Quebec in the Nineteenth Century

By the beginning of the nineteenth century the population had become more sedentary, more concentrated in the St Lawrence valley, and largely agricultural. As Maurice Lemire has demonstrated, the evolving elite, influenced by the Romantic concept of nation, sought to provide the emerging society with a history and a destiny. A myth of origins was gradually created, positing a definite time – that of Maisonneuve and the religious heroes who came to convert North America to Catholicism – and a circumscribed territory, the St Lawrence basin. The legendary economic activity became agriculture, thereby rooting the heretofore nomadic French Canadian. Yet the attractive image of the coureur de bois never completely disappeared, and this figure continues to be a cultural reference point to the present.

Literature was the privileged vehicle for the diffusion and perpetuation of this version of collective identity. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, poetry and historical narratives published in newspapers began to constitute a collective heritage in the service of the elite project of nationhood. Poets such as Joseph Quesnel started to create a definition of Canadian identity, often through comparisons between the French and the English. The habitant emerged as the representative figure of a collective heritage, the descendant of a line of heroes going back to New France. Wearing the hats of both poet and historian, Michel Bibaud published the first book of poetry by a French Canadian to appear in this country, Épîtres, satires, chansons, épigrammes, et autres pièces de vers (1830). Bibaud’s lyrical pieces sing of Amerindian chiefs and of Wolfe and Montcalm. His satirical verses target the lack of education and laziness he perceived among his contemporaies.

The historical novel was born in 1846–47 with P.J.O. Chauveau’s Charles Guérin: roman de moeurs canadiennes. In 1846 also appeared La terre paternelle by Patrice Lacombe, the first roman de la terre, or novel of the land, which would remain a French-Canadian form of fictional expression for a hundred years. These two genres, the historical novel and the novel of the land, sought to prescribe the place and time of origin in concert with the elite project of nationhood. But the myth of the nomad and the wide open spaces of the continent continued to fuel the imagination throughout the nineteenth century; an example is Joseph-Charles Taché’s Forestiers et voyageurs (1863). This myth haunts even the work that is considered the ultimate realization of the novel of the land, Le survenant (1945) by Germaine Guèvremont.

In the mid-nineteenth century there was an acceleration in cultural production that had as its aim the defining of the collective identity, in part as a response to Lord Durham’s report of 1839, which recommended the assimilation of the francophone population. The Instituts canadiens were founded in this era, and François-Xavier Garneau began publishing his Histoire du Canada (1845–48). Massive emigration to the industrial centres of New England also informed the discourse of identity; the dangers of this movement added fodder to the arguments presented in the novel of the land. The extent of the migratory movement is reflected in the number of writers of the French-Canadian canon who published in the United States, among them Honoré Beaugrand, Adélard Lambert, Henri d’Arles, Louis Dantin, and Alice Lemieux-Lévesque.

In the 1860s the group of writers now known as the École patriotique de Québec made the first organized effort to create a national literature: the literary journal Les soirées canadiennes was founded, to be quickly followed by Le foyer canadien. The preoccupation with creating a myth of collective origins is manifest in the effort to record legends, which were published, for example, in Henri-Raymond Casgrain’s Légendes canadiennes, and traditional songs, such as those collected by Ernest Gagnon (Chansons populaires du Canada, 1865), who stressed in his commentary the continuity between the rural population of his own time and that of New France. Le foyer canadien published the novel that posed the conquest as one of the defining moments in the collective Canadian psyche: Les anciens Canadiens (1863) by Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé. A hint that the nationalist tendency would not be the only current of literary expression, however, was suggested towards the end of the century with the appearance of the psychological novel Angéline de Montbrun (1881–82) by “Laure Conan” (Félicité Angers) and by poetry expressive of personal feelings and impressions by the writers who in 1895 formed the École littéraire de Montréal.