25
The Indifferent Mothers
HOW DOES A COLONY LEAVE THAT status behind? Sometimes the geopolitical situation is such that this can never be entirely accomplished. The presence on our six-thousand-kilometre-wide doorstep of the greatest empire of the century is just that sort of geopolitical reality. So to some extent is the lack of other real centres of French beyond France. But the physical and the cultural are not the only sorts of limitations a society may face. The colonial mind-set in and of itself can be just as important. This ought to be the easiest factor to deal with. Somehow it seems to be the most difficult.
Motherhood, for example, is a persistent theme in ex-colonies. This is unaffected by how mother and child came to be separated or how long ago or how successful either has become in the aftermath. Even if the imputed mother should fall on hard times and the former colony grow into the greatest nation on earth, the latter will only become more attracted with time to the idea of a womb.
In the case of Rome or the United States this psychological fetish is more a curious indulgence of power than a matter of geopolitical importance. They’re powerful enough to be able to offer themselves a minor delusion.
In less powerful countries this sort of relationship can take on a neurotic aspect. But as with the greater powers, it is the élite which most maniacally harbours these obsessions. The rest of us tend to wipe away irrelevant indulgences after a few generations.
I say irrelevant because, as pointed out in an earlier chapter, there is no filial relationship. A colony is a possession, something bought and sold, something used and thrown away. There is no blame in this. It’s the nature of power.
Yet still you find the anglophone and francophone élites of Canada searching desperately in Britain, France and the United States for the origins of every political and economic idea, every literary form, every confirmation of success and legitimacy. From the Shakespearean and Shavian festivals to the desperately imitative American manners of Preston Manning to the late-colonial chasing in vain of Conrad Black, apparently after a British title, to Lucien Bouchard constantly reminding us of his Parisian readings, none of this is of great importance. If we were going to examine the real contributions of the colonial powers, we might well conclude that they came down to that peculiar English belief in the superiority of white people, particularly if they speak English, and two dead-end ideas from France—the Ultramontane ideology and Maurrasian nationalism.
In a way our attitudes can be summarized through our relationship to Lord Durham. We have turned his four-month visit during 1838 into the touchstone story of the Canadian condition. All in the same breath he is treated as a great political figure from London, a radical thinker and a majestic aristocrat who came to inspire, even invent, responsible government, discover the tragedy of the solitudes (“two nations warring in the bosom of a single state”) and insult anglophones and francophones alike as colonial peasants. The words aimed at francophones have been particularly retained by part of their élite as a sore to be scratched open on a regular basis.
But consider the real Durham, beyond mythology. He was neither a great figure nor a great aristocrat. He inherited money and through political activity was paid off with a title. He was of marginal junior-minister importance. He is scarcely mentioned in British histories and biographies of the period. He was sent off to Canada more or less to satisfy a few people and to get him out of the government’s way. As for his great thoughts, no one but the Canadians remember them. His supposed invention of responsible government was merely (seen from his point of view) the exporting of a democratic method which had been established in Britain six years earlier. Lord John Russell, the man who stood in the way of responsible government in Canada, was in fact the same individual who installed it in Britain. He was followed by Sir Robert Peel, another leading reformer, who again refused it to the Canadians. That this illustrates the non-existence of colonies as real places in the mind of an empire is one thing. But Russell, Peel and the others knew what the rebels of 1837 had fought for, what the moderates were asking for, what the American neighbour had given itself and what England already had. They hardly required Durham’s imitative brilliance to inform them that Canada was on the road to responsible government.
His one original idea—that union of the two provinces would provoke the assimilation of the francophones—was completely wrong. Instead it formalized their nascent relationship—initiated during the Rebellions by Mackenzie and Papineau—with their natural reforming allies outside of Lower Canada and so ensured that there would be no assimilation.
