For My Country/'Pour La Patrie' : An 1895 Religious and Separatist Vision of Quebec Set in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Canadian attention; some young men went off to join the French forces in Mexico, while newspapers in Quebec followed, most of them with sympathy, the progress of Maximilian's Catholic empire. In the end, American hostility frightened Napoleon m away. The freeing of the Union army after the civil war hastened the withdrawal of French troops and made Maximilian's downfall inevitable. In Montreal, La Minerve expressed regret that the French flag was once more retreating across the Atlantic, but went on to announce: Nevertheless, just because an empire on which we had counted as an ally is falling, that does not mean we are discouraged. The struggle against the invasion of republican ideas will continue with no less ardour on this small corner of earth which we occupy in America. 9 The Mexican affair was highly symbolic. Behind Maximilian and Juarez were the real protagonists: on the one hand, Napoleonic France, eldest daughter of the Church, champion of order and the conservative principles that held society together; on the other hand, the United States, mother of revolutions, embodiment of republicanism, secularism, and conscienceless individualism. Now that the empire had fallen, predicted Le Journal des Trois-Rivieres, foreseeing Maximilian's death before a revolutionary firing squad, Mexico would 'fall once more into its old state of anarchy and troubles under the government of Juarez.' 10 And standing by to pick up the pieces were the United States, ready to exploit the situation to their own advantage. Mexico was neither the last nor the worst reversal for Napoleon III and his French-Canadian sympathizers. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870 destroyed him completely. In that war too the issue was symbolic, for France could still be seen as agent of the Catholic cause. Thus, Le Nouveau Monde of Montreal: God has made of the French people (despite all its faults still the most Catholic in Europe) His instrument in the past; and it is reasonable to see in this war a struggle on which will depend the future of Europe, whether or not predominance will go to the Prussian principle -tyrannic, protestant, rationalist, and Hegelian. As for us, we say it with a legitimate pride, regardless of all considerations of material interest or of fanaticism: our sympathies are X A.I. Silver behalf of world-wide Catholicism had a great impact on Quebec opinion. When, in 1882, the French general de Charette, under whom the Canadians had served at Rome, visited Canada, he was greeted at Montreal by a vast crowd of cheering people, and accompanied from the station to his hotel by the greatest procession ever seen in that city. 15 Despite such support, the temporal power of the papacy was destroyed in 1870. It was only one of a series of disasters which French Canadians had to brood over in the second half of the nineteenth century -the revolutions of 1848, the Mexican disaster, the crushing of the national aspirations of Catholic Poland in 1863, the defeat of France, the triumph of secularism in the schools of the Third Republic, of Germany, Switzerland, and closer to home, of New Brunswick and Manitoba. It hardly seemed possible that such a continuous succession of defeats could have been brought about by purely natural causes, and it was not surprising that many Catholics began to believe in secret conspiracies working to overthrow the Good Cause by devious and underhanded means. Two elements in particular came to symbolize the secret forces which were thought to be working underground against Catholicism and order: the Jews and the Freemasons. Both groups were (at least in western countries) supporters of that secular individualism to which Catholic conservatives were opposed. Freemasonry was, too, a secret society, which, in some repressive countries, had been associated with liberal revolutions. The Jews, for their part, were necessarily outsiders in any society that defined itself as Catholic, and for that reason, they had in modern times fought for a liberal society whose members would be considered as independent individuals regardless of their racial or religious background. To Catholic conservatives, who believed that society was not just a collection of autonomous individuals, but an organic unity whose members were held together by common language, institutions, and traditions and given purpose and strength by a Catholic religion, Jews necessarily appeared as an alien and dissolving element. Thus, in 1883, commenting on the secular school laws of France, L 'Etendard of Montreal complained of 'the horde of atheists, free-thinkers, Jews, and other foreigners, who are trampling upon the disfigured body of our unfortunate mother-country, insulting everything we hold most dear .' 