Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec 0299115143, 9780299115142

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Nationalism and the Politics of Culture

in Quebec

Richard Handler

NATIONALISM AND THE POLITICS OF CULTURE IN QUEBEC

New Directions in Anthropological Writing History, Poetics, Cultural Criticism

GEORGE

E. MARCUS

Rice University

JAMES CLIFFORD

University of California, Santa Cruz

GENERAL

EDITORS

Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec

Richard Handler

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Michael E. Meeker

Belonging in America: Reading Between the Lines Constance Perin

Himalayan Dialogue: Tibetan Lamas and Gurung Shamans in Nepal

Stan Royal Mumford

Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men

and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan

Janice Boddy

People as Subject, People as Object: Selfhood and Peoplehood in Contemporary Israel Virginia R. Dominguez Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity and Tradition

Michael M. J. Fischer and Mehdi Abedi

Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture Cynthia J. Novack

NATIONALISM AND THE POLITICS OF CULTURE

IN QUEBEC

RICHARD

HANDLER

The University of Wisconsin Press

ALD F

Handler, Richard,

1053.2 -H36 1988

1950-

Nationalism and the politics of Culture in Quebec

The University of Wisconsin Press

2537 Daniels Street

Madison, Wisconsin 53718 3 Henrietta Street London WCZE 8LU, England Copyright © 1988 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved 5

4

Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Handler, Richard, 1950Nationalism and the politics of culture in Quebec.

Bibliography: pp. 199-214 Includes index.

1. Nationalism—Québec (Province) 2. Québec

(Province)—Cultural policy. 3. Culture—Political aspects—Québec (Province} I. Title. F1053.2.H36 1988 306.4'09714 87-40362 ISBN 0-299-11510-0 ISBN 0-299-11514~3 (pbk.)

For my father's sisters Gertrude, Esther, Mary, and Talie

CONTENTS

ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS CHAPTER ONE

3

Meditations on la féte of November

15

CHAPTER TWO

30

Some Salient Features of Québécois

Nationalist Ideology

32 39

The Individual as a Member of the Nation The Nation as a Collective Individual and a Collection of

47 50

The Negative Vision: Pollution and Death Summary: Salient Presuppositions of Nationalist Ideology

52 57 63

67

81 81 87 102

107

Individuals

CHAPTER THREE

In Search of the Folk Society: Folk Life,

Folklore Studies, and the Creation of

Tradition

Remembered Changes in Folk Dancing and Family Parties Quebec as a Folk Society

In Search of the Folk Society CHAPTER FOUR

The Founding of the Ministere des Affaires culturelles Quebec Cultural Politics before 1960 Three Philosophies of National Culture The Founding of the Ministre des Affaires culturelles

One Culture, Many Contents

CHAPTER FIVE

109

Holistic Culture, Bureaucratic Fragmentation

118

Toward an Anthropological Conception of Québécois

110

Bureaucratic Fragmentation

Culture

vii

Contents

124 129

140 142

144

152.

159 162 169 175

Mutually Exclusive Totalities Can Empty Culture Be Filled? CHAPTER SIX

“Having a Culture”: The Preservation of Quebec's Patrimoine Cultural Property Legislation

Nationalism,

Government

Cultural Property On Having a Culture

Regulation,

and the Creation

CHAPTER SEVEN

A Normal Society: Majority Language, Minority Cultures Linguistic Pollution Nationalist Ideology and Language Legislation On Having Minorities CHAPTER EIGHT

183

Meditations on Loose Ends: Lament and

199

REFERENCES

215

INDEX

viii

Dissent, Totality and Appropriation

of

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The present book was written over a period of ten years, and during that time many people aided and encouraged me in ways too numer-

ous and varied to mention. Among those for whose help I am particularly grateful are Samuel Bouchard, James Clifford, Bernard Cohn,

Gary Downey, Franci Duitch, Michael Ebner, Denise Gaudreault, Amy Goffman, Earl and Phoebe Handler, Michael Herzfeld, Ira Jack-

nis, André Jean,

Raymonde

Jodoin,

Michael

Lambek,

Carmella

Lessard, Gordon Lester-Massman, George Marcus, Denis Perron, Dan Rose, Danielle Saint-Laurent, David Schneider, Anthony Scott, Daniel Segal, Michael Silverstein, R. T. Smith, George Stocking, and

Bonnie Urciuoli. Funding and institutional support for research and writing were

obtained from a variety of sources. The Danforth Foundation funded much of my graduate work between 1973 and 1978, including my longest periods of field work. The Department of Anthropology at the

University of Chicago made it possible for me to obtain a William Rainey Harper Fellowship, granted by the university, which enabled

me, during 1978-79, to write my doctoral dissertation (parts of which, revised, are contained in the first three chapters of the present

work}. Dean Bailey Donnally of Lake Forest College provided funds for summer research in Quebec in 1980. During 1983-84 I was the Quebec Fellow at the University Consortium for Research on North America, a partnership of Brandeis, Harvard, and Tufts Universities,

and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Michéle de Guire, Heléne Gagné, Claude Girard, and Polly Lyman of the Quebec Government Delegation in New England provided invaluable assistance

to me during my year at the Consortium. I would particularly like to

thank Seyom Brown and Elliot Feldman of the Consortium for their assistance and encouragement. They know the complexities of cultural politics, and the difficulties and rewards of studying it.

