On October 24, 1995, approximately seven thousand Québécois poured into Montreal’s Verdun Arena; five thousand more stood outside in the rain. The occasion was a rally for the non side of the Québec sovereignty referendum to be held six days later.
The moment was critical for the Canadian federalist cause. Though the campaign was initially polling ahead, if only slightly, and with the confidence that history would repeat itself—non had defeated oui in the 1980 referendum with nearly 60 percent of the vote—the prospect of victory had dimmed as the campaign progressed. Then-prime minister Jean Chrétien, whose early optimism had sunk into a barely concealed panic, concluded his speech that night by quoting Jean Lesage, the premier credited with bringing Québec into the twentieth century: “Le Canada c’est mon pays, le Québec c’est ma patrie.” (“Canada is my country, Québec is my homeland.”) The Québécois, at 93 percent participation, voted to stay in Canada by a single percentage point.
The polarizing result belies the fact that the separatists and the federalists (or at least Chrétien) were putting forth reflections of the same promise: whatever the result, Québec would be neither a free nation nor a Canadian province, but some sort of ambiguous concoction of the two, as if the only solution would be to make everyone and no one happy at once. The separatists promised “sovereignty”; the federalists, “distinction.” Both terms were hotly contested yet imprecise. If that myopia seems characteristically Canadian, it is also a continuation of what historian Ramsay Cook called the “paradox of Québec,” in which the future is entrapped by relitigation of the past, and straightforward concepts like “nationalism” and “independence” are embraced within a cloud of difference-splitting political jargon. Although, for one Québécois writer, the paradox was the point.
In 1962 Hubert Aquin published “The Cultural Fatigue of French Canada” in the journal Liberté, for which he was an editor. A sprawling defense of nationalism in an era where the concept seemed all but antiquated, it has become the most referenced, if not the most important, literary exploration of Québécois national identity and its limitations. “What will finally become of French Canada?” Aquin wrote.
To tell the truth, no one really knows, especially not French Canadians, whose ambivalence on this subject is typical: they want simultaneously to give into cultural fatigue and to overcome it, calling for renunciation and determination in the same breath. If anyone needs to be convinced of this, he need only read the articles our great nationalists have written—profoundly ambiguous speeches in which one can scarcely distinguish exhortations to revolt from appeals to constitutionality, revolutionary ardor from willed obedience.
Aquin, who died by suicide in 1977, would not see this play out in the political arena. By the second referendum he was like a democrat’s bad dream, presenting a style of cerebral polemic and madcap postmodernism that was outmoded in the 1990s, as was his consistent pessimism, which proved repellent to the optimism of consensus seekers. His novels earned him the Governor General’s Award, which he refused. He thrived in Canadian cultural institutions as he came to deny Canada’s legitimacy.
Yet Aquin’s writing, copious in volume, flexible in medium, albeit limited in availability to English-speaking (and especially American) readers, leaves a striking record of the nationalist mind in a historical turn that was hell-bent on modernizing it into, at best, a global one. It was not a mind in perfect equilibrium, guided as it was by a “collective unconscious, the protean product of two centuries of repressed desire.”
Québec before 1960 was provincial in more than political designation. The conquest of 1760—by which General James Wolfe took New France for Great Britain during the Seven Years’ War, being killed in the process—is the existential core of French Canadian identity alongside the contemporary Great Expulsion, which saw 11,500 of the 14,000 French-speaking Acadians forcibly deported from New Brunswick by the British. Québec separatists of every level of respectability have come to rely on its historical if not mythical import. The preamble of Bill 1, the sovereignty bill introduced in 1995, declared that “the conquest of 1760 did not break the determination of [French] descendants to remain faithful to a destiny unique in North America. Already in 1774, through the Quebec Act, the conqueror recognized the distinct nature of their institutions. Neither attempts at assimilation nor the Act of Union of 1840 could break their endurance.”
Although French was not suppressed in 1760, it was relegated to a lesser status. To the British, French was not the proper language of a healthy society, but that of a declining, and justly defeated, world power. If it was the language of a people, it was of a superstitious, subservient, and unwholesome people. The English-speaking minority, consistently around one quarter of the Québécois population, consolidated the predominantly urban economy. French language and culture, meanwhile, was preserved in a Catholic and agrarian fossilization.
Québec nationalism was largely shaped by clerics and conservative Catholic thinkers such as the priest Lionel Groulx to preserve the pre-industrial stasis. It culminated in the premiership of Maurice Duplessis, especially in his second fifteen-year tenure from 1944 until his death in 1959, known in Canadian history as la Grande noirceur (“the Great Darkness”). In that time, Duplessis exerted a Catholic authoritarianism that was closer to Portugal’s Estado Novo than to any Anglosphere parliamentary democracy.
