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June
20, 2003
A Radical from Quebec Passes
Pierre
Bourgault, 1934 - 2003
By NORMAN MADARASZ
Quebec political activist and intellectual, Pierre
Bourgault was a man for whom politics and passion were woven
from the same thread. The greatest orator that either Quebec
or Canada produced of his generation, perhaps even of the century,
he triggered the spark sending the province's "Revolution
tranquille" into turmoil and rage.
That so-called "Quiet Revolution"
refers to the period of Quebec's opening onto the outside world
following a lengthy retreat. It may have been festering as far
back as the colony's failed aspiration to independence in the
1837-38 uprising. What otherwise remains certain is its ultimate
culmination in Premier Maurice Duplessis' democratic dictatorship.
Duplessis seated his political power with the aid of the Catholic
Church in a heady brew of nationalist protectionism. It took
place at the cost of the Church's dominance over the souls--and
minds--of the former French colony. When he died in 1959, political
and social liberty finally reached Quebec.
Among its offspring, the Rassemblement
pour l'independance (RIN) was a festive sixties' rendition
of a two-century old dream: freedom of the French-Canadian nation
from British subjection. Among its founding members, Pierre Bourgault
set it ablaze with his fiery orations when assuming its leadership
in 1964. He died on Monday, June 16, bequeathing a haze of some
3500 speeches left untranscribed. They hover ethereally over
the French-speaking province's claims to cultural and national
distinction.
Bourgault was born in East Angus, Quebec
on Jan. 23, 1934, and was educated by the Jesuits at College
Jean de Brebeuf in Montreal. Like Louis Riel, another notable
French-Canadian radical--albeit Metis--Bourgault initially considered
becoming a priest. An atheist and homosexual, he became instead
"Quebec's official separatist icon: the standard against
which others gauge their level of militancy", as journalist
Benoît Aubin once said of him.
If icons all feedback to archetypes,
then Bourgault cast a Hamlet-like figure over Quebec politics.
As the leader of a political party, he was the first to call
out for Quebec independence in 1964. Four years later when de
Gaulle uttered his fateful words on the balcony of Montreal City
Hall, he was merely preaching to the converted.
Bourgault was especially the militant
and intellectual to have ushered in his generation to the awareness
that political reform in Quebec was akin to Third-World struggles
against colonialism. Political reform could therefore only mean
independence from the colonial Empire, represented in its later-day
by the Canadian Federal Confederation. He took no short cuts
to prove it. And the first victim was hope in the aspirations
of the Quiet Revolution itself.
Quebec is the core of what was once called
Nouvelle France: the land of the French Canadian nation. It was
conquered by the British between the years of 1754 and 1763.
The 1763 Treaty of Paris set the stage for France's willed exclusion
from the North American setting. In doing so it abandoned its
settlers to a country which Jacques Godbout argues in his film
The Fate of America really longed for 'the village'--which
is what the Iroquois meant by their word 'Kanata'. With a fleet
of seventy vessels and Iroquois warriors, Great Britain undertook
a full-scale colonial invasion of Canada, capturing the fortress
acropolis of Quebec in 1759. In addition to recently acquired
Acadia, British North America then counted fifteen colonies.
For the next two-hundred years the British either strived or
yearned for the francophone population's assimilation. This was
the ghost haunting Bourgault's nights, and the voice that became
verse and rasp in his smoke-incensed larynx was its very own.
It was a voice that could stir a crowd
into fury and outburst. Its pitch is said to have even frightened
its player. When he approached the orator's stage, Bourgault
rubbed words together to spark fire. A lover of the French language,
he also spoke English with a gentleman's finesse. But he never
forgot his stint in the Federal army in which every dictum had
to be uttered in English.
A defining moment in the Quebec struggle
for independence took shape in the infamous Saint-Jean Baptiste
riot of 1968. Crowds gathered at the edge of Montreal's Lafontaine
Park to view the annual parade in honor of Quebec's patron saint.
