presentations of this subject may be found in two works that vigorously denounce the new multicultural tendencies: A.M. Schlesinger (1991) and J.J. Miller (1998). 62 In this spirit, T.M. Massaro (1993) has developed a proposal for a national pedagogy centred essentially on the culture that permeates the Constitution and its legal heritage. 63 An international study conducted in 1997–98 by the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago showed that close to 90 percent of American citizens preferred their country to any other. This proportion proved to be the highest in the survey, which sought to

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Notes to pages 311–18 measure national pride in twenty-three countries (Research report broadcast on the h-ethnic network, 30 June 1998, and entitled: “Comparative Patriotism”).

chapter seven 1 Quebec is the only province with a francophone majority in Canada. French is the mother tongue of more than 80 percent of its residents; 85 percent of Canadians whose mother tongue is French live in Quebec. 2 Margaret Atwood (1972) famously remarked that the survival culture constitutes the “single unifying symbol” of English-Canadian literature. 3 In the case of Quebec, resorting to anglicisms (e.g., Ouate de phoque, by L. Granger 1969). 4 As P. Nepveu (1998, 67) has recalled. 5 Haiti and Puerto Rico are two other new collectivities that underwent a change of metropolis that they did not wish. It would be useful to study the repercussions of this in light of the Quebec case. 6 At the same time, one eases the problem of competing memories engendered by multiculturalism. In the case of Canada, there is another advantage: the division between anglophones and francophones is circumvented, the latter losing in this process their status as first occupants. 7 “We should think of ourselves as a nation of mutts, as a nation created, from its beginning, as a place where mutts can be at ease” (Toronto Star, 17 November 1999). 8 Apart from Hadgraft and Klinck’s (already cited) works, I should mention those of O.J. Miller (1980), R. Sutherland (1971), M. Dorsinville (1974), and L. Shouldice (1982). In formal terms, writing underwent typical changes. See, on this matter, the studies compiled in a special issue of the journal Études littéraires of Laval University (April 1981). 9 One chapter in E.E. Fitz’s (1991) work on American literatures is aptly entitled: “In Quest of an American Identity.” 10 In this vein, see, for example, the works of L. Spillman (1997), J. Hutchinson (1994), R. Rudin (1997a), N. Knowles (1997), J. Bodnar (1992), and H. V. Nelles (1999). 11 All these strategies belong to intellectual culture, but popular culture was also endowed with mechanisms for reducing otherness: for

Notes to pages 319–37

12 13 14 15

16 17

18 19

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example, establishing with the help of genealogy some kinship with the stranger, discovering shared geographical origins, and so on. Thanks to Patrice Charron for guiding me in this direction. On this subject, see P.K. Kohl (1998). As for Europe, see the proposals advanced by C. Lorenz (1999). On this question, see D.T. Haberly (1974), among others. As for the creation of a new language, the idea was current in Europe as well in the nineteenth century; one thinks primarily of Bulgaria, where the elites developed a national language, or even of Serbia, where Karadzic literally invented Serbo-Croatian (Thiesse 1999, chap. 3, 84, 101). See, for example, S. Methot (1999). This type of discourse has receded somewhat. One can see in this a consequence of the recent economic difficulties in the major countries of Asia, while the Australian economy continues to prosper. Histoire du Canada 8th ed. (Montreal: Éditions de l’Arbre, 1944–46), 150. I have discussed this theme in chapter 3. On this question, see also S. Courville (1993) and G. Bouchard (1990a).

conclusion 1 “It is the nation which makes tradition,” wrote M. Mauss (1969, 601), and not the reverse. On this question, I concur with E. Gellner (1983), B. Anderson (1991), E. Hobsbawm (1990), and many others. 2 On this subject, specifically in relation to the Quebec/France relationship, see G. Bouchard, M. Salitot, and M. Egalen (1997); and G. Bouchard, R. Hardy, and J. Gauthier (1997). Slightly in the same vein, but for the United States, see J.P. Greene (1988). For Canada, see R.C. Harris (1977).

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Index

Page references in bold type refer to a map Aboriginal peoples, 245; Aboriginal fact, 232–3, 254; Aboriginal narrative, 134; citizenship, 144, 168–9, 237, 240, 297–8, 328, 338; civilization, 151, 158, 162, 174–5; contributions, 66–7, 112, 153–4, 162, 164; and culture, 129, 131, 186; elimination, 151, 316–17; exclusion, 69–70, 117, 191, 227, 236–7, 271, 285, 300; history, 51, 319–21; indigenous issue, 245; language, 323; and long memory, 324–5, 330; as origins, 245, 248, 272–3, 314, 321; presence, 18–19, 58, 71, 177, 232–3; property rights, 236, 240, 285, 299, 363n33; relations with, 231, 240, 243, 321, 328; status, 251, 297, 321; symbolic presence, 233; views of, 69, 104, 129, 132, 144. See also assimilation; integration; specific peoples Aborigines (Australia), 232–4, 236– 8, 240–1, 248, 255–6 Act of Union (1840), 81 Adams, A.H., 220, 228 Adams, Francis, 214, 229 Africanity, 12, 42

agriculture, 355n6; return to the land, 107; ruralism, 40, 135, 289–90, 326–7 Alencar, José de, 161–3, 354n56 alibi: of continuity, 129; empire's, 209–10, 263, 277, 308; present's, 306; of scientificity, 287 amalgam, 74; amalgamation, 132, 170, 173, 176, 318 ambiguity, 104, 153–4, 215, 224–5, 253–4, 349, 354n57 ambivalence, 62–4, 143–4, 204–5, 210, 215–17 américanité, 129; and Americanization, 148; in Argentina, 352n29; and belonging, 167; Créole, 156– 64, 179; defined, 42; figures, 162; icons, 164; incomplete, 164–5, 167, 179; in literature, 129, 131; and métissage, 146, 166; in Mexico, 180, 313; modernity and, 130; pan-américanité, 133–4; in Quebec, 6, 82, 99, 119–22, 135, 141–2, 144, 178, 269; vs “American,” xiv Americanization, 111–12, 121–2, 127, 133, 148 Anderson, Benedict, 159, 339n2 Andrade, Oswald de, 163–4, 312

