Canadian Literature

III

Canadian Literature in French

French Canadians are descendants of the habitants, the French-speaking peasants who stayed on in Québec after the French lost their North American territories to the British in the 1760s. The distinctive complexion of French Canadian literature is due in large part to the national spirit of the French-speaking, predominantly Roman Catholic habitants and to tensions inherent in their social, political, and geographic situation. This situation is characterized by isolation and a feeling of being threatened by the larger, primarily Protestant and English-speaking culture in North America.

French Canadian literature, properly speaking, began with the introduction of a printing press and the founding of a weekly bilingual newspaper, the Québec Gazette, in 1764. However, the sense of a specific literature different from that of France did not take hold until the 1840s. From then on, for well over a century, literature was an important tool in French Canada’s ongoing struggle for cultural survival, and its themes of language, culture, religion, and politics reflected the evolving nature of that struggle. By the end of the 20th century, literature in Québec had become multiethnic, cosmopolitan, and confident of its identity.

A

The 19th Century

The first literary awakening of French Canada took place after an abortive rebellion by French Canadians against English rule in 1837. At that time Canada consisted of two provinces: the English-speaking Upper Canada (now the province of Ontario) and the largely French-speaking Lower Canada (now the province of Québec). In addition, an English-speaking minority resided in Lower Canada and controlled that province’s economy, leading to constant friction with the French speakers. In 1838 John George Lambton, 1st earl of Durham, was made governor-general of Canada. In his Report on the Affairs of British North America (2 volumes, 1839), Durham proposed unification of all Canada under a single government in which French speakers would be outnumbered and, as he envisioned, gradually assimilated. His report offended the sensibilities of French Canadians by referring to them as a people without a history or a literature.

A

1

Historical Themes

Durham's words have been credited with inspiring a young French Canadian lawyer, François-Xavier Garneau, with the desire to demonstrate to his compatriots and the world that French Canadians had a glorious history. His Histoire du Canada (1845-1848) records the deeds of his people’s ancestors. He gathered information from journals kept by 16th- and 17th-century French explorers Jacques Cartier and Samuel de Champlain, as well as from chronicles by 17th-century French lawyer and writer Marc Lescarbot, and by 18th-century French historian and Jesuit missionary Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix. Other sources used by Garneau were Les relations des Jésuites, annual reports from 1632 to 1673 of Jesuit missionaries about their lives among indigenous peoples, and letters and mystical writings of Marie de l'Incarnation, a Roman Catholic nun of the Ursuline order. She arrived in New France in 1639 and established a convent in Québec City for the education of both French and indigenous girls.

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The significance of Garneau's work extended far beyond its importance as a historical document. If French Canadians have subsequently been a self-conscious ethnic group engaged in a fight for the survival of their culture, it is due in no small measure to Garneau. Their destiny, he told them, was linked not only with the preservation of their religion, their language, and their laws, but also with their ability to take advantage of the constitutional progress brought to them by the English.

In 1866 Roman Catholic bishop Louis-François Laflèche made other points in his book Quelques considérations sur les rapports de la société civile avec la religion et la famille (Certain Considerations on the Relationship of Civil Society with Religion and the Family). French Canadians were charged, Laflèche said, with a mission to spread Catholicism and French culture throughout North America. He advocated as an ideal form of government a theocracy, in which God is the head of government and laws are divine commands.

Besides preservation of French culture and Catholicism, an enduring theme in French Canadian literary history is peasant life, a theme characterized by a feeling that the land is a precious thing to which human lives are bound. Corresponding to this idea is the conception of the family as the primary institution in a social pattern that was fundamentally religious, a pattern based on the idea that the father is head of the family just as God is the head of the Christian church. This patriarchal way is reflected in the novel of the land, which was the central tradition of the French Canadian novel from the 1840s until World War II (1939-1945). In novels of this tradition, the city is seen as a threat to the values of family, religion, and language—values that were seen as essential to the survival of the French Canadian people. Early examples of this genre are Patrice Lacombe’s Le terre paternelle (The Paternal Earth, 1846), Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau's Charles Guérin (1853), and Antoine Gérin-Lajoie's two Jean Rivard novels, published in 1862 and 1864.

A

2

Poetry and Fiction

French Canadian poetry began to flourish in 1860 with the writings of a group who called themselves the Patriotic School of Québec and claimed Garneau as their prophet. The writers met in a bookshop run by poet Octave Crémazie in Québec City and dedicated themselves to heroic and patriotic poetry, legends of pioneer days, and the study of history. Crémazie is considered the first important French Canadian poet. His finest poems, including “Le vieux soldat canadien” (The Old Canadian Soldier, 1855) and “Le drapeau de carillon” (The Flag of Carillon, 1858), are suffused with a pessimistic sense of longing for the glorious era of New France, as the French empire in North America was known before the British conquest.

Besides Crémazie the Patriotic School included historian Abbé Henri-Raymond Casgrain, author of Légendes canadiennes (1861). Casgrain was also a Roman Catholic priest, and he had a powerful influence on writing and publishing in the 19th century. His presence in the literary community began a century-long tradition of attempts by the Roman Catholic Church to control literary production. Casgrain, along with writer Joseph-Charles Taché, founded the literary magazine Les Soirées Canadiennes (Canadian Gatherings), published in Québec City from 1861 to 1865; much of the Patriot School’s work first appeared in this magazine. Taché was known for legends and stories of woodsmen and voyagers, for example Trois légendes de mon pays (Three Legends of My Country, 1861). During the literary awakening occasioned by this group, Philippe Gaspé wrote the lively and important novel Les anciens canadiens (1863; The Canadians of Old, 1864). This historical romance is set in the 1760s and focuses on a growing French suspicion of the British, who had by then begun their rule over French Canada.

Other important writers of the last quarter of the 19th century were poet Louis Fréchette and novelist Laure Conan (pseudonym of Félicité d’Angers), who was the first female writer of French Canada. Fréchette’s expansive romantic lyrics, inspired by French writer Victor Hugo, celebrate the power and majesty of North American nature. Conan’s novel Angéline de Montbrun (1884; Angeline de Montbrun, 1974) is a tragic fable in which a beautiful and much-admired young woman loses her adored father in a hunting accident and is herself disfigured in a mysterious fall. After this she breaks her engagement and spends the rest of her life as a recluse devoted to prayer, sacrifice, and works of charity. In spite of its sober religious themes, the novel has a power and quality that still fascinate readers and that have made it one of the most analyzed works of French Canadian literature.

Another 19th-century writer who has been read and loved by generations of Québec readers is poet Émile Nelligan, who wrote all of his work between the ages of 16 and 19. In 1899, at the age of 19, he was confined to a mental asylum, where he lived until his death in 1940. Nelligan’s exquisite melancholy and musical poetry are inspired by the French symbolist poets (see Symbolist Movement), who reacted against realism and emphasized feelings and imagination. Nelligan’s poetry evokes the tension between his dream of an ideal world and the cold and suffocating real world in which he finds himself. Unlike other French Canadian writers of the 19th century, Nelligan makes no references to history or politics. However, critics have interpreted the dreams and frustrations he expresses as symbolic of the mood of the French Canadian people at the end of the century: stifled by the control and political domination of the Roman Catholic Church.

B

The Early 20th Century

The isolation of French Canada was only partially eroded during the first quarter of the 20th century. Literary themes nurtured by preceding generations remained popular in Québec literature until World War II.

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