bout de papier, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1995) — Summer 1995 // Été 1995, pp. 43–46
ANDRE LAURENDEAU: FRENCH-CANADIAN
NATIONALIST 1912-1968 by Donald
J. Horton, Oxford University Press,
261 pages, $29.95
Reviewed by David Anido
Canada has achieved 127 years of democratic life as a Confederation. People settled the geography that is now Canada roughly 25,000 years ago, but it was the agreement between French and English speaking Canadians that created in the 19th century the nation state of Canada — “the collection of communities” Many new Canadians, who are not native speakers of English or French, accept the infrastructure of Confederation as a workable system for what could be the world’s most progressive democracy. Former UN Secretary-General Javier Péres de Cuéllar describes Canada as “a microcosm of what the world must become”. And Canada’s autochthonous peoples contribute a cultural and social depth of field to an ancient precambrian land with new ideas.
So, with all this promise, why must Canada face, on a regular basis, the prospect of the separation of Québec? Why does Québec always seem to be champing at the bit to leave the Confederation? Why does “English Canada”, ’, now so un-English and increasingly “American”, react with anger or sorrow to Québec’s aspirations without knowing how to reconcile them?
The answers to these fundamental questions are approached in Donald J. Horton’s excellent book, André Laurendeau: French- Canadian Nationalist 1912-1968, published in English by Oxford University Press. Professor Horton of the University of Waterloo has written a scrupulously research and eminently readable study of one of Québec’s finest intellectuals. It is in the life of André Laurendeau, and all the spiritual and intellectual contradictions he faced, that Canadians can see the tensions and possibilities of our Confederation.
Hugh Maclennan, the clairvoyant writer who coined the phrase “two solitudes” wrote that André Laurendeau died early because of the internal tensions he felt in trying to reconcile Québec nationalism with Confederation. “The strain of it is surely what caused the premature death of André Laurendeau.” (Foreward to Solange Chaput- Rolland’s Reflections: Quebec Year One).
Professor Horton’s chronological portrayal of Laurendeau’s life leads to the same conclusion.
André Laurendeau was born on March 21, 1 1912 and was raised in Montréal’s
Outremont district when that city was the / unrivalled urban centre of Canada. Musical interests of his parents; the intellectual acuity of his Jesuit teachers; and the history of four hundred years of French settlement in Canada gave Laurendeau a sense of belonging to his nation and culture – “the active presence of the past among the living”
Laurendeau’s nationalism was never a tribal protectionism. His upbringing in the French language he loved gave him the personal security to meet the real world beyond his culture. Professor Horton quotes the key passage from “Why I am not a separatist anymore”:
“I became a separatist as a young man, when I became conscious of this fact: the nation to which I belonged, whose history I read and loved, whose future is linked with mine, this nation was, inside Canada, in a state of inferiority.”
Confederation was a pact “which had never been fulfilled”. But Laurendeau saw what Hugh Maclennan describes as “the great reservoir of clumsy goodwill which exists in English Canada” for its confederate partner. He recognized also that Québec was moving from a crypto-feudal theocracy to a modern democracy where borders of the mind would slowly disappear.
The Catholic church has passed on the legacy of language and culture that hatched Laurendeau’s philosophy and ideas. But, with the Quiet Revolution, the chicken had to leave the egg or suffocate the life inside.
As editor of Le Devoir from 1947-1954, and known for his profound respect for clerical mentors such as Canon (Abbé) Lionel Groulx (“’notre maître, le passé”), Laurendeau encouraged a radical cleric, Jean-Paul Desbiens, to circumvent condemnation by the Catholic hierarchy by writing under the pseudonym Brother Anonymous (Frère Untel). “Les Insolences de Frère Untel’ was a seminal work in modern Québec literature for which Laurendeau experienced the wrath of Cardinal Léger, Archbishop of Montréal.
The waning power of the Church in Québec’s modern urban society was a sea-change. The power would shift from anointed clerics to elected representatives and business leaders. But the culture would remain as ever, solid and evolving.
Professor Horton divides his book into useful chapters which illustrate André Laurendeau’s personal voyage through Canada’s development from colony to nation. The first chapter, ’The Notable Tradition, 1912-1931”,, gives background to the home and environment in which young André grew. At the time of his birth in 1912 Laurendeau was destined by his parents to inherit “a fine future as a vigorous, patriotic and Catholic man..”. And in this “triumvirate of virtues”. Catholicism was the most important.
The second chapter, “Nationalism and Separatism, 1932-1935” “ deals with his education under nationalist teachers such as Abbé Groulx. The First World War, and its conscription problems, was over when Laurendeau was only six, but his sense of history bred in him a “consciousness of the English-Canadian threat”. ’. Later on, during the Second World War, the shooting to death in 1944 of conscript Georges Guénette by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was symbolic of this “threat”. Laurendeau wrote:
“Our nationalism springs from the desire that our French-Canadian — or Laurentian — nation should fulfil its own truth completely, and embrace its own natural vocation, thus preparing itself for its supernatural mission.” (Notre nationalisme, 1935)
In these words Laurendeau reveals his vision that his nationalism was a foundation for broader “supernatural missions” including the factor of Québec as part of the Canadian Confederation.