Quite apart from passing a pleasant summer holiday in the colonies, Durham understood very little of what was happening. Some of those engaged to help him prepare his report listened and learnt and were probably responsible for many of the more considered elements in the report. As for Durham himself, his overdressed and overly dramatic arrival in Quebec City announced the entry of someone playing Jane Austen’s Darcy, the foppish snob from London who finds himself stuck at a dowdy county dance. He doesn’t really know or care who these people are or what they really mean when they speak to him. His reaction is alternately one of enforced charm and boredom—acting and not acting. And then he flounces off home in a momentary fit of pique.
This is the context in which Durham’s gratuitous insults must be seen. It was just the sort of language you’d have expected from an immature graduate of Eton in the nineteenth century. Immature at forty-six? Age has nothing to do with it. The combination of personal privilege, marginal success, an unstable personality and class prejudice are enough to perpetuate this sort of juvenile wilfulness in a man who cannot engage with reality. You can almost feel his predictable logic unfolding. ‘The moderate reformers are terribly middle class. The colonial élite is naturally colonial and grasping. The francophones are incomprehensible, not in linguistic terms, but in terms of the logic of racially based empires. Give them democracy, of course, but save me from these common people.’
The extent to which the warring bosom comment and others were superfluous can be seen in the contradictory statements made elsewhere in his report. For example, it is also argued that whatever racial differences might exist, they could not be the primary cause of the difficulties, as all the British colonies in North America were in exactly the same desperate state. The difficulties must therefore lie in the laws which were failing them.
None of this stopped Premier Parizeau, during his introduction of the referendum bill, quoting—for the how-many-thousandth time in the standard negative-nationalist rhetoric—one of Durham’s humiliating insults. “Irremediable inferiority.” Now there’s a phrase designed to get everyone’s dander up. How dare he! How dare they! But exactly who are they? I mean, beyond Durham. There’s no one out there who thinks these things. Certainly not anyone with a brain or anyone who matters. There hasn’t been anyone in the mainstream of Canadian history who seriously believed the Durham line since before the alliance of LaFontaine and Baldwin. There is just the ghost of little Radical Jack, or rather an old white sheet with nothing but a stick inside to agitate it along with “quelques tragédies patiemment travaillées—a few patiently polished tragedies”—to borrow a phrase of Anne Hébert.1
What about D’Alton McCarthy and his friends? They didn’t buy Durham’s line. After all, if francophone Catholics were dangerous, they couldn’t very well be inferior. If they threatened to dominate, they couldn’t very well be without culture or character. What about Preston Manning? He’s a descendant of McCarthy, not Durham.
More to the point, during the whole lengthy period when governors and governors general mattered, Britain managed to send only two who were up to the job. Of course some were decorative, some amusing, some agreeable. Canada was treated as a nice little patronage pay-off, but not a good job. As late as the turn of the century, the mediocre Lord Minto was meddling in public affairs, trying to draw Canada deeper into empire politics and wars.
It is Durham who stands out in our mythology. We talk endlessly of him. Yet we never talk of Sir Charles Bagot who, although he was here scarcely longer than Durham (1842–43), made an important contribution. It was long enough for him to allow responsible government to function. He was an intelligent professional with a real career and he seemed to have no trouble recognizing and enjoying the society in which he lived, whether francophone or anglophone. This although he was deathly ill much of the time. He made LaFontaine his prime minister and followed his advice.
Think logically for a moment. Just over three years had gone by since Durham left. Suddenly a solid, reasonable governor with a long career at senior levels—under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, minister to France, to the United States, ambassador to Russia, negotiator of the Rush–Bagot Agreement—arrives and almost immediately understands that he is dealing with a vibrant, complex society in which anglophones and francophones wish to work together in an unusual non-monolithic relationship. Yet we choose to forget him and to quote instead in a remarkable mépris de soi the bon mot de salon of an unstable and ignorant amateur like Durham. Is there any reasonable explanation, beyond the crassly political desire in negative-nationalist circles to erase the memory of everything that has worked? The only other possible reason is a desire among our élites—francophone and anglophone, federalist and separatist—to see themselves in the self-loathing manner of spurned colonial children. If Durham is treated as our pivotal relationship with London, we can indeed imagine ourselves to be victims.
