The Quebec government has created the Secretariat for Relations with English-Speaking Quebecers. We have become a mystery to them, perhaps from as early as Josée Legault’s 1992 publication L’invention d’une minorité: Les Anglo- Québécois. We, the “invented minority,” seem to lack a strong sense of belonging. Of course, the Secretariat’s existence acknowledges that we exist, and the idea that we are a fictional minority seems to be understood, generally, as false. The Secretariat’s first job, according to an excellent article written by Guy Rex Rodgers for the Fall ’21 issue of Quebec Heritage News, was to figure out who we are. Though well-intentioned and welcomed, the Secretariat’s creation is a good example of how difficult it is for a colonizing power to understand how to decolonize itself, to examine its own history thoroughly and with an open mind before drawing conclusions about its minorities.
I know, your first reaction is to wonder how I can call Quebec a colonizing power. There is little question that Quebec has dominated and colonized its territory. There are many Indigenous examples of this, the first one that comes to mind is the Oka Crisis, but there are many other incidents, before and since, that indicate a cultural hierarchy inherited from France.
We, the English-speaking people, are those who chose to stay in Quebec when we did not have to. We endured the closed attitude to hiring our children in the public service and the slow decline of our cultural voice, until our only significant number of remaining members was in Montreal. There are expectations that we will die out and whoever of our descendants remain here will become real Québécois, somehow. The Secretariat and the majority thinking may not rise to the challenge of decolonization, but they are inviting us to share our voices.
The first item on the list is to tell the truth about our history. If Quebec was abused in its past, it was by the Catholic Church. Both here and in France, the Church looked after its parishioners and was responsible for over half the services we receive today from our provincial government, but beyond its tithe, the price it charged was to reformulate its people, changing the way they thought and functioned. Its influence was mitigated in a lot of other European countries for better or worse during the Wars of Religion, but Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII’s prime minister, set in motion the destruction of French protestants, the Huguenots, and Louis XIV completed it.
New France was the dream of the Huguenots who made four or five attempts to establish it in South America, the Carolinas and here, but the homogenizing vision of Richelieu left no room for minorities. In the 1620s, the cardinal forbade Huguenots from doing business in New France, and all births, marriages and deaths could only be recorded by the parish priest. That served to define French culture right up to the present. Even the French Revolution did not kill it. Difference is not tolerated.
With no Huguenots allowed legally in the colony, the Church took over administration and their shared objective was to create a Catholic colony by converting the people who were here already, and accepting colonists who were obliged to declare themselves as Catholic. Even so, a great number of those colonists were Huguenot and that is coming out in genetic research today. They were oppressed in France and hoped to be able to find greater freedom here. They were the Canadiens.
In 1629 a French Huguenot, David Kirke, sailing for the English king, took Quebec, but then England was forced to return it to France. The colony would remain French Catholic until 1763 when it was transferred again to the British, under the guidance of Jean Louis Ligonier, the 77-year-old Huguenot general who masterminded the British side in the Seven Years’ War. Once again, New France, Quebec, became a British colony where Christian religious freedom was accepted. Still, the homogenizing of culture is there, in our French history. It goes beyond its roots in the Catholic Church and guides policies of immigration and assimilation in both France and Quebec. For Quebec to properly decolonize itself, it must first accept that it is a North American culture, that its greatest victory was earned through the recognition of its people, les Canadiens, as a nation at La Grande Paix de Montréal in 1701. It must also acknowledge that the Church stole that victory and did it again, in the 1830s, when it undermined – instead of assisting in establishing – the secular and multicultural vision of Louis-Joseph Papineau. For the first time, Quebec became Roman Catholic during that decade, a step deeper into the Catholic culture than the Gallican Catholicism that prevailed in the French and then British colony. Throughout the 1800s, this new Church drove its people ever deeper into the Catholic hierarchy, even to the point of raising the first international military force in Canadian history to protect the Papal States. The Grande Noirceur was not caused by the English, but by the Church. If the British Colonial Office had a role, it was in being completely outflanked by the extraordinary minds at work in the Church.
