Monuments, Memorials and Site Inscriptions

In what I've read of academics writing about monuments and memorials, I find little agreement about the definitions of those two terms. A memorial invokes memory, obviously, but it need not necessarily be dedicated to the memory of a deceased individual. A monument is, well, big, it is built to be noticed. Art historian Michael J. Lewis proposes that, “a monument is the expression of a single powerful idea in a single emphatic form, in colossal scale and permanent materials, made to serve civic life. (Materials and size distinguish monuments from memorials, of which monuments are a subset).” (2). Lewis was writing in Imprimis, a free pamphlet distributed by the right-wing ideologists at Hillsdale College in Michigan. The title of his piece “The Decline of American Monuments and Memorials” critiques the new Martin Luther King memorial and the plans for a Dwight D. Eisenhower memorial.

In studying Quebec City I have come to focus on the connection between monuments, memorials, and place. This relationship is not obvious, for whereas a gravestone is meant to mark the site where that person is buried, a memorial need not mark any particular site. Kirk Savage, the author of two fine books about the monuments and memorials of Washington, D.C., in writing of the Lincoln Memorial, says “the monument is not, properly speaking, a sacred site. Typically it holds no relic or spiritual trace of a past presence. The site of the Lincoln Memorial, for instance, did not even exist in Lincoln’s lifetime; it sits quite literally on mud dredged from the Potomac River bottom” (6). Savage goes on to explain how in the 19th century the National Mall was a park with many trees and winding paths, but few museums or monuments. The city had plenty of statues of great men, but they were dispersed around the city such as in the circles where radiant streets meet. In the late 1800s and early 1900s a modernist plan cut down all the trees and added the reflecting pool, a series of new museums that continues today, and streets and parking for cars, changing “public grounds” into “public space.” Public space is abstract, relational, and visual. For instance the new plan emphasized the axis running through the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial and RFK stadium at the eastern end. This made possible the huge marches and celebrations for which the Mall is famous. With all those trees still in place few people could have watched MLK give his “I have a dream” speech or Barack Obama take oath of office at his inauguration.

So the many memorials in DC create a network or hierarchy of place and power, in that the relative significance of the person can be discerned from the size and location of the monument, but few of them actually commemorate events that occurred at that location. Washington DC was built from scratch to be the capital city, it did not arise from an important pre-national event, as Quebec City did.

I want to analyze instead the ways in which much smaller monuments or memorials commemorate events and persons connected with the spot which they mark. I will call it a site commemoration or site inscription. Among the most common is the now-cliché "George Washington slept here" or more general "so-and-so lived here." However, these are often intended less to honor the historical individual than to enhance the value of the building on which the plaque is mounted. I am specifically interested in site inscription as a simple marker on the (presumptive) site of an event, a non-monument that has no statue, no representational or artistic content, only a sign or plaque, often mounted on a rough stone, with simple text such as the “Here Wolfe fell” and the "Montcalm, Vaincu, Blessé a mort ici" that I discussed in an earlier post. The site inscription doesn’t really qualify as a monument (because it is too small) nor as a memorial (since it doesn’t necessary involve death nor a single person).  

At a site inscription there’s nothing to touch, nor to look at, no palpable connection to a person or event. There's no mortal remains and no relic (although such relics connected with the site may be found elsewhere). The site inscription invokes (or tries to invoke) among viewers an act of commemoration that resembles the reverence and singularity of a gravesite, without the metonymic relic. The marker doesn’t try to manufacture an aura (as at the Lincoln memorial) but only invoke one, as if the aura already inhered in the site or place. I think Native American “sacred sites” and the New Age religiosity about “sacred spaces” may have helped to sustain this effect and make it more influential. This abstraction is akin to the simplicity of radical protestant houses of worship, Quaker meeting house. The power must reside in the minds and memories of the viewers. At many such markers there are no scheduled events to bring together the community of commemorators, and so it must be an an individuated ritual or invoke an imagined community. It is up to the visitor to determine how to feel or whether to care, but the political interpellation (to use Althusser’s term) is usually pretty obvious.

One of the most provocative of these site inscriptions in Quebec is at the base of the Cote Gilmore, next to a stoplight on the busy Boulevard Champlain, the former Anse à Foulon before the anse or cove was filled in to build an industrial port. This granite boulder bears a plaque reading: “The first Reigning Sovereign / who ever set foot upon Canadian soil, / King George VI, / Made his first landing here, at Wolfe’s Cove, / Together with / Queen Elizabeth, / on the 17th of May, 1939.” (with French text below, of course). This is a powerfully imperial Anglo gesture and I can imagine how it might have provoked a francophone response (although I don’t yet know when it was erected). If the King visited of course he had to come ashore, and why does it matter where? Because it was the same spot where Wolfe came ashore the morning of Sept. 13, 1759 for the battle that secured the conquest of New France.

Halfway up the Côte Gilmore, a street so steep it is closed in winter and poses a challenge to avid cyclists in summer, is this monument. I think the two go together, and invite the tourist to climb the hill as a reenactment of Wolfe's conquest, even as it implies King George himself did in 1939. As Serge Tisseron writes in a study of monuments: “entrer dans le monument ou, mieux encore, l’escalader, permet de nous l’approprier et de nous l’assimiler bien mieux que de seulement le regarder.”

He was thinking of massive monuments such as the Eiffel Tower or Statue of Liberty, but I think the same holds true for site inscriptions that trace sequential commemorations. The archetype would be the via dolorosa in Jerusalem, following the fourteen (originally only eight) stations of the cross, each of which is marked with one or more plaques or signs. The tourist or pilgrim cannot see direct evidence of what happened on that site, and in some cases the location or event is disputed, but site inscriptions ask the viewer to commit to an act of memory, and a sequence of inscriptions is more effective at putting the visitor through an initiation ritual, at installing a sense of loyalty or belief.

Gabriel Franchère

I titled my blog Oregon and Quebec and in one post I acknowledged that many readers (both readers?) likely believe the two places are far apart and have little to do with one another. But one of my goals is to show that in fact many of the earliest Euro-American residents of Oregon came from Quebec. The first Catholic bishops of the Oregon territory were Quebecois. The earliest comprehensive glossary of the Chinook jargon, the trade language used by Indians and trappers in the Oregon territory, was published in Montreal (written by Rev. Modeste Demers, revised by Rev. F. N. Blanchet, in 1870). And among the founders of Astoria, Oregon in 1811, the trading post financed and named for the fur trading magnate John Jacob Astor, was Gabriel Franchère, a Montrealer. He is particularly noteworthy because he wrote a travel narrative that is the best record of the expedition, and was the primary source for Washington Irving's Astoria.

