Federalists and separatists try to claim Champlain as their own - both sides are wrong
MARGARET MACMILLAN, The Gazette
Published: 8 hours ago
Was Napoleon a monster or a hero? Ivan the Terrible a nation-builder or a psychopath? Should we be glad or sorry that Columbus discovered America? Every grown-up country these days, it seems, has its history wars and Canada is no exception.
Last summer, the fight was over Ottawa's War Museum and whether the exhibit on Allied bombing in the Second World War should point out that there was a controversy over whether the mass destruction of Germany's towns and cities and many of its civilians was effective or moral. This year, it is over the celebrations to mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Samuel de Champlain on the shores of the St. Lawrence River. He founded a permanent French colony which grew over the centuries into Quebec City.
Did he establish something more? All sorts of inflated claims are flying about, from the federal government that sees his arrival as somehow being the foundation stone of 21st-century Canada, to the Quebec separatists who see Champlain as the father of the French nation in North America.
We find ourselves in an absurd and ahistoric debate about what Champlain actually did.
On one side, the Harper government, having tried unsuccessfully to appease French nationalists in Quebec, has enlisted his story in the cause of a federal Canada. A government radio commercial plays faintly classical music while mellifluous voices chime in to tell us that a country was born 400 years ago. Ring your bells at the same time on July 3, the committee in charge of the celebrations urged Canadian cities and churches: "The harmonious resonance of these bells will salute our shared history from the earliest settlements in New France to the present day."
On the official anniversary website, a large maple leaf sits atop the slogan "Celebrating our past, building our future." Champlain's arrival, from Ottawa's perspective, set in train a happy process that culminated in a united and multicultural Canada.
"This is an historic date for all of Canada," says Harper's official message. "Since that date, we really began to come into our own and become what we are today, for the founding of Quebec City also marks the founding of the Canadian State." That's quite a stretch considering Canada did not come into existence for another 21/2 centuries.
Not everyone buys the Harper view by any means. The most vociferous objections come, not surprisingly, from Quebec nationalists, who complain that the whole commemoration has been hijacked by the federalists. Champlain did not found Canada but a great French nation that has been betrayed and oppressed. The celebrations, say the nationalists, just underline the extent of the betrayal and oppression of the French and the power of what they describe as occupying forces.
French nationalists are finding much to feel insulted about. They protested when the governor-general travelled to France for the start of the French celebration of Champlain and talked about Canada. They reacted with shock and feelings of betrayal when President Nicolas Sarkozy said that he loved Canada as well as Quebec. Mario Dumont, leader of the opposition, talked darkly about the neglected lover becoming a cuckold and Pauline Marois, head of the Parti Québécois, said any celebrations should be for the survival of the Québécois nation.
Prominent Quebec artists are protesting that Paul McCartney's concert tomorrow is "Canadianizing" Quebec City's anniversary. There are demands for the resignation of both David Emerson, the foreign minister, and ambassador Michael Wilson, because a poster for the annual Canada Day party in Washington showed Champlain with a large plate of poutine.
Pity the poor mayor of Quebec City who simply wanted some nice events to bring in the tourists. "We invested millions of dollars in this" he said plaintively, "can't we put our 50-year-old squabbles on the back burner for a little while?" And pity history, which yet again is being harnessed to political ends.
Nations are built on a shared view of the past - and that shared view is often wrong. Nationalists tell themselves stories, of past glories and past insults. They leave out the bits where different peoples share histories and cultures. Too often they assume that there has always been something called the nation, whether English, French, or any other, which has existed from, in that conveniently empty phrase, "time immemorial."
In fact, the idea of the nation is a relatively new one, dating back for most peoples to the 19th century. Before that, we were subjects of particular rulers, members of religions, or parts of clans or tribes.
Champlain was not working for the French "nation" but for the French king. The French colonists who came in the 17th century did not yet see themselves as a distinct "nation." That would come much later. Champlain's story does not belong exclusively to any one group today. It is part of the long and complicated history of Canada in which French and English confronted each other but also worked with each other, influenced each other, and married each other.
We know that Champlain came to Quebec and from that other things grew. But to gaze back 400 year and say, "Ah ha! So that is where it all started" is to impose a false sense of coherence and a misleading causal chain on our history. It is based on an incorrect view of history -- that it is like an oak tree so that you must hunt back to find the acorn from which the whole great edifice grew. A much better analogy for history is a river. Tributaries, some big and some small, flow together to make a larger current and the river can go this way or that depending on what it runs into. Its path is not foreordained in its earliest moments and it is folly to look for the one founding moment from which all else comes.
Champlain could have died that first winter and he would remain a footnote in history. Or his story could have become part of a French North America of today. Other later events intervened, though, and the British won the Seven Years War and the French lost. Then in turn, the British lost the Thirteen Colonies. If the new United States had conquered Canada, the French presence here could have evaporated, just as it eventually did in Louisiana. It did not, partly, I would argue, because it became enmeshed in a federal Canada and not a strongly nationalistic United States.
Our current history wars are by no means over. Stay tuned for the 250th anniversary celebrations of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham next year.
Margaret MacMillan is warden of St. Antony's College, Oxford, and a professor of history at the University of Toronto. Her most recent book is The Uses and Abuses of History.