We, those minorities that the Secretariat wonders about, succeeding those Canadiens who came for religious freedom, are the spiritual heirs of the Huguenots. Our claim to Quebec runs very deep, right back to its founding, and while Captain David Kirke was capturing Champlain’s Quebec in 1629, the English navy was attempting to save the French Huguenots at La Rochelle from the ethnic cleansing of Cardinal Richelieu.
Joseph Graham’s new book Insatiable Hunger reinterprets our historic understanding of the colonial period, here and in New England. It tells some of the stories that we were not taught in school.
I know, your first reaction is to wonder how I can call Quebec a colonizing power. There is little question that Quebec has dominated and colonized its territory. There are many Indigenous examples of this, the first one that comes to mind is the Oka Crisis, but there are many other incidents, before and since, that indicate a cultural hierarchy inherited from France.
We, the English-speaking people, are those who chose to stay in Quebec when we did not have to. We endured the closed attitude to hiring our children in the public service and the slow decline of our cultural voice, until our only significant number of remaining members was in Montreal. There are expectations that we will die out and whoever of our descendants remain here will become real Québécois, somehow. The Secretariat and the majority thinking may not rise to the challenge of decolonization, but they are inviting us to share our voices.
The first item on the list is to tell the truth about our history. If Quebec was abused in its past, it was by the Catholic Church. Both here and in France, the Church looked after its parishioners and was responsible for over half the services we receive today from our provincial government, but beyond its tithe, the price it charged was to reformulate its people, changing the way they thought and functioned. Its influence was mitigated in a lot of other European countries for better or worse during the Wars of Religion, but Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII’s prime minister, set in motion the destruction of French protestants, the Huguenots, and Louis XIV completed it.
New France was the dream of the Huguenots who made four or five attempts to establish it in South America, the Carolinas and here, but the homogenizing vision of Richelieu left no room for minorities. In the 1620s, the cardinal forbade Huguenots from doing business in New France, and all births, marriages and deaths could only be recorded by the parish priest. That served to define French culture right up to the present. Even the French Revolution did not kill it. Difference is not tolerated.
With no Huguenots allowed legally in the colony, the Church took over administration and their shared objective was to create a Catholic colony by converting the people who were here already, and accepting colonists who were obliged to declare themselves as Catholic. Even so, a great number of those colonists were Huguenot and that is coming out in genetic research today. They were oppressed in France and hoped to be able to find greater freedom here. They were the Canadiens.
In 1629 a French Huguenot, David Kirke, sailing for the English king, took Quebec, but then England was forced to return it to France. The colony would remain French Catholic until 1763 when it was transferred again to the British, under the guidance of Jean Louis Ligonier, the 77-year-old Huguenot general who masterminded the British side in the Seven Years’ War. Once again, New France, Quebec, became a British colony where Christian religious freedom was accepted. Still, the homogenizing of culture is there, in our French history. It goes beyond its roots in the Catholic Church and guides policies of immigration and assimilation in both France and Quebec. For Quebec to properly decolonize itself, it must first accept that it is a North American culture, that its greatest victory was earned through the recognition of its people, les Canadiens, as a nation at La Grande Paix de Montréal in 1701. It must also acknowledge that the Church stole that victory and did it again, in the 1830s, when it undermined – instead of assisting in establishing – the secular and multicultural vision of Louis-Joseph Papineau. For the first time, Quebec became Roman Catholic during that decade, a step deeper into the Catholic culture than the Gallican Catholicism that prevailed in the French and then British colony. Throughout the 1800s, this new Church drove its people ever deeper into the Catholic hierarchy, even to the point of raising the first international military force in Canadian history to protect the Papal States. The Grande Noirceur was not caused by the English, but by the Church. If the British Colonial Office had a role, it was in being completely outflanked by the extraordinary minds at work in the Church.
We, those minorities that the Secretariat wonders about, succeeding those Canadiens who came for religious freedom, are the spiritual heirs of the Huguenots. Our claim to Quebec runs very deep, right back to its founding, and while Captain David Kirke was capturing Champlain’s Quebec in 1629, the English navy was attempting to save the French Huguenots at La Rochelle from the ethnic cleansing of Cardinal Richelieu.
Joseph Graham’s new book Insatiable Hunger reinterprets our historic understanding of the colonial period, here and in New England. It tells some of the stories that we were not taught in school.