Champlain's heritage

Celebrating Québec City’s 400th anniversary is important in a number of ways. Doing so gives us all an opportunity to reflect on the origin of the French fact in Canada, and to remind ourselves of our history.

The foundation of Québec City in 1608 is the most famous moment in the quest of the French explorers and entrepreneurs in North America, an adventure that had a lasting effect on what would become Canada. Acadia’s 400th anniversary was held in 2004, and in 2001 Windsor celebrated 300 years of continuous French presence in the region. When Alberta and Saskatchewan held their centennial in 2005, people were reminded that French was the first European language to be heard in the West, in the 17th century.

Still, the foundation of Québec City stands out in the Canadian imagination. A significant reason for this is the personality and achievements of Samuel de Champlain. In addition to establishing the tiny colony that survived and thrived, he also established a number of lasting patterns that would shape the country.

Jacques Cartier, who had tried and failed to colonize the St. Lawrence 75 years earlier, started things off on the wrong foot, kidnapping Donaconna and his son and transporting them to France.

Champlain, in contrast, was a consummate diplomat. He established a military and trading alliance with the Hurons, explored the routes that would become the basis of the fur trade and laid the groundwork for the colony and the country.

“Champlain, more than anyone, understood that simply being a trader was not enough when engaging in the fur trade. Amerindian mores must be taken into account,” wrote Denys Delâge of Université Laval. “This was the secret of his success—not just the force of his personality, but his ability to organize the fur trade in ways that were compatible to the two economies.”¹

However, Québec 2008 will be much more than the celebration of one man, or a single event. It will be an opportunity to mark the larger heritage of Canada’s history.

Public celebrations are themselves significant exercises in what historians now call “public memory.”² And one of the most eloquent displays of public memory was the celebration of Québec City’s third centenary in 1908.

In his 1999 book The Art of Nation-Building: Pageantry and Spectacle at Quebec’s Tercentenary, York University historian Henri Vivian Nelles laid out the significance of the anniversary. “Much of what we as Canadians would become and could not become in the twentieth century was on display in the streets and on the pageant grounds of Quebec in 1908,” he wrote. “By commemorating we necessarily celebrate ourselves. But more often than not we are plural, and opinion about identity and destiny is divided.”³

Nelles describes in fascinating detail how the celebration in Québec City in 1908 meant dramatically different things for different people.

For Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, it was critical that the anniversary be inclusive: “the Government of Canada would accept the project of a jubilee on the condition that the festival would represent a truly national character in the broadest sense of the word.”⁴

For Governor General Lord Grey (best remembered for the Grey Cup), the 1908 celebration was a chance to win over French-Canadians to the British Empire and leave a lasting symbol of reconciliation between French and English. Largely at his insistence, the federal government purchased the Plains of Abraham, creating a park.

For French-Canadian nationalists, the broader, inclusive definition of the festivities represented a secular, imperialist threat to their identity as French-speaking Catholics. “Champlain is evicted,” wrote Jules-Paul Tardivel. “Wolfe dominates.”⁵

First Nations people—who, in Nelles’s words, “stole the show”—used the pageant, and the Native village that was built on the Plains of Abraham, as an opportunity to affirm their presence: “They forced their way onto the stage between the two nations and insisted that there be three.”⁶

Some of the same tensions that were expressed in 1908 have been echoed a century later, but the festivities are clearly being defined in inclusive terms. The Huron residents of L'Ancienne Lorette, descendants of those who fled to Quebec for protection after the massacre at Sainte-Marie among the Hurons by the Iroquois in 1660, will have an important role to play, as will the English-speaking minority in Québec City. And just as there was an international presence in 1908, the world will come to Québec City for Québec 2008: the festivities will conclude with the Sommet de la Francophonie in October.

What is clear from Nelles’s study is that Québec 2008 will not only celebrate history, it will make history—in ways that will be impossible to predict. A century from now, historians will learn a great deal from how we see our past today.

Graham Fraser

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Notes

¹Denys Delâge, Bitter Feast: Amerindians and Europeans in Northeastern North America, 1600-04, translated from the French by Jane Brierley (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1993), p. 96.

²For a discussion of the concept of public memory, see Chapter 1, “Exploring the Boundaries of Public Memory,” in Alan Gordon, Making Public Pasts: The Contested Terrain of Montreal’s Public Memories, 1891-1930 (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001). Maurice Halbwachs explains this concept in his book La Mémoire collective (preface by Jean Duvignaud; introduction by J. Michel Alexandre, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1968).

³H. V. Nelles, The Art of Nation-Building: Pageantry and Spectacle at Quebec’s Tercentenary (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999), p. 13.

⁴Nelles, pp. 62–63.

⁵Ibid., p. 127.

⁶Ibid., p. 181.