To Quebec’s few remaining hard-core Bloquistes, it was a devastating put-down from a fellow sovereigntist-in-arms: Gilles Duceppe’s party, declared former PQ cabinet minister Jacques Brassard in a La Presse op-ed last week, has become a “clone of the NDP” — just another opposition brand spouting pacifism, environmentalism, anti-Americanism and other fashionable “bric-a-brac.”
Brassard lays the blame on Duceppe and the other “old nag” sissies who trumpet Kyoto, gun control and the welfare state at the expense of sovereignty. But Duceppe has no other choice: Support for an independent Quebec is running at less than 40%, and even the PQ says this is the wrong time for another referendum. The pathetic state of the BQ is a symptom — not a cause — of a prosperous, confident French society that is increasingly post-nationalistic and generically leftist in outlook. Separatism now seems stale and corny to many young Quebecers — as well as completely irrelevant to the province’s growing immigrant population.
How did it come to this? The best explanation, as I see it, comes from an obscure book published a while ago — two decades before the BQ came into existence, in fact. Malcolm Reid’s The Shouting Signpainters: A Literary and Political Account of Quebec Revolutionary Nationalism deserves to be reread as a fascinating window into a fevered separatist community that no longer exists. The 1972 book also tells us, if only unwittingly, why the “revolutionary nationalism” Reid glorifies is now dead.
The Shouting Signpainters has been out of print for years. When you slog through it, it’s easy to see why. Reid is a tireless researcher who seems to have spent most of the 1960s embedding himself among the blue-collar neighborhoods and cheap restaurants of eastern Montreal. But as a writer, he is self-conscious and humorless. Much of the dense book consists of lengthy, overwrought quotations from the many 60s-era separatists he profiles, including (painfully) their unspeakably awful poetry (To wit: “will a million horizons gleam for us a million auroras lick the belly of the blast furnaces / are we simply the fuel of progress the surplus value chomped without attention by Texaco and general Motors”; or “Quebec — like a sleeping comet in the sleep of our bones — like the gunfire of the wind.”)
Yet buried amidst all the bad poetry and stale anti-colonial rhetoric lies the key to understanding the two reasons why “revolutionary nationalism” never took off in Quebec.
The first was the nature of the enemy. Reid’s revolutionaries were fighting against Anglo domination, yes. But they were equally hostile to what the author calls the clérico-bourgeois — the Duplessis-vintage amalgam of church and state that kept Quebecers fecund, servile and farm-bound. The idealized Quebec of the future, the province’s revolutionaries imagined, would do away with such pastoral reveries, replacing them with a utopia of hydro projects, government office buildings, and vibrant cafés. As Reid writes, these socialist radicals “had no use for the back-to-the-soil mythology of the old nationalists.”
The problem here was that all national movements — from Zionism to Gallism — depend on a sentimental fetishization of the land. If a society transforms into a network of globalized, geographically deracinated urban enclaves (as Montreal and Quebec City have more or less become) the whole concept of nationhood, as something worth fighting for, emotionally evaporates.
The second barrier to revolutionary nationalism in Quebec was the fundamentally humane nature of the French-Canadian character — which, once liberated from the Catholic church, was revealed to be too joyful, well-socialized and hedonistic to swallow the obsessive style of thinking required by all revolutionary movements. (Everyone is well-acquainted with the stereotype of the Speedo-wearing, hard-partying, life-loving Quebecer. Well, it’s true.)
This is something Reid uncovered without realizing it. One of the (unintentionally) comic rewards of reading The Shouting Signpainters is watching how the great heroes of Reid’s book — even as he is following them around, notebook in hand, seeking to dislodge pearls of their revolutionary wisdom — all proceed to get drunk, womanize, blow their money on fancy clothes, fall in love, have kids, settle down, and generally embrace bourgeois life in a way that no true Marxist or jihadi revolutionary would tolerate. This preference for messy human connection over abstract ideology explains, among other things, why murderous violence of the kind practiced by the FLQ was always an isolated phenomenon in Quebec.
This distinctly Québécois approach was best summarized by poet Paul Chamberland, one of the stars of The Shouting Signpainters: “I don’t understand the revolutionary who does not take the trouble to make love well.” What was wanted, as much as political autonomy, was an escape from the humiliating sexlessness of slum life, and an entrée into the Anglos’ world of beautiful things — “sleek upholstery, sleek automobiles, sleek duds.”
But there’s a problem with basing a revolution on getting nice things: Eventually, people get them — and their attention starts drifting away, to the boring “bric-a-brac” of daily life in a pleasant, prosperous, bourgeois society.
What is a shouting signpainter supposed to do then? Gilles Duceppe hasn’t figured that one out. As a federalist, I hope he never will.
jkay@nationalpost.com