16 The next year, in an article xii A.I. Silver while 'all our friends in France, the Catholic press, the most respectable writers' were opposed to him. 21 But it was not only in foreign lands that the struggle raged between Catholic conservatism and modern liberal individualism. For while Confederation had created an autonomous Catholic province of Quebec, it had federated that province with others whose English and Protestant majorities tended to prize the modern ideology. And if Quebeckers felt bound to support the Catholic cause abroad, so much the more were they bound to act as its defenders within Confederation. When New Brunswick ended tax support to Catholic schools in 1871 and established a compulsory neutral school system, Quebec, styling itself 'the defender of the oppressed,' 22 campaigned for a restitution of Catholic school support. Quebeckers were 'the defenders of our faith in Confederation,'23 with a 'noble' and 'elevated mission' 24 to defend 'civil and religious order' as perceived by Catholicism.2 5 It was frequently given to Quebeckers to pursue this mission during the first decades of Confederation. The New Brunswick schools affair, the harassment of French Catholics at Red River during the 1870s and in the events leading up to and following the North-West Rebellion of 1885, the disestablishment of the French language in Manitoba and the North-West and the destruction of the Manitoba separate school system in 1890 -all these occasioned campaigns by the Quebec press and attempts by Quebec politicians to defend the French and Catholic cause in these other parts of the dominion. But so little success did these attempts achieve, so regular were the victories of the anti-Catholic cause, that within Canada as without, many Quebeckers began to see conspiracies operating against them. 'One is tempted to believe,' complained Le Canadien of Quebec, in 1875, 'that there is an immense conspiracy against the French race in the dominion. Trampled underfoot in Manitoba, crushed in New Brunswick, we are threatened with annihilation.' 26 It was, after all, a credulous age. People believed things which today seem ludicrous to us. In 1866 a number of Quebec newspapers 27 carried a story about a man from a Gulf of St Lawrence south shore community who one day, while out rowing, saw a sleeping whale, rowed up to it and climbed onto its back. The whale, according to the report, woke up, and before the man could xvi A.I. Silver brother. The latter was a priest whose large parish and its responsibilities left him little time at home. In 1868, at the age of seventeen, Tardivel was sent by his uncle to obtain a classical education at the seminary of St-Hyacinthe. It was not uncommon, at that time, for American Catholics to attend Quebec colleges, whose classical courses were held in high repute, and while Tardivel was at St-Hyacinthe, about a fifth of his fellow students were Americans. He performed brilliantly at college. In four years he mastered the French language and completed an eight-year course, carrying off an impressive number of prizes in the process. Here, too, he became acquainted with the great political and religious concerns of French Canadians. In the year of his enrolment nineteen St-Hyacinthe students went off with the Zouaves, to the applause of professors and fellow students alike. In 1870, the papacy was the subject of the public composition contest whose prize was keenly sought by students, and in 1871 the contest was cancelled because of 'the captivity of Pius IX' (according to the Courrier de St-Hyacinthe), and the 'wicked treatment he has been subjected to.' 37 As for the college curriculum, it stressed orthodox Catholicism and French-Canadian patriotism: the pagan writers of Greece and Rome were banned; the Church Fathers and French-Canadian history were emphasized. So much was Tardivel affected by this environment that when, at the end of his studies, he returned to his homeland, he was no longer able to feel at ease there. By the beginning of 1873 he was back in St-Hyacinthe, feeling now more a French Canadian than an American. He soon found a job with the Courrier de St-Hyacinthe, one of the Conservative party organs. (In that age most papers survived only by the open patronage of political parties whose views they expressed.) Within a few months his talents had brought him to the attention of important party journalists, and he was offered a position at the more important La Minerve in Montreal. Although Tardivel's stay in Montreal was not an unpleasant one (he married there early in 1874), his job involved mainly the tedious work of translating, and he was glad enough to move to Le Canadien, another Conservative paper at Quebec City, where he was given more opportunity to write. His work soon filled the paper's columns, and by the end of the decade, two of his pieces had been published in book form: a biography of Pius IX and a polemic on behalf of the purity of the French language. xvii In 1881 Tardivel left Le Canadien, and that