Duplessis’ administration was isolated, rife with patronage appointments and corruption, contemptuous of the arts, restrictive to political dissent, and particularly aggressive against Jehovah’s Witnesses. The regime was “nationalist” insofar as it resisted World War II conscription, refused federal education subsidies, and officiated the fleur de lis flag that’s still in use today. But otherwise, Duplessis was quick to side with Anglophone and foreign business-owners against his striking citizens. Dressed in the double-breasted suits of a CEO and guided by the dogmatic certainties of an archbishop, Duplessis maintained electoral support in Québec’s rural, Catholic, and majority Francophone strongholds.
It was at this time that Pierre Trudeau emerged as a leading dissident in introducing liberal ideas into Québec’s priest- and demagogue-ridden intellectual diet. His vehicle was the little magazine Cité libre, which he co-founded in 1950. “Some of our leaders maintain political power by protecting the people from exaggerated and often imaginary dangers,” he wrote in the first issue. “Others gather the flock together and brandish threats of eternal damnation. In other words, it seems less important to make friends than to denounce enemies.” Trudeau was a prominent member of an eclectic coalition for an effective, dynamic opposition to Duplessis and his Union nationale. It included labor leader Jean Marchand, journalist Gérard Pelletier, the future separatist premier and leader of the 1980 sovereignty referendum René Lévesque, philosopher Charles Taylor, and future militant separatist intellectual Pierre Vallières. Hubert Aquin emerged among this milieu, becoming one of the scene’s most creative and contentious contributors.
Aquin was born in Montreal in 1929 to the owner of a sporting-goods store. Aquin was an Irish surname with a progressively Gallicized pronunciation (Ah-keen), but his upbringing was typical of his Francophone class: a rigorous formative education from Jesuits, a philosophy degree from Université de Montréal, further studies at Instituts d’études politiques in Paris concurrent with a grand tour of Europe, before returning to start a career in media. His path to politics was almost identical to those taken by his older contemporaries Trudeau and Lévesque, who started out as a radio field reporter and popular television host.
In 1955 Aquin took a job at Radio Canada before moving on in 1959 to write and direct for the National Film Board. Of his many NFB contributions, only one is streaming on its website, but it is instructive. The short 1962 documentary September Five at Saint-Henri is, on the surface, rather anodyne. It condenses a single day in the life of a blue-collar Montreal neighborhood into less than thirty minutes. Children get ready to go to school, local shops open for business, cops go out on patrol, youths joke around in a malt shop. It is an elegant cinéma vérité, free of abstract polemic, showing only the Québécois in their natural element. But a flat laconic narrative commentary can’t help but single out certain details: an unemployed father, the presence of English-speaking immigrants, the presence of all-English signage and American popular culture. If it made no implicit political statement, it did anticipate Québec’s political occupations at the time, on which Aquin himself would not remain aloof.
The core of Aquin’s intellectual and literary contributions coincide with the political and cultural eruption of the Quiet Revolution, initiated in 1960 under the Jean Lesage-led Liberal government. Under Lesage’s leadership, and with newcomers like Lévesque in his cabinet, the province would rise out of the Duplessis stagnancy. Québec’s ministry of education was reopened after nearly a century. Health insurance was socialized, and the hydroelectric industry was nationalized. Clerical supremacy gave way to more equitable secularism. More than that, however, Québec gained self-confidence within the surrounding confederation, while retaining its distinction from the Anglophone provinces. Lesage appropriated an old nationalist slogan “Masters in our own house.” Under a more social democratic aim, the Liberals were on course to be more nationalist than the nationalists they replaced.
Aquin first achieved prominence amid the Quiet Revolution by calling for a louder one. He wrote eloquent laments for how writing, let alone legislative reform, was an insufficient vehicle for that revolution absent any concrete plan of action. In 1961 he assumed the editorship of Liberté. The introductory essay for his first issue established the shift in Québec’s intellectual milieu. Trudeau had implored Cité libre’s readers to “batter down the totems” and to be “coolly intelligent” while doing so. Aquin, a decade later, declared Liberté “an act of aggression.” “We are opting for explosion, upheaval, and attack.” The line of attack was more aesthetic than specifically political: “We value language…Language is a form of life and, in its own wonderful way, a mode of action.” But that language would focus on “defining French Canada as it evolves” and “understanding the determining influences and forces of attraction at play outside its borders.”