418

Index

Andrès, Bernard, 7, 27, 70, 72, 131, 312 anthropophagy, 163–4, 176, 312, 314 anti-Americanism, 85, 98–9, 125, 273, 361 anti-Britishism, 193, 201, 228, 278 anti-intellectualism, 115, 337, 355n13 Antillanity, 12, 42 anti-Semitism, 52, 88, 117, 121, 271, 347n51. See also exclusion, of Jews ANZUS treaty (1951), 195, 278–9, 286, 289 appropriation, 319; constructive, 13; cultural, 5, 153, 156, 158, 161–2, 180, 258, 319–21; defined, 12–13; reappropriation, 164, 180, 245, 312; symbolic, 12–17, 60, 90, 104, 163–4, 177, 210–19, 257; territorial, 15, 65, 181, 299, 323, 363n33 Aquin, Hubert, 132, 146 architecture, 72–3, 105–6, 217, 269, 352n39 Argentina, 149, 169, 175, 316, 335, 350n6, 352n29; antinomy, 17, 166, 168–9, 178, 310, 352n35; population, 150–2 aristocracy. See class(es), aristocracy Asselin, Olivar, 97, 99 assimilation, 300, 317–19, 325; of Aboriginal people, 169, 229, 236–9, 285; economic, 240; of French Canadians, 79, 90–1, 98, 142, 311; of immigrants, 30 Atwood, Margaret, 268, 366n2 Aussie. See dinkum aussie Australia, 182–260, 343n25, 354n1, 355n12, 356n29, 358n52 Australia Act (1986), 196 Australianity, 42, 182, 201–2, 217, 226, 250, 252 autonomy: aspirations, 99; intellectual, 97; literary, 130; of national memory, 249; provincial,

82; spiritual, 172. See also sovereignty Aztecs, 151, 158, 175, 319, 325 Balfour Declaration (Australia, 1926), 193 Bancroft, George, 294, 298 Barbeau, Marius, 95, 107, 110 bastard paradigm, 147, 314, 320 Beaugrand, Honoré, 97, 99, 103 Belleau, André, 138, 145 Bernd, Zilà, 11, 164, 166, 314 biculturalism, 288–9, 317, 331, 364n39 Bill 22. See Official Language Act (Quebec, 1974) Bill of Rights (US, 1791), 291 Blainey, Geoffrey, 204, 241 Blais, Marie-Claire, 130, 132 Blanchard, Raoul, 106, 118 Bolívar, Simon, 155, 160 Bolivia, 149, 151–2, 173, 175 Borduas, 132, 142 Bougainville, L.A. de, 67, 69 Bourassa, Henri, 60, 90, 265, 267 bourgeoisie. See class(es), bourgeoisie Brazil, 149, 150–2, 155, 161–4, 166–70, 180–1, 313, 316–17, 320, 352n27, 353n53 Brazilianity, 42, 163 British North America Act (bna, 1867), 90, 262 Brunet, Michel, 27, 68, 133 Buies, Arthur, 97, 100, 103, 126 bushman, 213–14, 222, 226, 259, 337, 358n47, 2055 bushranger, 201, 212, 246, 248, 357n30 Bustamante, Carlos Maria de, 171, 174 Canada, 58–9, 79, 88, 90, 117, 140, 261–75, 304, 308–9, 330, 361n4; English Canada, 40–2, 55, 310– 11, 331. See also New France; Quebec

Index Canada First, 266–7 cannibalism. See anthropophagy capitalism, 31–2, 34–5, 114, 127, 301, 336 Casgrain, Henri-Raymond (Abbé), 99, 101–2, 109, 112, 258, 361n10 Catholic Church, 47, 65, 73–4, 83, 86, 88, 136; Catholicism, 83, 94, 160; and cultural survival, 92, 169–70, 176, 180, 214, 310; and education, 101, 107; missionaries, 158, 169–70, 351n22; and political culture, 73, 124, 202; and popular culture, 83, 122, 128; role of clergy, 45–6, 71, 88, 113–14, 142. See also religion caudillo, 162, 352n35 Cession (1763), 61, 63, 70–2, 141, 304–5 Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms (Quebec, 1975), 137 Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Canada, 1982), 270–1 Chauveau, P.-.J.-O., 81, 102–3, 107 Chile, 42, 149, 160, 163, 168, 175 citizen, 115, 168–9, 235, 244–5, 267, 291. See also Aboriginal peoples, citizenship citizenship, 194–6, 235, 238, 256, 264–5, 278, 296 Citizenship Act (Australia, 1948), 238 civilization: ancient, 291, 294–5, 297, 319; Asian, 239–40, 250; British, 219, 224; clash, 250; decadent, 177; European, 12, 95, 157, 208, 219, 239–40; lack, 11–12, 19, 49; material, 65; new, 149, 164, 167; pan-American, 20, 308; vs barbarism, xii, 157, 167, 297, 313. See also Aboriginal peoples, civilization Clark, C.M.H., 206, 245 class(es), xii, 66, 77–8; aristocracy, 186, 276; bourgeoisie, 68, 78, 95, 141, 152, 220; clergy, 77–8, 127,