Franchère sailed from New York in September 1810 on the Tonquin, and stopped at the Islas Malvinas or Iles Malouines before rounding Cape Horn, and for a lengthy stopover in Hawaii after the horn. In late March they reached the Columbia, and with great difficulty and the loss of eight men in their launches, crossed the bar. For me, homesick for the Willamette Valley, a great charm of this text is Franchère's reaction to the climate and the vegetation. The enormous trees, the spring flowers, and the success of his garden: “les navets etaient d’un grosseur extraordinaire; nous en mesurames un qui portoit 33 pouces de circonférence et pesoit quinze livres et demie. De douze patates que nous plantames, le produit fut de 90, que nous conservames avec soin pour l’année suivante." But at leaner times Franchère was forced to trade for horses and dogs; the animals that the Indians themselves did not care to eat.

Astor's scheme was inspired by the fact that as the Hudson's Bay company and especially the Montreal based Northwest Company stretched their networks farther and farther into the Rocky Mountains, they pushed against the limits of the yearly routine around which the trade had always been organized. The voyageurs would leave the posts in the spring with furs trapped over the winter, deliver them to Montreal, and return to the posts in the fall with the essential goods Indian trappers needed for the winter. It was not feasible to make this round trip from the upper Saskatchewan River in one season. Moreover, one of the richest markets for beaver, mink, and other furs was now in Canton (China). So a Pacific Coast fur factory could be very lucrative. Trade goods might be supplied in large ocean-going vessels, and furs collected from the western slopes of the Rockies, and shipped directly across the Pacific, along with the seal and otter skins collected along the coast. At last the transcontinental trade that explorers had dreamed of since the sixteenth-century could become a reality!

Astor sent a ship around the Horn, and a separate expedition overland, along the same route used by Lewis and Clark some six years earlier. But at the same time the NW Company traders, including David Thompson, were exploring the Columbia Valley with the same goal as Astor. And on july 23, 1811, Thompson himself showed up in Astoria: “Ce monsieur voyageoit plutot en qualité de géographe qu’en commercant de pelleteries. Durant un séjour de 7 à 8 jours qu’il fit avec nous, il eut occasion de prendre plusieurs observations, étant muni d’un bon quart de nonnante. Et il me parut qu’il tenoit un journal régulier” One thing that amazes me in this book is how the traders and explorers all seem to find each other in this enormous country. When I go hiking I usually have a map and look at it every mile or so. These guys followed directions on a very large scale; something like "ascend the Columbia to its headwaters, turn east, cross over a pass, and..." This was the route Franchère followed home, where he arrived on Sept. 1, 1814.

Franchère was extremely lucky to survive, but not lucky enough to find his fortune. While he stayed at Astoria to build the trading post, the Tonquin set sail to explore the coast, and near Nootka on Vancouver Island was attacked by the Indians and burned. Only one man survived, escaped from captivity and returned to Oregon to tell the tale. The party that crossed overland to Oregon suffered horrible privations. When the War of 1812 broke out and Britain and the United States became enemy powers, the competition for Astoria was no longer merely commercial but political. The Astorians surrendered to the more numerous NW Co. men, and “C’est de cette maniere que je perdis en un instant mes espérances de fortune après avoir franchi les mers et enduré toutes les fatigues et les privations auxquelles je fus exposé en formant l’établissement.”


Franchère kept a diary during his voyage, and wrote a narrative upon his return. In 1820 the editor Michel Bibaud published Relation d'un voyage à la côte du nord-ouest de l'Amérique Septentrionale, dans les années 1810, 11, 12, 13, et 14. This text was used by Irving, along with interviews with Franchère and other members of the expedition. Then an English translation appeared in 1854, and several others after that. But the original manuscript, held now at the Toronto public library, remained unpublished until 1969, when the Champlain Society released it in a bilingual edition. I've purchased a less-expensive French edition from LUX of Montréal.


I look forward to reading Astoria when I get back to Oregon, and perhaps to studying how Irving and others changed Franchère's original narrative. It's final lines are mémorable enough, and Franchère finally reaches his hometown, after paddling all the way from the Rockies. "Enfin après avoir desscendu ce dernier rapide nous mimes pied à terra à Montréal après le coucher du soleil, après quatre ans, un mois, et six jour d’absence. Je m’acheminai immédiatement vers la maison paternelle, ou l’on ne s’attendoit guère à me revois, les nouvelles leur étant parvenues que j’avais été massacré avec M. McKay et l’équipage du Tonquin. Je me retrouvai ainsi au millieu de ma famille et de mes amis, par un effet de la divine providence, qui voulut bien me preserver...”

Update on Student Strikes

The student strike is at an impasse. On Monday the provincial education minister, Line Beauchamp, resigned. She was deputy prime minister under Jean Charest as well. Charest's defense is that his government promises to add $39 million in bursaries, so low-income students will not be hurt by the $1,778 tuition hike, and says Quebec will still have the lowest tuition in Canada and the best student-aid program. But a hard-core group of protesters turns out nearly every night here and even more in Montreal, and the Montrealais are getting really tired of it, particularly when a smoke bomb in the metro there delayed trips for thousands of commuters last week. I saw reference to another subway disruption yesterday but can't confirm that.

The worst incident in terms of injuries was at the liberal party conference, which had been moved from Montreal to the small town of Victoriaville. The liberal party holds the majority in the "national" assembly, under Premier Jean Charest. So Charest was trying to avoid tying up Montreal, but the student organizations rented a bunch of motorcoaches and turned out in force in Victoriaville. Confrontations with riot police led to one policeman and several students being badly injured. One student lost an eye. 

After that the student associations met with the liberal party leaders and reached a tentative agreement. It proposed small tuition and fee increases for next year, something like $150, and would convene a special committee with members from university administration, faculty unions, and student groups, which would be charged with looking for cost savings in university budgets that could be used to offset the proposed increases, possibly reducing the increase to zero. But as my local host pointed out, administrators have been trained their entire career never to admit that they have been spending too much, and so that committee was never going to succeed. The proposal was sent to student groups for a vote and they all voted it down.

