A few days ago, the statue of Camille Laurin in front of the headquarters of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Montréal was vandalized for the second time in three months.
It was scaled the first time. This time he was chained, as if the man were an autocrat who had tyrannized the people of Quebec, and especially the English Canadians in Quebec.
Because if the gesture has not been claimed, we can only assume that it is the work of activists fundamentally hostile to the work of Camille Laurin and contesting his great political legacy: Law 101.
Let us not forget that Camille Laurin was the great political theorist of the nationalism of the Quiet Revolution – one could say that he politically broadened the thinking of the historians of the Montreal School.
He was convinced of one thing: the population of Quebec had been deeply devastated by the conquest.
nationalism
In other words, it was colonized to the core, and each Quebecer, in his own way, felt deeply this domination that had made us a hunched-backed people, believing that by imitating their master and practicing the kneeling would grow before him.
This psychology has not completely disappeared and one might even think that it is rising to the surface. It was independence that would have put an end to that. We are paying the price of their failure more than ever, even as we make immense efforts to artificially keep alive the myth of a normal society, similar to other normal societies on earth.
One thing is certain: for Camille Laurin, Law 101 was not just a legislative gesture, but a gesture of identity through which the historic French-speaking majority of the idea of the master took full effect in our country. It placed the historic French-speaking majority at the center of the Quebec nation-state’s identity construction – because Quebec is not a wasteland on a map, but the land of the Quebec people, just as Poland is the land of the Polish people. , Lithuania, the land of the Lithuanian people and so on.
The French Language Charter of 1977 was a gesture of power, of self-affirmation, of reclaiming one’s own country after two centuries of patience, to use the words of Gérard Bergeron.
Today we know it and, above all, we feel it very clearly: Bill 101 is more controversial than ever before. The magnificent story of its almost unanimous acceptance by the English-speaking community is unfolding before our eyes.
The latter had adopted Bill 101 because the balance of power was in favor of French-speaking Quebecers. That’s no longer the case, and much of it now tries to evade it by claiming to be a bilingual metropolis where French and English would have equal status – that is, where French would be optional, especially for immigrants . who in their minds settle in North America, in Canada, perhaps in Montreal, but certainly not in Quebec. Montreal has never been so un-French in 30 years.
The Hi-Hi society that has formed since the early 2000s violates the principle of Law 101 every day.
Therefore, in this environment, it is not surprising that the most ardent opponents of Law 101 want to attack and humiliate the man who held it. At least that’s what we can assume. Camille Laurin’s symbol has become a target.
balance of power
From this we could draw a reverse lesson: if sovereigntists want to reconnect with a vibrant nationalism and understand our people in its depths, they have great interest in turning to the ideas of Camille Laurin.
In particular, they were able to reread the speeches given in support of Bill 101.
You may recall that Camille Laurin believed that without independence, Bill 101 would ultimately be a poor protection and even counterproductive in that it would give Quebecers a sense of security that did not correspond to real linguistic security.
About dr Laurin’s work still needs to be thought about; above all, it needs to be completed.