As for Lord Elgin, he is not forgotten, but his name passes by with a nod of boredom and an acknowledgment—‘Yes, yes, responsible government.’ He was our one truly great colonial governor.
He named LaFontaine prime minister, with Baldwin as his number two, and didn’t interfere. Again, like Bagot, he was highly professional, intelligent and deeply cultured, as opposed to fashionable like Durham. For eight years (1848–54) he took enormous pleasure in the place and the society. He recognized the complexities which the anglophones and francophones were grappling with and encouraged this experimentation. Like Bagot, fluently bilingual, he lived and worked as much in French as in English, both in private and public business. And unlike Durham, with his scattiness and histrionics, Elgin demonstrated great courage and restraint.
After he was stoned in his carriage during the Montreal riots, which culminated in the burning of the Parliament Buildings, he was careful not to provoke further violence. In other words, he showed the kind of restraint which was already central to the Canadian approach. Yet for years afterwards he went to state occasions in the same carriage, with all its panels still driven in by the stoning, as if to say to the effectively neo-conservative élite which had tried to refuse responsible government, ‘I remember. So watch out.’
The names Bagot and Elgin didn’t cross Mr. Parizeau’s lips the day he cited Durham, but in the victim’s version of history these two men cannot exist. I don’t suppose they have ever crossed the lips of Mr. Manning either. An analysis of our political élites in general, whatever the origins or politics, would probably betray the same masochistic tendencies towards invoking Durham.
But the colonial mind-set is more tortured than that. Durham is needed as a source of the victim psychosis. He is the required demonization figure. Bagot and Elgin are ignored, not because they were successful or positive, but because they didn’t act as representatives of an all-powerful mother. They simply acted the way a Canadian might have in the circumstances. That isn’t what the colonial psyche wants. It needs approval; a sense of belonging, of embrace; of love. Or it needs to be severely demeaned. That also is a sign of childlike dependency.
All of which means that we have had to assiduously ignore the general tenor of our relationship with Britain over the last hundred and fifty years. It isn’t simply a matter of a string of mediocre vice-regal figures. When London did play a role in our internal affairs, it was to act almost consistently against our interests, as if we didn’t matter and scarcely existed. Indeed, from their point of view, we didn’t matter.
An important early example was London’s disallowance of Baldwin’s Secret Societies Bill of 1843, which was aimed at controlling the violent activities of the Orange Order. With proper tools in hand, the government might have been able to force the extremists out into the open and thus make their activities easier to moderate. Much of the responsibility for the momentum the Order built up was thus London’s. The British, incidentally, had their own strict rules to deal with problems like that at home. The colonies were another matter.
Among reformers the sense was quite strong, even early in the nineteenth century, that London understood nothing and cared even less. “Most of them,” Baldwin wrote from Britain in 1836, “seemed rarely to have had the fact of the existence of such a country present to their mind.” He came home convinced, as more and more of his friends and colleagues were, that this was “my own, my native land” and that there was nothing, as a consequence, to look for over his shoulder.2
Such growing psychological independence in the new élite was part of the explanation for the aura which in that period came to surround Tecumseh’s name. It was strange, because the aboriginal chief had been dead for more than twenty years, killed while fighting as a Canadian ally in the War of 1812–14. Gradually he became a symbol for the new generation. Every poet, including Baldwin, wrote an ode to him. Their view seemed to be that he, at least, “died fighting, while a British general retreated.”3
Perhaps the most important sign of London’s indifference, after that of its hypocrisy on the question of responsible government, surrounded the whole question of free trade. The free-traders were gradually winning ground in Britain. In the end they would get the repeal of the Corn Laws. But to do this was to condemn Canada to poverty. London had already decided where its own interest lay and it wasn’t with its own colonies. This internal battle dominated Britain in the 1840s and produced constant insecurity in Canada.