The next three chapters follow Laurendeau’s progress as pilgrim for his cause — the fulfilment of his nation’s desire. The sixth chapter, “The Bloc Populaire, 1942-1947”., has particular relevance to the situation in Canada today where another federal “Bloc” party, le Bloc Québecois, sits in Ottawa to bring the voice of Québec nationalism to the federal parliament.
This particularly interesting chapter allows for the inference that Bloc Québecois leader Lucien Bouchard is no equivalent to the intellectually sophisticated, politically adept, and internationally oriented André Laurendeau. Bouchard’s vacillation from acceptance of Canada’s ambassadorship in Paris to leader of a party bent on Québec separatism shows lack of vision, even the integrity, to contemplate a “supernatural mission”
Laurendeau, in another context, had experienced the vacillating nationalism of Camillien Houde, the Mayor of Montréal interned at Petawawa for opposing conscription. He described Houde’s flamboyant action as “logical and even heroic” but “also futile” • Bouchard, and fellow traveller Jacques Parizeau, may act as both “logical and even heroic”., but both fail to grasp the dimension of the futility of their cause if related to the “supernatural mission” that Laurendeau had conceived.
The leap of faith required for the acceptance of a “distinct” Québec, within an evolving and dynamic Canadian Confederation, still eludes too many voters and leaders across Canada. It is the Achilles heel on both sides of the argument.
The chapters on Laurendeau’s editorship of Le Devoir, “The War Against Duplessis, 1955-1959,” and “The Quiet Revolution, 1960-1968,” are enlightening as contemporary scholarship on great moments in Québec’s recent history. When seen through the prism of Laurendeau’s life they are poignant contributions to Canadian history not often available to unilingual English-speaking readers.
The tenth chapter, “Bilingualism and Biculturalism, 1963-1968,” captures the essence of Laurendeau’s lifelong quest, and the tormenting issues of a brilliant Québécois’ search for his Canadian identity:
“I remain a French-Canadian nationalist who doesn’t believe in separatism and who wonders how two nations can live together, in what kind of federation – two nations of which one dominates, and the other no longer wants to be dominated … I believe in a biculturalism which grows out of two productive nationalisms … that aim to modify the balance of power.” (1964)
The idea of Confederation as a partnership between nations was accepted by the Lester B. Pearson government as a “dualistic Canadian identity” “. The surge of Canadian nationalism, as experienced during Expo ’67 in Montréal, struck Laurendeau as familiar and acceptable. If his own soul was French, he fully empathised with an extended soul that was Canadian – such was the essence of partnership among differences.
Laurendeau accepted co-chair of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, with Davidson Dunton, because it was to be “the grand inquest into relations between Canada’s two main language groups” “. But he would not dilute his “defence of provincial autonomy” ’. As editor of Le Devoir Laurendeau had minced no words when criticizing politicians and bureaucrats. Also,
“he knew the Liberal Party was notorious for its tactic of absorbing rather than defeating its critics by offering them federal positions and taking only those of their ideas it deemed politically expedient.”
Laurendeau, according to Professor Horton, saw the Commission as an opportunity because it “offered an opportunity… whereby French Canadians could achieve linguistic and cultural equality in Canada”. Many of his former nationalist friends were shocked at his decision, but Laurendeau believed “there were only five years remaining to stem the tide of separatism”.
Laurendeau perhaps underestimated the perfunctory manner in which English Canada considered things cultural. His worst fears of English Canada’s cultural “fuzziness” would have been realized had he lived through the 1980s and early 1990s — a dark age in Canadian cultural life which saw constitutional stalemate and which has helped lead today to the most serious showdown with separatist forces in Canadian history.
The difference in attitude towards “culture” between French and English Canadians is a cause behind the two solitudes.
“In fact, the whole idea of a cultural solution to Canada’s internal problems was now beginning to decline in relation to the more traditional emphasis on political and constitutional negotiations between governments.
As René Levesque had warned him in Québec City before he accepted the Chair, Laurendeau would have to suppress his nationalist instincts to find a cultural solution to cooperative federalism.
Professor Horton concludes that André Laurendeau “lived his whole life between contending ideas, trying to reckon the value of each while finding ways to incorporate their best elements into his own point of view”. On June 1, 1968 André Laurendeau died in Ottawa of a brain aneurism.
The Laurendeau story is timely. Canada is more plural today than it was in the days of the Quiet Revolution. But the strains on the original confederate partnership are stronger than ever. Donald Horton’s book is a valuable contribution in the bibliography of Canadian history, and the best work so far in English on “the perfect example of (a) contemporary humanist”, ’, André Laurendeau.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1995) — Summer 1995 // Été 1995, pp. 43–46. Read the rest of this issue →