NATIONALISM AND THE POLITICS OF CULTURE IN QUEBEC

CHAPTER ONE

Meditations on la féte of November 15 “The simple truth is that we've lost control of our own borders,” Ronald Reagan said, “and no

nation can do that and survive.”

Newsweek, 1984

Euphoria reigned in the quartier latin. The revelers began to arrive in the middle of the evening as it became apparent that the indépendantiste Parti Québécois would win an election victory as stunning as it had been unexpected. By midnight celebrants thronged the streets, marching to and fro, waving banners, blowing whistles and horns, singing, greeting friends and embracing strangers. In the bars

and cafés the festive, fraternal spirit was even more intense. In some I

found it impossible to advance from the door to a table, so tightly packed was the human mass. Only the dancers succeeded in clearing a bit of space in which to spin themselves round and round in rough imitation of traditional dances. In others, less crowded, I watched scenes

of pandemonium,

televised

from

Montreal,

compared

to

which the celebrations in Quebec City seemed calm. Montreal, his-

toric seedbed French-Canadian of nationalist sentiment, exploded on the evening of November 15, 1976—not only in the Paul Sauvé arena,

where Parti Québécois supporters had massed to await the returns, but in the streets as well. A reporter for the Montreal newspaper, Le Devoir, described enormous traffic jams which “undid themselves joyfully without collisions and without the intervention of the police,

who themselves paraded inhabitual smiles." It was, he concluded, la fete (Barbeau 1976:6).

Perhaps the revelry of that night resembled celebrations of past

Quebec

elections, in which winners and losers demonstrated the

strength of partisan sentiments that French-Canadian nationalists

3

Meditations on la féte of November

15

have never ceased to condemn as divisive for the nation. Yet the evening of November 15 was different. For one thing, many of these celebrants were not partisan supporters—some, in fact, were not old

enough to vote. Furthermore, for them the victory of November 15

was not the simple replacement of one political party by another at the level of the provincial government. It_was i tional

victory, a victory of the Québécois people in its ongoing struggle for

independence and statehood. Their célebration éxpressed more than

mere partisan joy—it marked their belief in the coming of age of a

collectivity and their pride in belonging to that collectivity. Indeed, the celebrations ofNovember 15 could befairly likened

to those states of collective effervescence that Durkheim imagined as

central to the social order. Certainly the electricity was there, an electricity that lifts the assembled masses “to an extraordinary degree

of exaltation” (Durkheim 1912:247}. And certainly for the leaders of

the Parti Québécois the victory of November 15 represented a

renewal and even a rebirth of the collectivity. “On n'est pas un petit peuple, on est peut-étre quelque chose comme un grand peuple"— this was the passionate proclamation of René Lévesque to the cheer-

ing throngs in the Paul Sauvé arena.! Camille Laurin, soon to become

an important minister in the Lévesque cabinet, told the same audience that “we are the government that Quebec has awaited for

250 years. We are going to dance in the streets of Montreal. We are

going to dance all over Quebec. We are finally going to make of

Quebec the country of which our ancestors dreamed”

(Lachance

1976:A8). Following the interpretation of these leaders, then, it would

seem that the euphoria of that night was an index of supreme social

solidarity, a testimonial to the health of the nation. La féte of

November 15 was one of those acts by which the collectivity is “periodically made and remade" (Durkheim 1912:470).

Or was it? Even during the weeks of feverish electoral activity

that preceded November 15, an outside observer would not infallibly

have remarked upon the existence of a political campaign. Had he ignored the mass media and avoided political rallies, he could have

lived through those weeks with only the vaguest awareness of the unfolding political campaign, and with no sense at all of the discussion of national identity and destiny that accompanied it. Daily life

continued as usual during those weeks and, as is typical of their neighbors the Americans, the Québécois seemed able to live their

lives as if nothing out of the ordinary were occurring. Such an

1. As reported by Athot (1976:A9): “We are not a little people, we are perhaps something like a great people.” To appreciate fully the metamorphosis implied in this assertion, one must remember that the expression petit peuple is a standard epithet used by nationalists, especially before the 1960s, to describe the French-Canadian nation (cf. Reid 1974). 4

Meditations on la féte of November

observation does not immediately Durkheim,

15

invalidate our evocation of

for he himself taught that states of collective efferves-

cence are of necessity transitory and infrequent, the bulk of social life

being lived in the sphere of the profane (1912:245ff).