In the first wave of changes, during 1842–43, a local compromise was found which saved the Canadian situation. Yet even Gladstone, the reforming president of the Board of Trade, seemed bitter about this special arrangement and issued what amounted to a threat—“If the Canadians wish to remain under our colonial system, they must submit to the application of our system fairly and properly.” This meant, either accept that only London’s interests count or we’ll feed you to the Americans.
Just two years later London threw out the compromise and plunged Canada into economic depression. Gladstone was by then colonial secretary and still indifferent. Lord Elgin wrote to protest—“All the prosperity of which Canada is robbed is transplanted to the other side of the line [the United States], as if to make Canadians feel more bitterly how much kinder England is to the children who desert her than to those who remain faithful.”4
With that phrase Elgin pinpointed what would become the key element in Canada’s relationship with its two theoretical mothers, England and France. Above all, they weren’t interested in this marginal, northern, poorish, peculiar country, because what really interested them was its neighbour to the south. Empires like to have relationships—friendly or angry—with other empires or rising empires. And once they themselves have become ex-empires, they can only validate their own status by having an intense relationship—positive or negative or both—with the empire which succeeds them. From 1914 on, both Britain and France became obsessed by the United States. This is their child, because the real inheritance in international relations is not blood or language. It is power. That’s why their term for the United States quite automatically includes the whole continent—America, L’Amérique. They are always slightly embarrassed, confused, annoyed to be reminded that there is someone else there, taking up half the continent and breaking the illusion of parentship by claiming one of another sort.
The economic crisis which resulted from Britain’s repeal of the Corn Laws was the second cause of the Montreal riots of 1849. The merchants, still in a fury after burning down the Parliament Buildings in April, signed the Annexation Manifesto in October of the same year. The mentality of this class was clear. If London would give them power and money (the Château Clique) they were loyal children of the mother country. If London permitted democracy and endangered their income, they wanted another mother, the most easily available being south of the border. It never struck them that through democracy they might build a different sort of economic system. It took almost half a century before Cartier and Macdonald could convince them that this might be done. But their first reaction in times of trouble remained and remains to seek the bosom of maternity, however indifferent the mother might be.
Those curious about a modern interpretation of this trauma imposed on Canada by London might look in the recent definitive biography of Gladstone, by Roy Jenkins—631 pages in which the great English reformer would surely have been given time to say something about his indifference to those in Canada, and the effects of his policies. Unfortunately Lord Jenkins didn’t seem to have room for the subject.5
But then Britain’s willingness to sacrifice its ‘kin’ over trade policy is tied to the obvious fact that we are not kin. Their attitude on entering the European Common Market in 1973 was a repeat of 1845. It’s worth noting that when France joined the same market, albeit at an earlier stage in its creation, it negotiated tariff exceptions for its colonies and ex-colonies. This had to do with nothing other than their perception of their own best self-interest. Nevertheless, they did it.
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of London’s attitude was tied to its role in triangular negotiations involving disputes between Canada and the United States. In each case they have sided with the Americans, even though they were usually charged with defending Canada’s interests.
The inland fisheries negotiation in 1870–71 was an early example. Macdonald didn’t agree to sit on the commission in Washington because he thought he could alter London’s desire to cut a deal related to Britain’s desire for closer relations with the Americans. He simply hoped to compensate a bit for “Englishmen having little or no interest in Canada.” He signed the resulting disastrous treaty with, in Donald Creighton’s words, “cheerful cynicism.” Macdonald’s comments during the signing ceremony were, again according to Creighton, as follows:
“Well,” he said in a half whisper . . . as he took up his pen, “here go the fisheries.”
“You get a good equivalent for them,” the American negotiator countered swiftly.
“No, we give them away—here goes the signature!”
