Let me tell you about New France, the real one, not that of Jean-Luc Mélenchonbut the one we call today Quebec. By telling you where I’m talking about, as the leftists used to say. I am first and foremost a Quebec nationalist, a separatist, convinced that my people, to survive, must achieve full political existence, independence. The French know from near or far that on July 24, 1967, General de Gaulle launched his “Long live free Quebec!” » from the top of the balcony of Montreal city hall.
But let’s be honest, they know little about the history of Quebec. L’America French is the great unthought of their history. They have the vague memory that a few centuries ago, North America was French. But they didn’t really take these seriously. “a few acres of snow”to use Voltaire’s famous formula. France has repressed its American experience, as if the memory of its imperial expansion ignored its only successful settlement colony, having transformed itself into a people in its own right.
All that said, since the question of Quebec will return to the heart of international news in the coming years, with the probable holding of a third referendum on independence, some may want to know this unfinished country better. They could then look at the history of Quebec in two volumes just published by Jacques Houle, published by Liber, in 2024 and 2025.
A story of national affirmation
The title: The First Canadians refers to the old name of Quebecers – because, often, Quebecers have changed their name. They were first, in the early days of New France, French, before quickly becoming, in a few generations, Canadians, then French-Canadians, a century after the English Conquest of 1760, when the conqueror had appropriated the name of their country and their people’s name (conquerors like to appropriate the name of the peoples they conquer, I say in passing). With the Quiet Revolution in 1960, a great moment of national affirmation, the French Canadians of Quebec then became Quebecois. It was their way of calling themselves masters of their own home.
“ The Quebec people should have been swept away by history, but they clung to existence »
The diversity discourse becoming more and more established from the 1990s, and claiming to group all the inhabitants of Quebec under the term Quebecois, in particular the English-Canadians of Quebec and the anglicized immigrants – I am not obviously talking here about the Quebecized immigrants, who have become French-speaking Quebecers. We are there.
The history of the Quebec people, for Jacques Houle, is first and foremost that of a people that history should have swept away, but who clung to existence, with a keen awareness of the need to form a necessary demographic majority within the State that they control. Quebec is an unfinished nation-state, embedded in a Canadian federation which seeks to neutralize it, even destroy it. It is these people who aspire to independence. One should never underestimate the existential pain that comes with not having one’s own country. In other words, Houle is interested not only in Quebec as an administrative territory on which an indeterminate population lives, but in the Quebec people. To the historic people of Quebec. Here he sheds light on an issue on this side of the Atlantic.
Anyone who tells the history of France while pretending that the migratory revolution has not changed the very meaning of the word French is participating in an ideological hoax. These are the people who talk about republican values all the time, abstract identity taking over from real identity. The history of small nations is enlightening to the extent that they know that identity nationality and administrative nationality are not the same thing and that if the first is vital, the second, as soon as it moves away from the first, can turn against it and destroy it.