419

142; common people, xiv, 78, 83, 95, 128; dominant/ruling, 115, 169–70, 224, 300; gentry, 186; liberal professions, 77–8, 127, 141; middle, 78, 126, 128, 145, 206, 220, 228; notables, 116; petite bourgeoisie, 116, 141–2; proletariat, 186; working, 45, 83, 128, 201, 244 classes populaires. See class(es), common people clergy. See class(es), clergy Coleman, Peter, 217, 238 collectivities: founding, 4; Latin American, 150; most British, 277–9; new, 3, 18–19, 115–16; oldest of the new, 275–90; Quebec, 61; social cohesion, 115 Colombia, 149, 157, 166, 173, 175 colony: anti-colonialism, 23, 130, 336; colonial status, 208; colonial tie, 74, 82, 124, 141, 198, 204, 207, 261–7, 291; colonialism, 328, 336; colonization, 65, 113, 220–1, 285; decolonization, 253, 263, 266; dependency, 266; enclave, 4; penal colony, 45, 183, 243; recolonization, symbolic, 250; social structure, 66. See also mother country commemoration. See memory, commemorative common people. See class(es), common people Commonwealth Act (Australia, 1901), 192, 225 community, 34, 112, 173, 259, 270, 303, 336; communitarianism, 48, 87, 116, 121, 302, 328 comparative approach, 26–32, 44, 57. See also history, comparative comparison: Quebec/Australia, 255–60; Quebec/Canada, 273–5; Quebec/Latin America, 176–9; Quebec/New Zealand, 289–90; Quebec/US, 304–6

420

Index

consciousness: class, 154; collective, 10, 40, 118, 140; Créole, 174; historical, 142, 174–5, 243, 301; individual, 10; inter-American, 131; literary, 215; national, 70–1, 73–4, 88, 214, 246, 248, 304; social, 77; urban, 137 conservatism, 45–6, 75, 80, 100–1, 142, 256, 353n49; conservatives, 95–7, 114–16, 119, 155, 203, 208, 230, 242 Constitution Act (Australia, 1901), 206, 237 Constitution (Canada, 1982), 264 Constitution (Mexico, 1857), 161 Constitution (New Zealand, 1852), 276 Constitution (US, 1787–89), 291 Constitutional Act (1791), 74 continental drift, 267, 361n8 continuity: continental, 249; continuism, 96–7, 103, 107, 124, 143; contradictions of, 119; cultural, 96, 289, 311; culture of, 279–83; and discursive constructions, 19, 307; imagined, 158; New Zealand, 308; obstacles, 15– 16; paradigm of, 50, 275; political, 141, 179, 310; religious, 295; and rupture, 14–16, 139, 166, 176, 307–11; rupture and, xii–xiv, 62, 102, 126–39, 156–7, 180, 188–96; and social thought, 96–7; and survivance, 77; tradition of, 277. See also rupture convict. See settlers, convict Costa Rica, 149, 151 Crémazie, Octave, 100–1, 140, 354n59 Creole, 350n6, 351n26; Creolism, 171–2, 174 Crèvecœur, St. John de, 292, 300, 326 Cuba, 149, 156, 159, 161, 163, 173, 308, 335, 350n11 cultural cringe, 140, 213, 218, 230, 251, 280

culture: antinomy, 211, 253, 269, 297, 310–12; antinomy (common/elite), 122–6; antinomy (educated/uneducated), 78; antinomy (elite/popular), 17, 69, 80, 128–9, 140, 146; antinomy (prescribed/inscribed), 16–17; antinomy (survivance/ popular), 120; borrowed, 140, 206; of common people, 85, 111, 129, 162, 269; dichotomy, 166–7, 207; diversity, 292; dynamics, 267–9; of the educated, 86, 111, 118–23; elite, 57, 94, 99, 124–5, 127–9, 144–5, 164–5, 240–1, 280; English-Canadian, 274; francophone, 80, 87, 100, 118, 121, 140, 142, 268; high, 57, 130–1; and history, 36–7; as identity, 38; imprinted, 106, 130, 140; indigenous, 241; intellectual, 105, 128, 135, 138, 163, 257, 268–9, 296; of interstices, 146–7; legitimacy, 305; material, 66; minority, 61–3; national, 17–22, 81–6, 100, 106, 108, 230, 251, 253, 270; oral, 212; and otherness, 366n11; pluralist, 299; political, 202, 265; popular, 50, 108–11, 123, 129, 158, 162, 229; public, 296, 303; shameful, 138; shifts, 230–1, 239; of state socialism, 284; of survivance, 88, 111, 137–8, 265–6; traditional, 108; US, 85, 302; WASP, 300. See also specific entries Curnow, Allen, 281, 283 Declaration of Independence (US, 1776), 291 democracy, 114; anti-democratic, 114; democratic spirit, 68, 74, 116, 187; flaws of, 49; ideal of, 161, 180–1; local, 121; in popular culture, 50, 115; and rights, 137, 161, 220; struggle for, 200