summer he founded his own paper, La Verile, which he was to publish weekly, almost without interruption, until his death in 1905. It was to be an independent newspaper, expressing no party 'line' but only the opinions and interests of a thorough-going Catholicism. To maintain his independence, Tardivel had to forsake the party patronage which provided the financial life of other papers. He would never become a wealthy man, and would have to work as writer, editor, proofreader, and printer for La Verile. Nevertheless, he made it into a noted and notable journal, read not only in Quebec but by Catholics in other countries as well, whose newspapers translated and reprinted its articles in their own columns. Two central themes repeat themselves again and again in La Verite as in Tardivel's other writings. The first is the Catholicism of French Canada and its unique social and political implications; the second is the Quebec-centred need of French Canada for its own separate state. For Tardivel, as for Pius IX or any orthodox Catholic of his time, Catholicism was not just a Sunday mass but a way of life, a divinely revealed philosophy of the Good, the Just, and the moral ordering of society. To them society was not just a collection of individual people, each pursuing his own welfare, but an organic whole, consisting of classes or communities, each with its own function and position, and working toward a common Good established by God and interpreted by religion. It followed that all social, and even political, questions must be settled by religious principles. In Pour la patrie, the political action turns on a religious happening, and this, as one of the characters tells us late in the novel, is inevitably so: You may say what you will, but religion, the bond which unites us with God, will always have a preponderant influence on politics, the bond which unites men among themselves. The man who truly believes in God, the beginning and the end of all things; the man who truly believes in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who descended into this world to redeem mankind and open the gates of heaven to us; the man who truly believes in the Holy Catholic Church ... cannot envisage politics in the same way as one who does not believe. 38 Every religion influenced its adherents according to its own inspiration, which could be good in some respects, or bad. Only xviii A.I. Silver one religion, though, was thoroughly true and truly good: Catholicism. A curious illustration of Tardivel's notions about the influence of religion on peoples' behaviour can be seen in an 1883 commentary in La Verite on the trial of some Hungarian Jews for an alleged 'ritual' murder. There were Jews in Quebec, wrote Tardivel, and it hardly seemed possible to believe them capable of such monstrous crimes. It was necessary, however, to distinguish between the western Jew found in Canada and the Jew of eastern Europe. The former, living in a largely secularized society in which religion had lost its primordial place, had also lost the religious fervour of his ancestors. 'He is a financier or a dealer in drugs, with a keen eye for profit, sly, not very scrupulous in business. He may amass millions by shady means, but he no longer spills blood.' Such, after all, was corrupt man, left on his own in a society without religion to guide and order its conduct. But the Jews of eastern Europe lived among pious Christian populations whose lives still expressed the proper influence of their religion. In such a milieu the Jews too retained their orthodoxy. But it was a corrupt orthodoxy, for the refusal of the Jews to acknowledge Christ had meant that the torch of divine truth had passed from their nation to the Christian Church, and they, left without the guidance of divine revelation, had easily been led astray by rabbis and Talmudists with false and perverse teachings. So it was that a portion of the Talmud, dealing with the slaughter of the lamb at Passover, had been corrupted in many editions to say that the blood of a Christian child was more pleasing to God than that of a lamb! 'The Talmud,' concluded Tardivel, 'has really provoked murders in the past. This has been proven unquestionably! ' 39 The grace of revelation and of mission which God had withdrawn from the Jews had passed to the Catholic Church. It, therefore, was the only real source of Truth in the world. Men must be guided by it alone. However intelligent, tolerant, and good-willed they might be, they would inevitably go astray without the spiritual guidance of the Church whose head was the Vicar of Christ. Thus, in Pour la patrie, the Archbishop of Montreal tells the hero not to depend on the good will of Protestant friends, for 'true faith is the necessary basis for all true good. Where faith exists, there is a solid foundation .... Building where there is no faith is like building on sand.' 40 A bad book is only fit to be burned. Nobody can read it with impunity, unless he has received special dispensation. Otherwise, you might as well say that a man, because he is in good health, can eat poison without danger. Reading is the nourishment of the mind; it must be healthy if it is to give life instead of death. 