But as I started to write this I had not caught up on the latest news from just last night! The Assembly convened at 8 pm for a special session to debate a bill that would make it illegal for student associations to form picket lines preventing the classmates from attending classes. It would impose steep fines. This news prompted students in Montreal to march around the city until 3 am when they finally got tired and dispersed.

The merit of the student protest I think is that they have turned attention toward the Universities' bloated administrative costs, and claimed that tuition hikes are not necessary even if the province faces a budget crisis. I have no idea how administrative bloat here compares to schools in the US, but at least I get the sense that the students are concerned about educational value for the money, rather than expecting posh dorms and health clubs, and free tickets to big-time sporting events.

The peculiarities of Quebec politics have helped sustain the strike, even as a large majority of older Quebecois have come to oppose the students. The separatist Parti Quebecois, out of power in the province since I think 2001 or 2002, has embraced the students' cause and on the floor of the Assembly the PQ members wear the red square, symbol of the student movement. The students use slogans from the separatist movement like "maítres chez nous" and this ideology helps them justify the fact that even after the hikes tuition in Quebec would be much lower than in the other provinces. It doesn't look like this alliance will help the PQ win a majority in the next election, but voters may also turn against Charest's Liberals because they have failed to resolve the crisis by now.

The spring term is lost for those students who were on strike, which is roughly a third of all students. Now people are concerned that the strike could continue into the fall. The severity of the student debt problem here seems minor compared to the USA. A student here quoted in the newspaper was outraged at the prospect of a $30,000 debt upon graduation, but students in the US often have more than $75,000 and I don't see how anyone here could run up that much, with tuition at $3000/year or less. Plus, unemployment here is lower than in the US, and many jobs go begging in the remote mining and oil patch regions. Would you want to spend the winter in an iron mine in Labrador?

The translations of Montcalm

The re-burial of the remains of the "Braves" found near the Dumont mill site in Ste-Foy was called a "translation" (the word is the same in French) referring to the ceremony of re-intering the relics of a saint. In looking at the major monuments to Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, I'd like to again emphasize the function of translation.

We've seen how the obelisk in the jardin des gouverneurs, the paired statues above the entrance to the Parliament building, and the pair of markers for their death spots on the Plains of Abraham all grant Montcalm and Wolfe the status of equals, of twins whose shared sacrifice undergirds Canadian nationalism. One might say they were not twins separated at birth, but twins united in death. And the twinning of the two heroes goes along with the continuous acts of French-English translation that are also part of Canadian nationalism.

The monuments to Montcalm alone define a different type of translation; that of re-membering and re-burying a saintly hero, and moving his image back and forth between Quebec and France.

This is Léopold Morice's Monument to Montcalm, cast in 1910 and erected in 1911 facing the Grande Allée a few meters away from the Plains. The plans for the monument began, presumably at the time of the 1908 tri-centennial celebrations and the founding of the National Battlefields Commission. Today it stands in front of the concrete monstrosity of the Loews hotel and back to back with a bronze statue of Charles de Gaulle at the other end of a short median.

I don't think the statue really does the hero justice. The expression on his face and his pose, with both arms stretched out, suggests that the allegorical angel come to crown him with laurels has suddenly bumped into him and may topple him over. He straddles a cannon that lies on the ground in a position where it cannot possible aid him in battle. But let's look at the inscription on his pedestal.

The polished curved surface is hard to read. It says simply
    Montcalm
La France
         Le Canada

Another copy of this statue was unveiled in 1910 at Montcalm's birthplace, the Chateau de Vestric, in Vestric-Candiac, France, just south of Nimes. I've not seen a photo of that one, but its existence, and the inscription here in Quebec, suggests an emphasis on his French identity and the connection he provides between Quebec and France. This even though some of the major histories of the Seven Years War by Quebecois, including Guy Frégault and François-Xavier Garneau, tended to criticize Montcalm's battlefield leadership and favor that of the Canadian-born governor Vaudreuil.

Here is the plaque on the house now standing on the site of the house where Montcalm died, the day after the battle in 1759. This is one of the few inscriptions in the city that is not bi-lingual. It emphasizes his French birth. It was put there only in 1999, on the 240th anniversary of his death. The house faces Rue du Parloir, the short street where the cars of parents of Ecole des Ursulines students line up twice a day. Montcalm's remains were interred in chapel of the Ursulines until 2001, when a translation ceremony was held to move them to the cemetery of the Hôpital général de Québec, in the lower town. A nun at the Ursulines chapel recalled the event and said they had to dig a big hole in the floor, and that only part of his skull remained. However small the remains, they were carried in carriage pulled by four black horses and in a procession to the new site. I need learn the reasons for this move, but at the same time a new monument was built there to the memory of soldiers who died during the Seven Year War and had been buried in an unmarked mass grave in that cemetery.

Montcalm got a new mausoleum as you see here, but the effect was nonetheless to democratize the hero by putting him alongside some of his troops.The plaque in the foreground reads in part: "Il repose desormais auprès de ses soldats tombés avec luis devant Québec pour la défense de la Nouvelle-France." Inside, too dark for photos yesterday, is another inscription explaining that at the ceremony his descendant laid a stone from the ancestral castle at Saint-Véran, France next to his relics. So we see how the fetishism of objects inheres not only in holy relics, but even in buildings, stone, monuments, etc. To translate remains is to transfer the magical power of heroism or ownership, from one place to another. These "restes" carry a magical aura, that apparently can be felt by the remains of the soldiers who must be comforted at the thought that their leader now lies close to them.

Monument des Braves

One response of Quebec francophones to the cult of memory surrounding Wolfe and the battle of Sept. 13, 1759, has been to emphasize the Battle of Ste-Foy fought the following year on April 28th. In this battle the Chevalier de Lévis, whom most historians regard as a more capable tactician than Montcalm, but who was away from the city in September 1759, attacked the English forces led by James Murray in an attempt to retake Quebec. He was able to inflict significant casualties, and then beseige the fortified city, but when British ships arrived two weeks later and relieved Murray, Lévis' effort failed, and the focus shifted to Montreal. Because the French carried the day at Ste-Foy, commemorations of this battle have been used as a counterweight to Wolfe and the Plains of Abraham. So when military reenactment hobbyists proposed activities on the occasion of the 250th anniversary in 2009, they promised to reenact both battles. And likewise when the National Battlefield Commission began designing the park, they included the Monument which already stood at the sight of the former Dumont mill, around which the Ste-Foy battle had been fought. Here is a reproduction of a painting of the battle by Joseph Legaré, on a signboard at the park.