One such influence was the emergent leftist third-world nationalism of Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. The conception of Québecois as being perpetually colonized became frequent in separatist rhetoric, developing a taste for curious historical analogies that were short on historical self-awareness. While in prison, Pierre Vallières wrote a memoir that would become something of a classic of the cause, Nègres blancs d’Amérique (White N------ of America). This self-interested borrowing was not limited to the militants. Lévesque could be heard referring to Québec’s Anglophone elite as “a bunch of Rhodesians” adding “if we had coloreds here, you’d feel it.” A blinkered thing to say considering that they did. Black people had been in Québec since the seventeenth century, and Francophone Black immigrants brought their own understanding of what the inheritance of French meant to Canada.
Aquin understood this well enough. “Ethnic homogeneity no longer exists, or at least is very rare,” he wrote in “Cultural Fatigue.” “One has simply to look around among one’s personal acquaintances to count the number of true-blue French Canadians who are not ‘real’ French Canadians: Mackay, Johnson, Eliot, Aquin, Molinari, O’Harley, Spénart, Esposito, Globenski, etc.” The “common denominator” was not ethnicity, but language.
Yet given the choice between fostering a pluralist society and protecting linguistic purity, Québec often preferred the latter. The 1969 language law Bill 63 offered an option of English-language education, presumably appealing to immigrants, and was met with demonstrations that ended in police clashes. Bill 101 of 1977, by contrast, limited English education essentially to English-speaking Québécois. In this one respect, Aquin did not go against the grain of Québécois sentiment. “Immigrants are potentially the most insidious of our anglicization,” he wrote in 1974’s “Joual: Haven or Hell?” “It is not only the immigrants who want to be assimilated to the English, but who dispute our right to assimilate anyone at all to our culture and our language.” It was an enduring complaint for separatists; in 1995 Québec premier Jacques Parizeau blamed the referendum loss on “l’argent pis des votes ethniques” (“money and ethnic votes”).
Despite their own pressures to assimilate, Aquin argued, “French Canadians were not immigrants…they were at home in their own land.” But land can be a more essential fault line than language for certain populations. The First Nations of Québec—and perhaps Canada generally—were at best an afterthought for separatists. Writing in “Cultural Fatigue,” Aquin knew that French Canadians were just as prone to “place a certain value on the survival of the folklore of the Amerindians,” as a kind of comparative example to their own struggles. But Aquin did not take it beyond that. It was incumbent upon the Indigenous populations to do it themselves. The Crees held a separate referendum a week before the wider 1995 vote asking their people if they “consent” to let Québec remove them from Canada. Crees rejected the question by 96 percent.
The realities that complicated the separatists’ rhetoric lingered beneath a more pervasive concern for the movement’s leaders: that Québec’s hard-won political reforms did little to mend the rift between Anglophone and Francophone Canada. Aquin’s 1962 Liberté essay “The Politics of Existence” articulates this tension with a candid yet cool radicalism: “I know that hostility toward English Canadians is not a respectable sentiment, even in separatist circles. Unfortunately, I am a woefully emotional separatist who finds it healthier to acknowledge his negative feelings toward English Canadians.” Confederation “is a kind of constitutional purgatory” that has at the same time “reminded French Canadians of their numerical and political strength and of their ambitions.” What was lacking among separatists, Aquin thought, was political maturity. Petitioning the United Nations, as some had wanted to do, was fanciful. So was the prospect of political violence. “I am not an advocate of the coup d’état, of the putsch or of its related forms…We live in a political context colored by British parliamentarianism and we like things to run smoothly.”
The optimistic self-determination of the Quiet Revolution was not universally accepted. The Duplessis-era dissidents had fractured in the 1960s. Trudeau, who entered the Canadian parliament in 1965, accused the nationalists of fostering “alienation” and depriving Canada of previously neglected sources of talent. The growing separatist movement, he argued, was a delusion. Vigilant separatists like Aquin quickly noticed that nationalism was a pose that could easily evaporate once exposed to the trappings of political responsibility. Writing in another leftist journal, Parti pris, Aquin cleverly surveyed the sexual and marital metaphors strewn throughout Québec political rhetoric. He quotes Lesage, reported in La Presse in June 1963: “Our autonomy is being raped by Ottawa.” Then again four months later in the same newspaper: “We can never be more faithful to our origins than by remaining within confederation.”