He signed. . . and rose from the table. “They are gone,” he said slowly.6
The fur-seal negotiations began in the same atmosphere in 1890. And in the Alaska Panhandle negotiations, which ended in 1903, Laurier was betrayed by Lord Alverstone, the Lord Chief Justice of England, who had the deciding vote. Again Britain was looking over its shoulder to Washington. The two Canadian members of the tribunal—Sir Louis Jetté and Allen Aylesworth—refused to sign the decision. They said it was a “grotesque travesty of justice.” When Laurier protested to Lord Alverstone that his conclusion could not “be supported on judicial grounds,” the Lord Chief Justice, who was theoretically named to the tribunal as a jurist, replied, “. . . it was our duty to take into consideration the value and importance to the parties negotiating . . .” of the land in question. In other words, London sided with the greater power.7
There are few lessons to be learnt here, except that the business of empires is power and business, nothing more. What many have taken to be crises in the special relationship between family members have invariably been simple questions of national self-interest. There is nothing new about this. After the rebels fled to the United States in 1837, they attracted large numbers of supporters who were ready to invade northward and were well armed. Washington made this impossible because their real interest at that time was in close relations with London.8 Questions of principle melted away before the simple truths of geopolitics.
There is perhaps one clear lesson which we should have learnt by now. It is particularly important to concentrate on this given that NAFTA is using foreign experts to chair dispute settlement panels and the World Trade Organization is turning itself into an international court of economic arbitration. In a dispute pitting Canada against the United States, never, never agree to the British having the deciding vote. If the dispute involves Britain, never, never let the Americans get involved.
As to Britain’s main interest in Canada during the twentieth century, it can be summarized in a series of attempts to push Canadians to assume part of Britain’s military burden. This was never about participation, advice or partnership. It was always about payment in blood and cash.
Particular opinions about participation in these wars have nothing to do with what I am describing. During the period of the naval arms race preceding World War One, London was determined to get the dominions to pay for a good percentage of her dreadnoughts. In order to force the hand of Laurier’s government, she meddled in Canadian politics, concentrating on those parts of the élites susceptible to the maternal mythology.
V.S. Naipaul described élites of this sort with great precision when writing about the establishment in Argentina, a country which has similar contradictions. They were forever setting the value of European culture against the real place in which they lived. For these individuals “. . . the real world is felt to be outside, everyone at home is inadequate and fraudulent.”9
London’s aim was to unleash a pro-empire sentiment which would translate into a transfer of money. Laurier more or less held them off, but it was clear that London would have happily brought the government down, if it could have been accomplished and a transfer of money been the result.
World War One was a daily exercise in pressure of the same sort, but in this case payment came in the form of men. By all the means of imperial propaganda the empire cards were played. A few decades later Mackenzie King would have great difficulty ensuring that during the Second World War the various bells and whistles of blood and motherland would not be indiscriminately yanked.
This is why Lester Pearson’s intervention in the Suez Crisis was so important. For the first time we didn’t simply balk before motherly interested blandishments. We actually opposed their position and suggested another in the international arena.
Although there are many explanations for the sourness and dismissive attitude towards Canada which has developed in Britain over the last forty years, one of the key elements was that decision, by a particularly mature part of the élite, to no longer even pretend that there was a family game to be played.
Suddenly, the adjectives attached to Canada were no longer ‘plucky’ or ‘tough little’ or ‘valiant,’ but ‘whining,’ ‘soft’ and more recently ‘wet.’ If this were indeed a question of family, a suitable quote might be “No greater fury . . .” But this is merely the awkward debris of an old business relationship which was disguised for a long time under the language of family. Empires rarely confuse personal relationships with geopolitics. But they count on smaller states, because of their psychic needs, doing it all the time.
Our experiences with France have been less frequent but no different. I wrote earlier of Paris preventing the growth of integrated production in New France in order to save the market for goods manufactured in the motherland. After 1627 the blockage put on Huguenot immigration—mainly educated and middle-class with a high level of skills—removed a factor which might have made the colony much more self-reliant.