The text of the signboard contains a detailed account of the military maneuvers which led Lévis to victory. It also explains how "in 1849, workers discovered bones and remains of weapons near the presumed site of the Dumont mill. Excavations conducted in 1852 seem to confirm that the remains were those of soldiers, both French and British, who died in the Battle of Sainte-Foy. ON June 5, 1854 a translation ceremony was held, at the end of which a casket containing the soldiers' remains was lowered into a grave on the battlefield, where the monument was later erected."
The battlefield commission seems reluctant to endorse the authenticity of these finds. I also like the way the verb "translated" has the obscure meaning of "the removal of the body or relics of a saint to another place of interment" [OED I 1. a]. As we have seen, translation between English and French is also an important element of the commemoration process.

The monument is at the north end of the Avenue des Braves, a street of sumptuous residences, which runs from the eastern end of Battlefields park. It's about a kilometer to walk, and so few tourists who see the Wolfe Monument and other sites in the park are likely to make the trip, although in the high season there is a shuttle bus.

The monument itself was commissioned by the Societe Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Québec (the francophone social/political club, which had purchased the land in 1855), designed by celebrated architect Charles Baillargé, and erected in 1860. It has the Roman goddess of war, Bellona, on top, and plaques on opposite sides honoring Levis and Murray.

 So it seems clear that the SSJB wanted to reply to the Wolfe monument and the Dalhousie one by putting up their own to the 1760 battle, which was a French victory, but they made it appear non-partisan by using a design similar to the Dalhousie monument, with paired French and English heroes, plaques with the name of each facing away from each other on opposite sides of the monument even as they faced toward each other on the battlefield.

There are also, in an adjoining shelter added much more recently, two bronze statues of the two heroes. The francophones were already in the mid 1800s adept at monumental balance, at giving equal time to both sides so as to avoid offending the Anglophones who held greater economic clout in the city. The same kind of delicacy is often required today when building historical monuments and composing plaques and texts, whether in the U.S. or Canada, and whether the issue is the Civil War, or slavery, or what-have-you.

The only way the francophones can celebrate their own side is to do so obliquely. Thus, for instance, the first stone in the construction of the monument was laid in June 1855 by the captain of the Capricieuse, the first French military vessel to reach Quebec since the Conquest 96 years earlier. In our next posts we will see more examples of this oblique patriotism.

The Wolfe Monument

The Wolfe Monument is the is the most highly charged monument in the entire city. Not because of its appearance, more because of its location and its history. Wolfe’s heroic image and the commodification of it in England and the Empire (see Alan McNairn's book Behold the Hero) has aroused resentment among some Francophone partisans and Quebec nationalists. And the location of the monument directly in front of the national museum of art is a position of privilege exceeded only by that of the Champlain and Laval monuments at the brink of the bluff in the old city, and monuments in front of the Capitol building. An heroic bronze equestrian statue might be more provocative in suggesting Wolfe's military might, and huge bronze statue of Wolfe is found in Greenwich park near London, but of course Wolfe did not ride a horse into the battle on Sept. 13, 1759. The Wolfe column is a memorial not a statue, on the top are a bronze helmet and a sword, a neoclassical symbol for the fallen warrior. It marks the spot (supposedly) of Wolfe’s death, and suggests a metonymic connection with his body, much like the relics of a saint.

That's me at the monument, which stands in a traffic circle directly in front of the entrance to the national art museum, and just a few meters off the Grande Allée. But the monument predates the civic buildings (including the city's main jail, only recently transformed into a wing of the art museum). The travel writer John Lambert reported that in 1807 he "went sadly to the place where Wolfe had given his life for the glory of the Empire, deploring that sacriligeous hands had taken the large stone against which the motrally wounded general had been held up by his officers, and indignant that his compatriots did not show more respect." Lambert suggests and English pilgrims were so eager to take home a piece of this sacred rock that they finally destroyed it altogether. Adjacent to the site, but now effaced by the construction of a new building for the Musée de Beaux Arts de Quebec, was a well, from which Wolfe was supposedly given water in the last moments of his life. Like the name Plains of Abraham, (which had an entirely secular origin in the name Abraham Martin, who sailed with Champlain), this story gives a biblical weight to Wolfe's heroic image. He sacrificed so that his people (the English) might become God's chosen and might reign over Quebec and the world.

The plaque explains that this column is the fifth monument on the site. The fourth was destroyed on March 29, 1963 in an act of vandalism that some attribute to the Front pour la Libération de Québec, a radical nationalist group. In my photo here you can see faded evidence of a red X across the plaque on the left. I will update with more about the attack.

I believe that the reason this monument is so provocative is not simply that it is devoted to Wolfe but that it lacks the balance carefully observed in the obelisk at the Jardin des Gouverneurs and in the Monument des Braves, which will be the subject of my next post.

The other monuments of Quebec City either show a careful balance between English and French communities and heroes, or they use an allusive rather than direct method of favoring one side over the other. The Wolfe monument here is direct and partisan.

The Wolfe/Montcalm Dialectic

Now, after a beautiful morning walk on the Plains with Marsha, I have new photos and can begin the narrative.

Monuments can be to persons or to places. A bronze statue is of course a monument to a person who may have little to do with the site where the statue stands, while an inscription can attach event to place with or without a specific person. Just behind our building is this monument to Wolfe's famous fatal wound:

And just about 100 meters farther east is another granite block, of nearly identical size and shape, and carrying a nearly identical inscription:

Dual French and English texts are found on nearly every such inscription and every signboard in the city, but here the two languages recapitulate the tense balance in which the two heroes are memorialized. For the heroes represent the two language communities in the city. A monument to Wolfe without equal time for Montcalm would be like a sign in English without French translation; it would be an offense and likely even a violation of the law.

I am not sure when these were erected but it would have to be after the park and the battlefields commission were begun in 1908-09. The first major monument to the heroes was erected in 1827 in the Jardin des Gouverneurs behind the Chateau Frontenac hotel. It is another example of the careful balance between the two heroic figures, and is the first volley in the ongoing dialectic.