“There is no alarm then,” Aquin sarcastically retorted, “since even nations have their menstrual cycles and their mood swings according to the laws of nature. A sedative will suffice to bring Quebec’s behavior under control during these lunar periods.” At least in the available translated essays, gender was not a significant touchpoint for Aquin, though here he inadvertently exposes the predominantly masculine air of post-Duplessis political life. This would be explored more deeply in Anne Claire Poirier’s 1974 documentary They Called Us ‘Les Filles du Roy’, which, in addition to surveying the history of womanhood in Québec history, featured a multigenerational gathering of Québécois women discussing the forgotten customs of Francophone social life; relatives of Lesage—referred somewhat sardonically as “the handsome politician”—appear in the footage.
Separatism had made only slight inroads into the political mainstream. The Parti Québécois got nearly a quarter of the popular vote in 1970, but that amounted to only seven National Assembly seats. Absent a serious democratic outlet, separatist sentiment was expressed through street demonstration, which frequently ended in violent disruption by police. Rassemblement pour l’ndépendance Nationale (RIN) was founded in 1960, and despite being made up largely of intellectuals and civil servants, it was better known for its street theater than for its electoral success. Aquin himself was an active enough member of RIN to become a regional leader for the party in Montreal. But it was the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) that escalated the movement into revolutionary militancy. They’d spent much of the 1960s setting off bombs in or near any Anglophone or otherwise antagonistic symbol in Québec: the Wolfe monument, Canadian military barracks, RCMP headquarters, a Seven-Up factory, and the home of Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau, to name a few. They took some casualties in the process.
Aquin’s own stance had grown more militant in turn. The essays made available in English offer a more of a snapshot of his progression than a complete arc. But as Québec’s political growth seemed to leap from tumult to tumult, Aquin wrote according to its rhythm. Functioning democracy or no, Québec was a colonized state, he decided. The literature he earlier championed was itself a pillar of that status. “I refuse to write works of art,” he wrote in “Occupation: Writer,” “because I refuse the significance art assumes in an ambiguous world. As an artist, I would be playing a part that had been assigned to me: that of a talented underling.”
The domination of one human group by another places an exaggerated importance on those powers of the inferior group which are harmless: sex, artistic proclivities, natural talent for music or creation, and so on. Are we not, as French Canadians, interested in Eskimo art and the mythology of the Indians we keep on reservations?
The essay was published in January 1964 in Parti pris. Six months later, the major Québec newspaper Le Devoir ran an item announcing Aquin’s departure from the RIN to fight for independence “clandestinely” as the “Commanding Officer of the Special Organization.” In a subsequent communiqué Aquin declared “total war” on the enemies of independence: “My harmonious relationship with a society which cheats is ended for good. For some time, I shall be away. Then I will return among you. Let us be prepared. The revolution will succeed. Vive le Québec.”
It is unclear whether the Special Organization had any members other than Aquin, who spent the next month jumping from one friend’s home to another, reading about the Irish War of Independence, writing notes he did not keep, and trying to evade people who he thought were trailing him. His mission came to a conclusion on July 5, 1964, when police apprehended him getting into a car that was not his. The owner of the car, a political sympathizer, did not press charges. But police moved ahead on his possession of a .38 revolver. When asked at the precinct for his occupation, he said, “Revolutionary.”
“To be dominated is to live a novel that is written in advance,” Aquin wrote in “Occupation: Writer.” Awaiting trial, he was sent to the Albert Prévost Institute for psychiatric evaluation. He stayed there for four months and wrote his first novel.
The content of Prochain épisode (Next Episode) was indeed the stuff of life, being a novel about an unnamed Québec separatist terrorist under psychiatric care who resolves to write a spy novel. In style it deviates quite markedly from his previous work, abandoning the rigors of his essays in favor of an unrelenting, nonlinear stream of consciousness. The narration is always of an “I” but that “I” shifts between narrative and narrative within the narrative—that of pursuing an elusive target all over Switzerland. It corresponds well with the emerging Québec filmmakers like Claude Jutra, Gilles Groulx, Anne Claire Poirier, and Jacques Godbout (whose short biographical film on Aquin can be viewed), who forged their own nouvelle vague to express their angst of going from clerical suffocation to capitalist absorption. Aquin’s emotional register was less anxious than it was in despair.
For years I’ve lived flattened with fury. I’ve accustomed my friends to an intolerable voltage, to a waste of sparks and short circuits. To spit fire, to cheat death, to be resurrected a hundred times, to run a mile in less than four minutes, to introduce a flame-thrower into the dialectic and suicidal behavior into politics—that’s how I’ve established my style…I’m the hero, the former addict! National leader of an unknown people. I am the fragmented symbol of Québec’s revolution, its fractured reflection and its suicidal incarnation.