Index Dessaulles, L.-A., 88, 97 dinkum aussie, 226–7, 357n30 discourse, 111–18; anglophone, 89; anti-American, 85, 98–9, 177; anti-colonialist, 130; artistic, 129; colonizing, 113; of cultural elites, 6, 94; of difference, 38–9; discursive constructions, 231; discursive strategies, 168, 175; double role, 19–20; equivocal, 86, 296; functions, 13–14; of high culture, 132; historiographic, 294; liberal vs conservative, 115–16; literary, 7–8, 16, 129; of national identity, 226; of national imaginary, 323; new, 302; of new beginnings, 291–5; scientific, 106; standardizing, 251; strategies of, 322–8; of survivance, 117; vs custom, 14–15, 20. See also continental drift; equivocal thinking; radicalism, radical thought disengagement. See rupture, disengagement Doutre, Joseph, 88, 114 duality: of Canada, 59, 90, 124; conservative/liberal, 93; Créole, 154, 353n4; cultural, 117, 119, 124, 215–16, 253, 304, 343; ethnic, 153, 288, 321; francophone/anglophone, 58, 79, 270, 324; historical, 93, 97, 215–16, 290–306; of the past, 93; in political life, 267; of US narratives, 290–306; of utopian constructions, 100 Ducharme, Réjean, 130–2, 312 Dumont, Fernand, 37, 67, 81, 138 Durham (Lord), 73, 76, 101 Durham Report (1839), 79 eclecticism, 63, 80, 120, 230, 312, 335 Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE), 239 Ecuador, 149, 151–2, 156

421

education: compulsory, 114; content, 96; control over, 107; democratization, 128, 142, 155; and development, 47; and memory, 365n59; popular, 46; role, 96; university, 74, 106–7, 130, 133 effect: founder, 43, 342n22; inhibiting, 140; repressive, 62, 85, 96 El Salvador, 8, 149, 168 elites: Australian, 234–5, 245; business, 81; colonial, 66, 208, 288; conservative, 119; Créole, 351n26; cultural, 72, 267–9; educated, 77; elitism, 168, 226, 245; function, 15; intellectual, 230; national, 74, 79; new vision, 127; tasks, 18; urban, 198; vs common people, 16–17, 49–50 emancipation. See rupture, emancipation Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 292, 300 emigration. See immigration empire, 194–5, 198, 206–10, 220, 245, 266, 282; imperial sentiment, 263; imperialism, 165, 219, 229–30, 279, 362n21. See also alibi, empire's Enlightenment philosophy, 297; espousal of, 76, 115, 158, 336; impact of, 73–4, 155, 161, 180, 215, 259; tenets, 297, 327 equality: Canada, 90; egalitarianism, 50, 114, 161, 226, 259, 301; inequality, 121, 255, 312; Latin America, 212, 219, 221, 254; New Zealand, 280; Quebec, 47, 66, 75, 98, 113, 115, 121, 137; US, 9, 293, 298, 303, 306, 309 equivocal thinking, 120, 126, 134, 144, 296 ethnicity, 218; diverse, 284; diversification, 210, 229; ethnic clientele, 239; ethnic groups, 151–2, 177, 185, 202, 232, 234; ethnic relations, 180, 231;

422

Index

ethnocentrism, 157–8, 208, 220, 235, 269–70 (See also exclusion); heterogeneity, 152–3, 270; melting pot, 302; multi-ethnic, 197; pluri-ethnic, 256, 271–2. See also Aboriginal peoples; race eugenicism, 88–9, 118, 235, 237, 271, 298 exceptionalism, 33–4, 39, 84, 117, 294, 300 exclusion, 50–1, 136; of Asians, 235–6, 271, 286, 358n57; of Blacks, 271, 298–300, 365n49; of Europeans, 235; of Jews, 65, 69, 345n15 (See also anti-Semitism); of the less privileged, 229; of minorities, 85; of non-Catholics, 65, 69, 344n8; of non-Whites, 297; and survivance, 117; symbolic, 50–1, 70, 117, 169, 237–8; traditions of, 255; of women, 227, 235, 245, 271, 286, 299, 360n88. See also Aboriginal peoples, exclusion; immigration, discriminatory; White Australia Policy (1901) exile, 119, 269, 280–1 Falardeau, Jean-Charles, 100, 134 Ferron, Jacques, 129, 131–2, 312 First Nations. See Aboriginal peoples founding: act, 192–3, 224, 282; culture, 19, 179; dream, 281; era, 244; events, 22, 94, 190, 205, 246, 272; heroes, 22; moments, 293–4; myths, 171–2, 246–9, 285, 288, 300, 302; peoples, 270, 273; statement, 125–6; themes, 304 Fournier, Marcel, 77, 106 fragments, theory of, 8–9, 356n26 France, 27, 32, 35, 40, 51, 58, 334, 344n2, 345n16; and Australia, 225, 257; and Latin America, 150, 163, 166, 180–1, 313, 350n11; and New France, 41, 62–77, 80–5, 91–3, 96–7,