Here are two sides of the obelisk, rigorously balanced. And here the bilingual rule is broken. In the spirit of compromise and reconciliation, the inscription was done in Latin, on the side facing the river, between the two hero's names, has two panels. The top panel, the shorter text, says:

Mortem vitus communem, famam historia, monumentum posteritas dedit
Leur courage leur a donné la même mort; l’histoire, même renommée; la postérité,même monument
Their courage as given them the same death, history, the same renown, posterity, the same monument
The larger lower panel is below the photos:

HUJUSCE

MONUMENTI IN MEMORIAM VIRORUM ILLUSTRATIUM

WOLFE ET MONTCALM

FUNDAMENTUM P.C. GEORGIUS COMMS DE DALHOUSIE

IN SEPTENTRIONALIS AMERICAE PARTIBUS

AD BRITANNOS PERTINENTIBUS

SUMMAM RERUM ADMINISTRATUS;

OPUS PER MULTOS ANNOS PRAETERMISSUM

(QUID DUCI EGREGIO CONVENIENTIUS;)

AUTORITATE PROMOVENS, EXEMPLO STIMULA

MUNIFICENTIA FOVENS

DIE NOVEMBRIS XV a A.D. MDCCCXXVII

GEORGIO IV BRITANNIARUM REGE

roughly translated this means

this

demonstrative Monument in memory of

Wolf and Montcalm

was founded during the administration of P.C. George of Dalhousie

In the northern regions of America

controlled by the the Britons, 

an administrator whose

Work went unnoticed for many years

(as is fitting for this good duke)

under his authority, to stimulate and promote examples

and foster generosity

November 15,  A.D. 1827

George IV King of Britain

The Governor General of Canada at this time, Lord Dalhousie, was trying to defuse political tensions between Anglophone and Francophone factions by promoting a sense that their patron heroes were of equal status. But the historical content--what they did to deserve such acclaim--is referred to only obliquely, and the Latin inscription reaffirms British colonial rule and the status of Dalhousie himself.

"maitres chez nous"

Student strike continues here. There was a brief period of negotiations between the ministre de l'education Line Beauchamp and some of the student groups who had agreed to renounce violence. But the acronyms for various student organizations: FEUQ, CLASSE, etc. are a real alphabet soup and it has been impossible to get them all in line together.

In the english-language Montreal daily, The Gazette, I read this op-ed article which I found really interesting. The author asserts that the student movement is appropriating slogans from the nationalist movement of the Quiet Revolution, such as "maîtres chez nous" for their own student movement. She critiques the exclusionary nature of these slogans. If the nous includes only native born Quebecois, then are they ignoring the presence of African and native students in their classes? A video of a demonstration, she says, included only white faces among the protestors. The students attempt to evoke Pierre Vallières' notorious essay "les Negres blancs d'Amérique" which claimed the Quebecois suffered the same kind of discrimination from white Anglophones as blacks were suffering in the American south. It was hyperbole but it resonated with the radical-chic of the moment. The phrase also reminds me of the film about the Irish blues band that covered soul hits and declared that "the Irish are the blacks of Europe!"

The student movement does appear to dovetail with the Quebec separatist movement. It is little surprise that students from other provinces (of whom there are very few at Laval) or from other countries (including the Haitians I have met in the CELAT program) are not supporting the strikes. If one intends to move out of Quebec after earning one's degree, why would one wish to sacrifice an entire term of credits in order to preserve lower tuition for future undergraduates here in Quebec?

Another op-ed in the same paper examined how the Parti Quebecois leader has taken to wearing the red square, symbol of the student movement, on her lapel. Will this be a successful strategy for the PQ? I'm not sure, but there is an obvious resonance. The strikers attack the Liberal party provincial government and demand to be "maîtres chez nous" as if the liberals and the university rectors are their anglophone oppressors.

Portland Timbers vs. Montréal Impact

The only possible meeting between Oregon and Québec teams in major sports will take place this coming Saturday 2 pm at Stade Olympique in Montréal. Portland Timbers vs. Montreal Impact. I'd love to go. It would be my first MLS soccer game and the second time at the Olympic Stadium. I saw the Expos play there in 1993!

Je veux que les Inuit soient libres de nouveau

Last weekend I went to a poetry reading called Les Bruits du Monde connected with the Salon du Livre book fair here. It featured 20 different poets in less than two hours, and nearly all of them were memorable. Several of the readers were Haitian, including Dany Laferrière who is one of Canada's best known contemporary authors, and I think four were Native authors, or Autochthones as they like to say here in Quebec. Louis-Karl Picard-Sioui, a Wendat writer and part of the important Sioui family, was one and Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau, a Cree métisse painter and writer, was another.

Native authors who publish in French and in an autochthonous language are interesting, and I'm sure are very little known to the US scholarly community in Native American Literature. I'd like to pursue this a little and try to read some of their works, and perhaps try to publish something on it if I find a writer I enjoy reading.

As a first step I began reading the autobiography of Taamusi Qumaq, Je veux que les Inuit soient libres de nouveau. Taamusi lived from 1914 to 1993, and also wrote an ethnographic and historical encyclopedia, in the Inuit language. His work alongside Louis-Jacques Dorais, translator of the autobiography, was instrumental for the creation of a dictionary of the language as well. But Taamusi spoke and wrote only Inuktitut, so this is an "as-told-to" autobiography. And like the works of that type in the 19th and early 20th century, such as Black Hawk's autobiography, it describes the enormous changes that colonization and modernity brought to his people, all within one lifetime. Until the early 1950s, Qumaq writes, there were no airplane flights to the villages of northern Quebec, only a resupply ship that arrived once every summer. The people lived in igloos all winter and in tents in the summer. Qumaq travelled by dogsled to fetch the mail for his community. They trapped fox and sold the pelts to traders from Revillon Freres or the Hudson Bay Company, and with the proceeds purchased only tea, ammunition, tobacco and flour.

Not until the 1960s did Qumaq and the community of Puvirnituq where he lived begin to sense the political forces of Canada. He writes of the "les deux paliers de gouvernement, fédéral et provinciale" and explains that he favored the Quebec authorities. In 1964 Qumaq, in his capacity of chair of the town council, met René Lévesque at a conference of Inuit leaders. At that time Lévesque was ministre des richesses naturelles, and in the midst of his effort to nationalize Hydro-Québec. He also worked to change the language of instruction in schools for Inuit children in Québec from English to French. The ministre said at the meeting that "Les Inuit ne devraient pas perdre leur culture et leur langage. Ils devraient pouvoir travailler dans leur propre langue...Les Blancs qui travaillent dans les collectivités inuit devraient parler l'inuktitut" (94). Those lines could just as easily have been spoken about Quebec and the French language. Qumaq was persuaded, and later even joined the Parti Québecois! This even though the schools recently established in his village demanded that the children to speak only English.