Next Episode was published in 1965 to critical acclaim, in Québec and in Canada. Over the course of nine years he would publish four more novels of a similarly experimental vein. His last one, 1974’s Hamlet’s Twin, was a screenplay. Not all of his novels would be political, yet Next Episode set the tone for the political writing that followed.
In “The Art of Defeat,” published the same year as Next Episode, Aquin renders Lower Canada’s failed attempt to replicate the American Revolution as the decoder of the national psyche. When the Patriotes defeated the British at the opening battle at Saint-Denis in 1837, they did not push onward because they had been “paralyzed by a totally unforeseen victory.”
The victorious company at St. Denis did not press home its advantage because…the Patriotes had prepared, with a light heart, only for their own death and destruction…Conditioned to defeat, as others are to suicide, because it is the honorable thing to do, the Patriotes suddenly found themselves having to survive without honor, without style, without even the hope of having done with it all.
“Their rebellion,” he continued, “so tragic in its disorder, resembles the poetic project of the man who has grown indifferent to the forms of his failure…Their errors go beyond the very concept of error, and the confusion in which they worked is radically different from any other kind of confusion; in fact, their failure…looks like a long-premeditated one, a Gothic masterpiece of madness.”
In 1970 the FLQ pivoted to kidnapping, taking British diplomat James Cross and Québec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte five days apart. Trudeau, now prime minister, sent the military into Montreal. Nearly five hundred people were arrested; less than half were charged with anything. The controversial decision was a popular one, though it was likely the discovery of Pierre Laporte’s body in the trunk of a car, after being strangled to death while captive, that ended violent resistance. Gothic madness had a ceiling in Québec. Even the RIN was absorbed into Lévesque’s more respectable Parti Québécois, which favored a semi-sovereign status within Canada rather than independence outright. When Parti Québécois won their first majority in 1976 and made a poet minister of justice, Aquin had hoped for their call. His talents, however, were not sought.
Aquin’s final years were marred with political disillusion and isolation, professional and financial setbacks—and writer’s block on top of all that. In March 1977 the lifelong depressive for whom suicidal ideations were almost a habit drove to a park in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, where he shot himself in the head. His suicide quickly became a mythic center of his legacy in Québec literature. He’d become, in the words of essayist Jean Louis-Major, “a literary martyr,” displacing the artist and earlier dissident Paul-Émile Borduas, who may also have died by suicide while effectively exiled in Paris. “For Hubert the suicide of such extra-lucid people,” his colleague Gaëtan Dostie said, “was the result of a profound cultural colonialization, in the sense that all the beings he was referring to—like Borduas—had tried to push Québec’s cultural awakening to its limits and had been obliged to admit defeat.”
“People who are happy are counter-revolutionaries!” Aquin wrote in 1961. “For those who have chosen happiness have chosen not to be heroes. I would even say, at the risk of seeming paradoxical, that anyone who chooses happiness gives up, or ought to give up, the possibility of being an artist.”
Heroes, happy or no, are central figures, with a mesmeric hold on the crowd and an innate understanding of their vulnerabilities and aspirations. René Lévesque, the diminutive, chain-smoking, womanizing, absurdly combed-over statesman, is Québec’s chosen hero, if a tragic one. His 1980 referendum failed. His gambler’s impulse was easily exploited by his great rival Trudeau at the 1981 constitutional conference (dubbed, in another inappropriate Québécois historical analogy, “The Night of the Long Knives”). Still, the Parti Québécois largely kept their promise to be less corrupt than their predecessors. And Bill 101, officiating French in Québec daily life five months after Aquin’s death, was perhaps a greater boon to Québécois self-confidence than the messy pursuit of whatever “sovereignty association” was supposed to be. Lévesque brought full-circle the province depicted by Aquin in September Five at Saint-Henri. Québéc is its people.
Aquin, mercurial, cerebral, critical, and downbeat, was destined for the margins. But they were at least Québec’s margins. He is better suited as its antihero than as its martyr. He produced, in poet Anthony Purdy’s words, a kind of “terrorist writing.” Writing in Québec, Aquin wrote in “Occupation: Writer,” “is like saying one’s prayers while sitting on a nitroglycerine bomb set to explode in five minutes’ time.” It was writing that did not make ambiguous promises or offer appeasing concessions. Separatism, in fact, seemed to dissolve into an existential mist of Québec’s perpetual yet ever adapting state of colonial siege. “In a country which is blacking out,” wrote Aquin, “the writer who attempts to breathe life into what is killing him will not write a Stendahlian tale of French-Canadian carbonari, but a work as uncertain and formally unwholesome as the one taking place in him and in his country.”