The chronicle of Louis Cornellier: “The choice of Marie”

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Can Marie de l’Incarnation (1599-1672), the great mystic canonized in 2014, still inspire Quebecers? The writer Carl Bergeron believes it and seeks with enthusiasm to convince us of it in The great Mary or the luxury of holiness (Médiaspaul, 2021, 80 pages), an ardent apologetic meditation on the first and most famous ursuline in our history. At the bottom of his work, writes Bergeron, “would rest the too long lost secret of our name”, the “metaphysics” of our people.

Bergeron does not exaggerate the importance of Marie de l’Incarnation, née Guyart. In New France. The great adventure (Septentrion, 2001), the journalist fond of history Louis-Guy Lemieux affirms that it is she, more than Champlain, Hébert, Talon or Jolliet, “who best embodies the courage and tenacity of the first Canadians”.

The historian Dominique Deslandres does not hesitate, for his part, to put the nun on an equal footing with “the Descartes, Pascal and other geniuses of the time”, while the French philosopher Bruno Pinchard compares her to Chateaubriand and Baudelaire. “Everything is admirable there,” said Bossuet when speaking of his texts.

By presenting the Correspondence of Mary of the Incarnation as “a Search for lost time Catholic who, faithful to the inverted genius of our history, does not bear witness to an old world – decadent and refined – but to a new, rustic and adventurous one, called to thwart all calculations and to rise from all the dead, over and over again ”, Bergeron is therefore part of a long line of admirers.

The Quebec writer, however, goes further. Mary of the Incarnation, he writes, is “an unalterable source of life” from which, even today, we can draw to reconnect with “honor, beauty, grandeur”, ideals that our history tormented. made us forget and that our frustrated time no longer understands.

Some people will believe that in such a discourse, we find the return of “mythical compensations” from the time of survival. After the Conquest, dispossessed of any effective political power, the French Canadians, guided by the Catholic clergy, took refuge in an epic past to be convinced of their value, while submitting to English power. Bergeron knows this story and does not fall into this trap.

From the start of his essay, he greeted the generation of Bias, who saw in these compensatory myths the manifestation of a mentality of the colonized. By pleading for a “reconquest of the principle of historical reality” based on “an iconoclastic and unbelieving reading of the history of New France” and on the idea according to which our history really begins only with the patriots in struggle of 1837-1838, the thinkers of Bias led, underlines Bergeron, an “intellectual adventure […] courageous and healthy ”.

This lucid enterprise, however, had a sad backlash by depriving us of our long history, by throwing away “the key to the rich treasure” contained in New France. However, explains Bergeron, to give yourself the chance to be truly free, you have to know both how to assume the duty of lucidity, that is to say the terrain of reality, of politics, and to welcome all the heritage. , so as not to give up a part of ourselves, especially if it is the momentum of the beginnings.

Marie de l’Incarnation, in 1639, despite the extreme difficulty of the enterprise, despite her entourage who tried to dissuade her, despite “petty-bourgeois reason”, made the choice, for the love of God , to link its destiny to that of New France, “a country which thwarts all calculations and maintains a fine line between being and non-being”.

Three hundred years later, Gaston Miron, “this modest and heroic Joseph who first built the house of being, by making the wounded language of the tribe, for the first time in our history, the material of his art and of his father’s love ”, resumed, in a certain way, the“ walk of love ”of Mary of the Incarnation.

By restoring verticality to a culture condemned for too long to survive on the ground, by proclaiming “the responsibility to exist”, individually and collectively, in all sovereignty, Miron, who thus finds a form of transcendence in immanence, reinscribes our adventure in universal history and invites us to say “yes” to our destiny in order to pass, concludes Bergeron, “from survival to survival”.

After A cynic among lyricists (Boréal, 2012), in which he saluted the foreknowledge of the work of Denys Arcand, Carl Bergeron, in this original and lively essay whose sumptuous style with aristocratic accents does not always avoid the trap of grandiloquence, becomes lyrical among the cynics. I do not say no.

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