Ronald Rudin's Article: Quebec Historical Writing and Shaping of Identity

Historians project particular visions for the future of their society onto the past: this shouldn’t surprise us, says Ronald Rudin of Concordia University. Rudin provides a strong account of the way Quebec historians’ perspectives on citizenship evolved, reflecting the contexts of power that existed at the time (i.e., the relative power of Quebec within Canada, of francophones versus anglophones). He turns to Jocelyn Létourneau’s critique of Gérald Bouchard, a leading intellectual of the sovereignty movement. Bouchard is an advocate of a constitutional civic nationalism in which the story of French Canadians is central. It has affinities with traditional ethnic-based nationalism in Quebec, Rudin argues. But the relative ease one has in surfacing overt political intentions in Bouchard’s writings should not lull us into believing that most other history is somehow untainted by the political views of the period in which it was written, or indeed free, of the author’s subjectivity, he cautions. He says historians have long contributed to identity-making – and they don’t always attempt to hide it. But this has contributed to an awkward spectacle, since historians are supposed to be engaged in science.

Following the early 20^th century work of Groulx and Garneau and their emphasis on citizenship as ethnicity (including language and religion) in an era where cultural survival was considered the most achievable goal, two groups of historians, based at Université de Montréal and Université Laval, began to focus on the economic powerless of Quebec society. They provided the intellectual foundations for the Quiet Revolution that would offer a means to overcome that powerlessness. But fundamentally, historians were still writing from the point of view that Quebec’s story was different from the rest of North America. All this changed with the arrival of the modernist historians: the normalcy paradigm. The Quebec state was now interventionist, the society was rapidly modernizing and increasingly prosperous, and the historians reflected this. Histoire du Québec contemporain dealt with the post-Confederation period, in a departure from most histories that contained a strong focus on the conquest. Moreover, Linteau, Robert and Durocher and others emphasized territorial Quebec, not an ethnic Quebec. The old sense of defeatism was gone. Although Rudin does not say explicitly why historians would have resorted to territory in particular to talk about Quebec identity, perhaps they thought the conceptual borders in the realm of geography were more solid.

Dumont, Bouchard and others who have challenged the modernist view appear to believe “the older form of nationalism had its merits.” Rudin asks: How different are the “false representations” Bouchard finds in the early historians, with their emphasis on rural society as fundamental to Quebec’s past and future, from Bouchard’s own work in preparing the intellectual ground for a nation québécoise?  As Létourneau contends, where Bouchard’s writings pay attention to non-francophones, it is for the most part “only in terms of their ties ‘to a welcoming French speaking population”(108). It is also interesting to view this discussion of Bouchard’s advocacy for civic nationalism in light of his later involvement with the government-appointed Bouchard-Taylor Commission on ethnic accommodation.

A potential limitation of the article is that the citizenship that Rudin is speaking about concerns primarily the relationship between the citizen and the State, or occasionally the relationship between the citizen and a broad collective of his/her co-citizens (the “big group”). But we should not forget that the citizenship literature, in accordance with communitarian theories of citizenship, is also interested in the individual’s relationships to the small group(s).

Another potential limitation: it would have been interesting if Rudin had considered the impact of Quebec historians’ emergence in the field of globalization studies as well as citizenship theory. Other models of citizenship have come home to Quebec over the past 40 years even as the province has become an economic powerhouse. Economic self-sufficiency and an emphasis on knowledge workers appear to have created a space for more cosmopolitan forms of citizenship in the province’s global hubs.

The main strength of the article is to show that the writing of history – in contemporary times as much as in the past – has been used to advance particular claims about citizenship and belonging. Rudin’s analysis also invites us to consider Quebec history in light of Benedict Anderson. Although Rudin doesn’t cite him specifically, Anderson among others comes to mind when Rudin writes about the complementarity between shaping the past / shaping of citizenship. (Bouchard’s research chair at UQAC, where he currently teaches, centres on les imaginaires collectifs).