101–5, 109–13, 119–33, 138–45, 319 francophones, viii, 38–9, 58, 61, 74–5, 79, 90, 145, 269–71; Quebecers, 42, 44, 52, 117–18 Fréchette, Louis, 97, 101, 119 Free Trade Agreement (Canada/ US, 1988), 271 Frégault, Guy, 26, 68, 101, 133 fusion: cultural/ethnic, 20, 239, 250, 314, 318, 326; racial, 172–3, 180–1, 317, 320, 325–6, 362n18, 363n34; religious, 171 Gagnon, Clarence, 105, 119 Galbally Report, 238 Garneau, François-Xavier, 79, 81, 91, 94, 109, 123, 125–6, 142, 325 Garneau, Saint-Denys, 103, 119, 142 gaucho, 162, 168, 176, 337 Gauldrée-Boilleau, C.-H.-P., 106, 118 Gauthier, Raymonde, 72, 105 genocide, 168–9, 236–7, 353n49 gentry. See class(es), gentry Gérin, Léon, 106, 118 Germany, 12, 32, 180, 209, 334 Girard, Rodolphe, 103, 122 Godbout, Jacques, 129, 131–2, 144, 312 governors-general, 194–6, 205, 210, 264–5, 278 grande noirceur, 40–1, 256 Great Britain, 239, 244–5, 252–3, 257, 262, 288, 308; and Australia, 41, 182–3, 185, 188–210, 214–16, 219–25, 234, 320; and Canada, 263, 266–7; and New France, 58, 62, 73, 75, 83, 124, 139; and New Zealand, 275–9, 281–3, 285–6, 288–9 Groulx, Lionel, 39, 60, 68, 90, 93, 109, 124, 126 Gurik, Robert, 130, 312

Index habitant. See settlers, habitant Haiti, 149, 151, 156, 159, 308, 350n11, 366n5 Hancock, William Keith, 227, 356n25 Harris, Alexander, 220, 225 Hartz, Louis, 8–9, 28, 356n26 Harvey, Jean-Charles, 104, 114, 122 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 292, 296 Hébert, Anne, 131, 138 hegemony: Catholic, 46–7, 259; cultural, 44; European, 302; intellectual, 167; of the nation, 303 Hidalgo, Miguel, 155–6, 159 Hirst, J.B., 201, 245 historiography, 26, 56, 272, 365n59; Australia, 183, 238, 242–4; Latin America, 165, 169– 70, 173–5; New Zealand, 282; Quebec, 38–56, 83, 114, 133, 139; US, 294–6, 299 history, 25–6, 36–7, 52–4, 60, 276, 301–2, 318–19; comparative, 6–7, 22–3, 25, 27–37, 55, 341n3; historical knowledge, 56–7, 131; macro-history, 5, 27; modernist, 54, 63, 167, 257, 305, 327, 343n29; national, 133, 222, 280, 282, 287, 301; postmodernist, 144, 329; progressive, 294; revisionist, 53, 245, 247, 287–8 Howard government, 196, 242 hybridization. See métissage identity: Canadian, 269–73; collective, 5, 38–9, 158–9, 175, 201, 226, 230, 282; collective, crisis of, 165–6, 251, 287, 289, 296, 302–3, 328–31; collective (Australia), 249–52; collective (Latin America), 161, 165–6; collective (New Zealand), 287–8; collective (US), 116, 160, 164–5; cultural, 82, 84, 161–2; false, 44, 62, 85, 116, 143, 300–1, 363n34; French-Canadian, 61, 87, 93,

423

97–9, 112, 116, 129; national, 18, 42, 85, 168–75, 192, 199– 201, 226, 241–52, 255–6, 288, 304, 315–18; new, 268; plurality, 302; and political independence, 44; Québécois, 45, 61, 136–8, 144 ideology: Canadian, 265; contradictory, 254–5; left-wing, 135; Liberal, 169; of racial democracy, 172–3; right-wing, 114; ruralist, 327; of survivance, 45, 50–2, 81, 83–6; of trade unionism, 220 imaginary: American, 291; Australian, 218–22, 229, 234; Canadien, 72; collective, 5–6, 17, 92, 219; contradictions, 327; of elite culture, 257; FrenchCanadian, 122; national, 71, 80, 94, 112; of new collectivities, 120; Québécois, 131; semantics of, 323; US, 295 immigrants, 317, 322, 342; Australia, 185–7, 202, 217, 227, 232–4, 238–9, 355n16 (See also settlers); free, 278; Canada, 264; Latin America, 149–50, 152, 324; New France, 65, 70, 79, 89, 112– 13, 120, 344n7; New Zealand, 275, 278–9, 289; US, 289, 293, 299–301, 303, 305. See also settlers immigration, 183–4, 187, 197, 229, 233–5, 262, 276; discriminatory, 271, 303; diverse, 270; emigration, 55, 83, 89–90; free, 205; international, 90; law, 264; migration, 277; migratory transfers, 4, 6–7, 11, 79, 148, 185, 234; models, 305. See also exclusion; White Australia Policy (1901) Immigration Restriction Amendment Act (NZ, 1920), 286 imperialism. See empire, imperialism Incas, 151, 158, 175

424

Index

independence. See autonomy; sovereignty Indianity, 158, 162–5, 172–3, 175, 179, 351n26, 354n56; and belonging, 167, 201 Indigenism, 158, 175 Innis, Harold, 266, 362n18 integration, 22, 169, 206, 208, 239, 305 interculturalism, 137, 156, 331 Jefferson, Thomas, 294, 298, 326, 364n48 Labelle (Father), 90, 100 Laberge, Albert, 103, 122 labour movement. See trade unions, labour movement Land Selection Acts (Australia, 1851), 187 landscape, 186, 213, 216, 268, 280 Lane, William, 199, 220, 227 Lang, John Dunmore, 190, 194 language: Anglicism, 95, 112, 130, 366n3; and assimilation, 234; choice, 323, 364n41; colonial twang, 278, 280; common idiom, 69, 71–2, 96, 129, 176, 211; divisions, 144; francophone idiom, 104; international English, 287; linguistic nationalism, 292; linguistic norm, 62, 95; linguistic standard, 66–7, 129, 139, 144, 176, 207, 211, 344n5, 363n26; national, 95–6, 102, 129, 367n15; official language, 303; popular, 121, 137, 256; prohibited, 285; pure, 103; and survivance, 94–6; vernacular, 281; written, 96 Larose, Jean, 138, 144 Lasnier, Rina, 104, 131 Latin America, 68, 148–81, 308–10, 314, 316–18, 349n1 Laurendeau, André, 99, 101, 136 law: Catholic, 119; citizenship, 194, 196, 278; and civilization, 294, 297, 330; constitutional, 2+62,