42 Among bad books Tardivel was inclined to list virtually all novels. The novel form itself was an invention of the devil. 'The novels one reads in the newspapers, as a general rule, are veritable pulpits of Satan, nothing more nor less. In them, the Demon advocates all possible sins and mocks all virtues.' 43 Strange words from a man who xx A.I. Silver was to write a novel himself! Yet, as he explained in the preface, it was only because 'it is permitted to capture the enemy's war machines and to use them to assault his own ramparts' 44 that he was able to bring himself to compose Pour la patrie. The way in which authors used literary forms and their own talents was the essential thing. Thus, in the novel, Tardivel tells us that the writer-editor of a certain newspaper 'had gone into journalism without moral preparation, without having sufficiently purified his intention,' 45 and we are, therefore, not surprised to see him and his paper inflicting harm upon the Catholic cause. Similarly, Tardivel complained, when Sarah Bernhardt and her French theatrical company visited Montreal, of spectators who praised her talents when they should be condemning the use to which she put them. The plays she presented were vehicles of diabolical notions, and the Bishop of Montreal was right in warning Catholics to stay away from them. 46 Indeed, Quebeckers ought to make such shows 'physically impossible' by the use of whistles, rotten eggs, and cabbages. 47 Against the agencies of error, then, Catholics must constantly fight. 'It is not only the right but also the duty of Catholics to unite in order to cause the teachings of the Church to prevail in social life.' 48 It was particularly their duty because of the constant war which the modern world was waging against Catholicism in country after country, and because of the insidious ways in which that war was waged. As a journalist, Tardivel was particularly aware of the setbacks which the Catholic cause was undergoing, and, like so many others, he came to see organized conspiracies behing those setbacks: 'a united Freemasonry, that powerful sect which wages a furious war everywhere against the Catholic Truth, sometimes openly, sometimes in secret ... the terrible attacks made by the huge army of evil, in all countries, against everything Christian.' 49 If the war against Christianity was being waged in all countries, there were, nevertheless, certain ones that provided powerful bases for the enemy. Not least of these was France, for alas, modern France was no longer the thoroughly Catholic eldest daughter of the Church that she had been of old, and with the new France French Canadians could feel little sympathy. Tardivel was expressing a common attitude when he made this distinction in Le Canadien: We love the France of olden times, powerful, great, and glorious France, France the eldest daughter of the Church; we also love the ## Introduction xxiii infected with Masonry' and that 'the conspiracy against the Catholicism of the French Canadians is particularly strong.' 58 The following year, with the Freemason scare running even more wildly through Catholic circles, an international anti-Masonic congress was organized at the north Italian town of Trent, site of the famous sixteenth-century Church Council. Tardivel was invited to speak to the congress, and a group of Quebec Catholics raised the money to pay for his trip. He travelled under a false name, with false initials stamped onto his luggage, and with his life heavily insured against accidents -for, as he wrote to a friend, 'as you know, accidents happen rather often to the enemies of Freemasonry.' 59 The congress was attended by more than 1500 laymen and clerics (from a cardinal down to ordinary priests), including seven French Canadians, one of them a bishop. Tardivel's speech was a success, but his attendance at the congress made him uneasy on another score, for strong doubts were raised there about the authenticity of Leo Taxil's revelations, and in particular, about the existence of Miss Diana Vaughan. No one, in fact, had ever seen the young lady. Taxi! claimed she was in hiding in a French convent; he couldn't say which one, for if the Luciferians knew where she was, they would certainly seek vengeance against her for having revealed their secrets. But many Catholics, including the theologians of the Jesuit order, were unwilling to accept his assertions. In the end, the congress agreed to set up a commission to investigate the matter. Despite the doubts of the congress, Tardivel returned to Canada still convinced of Miss Vaughan's existence. He had met Taxil again in Europe and received his personal reassurances on the matter. His embarrassment, therefore, was