General James Murray reported, with military precision, on what he found when he took over in 1760. “Wholesale businesses were almost exclusively in the hands of the French from the metropole, while retail was generally abandonné aux Canadiens—left for the Canadians . . . Few of those with capital of any importance in France will stay in the colony.”10 The business leadership and most of the other members of the French élite simply abandoned the French Canadians to their own devices, with almost no educated leadership. After all, the metropolitan élite, which had occupied most of the positions of political and financial power, had been quite careful to limit the growth of a local élite.
In 1855 P.J.O. Chauveau’s career was launched by the speech he gave at the unveiling of the monument to the dead of the two battles of Quebec—the Canadiens, the French, the British and the Huron. It was a grand speech in the Victorian style, but with tough elements in it. Reading the text, you can see why he would go on to become a very fine superintendent of education and a not very strong premier of Quebec. He described how the Canadiens had poured out in great numbers to defend the regime which would quickly abandon them and which had always kept them in poverty.
How had the loss been greeted in the metropole? “Avec une inconcevable indifférence.”11
And so the mother disappeared for a century, until Bishop Bourget took the initiative of more or less importing large quantities of clerics from France, many of them reactionary and being left behind by the changes in European society. A half-century later various politicians began importing not nationalism but a Maurrasian nationalism and corporatism, the political formula which seemed often to accompany it. And finally a French president came visiting and told a crowd that he sensed an atmosphere of liberation which reminded him of his own advance on Paris in 1944.
Having written my doctorate on Charles de Gaulle and having admired his political skills, I have always been particularly entertained by the underlying complexity of his intervention. The elements which most people concentrate on had little to do with the strategic move he was making. That it was a strategic move could be seen in the things he chose to overlook—elements which normally would have been of importance.
For example, the strand of nationalism he was supporting in Canada was precisely the sort which had generally opposed his advance on Paris. Being the good historian that he was, de Gaulle can only have decided to ignore reality. What’s more, he would have been aware that the small cell within the Quai d’Orsay which was pushing the dossier of a possible Quebec separation as being to the advantage of France, belonged, as its members still do, to the right-wing Maurrasian group which survives in a minority position inside the French civil service. In other words, they belong to the anti-Gaullist tradition. In the interests of maintaining some power, they converted themselves early on into the right wing of the Gaullist movement. Finally, the general knew that in making his move he would be attacking precisely those francophones and anglophones who had advanced with him. That is the sort of choice he would make very consciously. And there is one other small detail, which would not have been forgotten in the Quai d’Orsay or the French Ministry of Defence: the role of the Canadian government—and in particular Lester Pearson—in the humiliation of France during the Suez Crisis.
Lester Pearson, the Canadian prime minister in 1967, was the same man who, as minister of external affairs in 1956, had led international opposition to the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt. In many ways that was the last humiliation of the two European empires and marked the definitive arrival of American power. From the rather convoluted and paranoid European point of view, Canada had been a stalking horse for American interests, not a force for international responsibility.
Remember, it wasn’t until the Iraq War of the 1990s that London and Paris got over their hatred of the United Nations’ peace-keeping forces. They, after all, were Pearson’s invention and his solution to the Suez Crisis. Remember also that Suez, not Algeria, was the event which announced the end of the Fourth Republic. While from a tactical point of view, de Gaulle had reason therefore to be grateful, from a strategic angle it was the Gaullist soldiers, civil servants and politicians who had encouraged aggressive military action in Suez. One of the central themes inside Gaullist foreign policy was a determination to erase the humiliation of Suez and win back a mainstream position in international strategy.
The enthusiastically naïve ignore all of this and see in the general’s intervention only a sudden desire to support the concept of liberty, as well as a determination to support a francophone community. Unfortunately his actions had very little to do with either factor. On the matter of liberty, several quite different definitions of the term seemed to be in use. For example, on the basis of normal usage, the comparison to be made between France and Canada in the 1960s was not favourable to the former. French television and radio were still the absolute creatures of the government. Other forms of censorship were common, and the police had an ongoing omnipresent role of the sort which we have experienced in Canada only rarely and for very brief periods. That is why, within ten months of his Canadian pronouncement, Paris was brought to a halt by people protesting the basic lack of liberty inside France. At the same time, de Gaulle was still engaged in his long and more than justified battle against a large part of his own army. By 1967, at least the violent aspects of this division were almost over and it had been reduced to behind-the-scenes struggles.