205–6, 264; French, 65, 116; human rights, 235, 270–1, 303, 345n15; international, 194 Lawson, Alan, 215, 340n10 Lawson, Henry, 207, 214, 228 Le Moyne, Jean, 104, 146 League of Nations (1919), 263–4, 277 Lemieux, Jean-Paul, 105, 129 Lemire, Maurice, 72, 119 Liberal government (NZ), 283–4 liberalism, 75, 98, 167, 208, 336, 343n23; liberals, 47, 96–9, 114– 16, 168–9, 353n49 liberation. See rupture, emancipation literature, 12, 59–60, 77, 167, 315; anglophone, 267–8; compared, 257–8; Latin American, 314, 352n27; letters, 88, 110, 123, 138, 280, 292; literary censorship, 109, 123, 130–1, 145, 256; literary life, 72, 216; national, 72, 163, 212–15, 268, 280–1, 292, 347n47, 361n10; philosophy, 97, 130, 292, 296; Québécois, 131–2, 176; traditional, 100, 103, 108. See also novels; poetry; regionalism, literary Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 292, 315 Lower, A.R.M., 273, 362n18 Mailhot, Laurent, 104, 258 manifest destiny, 63, 134, 143, 291–2, 302 Maoris, 275, 284, 286–8 Marcotte, Gilles, 105, 138 Marienstras, Élise, 295, 326 Marie-Victorin (Brother), 99, 106– 7, 142 Marshall, John (Judge), 322, 365n53 Marxism, 10–11, 47 Mayans, 151, 158 McQueen, Humphrey, 207, 215, 228, 231

Index Meech Lake Accord (Canada, 1990), 274 memory: antithetical sides, 91–2; borrowed, 173–5; Canadian, 72; collective, 41, 117, 287, 294, 304; commemorative, 91, 148, 167, 195, 247–8, 293–4, 318; competing, 366n6; continuist, 282; crisis of, 247; and dream, 94; and elite culture, 109–10; founding, 218; games, 143, 322; and identity, 158–9; long, 125, 133, 144, 174, 248, 297; of the mosaic, 273; national, 41, 91–4, 133, 142, 273; repatriation of, 287; shameful, 243–9; short, 319–20; and silences, 47, 51–2, 114, 116, 142, 231, 301; silencing, 243–5, 248, 301; strategies of, 245, 318–22 Menzies, G., 194–5, 204, 355n11 Mercier, Honoré, 82, 88, 124, 136, 265 métis, 132, 152, 158–9, 285–6 métissage: cultural, 121–2, 145–6, 158, 166–7, 249, 288, 318; racial, 150, 152, 172–3, 237, 317, 320–1, 325, 331 Mexico, 42–3, 148–81, 149, 242, 299, 302, 310–11, 313, 317, 319, 322, 324–5 Mier, Servando Teresa de, 156, 158, 170, 174 Minville, Esdras, 101, 107 Miranda, Francisco, 155, 160 modernity, 75, 99–101, 103–6, 127, 130, 138, 287 Montpetit, Édouard, 99, 101, 107 Morelos, José Maria, 155–6, 159 mother country: ambivalence towards, 44, 62, 94, 102–3, 197– 8, 253–4; break with, 150, 153–4, 165, 291, 303, 312; cult of, 80, 280; dependency on, 80, 96, 203, 310–11; destabilization, 351n17; differentiation from, 4–5, 16, 70, 211, 223; economic relations,

425

186, 203; filiation with, 97, 129, 203, 205–7, 248, 278, 283; hegemony of, 274, 277; inferiority to, 176, 213, 230, 252, 258, 280; as model, 5, 13–14, 51, 71, 254, 258, 298; promise of, 119, 130, 279, 309; stances towards, 17, 20, 160, 291; symbolic capital of, 19, 318–19; withdrawal, 288–9; withdrawal of, 286 movements: colonizing, 113; egalitarian, 189, 191; emancipation, 75; imperial federation, 191; independence, 135, 144, 155, 160, 190; literary, 101–4, 132, 213, 250, 279–80; modernist, 162; nationalist, 206; nativist, 298; right-wing, 40–1; trade union, 201, 220. See also trade unions, labour movement; specific movements multiculturalism, 365n60; Australia, 225, 229–30, 238, 240–2, 249– 50, 254, 331, 360n83; Canada, 270–2, 274, 366n6; New France, 70; US, 302–3, 365n59 music, 66, 106, 120, 122–3, 129, 164, 212, 269 mythology, 11, 24, 114, 160, 225; American dream, 145, 291, 295, 303, 306; Black Legend, 157, 175, 328; deflating, 22, 91, 133, 142; egalitarian, 231, 279; frontier, 9–10, 214, 292–3, 305; Indianist, 352n27; melting pot, 292– 4, 297, 299–302, 318, 326; of new beginnings, 146, 221, 291, 295; of the nineties, 215, 225–6; Noble Savage, 157, 237, 249–50, 285; pastoral, 279, 281, 287, 326; of racial supremacy, 279, 298; ruralist, 112, 217, 255, 283, 326; of upward mobility, 48, 114, 221–2, 231, 257. See also anthropophagy; founding, myths Narrache, Jean, 104