Among them was the star of Trudeaumania, acting-Prime Minister
Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a homegrown product of the federal Liberal
party running for his first election as head of state. Even more,
it was the eve of a federal election held against a background
of growing insurrection in Quebec. Trudeau, a staunch opponent
of the 'independantistes' whom he had tainted in an article as
"not social nationalists, but national socialists",
was favored to win. In his hometown, Trudeau's appearance on
national television meant to prove Quebec's love for Confederation.
Bourgault's RIN had other ideas.
In one of the truly outstanding historical
documentaries on Canada, Donald Brittain's three-part The
Champions, Bourgault is confronted to the filmmaker's prodding
questions. 'Who organized the Saint-Jean-Baptiste riot?' "I
did," responded Bourgault unequivocally. It was a night
of frenzy rarely seen in Quebec, comparable only to "Samedi
des Matraques" (Truncheon Saturday), a vicious police crackdown
on demonstrators against Queen Elizabeth II's 1964 visit to Quebec.
Then, the police violence had occurred despite Bourgault's call
for restraint. In a furious speech, he had just called for Quebec
to seek independence from Canada.
On June 24, 1968 Bourgault chose not
to let history repeat itself. As the Molotov cocktails and bottles
flew into the VIP grandstand, pelting the fleeing dignitaries,
mounted police charged the thick crowd. Bourgault recounts how
his people were spread about to seek both shelter and tilt the
brewing passion of a youth swept up by the world student movement.
Despite the police brutally and indiscriminate violence, Trudeau
remained in his seat. In an evening meant to offer a heroic welcome,
Bourgault handed his rival a hero's stage.
Unbeknownst even to him, he had just
signed Trudeau's ticket to become the most influential politician
in Canadian history. As for Bourgault himself, police spotted
him immediately. First to be arrested and charged with inciting
a riot, he was acquitted a week later.
Failing to get elected at the helms of
the RIN, the project of Quebec's future convinced Bourgault of
the need to step back from the leadership. When another of Trudeau's
rivals, Rene Levesque's Movement Souverainete-Association turned
into a full-fledge party, the Parti Quebecois (PQ) in 1968, Bourgault
dissolved the RIN. He called for his movement to rally to the
new hopeful and work in haste for independence. Side-lined and
feared by Levesque, Bourgault was still elected to the Party's
executive committee and never lost his vision of an independent
Quebec based on humanist principles.
Under Levesque, the Parti Quebecois was
first swept to power in the fall of 1976. It held the first referendum
on Quebec independence in May 1980. Bourgault appeared as a commentator
on the French-language national network, SRC (Societe Radio-Canada),
on Referendum night. As the results streamed in against the Sovereignists,
Bourgault showed another side of his impenitent passion. Unable
to witness the defeat, he turned his back to humiliation and
to the screen broadcasting the referendum results. Stupefied
silence was the order of the day. He would next open his mouth
only to call for Levesque's ousting: "it's with death in
my soul to have to call for the resignation of the greatest statesman
Quebec has ever produced".
Always on the vanguard, he began writing an English-language
column in the meantime for the arch-conservative Montreal daily,
the Gazette. In doing so, he entered the lion's den. "A
shouting match is better than the dreadful silence that sows
distrust between partners and turns true friends into enemies,"
is how he explained his move. To this day, the Gazette
has been rabidly opposed to French Canadian nationalism and has
always interpreted Quebec politics through the attenuating spectrum
of Anglo-Saxon rights. And when the Brits left the land subsequent
to the 1976 PQ victory, the newspaper then increased its font
to include ethic English-speakers.
Bourgault's essays dealt with issues
of civilization, morality and critical thought. In a piece from
May 1982, he wrote of the racism expressed toward Quebec's fleet
of Haitian taxi drivers. "It is almost natural to be born
a racist," he wrote. Only to challenge his readers: "It's
a crime to remain one."
