In The duty of December 31, 2021, Gérard Bouchard wrote a column on a fundamental subject for the present and for the future of Quebec. Are we, he asked, out of transcendence, that is to say deprived of strong values and ideals that give meaning to individual and collective action?
Generally inclined to optimism, Bouchard intended precisely to refute this thesis by contesting some of his great predecessors who had supported it. Bouchard excels when he tackles this type of big questions mixing history and sociology. The result of his “critical examination” is therefore fascinating, but nevertheless remains questionable.
The thesis under debate, mainly defended by Fernand Dumont (1927-1997) and Jacques Grand’Maison (1931-2016), is well known. Necessary, they said, the Quiet Revolution, however, had a perverse effect in destroying the old French-Canadian culture without really replacing it. She, therefore, wrote Bouchard to summarize the opposing thesis, “born of a vacuum that augured well for many evils from which Quebec would later suffer, as one would expect from a society without a compass, devoid of ideals and civic morality ”.
Bouchard does not subscribe to this interpretation. Rather, he asserts that the great national myths—the quest for national uplift and the desire for solidarity—undauntedly animated the momentum of the Quiet Revolution. According to him, the disappointment of the grief-stricken intellectuals whom he contests is explained by their attachment to a fantasized Catholic religion, the decline of which would have hurt them, and by a melancholy look at an idealized past.
A critique of this critical examination is in order. A clarification, first: if we can, in fact, agree with Bouchard regarding the maintenance of strong values and ideals during the Quiet Revolution, we can also observe a serious erosion of these same ideals thereafter.
The transcendence in question in this debate is not limited to its religious expression. As Bouchard explains, it also designates “an order of transcendence that can operate in the sphere of humanism”. Fernand Dumont already said that, in 1995, in Common reasons, noting that the human “is only at his measure by surpassing himself” and that a “society cannot be reduced to exchanges on markets nor to the division of labour; it is a sharing of ideals which give the greatest number the feeling of participating in the construction of the City”.
The Quiet Revolution, of course, was driven by this kind of transcendence. In a text published in the collective I remember, I imagine (PUM, 2021), the essayist Mathieu Bélisle goes in the direction of Bouchard, by advancing the idea that Quebecers before 1960 were probably not as religious as the historical vulgate affirms, and he goes even further going a long way, adding that the Quiet Revolution was a great moment of faith in Quebec — “in youth, in man, in the revolution or independence”, he specifies.
Contrary to Bouchard, however, who is more vague in this regard, Bélisle does not hesitate to observe that this bubbling did not last and gave way, especially since the 1995 referendum, to “the return in force of prosaism” and to a “kind of political (and probably also spiritual) vacuum”.
Where, indeed, is collective transcendence today? What are the sacred ideals of the Quebec nation? Jacques Grand’Maison, whom the theologian Gregory Baum described as a prophet, knew well that he was not doing science by deploring the absence of inner life and deep moral convictions in too many of his compatriots, but the spectacle of contemporary selfishness prevents us from contradicting it too quickly.
Fernand Dumont, the wise man of Quebec according to Baum, hailed the Quiet Revolution—“a capital stage in our historical journey”—but noted the “breakdown in interpretation” that followed. He diagnosed a “crisis of objectives” in health and education, a strictly administrative shift in the Quebec state and indifference to the status of French and the nation.
“Where then,” he wrote in Common reasons, will citizens draw the enthusiasm that drives work, innovation and entrepreneurship, if not from passions that have their source elsewhere than in Treasury Board diagrams? Liberation from the constraints of religion, added the believer that he was, will it only lead to an ethical void? Is the vague environmentalist faith that we lend to the younger generations by generalizing a little hastily sufficient as transcendence?
With this spicy column, Gérard Bouchard launched an essential discussion for the future of Quebec. I hope it will continue at the same height.