From The Nation to the Citizen

There is a strong relationship between how individuals define their identity and individuals conceive of their history. But is history objective? Or even more precisely, can history be objective? How much is historiography informed by the socio-political context in which historians live?

Ronald Rudin investigates these topics in his article “From the Nation to the Citizen”. In doing so, he looks into two interrelated questions, namely, how historiography in Quebec has been informed by the educational and political dynamics in Quebec, and how writings about the Quebec history have shaped the identity of the Francophone population in Canada.

The author argues that it is possible to divide the writings on the history of Quebec into three more or less distinct paradigms. Writing up until the middle of the 20^th century, the authors of the first paradigm were amateur than professional historians. These historians were primarily preoccupied with the difference among the minority French Canadians and the majority of English Canadians. Aware of the political and economic inferiority vis-à-vis their English Canadians, these non-professionally trained historians focused their writing on accounting for what made French Canadians culturally unique. While these texts were primarily historical writings, they secondarily served “to stiffen the resolve of [Quebec] people to survive”.

Late 1940s and early 1950s witnessed economic growth in Quebec. While more money was invested in education, history departments grew and a new wave of professional historians emerged. These writers put the blame on economic and political failure of the Quebec less on the outside world than on the French-speakers. These writings had an impact on the “Quiet Revolution”, which raised the question of who it was that made the Quebecois.

Modern historical narratives constitute the second paradigm. These narratives differ in two important ways from earlier ones. First, the nous or we of the Quebecois includes not only the French speakers, but also native speaking and English speaking Quebecers; and secondly, they depicted the Quebecers as self-confident, well educated, “successful, entrepreneurial and ambitious”. Moreover, modern historians were rather neutral and avoided devoting themselves to any particular political group or functioning as an activist of any political party.  

Historians in the third paradigm are critical of modernists’ historiography in that there is “no real connection between the [modernist] interpretation and the persistent representations of the past in the collective memory”. A well-known historian of this paradigm is Gerard Bouchard who defines the history of the Quebec society as the society of a new people with some residents like the natives as earlier settlers and some others like the immigrants from the 17^th century onward as the more recent residents.

I found this article interesting for an epistemological and an historical reason. As for the former, the author replies to the questions mentioned in the first paragraph by showing how historians in Quebec “have produced works based upon a certain search for the truth, but moulded at the same time by the society in which they lived”. We often tend to consider history a science, whose strong connotations such as method, objectivity and neutrality lead us to believe that history describes the past or even the present by truly reflecting what has happened. I believe it is important to be aware of the contractedness of history. History is written by an historian who lives in a particular socio-cultural-political context and this context is key in defining how s/he observes the historical phenomenon under study.

I enjoyed reading the article for the role historical writings have had in the formation of Quebec identity. It shows that identity is as much a construction that historical writings are. If identity can change with time, and if historical writings can play a role in this, the role of education in co-constructing a cosmopolitan and multicultural identity might come to the fore. A question worth being raised is whether teachers can or should be neutral when teaching students about abstract issues such as identity or citizenship?