What interests me is the potential validity of an analogy between Quebecois nationalism and sovereignty movements and indigenous ones. Each can claim to be a colonized people whose language and traditions are under threat of assimilation by Anglo-American imperialists. I've begun to study how Quebecois scholars of the colonial period claim an affinity for Indians and even a kind of regional autochthony, or "originarity" to coin a term. Yet within Quebec the first nations peoples are not necessarily any better off than elsewhere in Canada, and some of them are quite annoyed by the way Francohphone Quebec claims to be a "distinct society" with special rights and privileges such as ought to be granted to the true natives of the country.

Wal-Mart Quebec

Last Sunday we went to Wal-Mart. I did not think there were any Wal-Marts in Quebec, because I remember news from many years ago that they shut down a store in St. Hyacinthe rather than allow its workers to organize. Nonetheless, there are many Wal-Mart stores in Quebec today. Wal-Mart first found success with stores in smaller towns in the Midwest and South, where people were not affluent and in any case had few retail options. The same holds true for much of Canada outside the major cities. But unlike the US South, Canada does not have anti-Union laws. The United Food and Commercial Workers of Canada has had some success in organizing workers here. Their website does not say which stores or how many workers they represent, but it explains the card-check process that applies in Quebec, which is similar to what we have in Oregon.

Our trip to Walmart, at a huge and hideous Gallerie Mall in suburban Quebec City, entailed waiting for several minutes, through three light cycles, to turn left into the complex. We also had to wait another ten minutes, Hannah and I, just to buy a soccer ball. Walmart was doing plenty of business that day. It was depressing to be stuck in there on a warm and sunny day. Fortunately, when we finally got out and returned to the hockey rink nearby where Josh was having baseball practice, Hannah and I explored the Parc Chauveau next to the rink. The Riviere Saint-Charles flows through the park, and it has lively rapids and small cliffs alongside. The shale there makes stones perfect for skipping, which Hannah loved.  This park is part of a "parc linéaire" that runs for 32 kilometers along the St. Charles.

Not only does Quebec City have Wal-Mart, they also have Costco! Our friends the Robichauds who lived for ten years in Georgia before moving back to Quebec three years ago, told me that when they go to Costco, it's like a visit back to the USA. "Even the people are fatter!" Catherine said. But Target is not yet found here, although Louis Robichaud said that Target's parent company has bought out some of the Zeller's stores formerly run by the Hudson's Bay company. The Robichauds would like to see Target in Canada.

Update on student strike

The strike continues and the two sides harden their resolve. The headline today is that provincial premier Jean Charest accuses the students of using initimidation similar to what occurs in the (Mafia-controlled) construction industry. It's odd he would say this since the bid-rigging and kickbacks cost provicial tax-payers millions, which is perceived to be a major political weakness for Charest.

The newspaper, le Soleil of Quebec City, says that 65% of students are attending classes, but the other 35% seem to be getting more militant. The schools of forestry, medicine and lab sciences at Laval are unaffected by the strike, while the student organizations in Art, literature, and Sociology are very active in it. They were picketing at the city's major artery this morning as we dropped the kids off at school. The symbol of the movement is the red square, and protesters have put red tape over the mouths of some of the many bronze statues of past heroes that one finds all over the centre-ville.

In Quebec, high school ends with the 11th grade (or 5th year of secondary school, as they call it) and then students go to CEGEP for two years before University. This "community college for all" model sounds like a good one to me. The CEGEPs are small but numerous and can be located closer to the remote rural areas than the universities are. Because tuition is low, housing and travel is a major part of the expense for students. What's more, since all students, rich and poor, dimmest to smartest, go to CEGEP, the rigid socioeconomic segregation that exists, for example, between Lane Community College and the U of O, is avoided. And the universities don't have to teach remedial courses.

I've got to admire the organization and resolve of the student leaders. This article outlines their demands to "cut the fat" in information technology and administrators' salaries so that research and instruction can be maintained without tuition hikes. Ben Eckstein has done great work but he doesn't have the back up from the student body to carry off demonstrations that might get traction for his demands, such as for the Athletic dept. to contribute to all students' education.

Denis Vaugeois

Yesterday I had lunch with Denis Vaugeois, the publisher of Septentrion and former minister of culture in the Province of Quebec. I met him at the editorial offices, above his daughter's bookstore in Sillery. Vaugeois is the author of a shelf of different books. In the 1960s and 70s he was part of the separatist movement, and wrote Union of the Two Canadas: a New [English] Conquest?as well as a school textbook on Canadian history emphasizing the Quebecois perspective. More recently he has turned toward history and to books with beautiful color illustrations and design. Some of his publications from Septentrion, such as a lavish coffee-table book about Champlain, an historical atlas The Measure of a Continent (which I reviewed for Common-place). His most recent is a history of The Jews in America, 1760-1860, based upon the Hart family of Montreal. He said the English version will be out in June, and gave me a copy of the French version.

Because of my own nascent research project, I was eager to hear his views of the English conquest of 1759 and the historical legend of Montcalm and Wolfe. Vaugeois explained that the battle on the plains of Abraham was a minor affair that has been enormously exaggerated and mythologized by historians, due to the heroic deaths of its two commanders. Far fewer soldiers died than the historians have claimed. It was less decisive than the battles that preceded it (at Beauport and Montmorency in July 1759) and at Sainte-Foy the following year. Of course, both of those were French victories.

Vaugeois also suggested there is an historiographic divide in Quebec. The "Montreal school" sees the English conquest as a decisive and tragic event for Quebec, while the "Laval school" sees it as less disastrous, and possibly even advantageous for Quebec. Given the American and French revolutions that followed, a speculative history might propose that if the French had held on to Quebec they have been  conquered by the American rebels in 1775, or by the British Navy in the 1790s, or handed over to the Americans by Napoleon as Louisiana was in 1803. (Actually Vaugeois did not mention those scenarios but it got me started thinking about it).

Aside from that comment about the two schools of thought on 1759-63, he was withering in his critique of academic historians, at least at Laval, just a half hour walk from his office. He said they are still ruled by the "annales" school, which maintains that there are no events, and no individuals in history, only processes and epistemes. This is a caricature, but it I have noticed that even as Septentrion publishes lots of history books, few of them are by prominent academic historians from Quebec universities. Many are by independent scholars.

