It is a formula based on popular wisdom: a people who forget their history lose their identity.
This is what is happening in Quebec as everywhere in the West. Worse still: most professional historians have participated in this mutilation of identity by submitting it to fashionable academic ideologies, too often presented as scientific advances.
Consequence of this: we have lost track of the Quebec people. We have come to doubt our own existence. A young person who wanted to read the history of the Quebec people would simply not know which book to open.
Aware of this situation, the essayist Jacques Houle has just published, with Liber, an absolutely essential work.
Nation
Its title: The first Canadians
Its objective: to tell the story of the Quebec people, assuming that it is anchored in that of the majority of French ancestry. Whoever forgets this condemns himself to understanding nothing of our history.
Houle does not reduce the history of Quebec to that of its territory or to that of the population of Quebec in the administrative sense.
Quebec is the national state of the Quebecois, just as Ireland is the national state of the Irish and Morocco the national state of the Moroccans.
Houle tells the story of the human group which gave shape to this country, which identified with it as every people in the world identifies with its own. It tells the story of those who first identified themselves as French, before becoming Canadians, then French-Canadians, then Quebecers, then French-speaking Quebecers.
Houle returns in this first volume to the origins of the country.
It tells the story of New France and the formation of our people in the St. Lawrence Valley. It recalls its difficult establishment in a territory that cannot be called hospitable, as well as our good relations with the Amerindians.
It then recounts the growth of the colony, then the English Conquest, in the international context of the time. This also leads him to our resistance after the Conquest, and to the way in which we resisted under the English regime, which had planned our eradication. He goes to the Patriots, and to the failure of their rebellion, where the aspiration for independence that runs through our people was expressed for the first time.
The next volume, which will be released in a few months, will cover our history from united Canada to sovereignist Quebec.
I was deeply moved to find my people while reading this book.
Identify
We come away convinced of one simple thing: our people are certainly not the most powerful in the world, but they are a beautiful people, who deserve to live.
I don’t usually recommend Christmas gifts, but this book should be one. It is beautifully and simply written, educational, documented; without ever being guilty of intellectual pedantry, Jacques Houle makes our own people aware of their history.
A story driven by an obsession: to survive. And crossed by an ideal: one day, we will be fully masters of our own home.