426

Index

nation, 20–3, 86–90, 115, 123–6, 132, 136–7, 223–42, 261–75, 286–8, 300–3, 340n11; nationalism, 137, 156, 159, 177, 206, 210, 227–8, 258, 274, 278, 352n29; nationality, 98, 102, 270; nationhood, 50, 80, 89, 107–8, 111, 136, 159–60, 177, 270; neonationalism, 133, 137, 274; vanquished, 91. See also specific nations national: anthem, 189, 195–6, 212, 264, 277, 301; character, 116, 212, 225, 283–4; flag, 205, 264, 277; holiday, 247, 277, 288; motto, 295; narrative, 223–42; pride, 199, 264, 270, 365n63 Nelligan, E., 103, 142 neo-nationalism. See nation, neonationalism Nepveu, Pierre, 10, 103 New France, 59, 61, 65–73, 108–9, 141, 304, 322, 344n8. See also Quebec New Zealand, 34, 40, 141, 195, 225, 275–90, 308–11, 362n21– 362n22 Nile, R., 228, 251 Noble Savage. See mythology, Noble Savage novels: Australia, 211, 213–16, 239, 360n81; English-Canada, 325; Latin America, 163, 165–6; New Zealand, 279–81, 287; Quebec, 48, 72, 100–5, 109, 112, 122–3, 129–32, 138, 256, 258, 312 objectification, 25, 56–7 objectivity, 26, 53, 56 oceanity, 182, 239 Official Language Act (Quebec, 1974), 136 outback, 184, 201, 225–6, 247–9, 255, 259, 310, 326 painting, 105, 132, 164, 216–17, 238, 258, 268, 280, 292, 357n35

pakehas, 285, 288, 325, 362n21 Palmer, Vance, 207, 212, 216, 226 Papineau, Louis-Joseph, 62, 75, 88, 124, 345n16 Paraguay, 149, 160, 199, 221 Parent, Étienne, 60, 76, 79, 81, 87, 97, 345n16 Parti canadien, 75–6, 134, 345n16 party, political: Conservative, 303–4; Federalist, 300; Labor, 220, 227, 238; Liberal, 169, 242; New Right, 241; One Nation, 242; Populist, 364n44; Québécois, 124, 134–5; Reformists, 262; Republican, 300 Paterson, Andrew B., 212, 214 Patriotes. See Parti canadien patriotism, 106, 189, 205, 302, 365n63. See also national, pride Paz, Octavio, 161, 165, 315 Peru, 149, 152–3, 160, 163, 166, 168–9, 173–5, 319, 322, 350n11, 352n27 Phillips, A.A., 215, 218, 229 Phillips, Jock, 34, 287–8 Pietri, Arturo Uslar, 159, 165–6, 354n55, 354n59 poetry: Australia, 213, 215–16, 250, 256; New Zealand, 281–3; Quebec, 102–4, 129–31, 138; Venezuela, 354n59; US, 292, 296, 301 population, 185, 228; anglophone, 72; Australia, 232; Canada, 79; Caucasian, 151; fertility, 152; and fertility, 92; francophone, 79; genetics, 43; homogeneous, 231; immigrant, 234; indigenous, 148, 150–2; Mexico, 150; minority, 145; of new collectivities, 55; New France, 141; of New France, 70; New Zealand, 276; Quebec, 62, 83 Portugal, 170, 181, 309, 313, 350n13, 351n17 proletariat. See class(es), proletariat Puritanism, 41, 295, 302

Index Quebec, vii–ix, xii–xvi, 3–4, 7–8, 25, 58–147, 344n5, 366n1. See also comparison; New France Quebec Act (1774), 73–4 Quiet Revolution, 43–4, 54, 128 race, 336, 349n5, 350n6; biracial, 288; Cosmic Race thesis, 20, 161, 172, 317, 325; mixed, 153–4, 157, 168–9, 172, 185, 319 (See also métis); new, 93, 172, 226, 291; racial purity, 89, 206, 234, 286; racial supremacy, 208, 220– 1, 235–6, 269, 298–9, 325, 328; racism, 117, 231, 238, 242, 297, 303, 353n50, 353n53; regeneration, 110. See also ethnicity; eugenicism; exclusion; genocide; immigration, discriminatory; métissage radicalism, 48, 98, 114, 364n44; radical thought, 202, 227, 294, 343n24, 347n51; radicals, 219 Raffestin, Claude, 12, 218 realism, 103, 105, 122, 129, 214, 221, 269, 281 Rebellions (1837–38), 45, 76–7, 262; effect, 79, 84, 141 regionalism, 130, 199, 218, 232, 269; literary, 101–5, 132, 258, 346n36, 347n47 religion: anti-religion, 220; Australia, 357n41; Aztec, 171, 328; clergy, 101; and culture, 176, 180, 204, 310; missionaries, 297; and nationhood, 59, 71, 83–4, 115, 158–60, 167, 293, 316, 329; New Zealand, 363n29; Protestant, 38, 42, 232, 255, 297, 301; role of, 42, 45, 47, 55, 116– 18, 220, 258; of science, 167. See also Catholic Church return to the land. See agriculture, return to the land Ribeiro, Darcy, 10–11, 161, 173 Ringuet, 102–3, 131, 133 Rioux, Marcel, 135, 138

