In Of Montreal, Robert Everett-Green writes weekly about the people, places and events that make Montreal a distinctive cultural capital.
We Canadians love to keep track of our successful cousins abroad. One sign that you may be talking to an American is the apparent unawareness that Jim Carrey and Mike Myers were born in the suburbs of Toronto.
A book published recently in Montreal pursues this diversion to genealogical extremes. The notables in Jacques Noël's La Diaspora Québécoise are there not because they were born in Quebec, but more often because their great-great-grandparents were.
Noël, a sociologist and sometimes journalist for La Presse, turns up some surprising names and narratives. Hillary Clinton has alluded to a Quebec strain in her lineage, but Noël traces it to a carpenter of New France named Nicolas Godet, who was killed in 1657 by a party of Iroquois while working on a roof. Beyoncé's French-Canadian heritage links her to the Acadian resistance hero Joseph Broussard (a.k.a. "Beausoleil"), and to Marie-Josephte Corriveau ("la Corriveau"), a convicted murderer whose corpse was famously displayed in an iron gibbet at Pointe-Lévy for several weeks in 1763.
Noël also finds that Madonna and Celine Dion are distant cousins, though fails to mention that both are similarly related to Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. Unlike many of Noël's subjects, Madonna speaks some French, and sent her children to immersion school. "You know, I am French-Canadian too," she told a Montreal audience at a concert in 1987. Characteristically, Noël interprets this shout-out as "the cry of a child of the diaspora asking for repatriation into the family."
In a 2013 census survey, about two million Americans claimed French-Canadian ancestry, which was less than two-thirds of 1 per cent of the population. This demographic detail holds immense significance for Noël. He sees it both as a proud sign of "the genetic imprint of our people on this continent," and also as a mournful index of what might have been. Quebec's population today would be at least 50 per cent greater, he speculates, if so many had not left for opportunities elsewhere.
This migration became a flood during the decades after Confederation. In 1861, 86 per cent of French Canadians lived in Quebec. By 1911, only 53 per cent did. Nearly one million Quebeckers had left for the United States, most of them drawn by the bustling mills of New England.
"Diaspora" properly refers to a broad community of displaced people who maintain the customs and language of their homeland. Noël's star witnesses for this kind of diasporic experience are writers Jack Kerouac and Annie Proulx, whose parents were economic migrants. Kerouac spoke only French till the age of six, and later reflected on "that horrible homelessness of all French Canadians abroad in America." Proulx never learnt the language, and came to feel that her separation from her parents' cultural roots created "a profound solitude that grew with the years."
Many of Noël's subjects, each of whom get a short chapter to themselves, show no active interest in their French-Canadian heritage. "I really don't see the point," says British comedian Ricky Gervais. For him, the mere genetic fact has no personal or cultural importance.
But Gervais and Hillary Clinton still hold a place in Noël's diaspora, because for him the first and deepest marker of nationality is found in the blood. This becomes screamingly clear in his section on Louis Riel. "We all grew up with the idea that Riel was a Métis," Noël writes, before revealing that the Métis leader had "only one-eighth Indigenous blood in his veins." That's not enough for this genealogist, who blames the "Indigenous lobby" for preventing us from seeing Riel primarily as a Franco-Manitoban.
This is the old blood-quantum method of using racial analysis alone to decide who is a "little 'm' métis," as Métis activist and cultural critic Chelsea Vowel writes in her recent book Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis & Inuit Issues in Canada. Vowel argues for a "big 'M'" definition of Métis identity, based on kinship but largely determined by shared social practices, language and history. This is the view adopted by the Supreme Court of Canada in a landmark decision in 2003.
Noël's thinking about blood and nationhood are similar to that of Lionel Groulx, the abbé and polemicist who fathered modern Quebec nationalism. In Groulx's 1922 novel L'Appel de la Race, the hero, who is descended from luminaries of New France, gives a speech praising "the nobility of our race, the pride of our history [and] the grandeur of our destiny." The whole book is about the struggle to resist assimilation to English ways, which conflict with the culture and destiny native to the race.
La Diaspora Québécoise is the melancholy sequel to L'Appel de la Race. In Quebec, Groulx's certainties about blood and destiny have yielded to an immigration-based idea of nationality in which, as Noël puts it, merely living in a territory has at least as much legal weight as being rooted in "le terroir" – one's native land. But the Québécois, he insists, are not an immigrant people. Scarcely 30,000 came from France during the whole history of New France; all the rest were born here. "We are the pure product of this continent," he concludes, somehow indigenizing those boatloads from elsewhere, or starting his clock after their arrival.
Jumping the shark entirely, Noël also claims that le terroir of the Québécois was never taken from indigenous people, "as we are incessantly and falsely told." He seems to believe in a secular version of what the French missionaries of New France took on faith: that the land was a gift from God for converting the heathen.
La Diaspora Québécoise was published by Les Éditions GID, which specializes in works on history and heritage, and was reviewed seriously in Le Devoir. But its blood-and-soil ideas are neither fresh nor current in Quebec. The notion of "pure laine" nationality is probably more often invoked outside the province than in it. As historian Benedict Anderson observed 30 years ago, being a modern nation is mainly a work of collective imagination, not of bloodlines.