Other facts claim our attention, however. For example, the Parti

Québécois received only a bit more than 40 percent of the votes cast

among five parties. Of those francophones who did not vote for the Parti Québécois some claimed an allegiance to Canada equal to that which they felt for Quebec; others gave primary loyalty to Quebec

but argued that the province ought to remain in the Canadian Con-

federation; and still others felt no attachment to Canada but nonethe-

less disagreed with the Parti Québécois vision for the future of Quebec. These Québécois did not participate in la féte of November

15, though they were well aware of those who did. Euphoric effervescence might have reigned, but unanimity did not. Furthermore, it is to say the least ironic that during the campaign péquiste (from P. Q., for Parti Québécois)

candidates often

spoke as if the nation were in imminent danger of disintegration. For there is, in the ideology of the Parti Québécois, something that might be called a “negative vision." This negative vision is a reality not only for the ideologues of the Parti Québécois,

but for all Québécois

nationalists concerned with la survivance—the survival of the French-

Canadian or Québécois people. The notion of survival impliess strug: gle in a hostile environment, and, for a small group of French speak-

ers who see themselves as surrounded by a sea of English-speaking

North Americans, it is no wonder that Hamlet's question has come to

have special relevance. “To be or not to be"—the leading nationalist historian Lionel Groulx asked this on behalf of his people time and

time again in the first half of the the twentieth century, and still today

this reference to Shakespeare is common in nationalist writing. After the Parti Québécois took power, it would attempt to provide the

institutional bases to allow the Québécois nation to ansyer affirmatively, once and for all, the question of its survival. For example, Bill 101, the controversial language law to be enacted in 1977, would be

designed to counter "the cultural and linguistic disintegration of French-speaking Quebeckers" (Quebec 1977:49). And a government paper on cultural development would propose remedies for “our state of advanced deculturalization” (Quebec 1978:155).

positive vision of collective unity

and maturity—for how can an

entity that does notin the first place exist run the risk of disintegra-

tion? The historian Groulx saw the birth as well as the golden age of

the French-Canadian people in the past, in Catholic New France, while situating the beginning of its disintegration in his own time.

Parti Québécois ideologues and other contemporary nationalists also

look back to New France, as well as to the nineteenth century, to find

5

Meditations on la féte of November 15

the birth and slow development of the Québécois people. In their view,

however,

a

perfected state of national

being

depends

upon

political independence, which leads them to place the gelden age tn

the Future. Meanwhile, as for Groulx, the present is marked with the

threat of annihilation. In both cases a vision of the integrity of the collectivity coexists with a dark vision of national disintegration.

For the celebrants on the night of November 15, the vision of

integrity prevailed. It seemed to them that the people, by electing a Parti Québécois government, had taken the first step towards assuming its destiny as an independent nation-state. The next step would be

the referenduiii.

Nationalism is an ideology about individuated being. It is an ideology

coricérned with boundedness, continuity, and homogeneity encompassing diversity. It is an Ideology in which social reality, conceived in terms of nationhood, is endowed with the reality of natural things. In principle the individuated being of a nation—its life, its reality—is defined by boundedness, continuity, and homogeneity

encompassing diversity. In principle a nation is bounded—that is, precisely delimited—in space and time: in space, by the inviolability of its borders and the ex: allegiance of its members; in time, by its birth or beginning in history. In principle the national entity is continuous: in tinie-by virtue of the uninterruptedness of its history; in space, by the integrity of the national territory. In principle national being is defined by a homogeneity which encompasses

diversity: however individual members of the nation may differ, they

share essential attributes that constitute sameness overrides difference, ~~

their national identity;

“In principle an individuated actor manifests his life through the

exercise of choice, and through the consistent action that follows

therefrom. Consistent action is both characteristic and rational: the nation acts in accord with its essence, and according to its needs.

In principle the life of an individuated actor is celebrated

through creativity, which is the imposition of one's choices on the physical and social world, and in proprietorship, which is the establishment of permanent bonds between self and the products resulting from creative activity. Nationalism is an ideology of what C. B. Macpherson (1962) called possessive individualism. It is customary in the literature on nations and ethnic nationalism to distinguish between “nation” and “state.” A nation, it is said, is a human group that may or may not control its ow) . while a state is a palolitical organization that mai or may not corres-

pond to all of one, and only

one, nation. It is customary to point out

that there are many more nations or potential nations than states; that most nations aspire to statehood yet many have not and will not attain it; and that many states, federal or unitary, encompass more than one 6