427

Ronfard, J.-P., 130, 132 Roussil, Robert, 133, 138 Royal Commission of Enquiry on Constitutional Problems (Canada, 1956), 134 Royal Proclamation (1763), 71, 73 Rudin, Ronald, 39, 53, 70, 341n2 rupture, 14; and continuity (See continuity, and rupture); cultural, xiii, 126, 323–6; differentiation and, 176; and discursive constructions, 19; disengagement, 14–16, 130–9, 161–3, 178–210, 262, 278, 296, 323–6; emancipation, 7, 155–6, 166, 199, 204–11, 254, 350n11; political, xiii, 71–7, 126, 271; strategies of, 143, 312–16. See also autonomy; continuity; sovereignty ruralism. See agriculture, ruralism Sahagún, Diego de Landa, 158, 171 Saint-Maurice, Faucher de, 101, 114 Savard, Félix-Antoine, 101, 110 seato. See South East Asia Treaty Organization (seato) settlers: Canadien, 67–8, 70, 90; Canadien-Français, 90; convict, 183–4, 201, 244, 276; coureur des bois, 67; as crusader, 110; free, 244; habitant, 50, 67, 69–70, 120, 259; peasant, 95, 109, 112, 121, 259; representations of, 91; women, 247. See also immigrants Sifton plan, 90 Sinclair, Keith, 282–3, 287 slavery, 151–2, 169, 298, 301, 344n9, 364n48 Smith, Bernard, 217, 238 social Darwinism, 180, 235, 237–8, 298 society: civil, 47–8, 69–70, 75, 116, 206, 220, 296; distinct, 10, 14, 17–18, 44, 138; francophone, 61–2, 65, 68, 71, 79, 81, 83, 117, 142, 271; new, 38, 52, 54, 57, 84,

428

Index

123, 149, 201, 252, 259, 280–2; rural, 106, 109, 143, 276, 283, 309; secular, 45–6, 301; settler, viii, 4, 123 solidarity, 84, 127, 195, 211–12, 222–7, 235, 329–35 South East Asia Treaty Organization (seato), 289, 363n24 sovereignty, 62, 82, 115, 133, 139, 141, 146, 155, 252; Australia, 257; political, 262, 274, 293; political (Quebec), 348n62; Quebec, 309. See also autonomy Spain, 148, 149–50, 155–7, 161–3, 172–6, 180–1, 309, 351n17 Statute of Westminster (1931), 193–4, 207, 264, 276–7 strikes. See trade unions, strikes Sulte, Benjamin, 97, 99, 109 survivance: and américanité, 133–4, 259; and culture, 110, 138, 142– 3; culture of, 88, 111, 120, 132; discourse, 106, 111, 117; and dissent, 98, 101; and exclusion, 50, 99; ideology, 22, 52; language, 94; literature and, 104; and nationhood, 98, 101, 121, 126, 267; paradigm, 39, 45, 77– 86, 104, 125, 138; struggle for, 142; visions of, 91 syncretism, 51, 86, 94, 99, 107, 132, 158, 170, 314 Taché, Joseph-Charles, 60, 101, 109 Tardivel, Jules-Paul, 90, 124 Tarver, H., 297 Terra Nullius doctrine, 236, 240, 322 theatre, 72, 132, 215–16, 256, 312 Thérien, Gilles, 131, 138, 146 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 12, 42, 49, 59, 73, 115, 343n25 trade unions: Catholic, 114, 123; labour movement, 114, 127, 135, 219, 227; strikes, 127, 135, 219, 227; trade unionism, 114, 201, 220; union militancy, 227

Treaty of Versailles (1783), 291 Treaty of Waitangi, 276, 284, 288 Tremblay, Michel, 130, 256 Trudeau, Pierre-Eliot, 266–7, 271, 364n39 Trudel, Marcel, 133, 344n9 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 9, 292, 300 Union Act (1849), 76, 79 United States, 40–2, 202–3, 265, 290–306, 316–18, 322, 326–7, 335–6 Uruguay, 149, 151, 162, 168, 352n62 utopia: of the Americas, 100; antiutopia, 296; Arielist dream, 161, 352n32; of biculturalism, 288–9; of colonization, 100; constantly reborn, 304; continuist, 279; of continuity, 219; of development, 268; Enlightenment, 74; of expansion, 89; founding, 173; imperial, 219, 221; of new beginnings, 161; of the Noble Savage, 250; postmodern, 250; radical, 114, 219, 221; of rupture, 141; of rupture and appropriation, 160–1; of synthesis, 239; urban, 220–1; utopian constructions, 100; utopian rapture, 163; utopian thought, 20–1, 47, 218–22 Vachon, Georges-André, 119, 138 Vadeboncœur, Pierre, 135, 138 Vasconcelos, José, 20–1, 161, 172 Vénézuela, 149, 152, 155–9, 161, 163, 165–6, 173–4, 178, 354n59 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, 186, 276 Ward, Russell, 205, 207, 212, 229, 357n33 Washington, George, 295, 298 Webster, Noah, 292, 296 Wentworth, W.C., 201, 213

Index White, R., 220, 226 White Australia Policy (1901), 192, 206, 227–8, 232, 235, 238 whitening. See métissage Whitman, Walt, 292, 313, 315

429

xenophobia, 88, 206, 227, 231, 235 yellow peril, 40, 228, 241, 278, 286, 298