With his fine intellectual's eye, oratory
wit and communicator's heart, it was no wonder that the next
major PQ leader after Rene Levesque, Mr. Jacques Parizeau, sought
his services as political 'communications' advisor. Yet the hamlet
would soon overwhelm the village. At first, Bourgault was damned
for preaching sedition: "If a vast majority of franco-Quebecers
vote Yes and are prevented from (becoming sovereign) because
the English vote against, then it's a dangerous situation."
Then he shamed by lashing out at Quebec's minorities: "It
is the Jews, the Italians and the Greeks who cast an ethnic vote.
It is they who are racist, not us. They have only one objective,
to block (sovereignists). To win a referendum we will have to
do like them: an ethnic vote!" Premier Parizeau could only
repeat Bourgault's verdict when learning of defeat in the 1995
referendum by less than one percent. It still remains that "money
and the ethnic vote" did indeed block an overwhelming majority
of Quebecois from winning their referendum.
He was at his most Hamlet-like in the tone of his resignation
from government advisory functions: "I have become an embarrassment
to my allies. Since the sovereignist cause comes above all else
and I can no longer serve it correctly, I am definitely quitting
the political scene and leave others, no doubt more able and
efficient than I, the care of defending and promoting (sovereignty)."
Few however will be able to speak so strikingly from where it
made collective sense to seek historical retribution.
As if in a morality tale, when Quebec
finally rid itself of the Catholic Church's paternalism and weaned
itself from a corrupt democracy in the early sixties, it awoke
to a world in which its language and culture were immediately
made vulnerable. Numbering less than 4 million at the time and
with the specter of fully anglicized New Orleans as a nearby
memo, the 'French-Canadians' had cause to worry.
Under the dominance of Anglo-Saxon industrialists
and financiers, its people were as undereducated and unskilled
as Blacks and Natives even for the 1960s' work force. As Jean
Lesage's provincial government took office in 1960 it implemented
an urgent plan to modernize the province. It had to prepare a
work force to confront the Anglo-American system that had dominated
it for decades. This preparation would bear its fruit with the
flight of Anglo business in the late-1970s, petrified by the
prospect of a 'French' take-over. Quebecois men could now strive
for more than to be priests and school teachers, and young women
began streaming through the university doors.
The most ambitious step in the public
transformation of Quebec into French came with the enactment
of Law 101, the French Language Charter, in 1977. French became
de facto the official language of the province--just as Canada
as a whole was going through the strokes of becoming bilingual.
For all its brilliant accomplishments, the PQ's work on rallying
immigrants to the just cause of Quebec independence has been
the major obstacle to fulfilling its historical project.
The quality of Quebec's intellectuals
has often balked at convincing the stubbornness of the other.
At the same time, many intellectuals have all too easily embraced
the myth of the American and French republics as if seeking remoteness
from the British system at any cost and irrespective of the government
in charge. In that, they submit to the attraction most often
exerted by the southern neighbor onto Quebec's immigrant populations
and their offspring. Locked in a blind spot, the two persuasions
have not met.
Bourgault's column in the 1980s for the
Montreal Gazette was a rare glance given to Anglo readers
of the level of intellectual debate occurring just across the
language divide--if only they would learn the province's official
language. As the son of Hungarian political refugees, I was often
uncertain where to stand on the provincial national issue. Bourgault's
writings and speeches were instrumental for lifting Quebec out
of the provincialism of the debate as depicted by the Gazette
as well as by many French Canadian federal politicians eking
out a living in Ottawa. He placed its struggle on a broader world-historical
plane. As such he wrote and spoke like a comet, or a shining
star, an artist/radical who made revolt crystal clear by painstakingly
polishing its essence: words that when uttered have the character
to shape the common good and collective will.
In 1980 he spoke as if today: "I
will walk no longer."
Norman Madarasz,
born and raised in Montreal as a 'bilingual allophone', teaches
and writes on philosophy and international relations in Rio de
Janeiro. He welcomes comments at nmphdiol2@yahoo.ca.
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