Tomorrow I plan to go to the Salon du Livre at the convention center downtown. I hope to visit booths by French and Quebecois publishers there.

The grave of David Thompson

The explorer David Thompson was the first European to navigate the entire length of the Columbia River. He also mapped much of the Canadian West by surveying and navigating with skills far better than Lewis and Clark, his contemporaries. He also wrote a better narrative than most explorers, and behaved more ethically. He married a metis-Cree woman, Charlotte Small, and rather than leave her in the field and go back to Montreal, he lived out his entire life with her, and raised I forget how many children, until they both died in Montreal in 1857. So I knew that my trip to Montreal had to include a visit to their grave, in Mount Royal cemetery on the back side of the eponymous mountain.

So I set out to run around the mountain and find the grave. It was in the upper 20s F and I had no gloves. This is not something one can complain about when seeking the grave of David Thompson. I looked at a map and got a general idea of how to follow trails through the park in a counter-clockwise direction, and the hotel desk clerk told me where the entrance to the cemetery is. Following gravel and leafy trails I made it to the other side of the mountain, but it was not obvious where to find the entrance. I asked the right person. A blond woman in a gore-tex raincoat with hightop sneakers and a scarf told me in French to head back up hill along the major auto road through the park, then follow a "path" (the only english word) to the right until I saw a "batisse" a building of some sort. I ran along the shoulder of the road and eventually saw the building, a funeral home. But I had missed the path and had to scramble down an embankment. Most of the cemetery is fenced off, but there was opening here. I knew from findagrave.com that his grave was in section C-5, and I was able to find a map at the entrance identifying the sections. I am lucky I asked that woman who had local knowledge, because I'm sure following streets to the formal entrance would have been much farther.

Thompson is buried alongside his wife, and daughter and grand-daughter named Charlotte Londel, as well as a military officer descendant who spelled it Londell. A plaque indicates that the marble column and inscription was installed only in 1927 by J. B. Tyrrell, an editor of Champlain society exploration narratives. I didn't bring my camera, but there is photo on the website I consulted.

My fondness for David Thompson and his narrative also carries over into an admiration for those who have edited and published his work. After editing and translating Dumont I know how hard this is. William Moreau of Toronto has been working on a new edition of Thompson's writings, first issued in a Champlain Society publication. Moreau has finished one volume and we are still waiting for the second.

The trip home was shorter but just as adventurous. I found another hole in the fence at the top of the cemetery, and followed a trail down around a road-cut, then asked a bicyclist who was coming up to the crest of the hill. He told me how to cross the park back to the city side, behind the General Hospital.

Tuition hikes and student strikes

What do Oregon and Quebec have in common? Six letters, beginning with a round thing, and an e in third place. But perhaps not much more. Take the student protest movement that has kept many students away from classes at ULaval (including most of the Quebecois enrolled in the course I was guest-lecturing in last Friday) and led to huge protests in Montreal. The contrast between the students' political movements here and at the UO are very different.

The Quebec provincial gov't has proposed raising tuition (frais de scolarité) by less than $400 in each of the next five years, a total of $1625, bringing tuition up to around $4000/year. Back at the UO, tuition has increased by about 9% each of the last several years, and is now about $8000/yr for instate students. There was no talk of a student strike at the UO, and no picket lines. The state legislature posed no real opposition to the administration's plans for tuition hikes.

Talking with faculty at ULaval and at McGill, they were both sympathetic with the students, and unwilling to cross picket lines to teach their classes, but they also supported the tuition hikes. They said that Quebec universities charge less than those in Ontario and western Canada, and that a longstanding tuition freeze means that costs are actually lower now than they were in 1968.

I also learned that very few students at McGill are staying away from classes or forming picket lines. Most likely because McGill has many non-Quebecois and non-Canadian students, and they already pay higher tuition. I just checked and saw that McGill charges about $3800 for tuition and fees to Quebec residents, and $7500 for other Canadians. Laurier told me that there is no such thing as "out of province" tuition, but the Laval website shows that he was incorrect. Laval charges about $2800 to Quebecois and $6500 to other Canadians. So McGill is only about $1000 more.

Sovereignty in Quebec and Native America

In the last ten or twenty years scholarship in Native American studies has seen the rise of  a separatist or sovereigntist movement. Tribal-affiliated scholars have asserted a right to unique intellectual traditions, and to literary self-determination. The terms "intellectual sovereignty" and "rhetorical sovereignty" often associated with Robert Warrior and Scott Lyons, have become de rigueur citations in books and articles on Native American Literature.
There's another entity that has been asserting sovereigntist and separatist sentiments over this period: Quebecois. Rather like American Indian tribes, Quebecois feel the yoke of being a "domestic dependent nation" within a larger national entity that neglects and condescends toward it. And like the Quebecois, many tribes articulate their distinct identity through speaking a special language. But, like many post-colonial authors, the literary artists working in these languages face a dilemma between seeking a larger audience in English, or sticking to their native tongue.
The claim to original sovereignty relies on a priority, on preexisting the formation of the nation that now subsumes it. Canada was French before it was English. Its founders, Jacques Cartier and Samuel de Champlain, were French.
I believe that as in Quebec, tribal sovereignty is more an intellectual than a political concept. Tribes resent, and yet depend upon, the BIA and its bureaucratic services, just as Quebec relies upon Canada. Quebec has an assemblée nationale, a bibliotheque nationale, etc., yet this is a nominal nationalism, like the Cherokee or Navajo Nation.
Any study I might write using this comparison would have to examine First Nations relations with Quebec, and their colonial origins. French Canadians cherish the ideal of a "génie coloniale"--the idea that French colonists had greater sympathy and understanding toward native nations than the English did. There is a good deal of truth to this. French colonists did not try to claim land from the Indians the way the English did. Patricia Seed's American Pentimento makes an interesting argument about how English colonial law and ideology was all about seizing land rights from the Indians, whereas the Spanish and Portuguese claimed the labor and resources of the Indians, not the land. But sometimes the "génie coloniale" comes off sounding like an effort to assert common cause with the Indians against the English.
One good point I might pursue would be that the Durham report of 1840, following the patriot rebellions of 1837-38, treated the French much like Jacksonian policies treated the American Indians: as primitives without true culture or history, who would have to assimilate or perish in the face of a tide of Anglo-Saxon superiority.