all the greater when the commission reported, in early 1897, that although it had found no proof that Diana Vaughan did not exist, neither had it found any evidence that she did. Two months later, at a stormy public lecture, Taxil announced that the whole thing had been a fraud, that Diana Vaughan and all the 'revelations' about the Satanic workings of Freemasonry, from beginning to end, had been a colossal 'April fool's joke' perpetrated for the 'delicious pleasure ... the sheer joy of playing a good prank on an adversary, just for fun, for a good laugh.'6() Tardivel was dismayed, but, like many other thorough-going Catholics in Europe as here, not completely undeceived. Clearly, he xxiv A.I. Silver wrote, Taxil was a villain. Nevertheless, there must still be some basis in truth for all the Satanism stories that had been circulating for the past decade; where there was smoke, there surely was fire. Was it not likely, in fact, that the Masonic Luciferians had purposely circulated the false Diana Vaughan stories in order, by revealing their falsehood, to discredit the anti-Masonic elements and cover their own trail? 61 Commanded by Satan or not, Freemasonry was still, like all secret societies, condemned by the Church, and Tardivel was far from alone in his continued war against it. Secret lQdges he saw as responsible for defeat after defeat of the Catholic cause in Canada. Had not the Orange Order secretly worked up the North-West Rebellion in 1885, in order to have an excuse to suppress the French-Catholic Metis? 62 Was not the federal government pursuing a relentless program of centralization aimed at suppressing the autonomy of the Catholic province of Quebec, in accordance with a long-prepared plan unfolded secretly in the lodges of the Freemasons? 63 That Tardivel saw the lodges as enemies of Quebec's autonomy brings us to the second principal theme of his writing: French-Canadian independence. Because Catholicism involved a whole social and political program, or, at any rate, a unique perception of social and political questions, it was necessary for the French Canadians, the only coherent Catholic population in America, to have their own state. Only a formal French-Canadian government, with a wide range of competence, would be able to apply such a program or such a perception. For a Catholic society would certainly be materially different from those around it. It would be agricultural in a world of industry, and stable in a world of progress. (Early in Pour la patrie Tardivel observes that the countryside is the last bastion of Christian morality, while later in the novel the wreck of a train symbolizes the fate of technological man, rushing headlong in his arrogance toward the abyss. The Eiffel Tower, symbol of industrial progress, was to him a modern Tower of Babel.) While the identification of Catholicism with agriculture was characteristic of nineteenth-century Quebec, it was also rather ineffective. The inability (from a number of causes) of the old rural parishes to support the rapidly increasing French-Canadian population was compelling thousands of young men, by mid-century, to xxvi A.I. Silver messages were usually garbled or not delivered at all. The fault belonged to Quebec politicians too eager to co-operate with the English: We see our politicians running around the other provinces to win the good will of the English. That is all very well, but they should not forget that they also represent the French Canadians, and that they have a duty to make sure our language is respected. 65 In the long run, excessive tolerance of English language and institutions would only lead to the destruction of French Canada. Tardivel, therefore, opposed all notions of bilingualism as a 'trap' for the French-Canadian nationality. 'Do you know of many bilingual peoples?' he asked. 'I haven't heard of any. But I do know of a people that lost its national language because it was forced to learn another.' It was all right for a few individual French Canadians to learn English if they had to. 'But let them learn French first, and let French always remain their mother tongue, their real language.' 66 Like bilingualism, the idea of a pan-Canadian nationality was also to be opposed as destructive of the uniquely French-Canadian identity. In 1887 Tardivel criticized Quebec's prime minister, Honore Mercier, for a speech that called for 'the creation of a truly Canadian feeling, transcending all questions of race and religion.' To Tardivel, this sounded too much like the English-Quebec newspapers, or 'all those who dream of God-knows-what mixture of the different races living in this country. This is a wicked idea. The French-Canadian race must remain what it is now, with its own language, institutions, traditions, and distinct autonomy.' 