Canadian Identity: A Francophone Perspective

It would be imprudent to define Canadian national character as a collection of objective traits, as Andé Siegfried once attempted to do. National character or national identity is better understood in terms of the discourse of those concerned. How can we distinguish Canadians from Americans? How were the English Canadians of a former era distinguished from their French-Canadian contemporaries? How can we distinguish today’s Canadian identity from Québécois identity if not by the images they have of themselves and by the distance they put between themselves and others?

National identity is above all a construct. In an uncompleted 1920 monograph on the nation, the well-known French sociologist Marcel Mauss expressed this idea well when he wrote that a “nation believes in its language.” While at first glance the reader will no doubt be struck by the word language, it is actually the word believes that appears crucial here. With this word, Mauss indicates that identity is constituted first and foremost as a belief. He adds, “All the citizens who make up the nation participate in the idea that drives it.” The idea that drives it: again, it is in the imagination, manifesting itself in works that reflect human thought, that identity is created.

Identities are formed through discourse. But what kind of discourse are we talking about? And how does a national identity come to be identified? Fernand Dumont has cast new light on these questions by identifying the processes through which a national reference is constructed. Dumont defines the nation as “a grouping by reference: people are brought together in a nation through common symbolism and ideological discourse. Historians, poets, and many others contribute to this symbolism and discourse, and hence to developing and confirming the reference.” People share something in common, a symbolism of reference expressed in works of the collectivity such as literature, ideology, and historical writing. This shared symbolism is the basis for a sense of belonging that transcends divisions of class, religion, region, age, or sex, and that takes the form of national sentiment, which is not the same thing as nationalism. Consequently, there is a radical difference between Siegfried, whose approach to the definition of identity involves a view of society as an objective reality, and Dumont, for whom society is what it interprets itself to be. We will follow Dumont’s approach.

To analyse the contours of Canadian identity, we need to adopt a historical perspective so that we can trace the origins of the symbolism of reference. To bring the question of Canadian identity into focus, we need to start with the representations developed by groups of people who shaped the country and now share its common imaginative space. This space has been defined by aboriginal peoples, Acadians, French Canadians, English Canadians, Canadians living in various regions, and new Canadians who have come from all parts of the world.

Is the Canadian identity still a plural one, defined differently by people belonging to different groups? Is it fragmented, as Gilles Bourque and Jules Duchastel have characterized it? If there have been a variety of representations of Canadian identity through history, can it be said that there is now one genuine Canadian identity, an identity that can be thought of as a new totality as we enter the twenty-first century? As we will see, there are no easy answers to this question.