The basis for national literature

Here is a draft for ideas I want to present as part of my lecture on March 30

The Five Foundations of National Literature 

Langue: A nation's literature should embody the best written expression of the nation's language. Hence the ideal situation would make the borders of the state coincide with the area in which the language is spoken and printed. I suppose Italy and the Scandinavian countries come close to this ideal. Colonialism destroys this discreet boundedness and thus problematizes national literatures. British history is illustrative. Until 1707 when England annexed Scotland, the term Great Britain was not used. (Wales became part of the same kingdom centuries earlier but I guess was smaller and didn't count.) And yet today we continue to use the term "English literature" for anthologies and courses of study, and include within those many works by Scottish authors, as well as Irish. The word for the language is habitually confounded with the word for the place.

Enseignement: If a national literature contains the best expressions of a given language, this is what schools will want to teach their students in literature classes. A nation that speaks and teaches a cosmopolitan language will be caught in a subordinate position: extolling the writers of a distant land as its cultural models. So both Canada and the United States were stuck teaching English writers as the supreme literary geniuses. Thomas Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia felt compelled to explain why Virginia had not produced a Shakespeare, a Milton, or a Newton (the land was too new, and its population too small). The New Canadian Library was begun in 1958 to publish inexpensive editions of Canadian authors so that these works could be assigned in Canadian schools and read by its students. The language of the collection was English, and the small proportion (just over 10%) of texts by Francophone Canadians were published in translation. Classroom anthologies also exist for teaching the great works of literature.

Territoire: In the 1990s I learned that a fellowship program had been created at Harvard for LOWINUS: Literatures of What is Now the United States. A similar motive lay behind the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage project based in Houston, whose website announces its mission as "a national project to locate, preserve and disseminate Hispanic culture of the United States in its written form since colonial times until 1960...in what today comprises the fifty states of the Union." Thus the imperial state and language that has subjugated the people of another recognizes their "contribution" to the new cosmopolitan or multicultural national literature. The project publishes books mostly in English translation, although some titles are in spanish and a few are English-language works by hispanic authors.
A related phenomenon concerns how the editors of classroom anthologies of American Literature define the works  that deserve to be included. We have seen in the last 20 years or so that the Heath and then the Norton and other major anthologies have abandoned the "langue" rubric and included more texts originally written in Spanish or French or Dutch, or even oral tales from Native American languages. But should Hernan Cortes and Christopher Columbus be included even though they never set foot on LOWINUS? The Norton said yes, as did Schweitzer and Castillo in their Blackwell Anthology of Early American Lit., whereas the Heath, and Carla Mulford in her anthology opted for LOWINUS criteria and so chose Cabeza de Vaca instead.

Politique: Whatever underwrites the existence of a nation, the creation of a state is a political act. A structure of government must be established and a sense of sovereignty recognized by the world's other states. In the United States the documents of the nation's foundation serves as the origin of its literature. The Library of America series, begun in 1979 (first volumes appeared in 1982) includes 246 volumes, but only 16 by authors born before 1787. Of these 4 are anthologies of 17th and 18th century writings, and 8 of the remaining 12 are collections of writings by founding fathers: Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Marshall, Paine and Washington. Several other politicians and historians are included: Henry Adams, Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, Francis Parkman, and William T. Sherman. The only volume translated from another language is Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America!

Explorateurs:
The nations of America are post-colonial states. In preserving and transmitting the texts of their foundations the states have met the challenge of establishing sovereignty and indigeneity in various ways. Mexican mestizo ideology, wherein Vasconcellos' raza cosmica is rather like Riel's Méti, are two examples. A nation's "founders" may be its political or its territorial discoverers. In the United States at least since Washington Irving, great effort has been expended to make Christopher Columbus an heroic founder. So many places are named Columbus or Columbia. Italian-Americans mounted a successful campaign to give Columbus his own holiday and make him the "first American." I observe that in Quebec the explorers such as Cartier and Champlain have enhanced status, because they were francophone founders of Quebec and by extension of Canada. Quebec can claim these men and their writings as the foundation of a national literature, which explains why in the Bibliotheque du nouveau monde, roughly 20% of the texts and the authors published so far are explorers from before 1759.

Hemispheric American Literature and Quebec

I have enjoyed several essays in a 2010 collection entitled Canada and its Americas: Transnational Connections. The introduction reviews some of the arguments that I have heard about the "hemispheric turn" in American Studies, such as in the review essay by my friend Ralph Bauer in PMLA a few years back. Does this turn represent an admirable effort by heretofore monolingual and nationalist scholars to reach out and study other traditions? Or is it another instance of American imperialism, as U.S. American Studies scholars seek to become specialists in other national traditions? Why does the term "American" seem to be used as a synonym for United States? Editors Wilfried Siemerling and Sarah Philipps Casteel complain in the introduction that U.S. scholars who have become interested in Mexico show little interest in Canada.

An essay by Monica Giacoppe compares Chicano and Quebecois literature and culture. These arose in regions where Spain and France colonized for decades before "The vagaries of colonialism turned the tables on both the Spanish and the French colonizers: anglophone Protestants who saw their rise to power as proof of their superiority of their 'race' religion and culture displaced" the habitants (189) and peonized them. In both cases "the claiming of a privileged link to the land is a valuable move for budding nationalist movements, it is nevertheless a problematic gesture" because of the dispossessed native peoples (191).

Giacoppe even compares Gloria Anzaldua with Quebecoise writer Anne Hébert, for whom Hannah's primary school is named. In the latter's 1975 novel Les Enfants du sabbat overturns the gender politics of the traditional Catholic culture, as the protagonist is a practicing witch, who "offers her own daughter up to her husband for ritual sexual initiation into the cult" (194). Yikes, I hope they don't teach that book in her class in la quatrieme année!

But even more interesting, given my interest in Louis Riel, was the essay by Albert Braz, professor at U. of Alberta, who has also written The False Traitor: Louis Riel in Canadian Culture. Come quotations from Riel show how he defined Metis identity in a rather utopian and evangelical way. "l'expression anglaise correspondante, Halfbreed, fut a la première génération des mélanges des sangs...Le mot français, Métis, exprime l'idée de ce mélange d'une manière aussi satisfaisante que possible" In this sense the Métis were not the mixture of any particular bloods, but the mixture of all the world's races into one new one. It also suggested how Riel did not see himself as a Canadien Français, but as something new. And indeed, the Quebec francophone catholics did not look kindly on him.