67 The danger of anglicization within Quebec and the danger of pan-Canadianism went together with the danger represented by centralizing tendencies within the Canadian confederation. The British North America Act had given Quebec 'a relatively complete autonomy'; but, warned Tardivel, it was necessary to 'watch out constantly to preserve the true character of the federal pact. Let us not, by our negligence, permit the federal system to degenerate into a unitary state.' 68 If there was any province that had a particular interest in maintaining provincial autonomy, it was Quebec, for her unique religion and nationality set her apart from all the others. The unification of Canada through the increasing dominance of the federal government was a particular threat to French-Canadian Catholicism. xxxii A.I. Silver same advance of centralization under Mercier as under his predecessors. In the end, English and French Canada simply could not continue to live together, but must separate. This was the idea that Tardivel was to express in his novel. 'We hope,' says one of his characters, 'that English and French Canadians can get along as neighbours, joined by a simple customs and postal treaty .... There are too many basic differences between the two races who inhabit this country to be able to make them into a truly united nation.' 88 Quebec, therefore, must seek to become what Confederation had failed to make it: 'a New France, whose mission it will be to continue on this American soil the work of Christian civilization that the old France pursued so gloriously for so many hundreds of years.' 89 It was to help on this aspiration that Pour la patrie was written. It is, no doubt, always tempting with political novels to try to identify their characters and circumstances with real-life people and events. While it is not possible to give, for Pour la patrie, the sort of 'key' or exact table of equivalents between novel characters and real political figures that one finds, for example, with Disraeli's Caningsby, one can, at least, see certain characteristics of the fictional people that were shared by real ones of Tardivel's world. Tardivel himself can probably be found in two characters, the hero, Lamirande, and his journalistic sidekick, Leverdier. Certainly, Lamirande's ideas are Tardivel's, while Leverdier's newspaper, La Nouvelle-France, bears a close resemblance to La Verile. Moreover, Leverdier shares Tardivel's own first name. Other newspapers and journalists may also be tentatively identified. Le Mercure is a pretty thinly disguised La Minerve. Its name, its political affiliation, and its interest in commerce are all clues. Moreover, the tactics followed by Le Mercure during the period of crisis following Lamirande's denunciation of the first Marwood bill are pretty much the same as those followed by La Minerve and other ministerial papers during the Riel crisis. Less obvious are the inspirations for La Libre Pensee and its director, Ducoudray. They may well, however, have been La Patrie, and that controversial poet-journalist, Louis Frechette. Certainly Frechette was a bete noire for Tardivel, as indeed Tardivel was to him. There was constant editorial warfare between La Patrie and La Verile, and a continual trading of insults between the two men, the one a liberal and the secret influence of the Masons. Tardivel, in fact, took it for granted that only the continuance of British imperial authority made Confederation possible, and that when that authority disappeared, Confederation would have to give place to some new arrangement. For in his view, Anglo-Saxon aggression was not to be feared in the form of British imperialism so much as in the form of English-Canadian nationalism. 'As for us,' he wrote, 'inhabitants of the xxxviii In his frankly separatist and religious novel Pour la patrie, Jules-Paul Tardivel expressed in an extreme way what the majority of nineteenth-century Quebeckers would have expressed more moderately. Originally published in 1895, the novel reiterates two central themes of Tardivel’s writing: the Catholicism of French Canada and its unique social and political implications, and the Quebec-centred need of French Canada for its own separate state. Tardivel wrote this book to help Quebec become ‘a new France, whose mission it will be to continue on this American soil the work of Christian civilization that the old France pursued for so many hundreds of years.’ Though set in mid-twentieth century, Pour la Patrie represents Tardivel’s vision of his own times. He was a man of his time and of his society, and both as editor of the widely-read newspaper La Vérité and in his many other political writings, his influence on that society was great. If he was more extreme than most of his contemporaries in Quebec, it was more in his politics than his ideology: his underlying notions of religion, society, and the relations of men to each other and to God were in harmony with those of his province, and indeed, as the international circulation of his writing suggests, with the extreme Catholicism – the militantly defensive Catholicism – of his age.