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English Pages 217 [240] Year 1988
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