As someone specialized in French civil–military relations, I was particularly drawn to the general’s use of the concept of liberty outside of France. After all, here he was advocating the break-up of one of the world’s oldest democracies—one which had avoided most of the violent pitfalls of European history. And the democracy in question, Canada, was also one of France’s closest allies.
What’s more, the general’s intervention came at the same time that he was busy solidifying a refurbished empire of African client-states run by Paris through pliant local élites. These theoretically post-colonial leaders were commonly referred to in official Paris circles as les rois nègres. The client-states they led, with ‘advisers’ from Paris at every imaginable elbow, were not places where the concept of liberty was often entertained.
Paris maintained a large contingent of élite troops in strategic centres. Their job was to intervene rapidly should any real movements of liberation or positive nationalism emerge. Over the years these troops have been used repeatedly to maintain Paris’s rois nègres in place.
This was a system developed by a number of old colonial hands under the leadership of Jacques Foccart in the general’s office and Pierre Messner, the long-time minister of defence. In 1997 there were still close to eight thousand soldiers in the rapid intervention force stationed in Africa maintaining ‘stability’ in the client-states of France’s discrete empire. On average, they put down eruptions of varying sizes two or three times a year. Most of these revolutions are led by groups seeking to free their country from the control of Paris.
Of course, all of these contradictions in the use of the idea of freedom might be acceptable to some people if what was at stake in Montreal in 1967 was the freeing of a francophone people. Unfortunately the meaning of the word freedom and whether French Canadians were prisoners or already free were probably not very important questions in the general’s mind. What he was engaged in was yet another move in his endless chess game with the United States.
From 1958 on, he had been involved in a difficult struggle to be treated with respect by Washington. American officials had come to believe that an ally was someone who followed orders. Most of the time the general was taking perfectly justifiable positions. Two good examples are his independent action over the creation of a nuclear force and his refusal to be pushed around inside NATO.
His ongoing aim was what you would expect from a good strategist. He wanted to undermine the American position just enough to make possible the creation of a coalition in which France could play a real role. The destabilization of Canada was one of those brilliant moves aimed at rattling Washington in its own backyard. The Maurrasian nationalists in Quebec, in which he had little interest, were perfect foils in this move. And in his grand game of geopolitical strategy, Canada was perfectly expendable.
One of the disturbing aspects of Canada’s lack of a long-term foreign policy—in fact its refusal to deal seriously with geopolitics—is that we have difficulty following the persistent lines followed by others. This is the worst kind of naïveté. And it is as flagrant among federalists as among separatists/sovereigntists.
As a great actor, the general always sent out signals of what he was going to do. Dramatic, theatrical signals. For example, when he landed from his battleship in Montreal, he wore his uniform. This was something he never did in France as president, except once during an attempted coup d’état by four other generals. To put on a uniform in Canada was to indicate to the Americans that he was making a strategic move.
At the same time, he was obviously having fun. De Gaulle had a very developed sense of irony, particularly international irony.
Nothing amused him more than to play out his grand politics on other people’s territories. And why not, if other people, federalists and separatists alike, were willing to act as his foils? We should all laugh along with him.
If you talk with the groupuscule inside the Quai d’Orsay who continue to pursue his Quebec strategy, you will find the same indicators as in the mid-1960s. For example, it was wonderfully symbolic that the two statesmen sent in 1997 for the thirtieth anniversary of the general’s intervention were Pierre Messner and Philippe Séguin: Messner, the father of the militarily maintained client-state empire in Africa, and Séguin, the leading spokesman for the sort of Maurrasian nationalism which the general had spent most of his life opposing.
But again, there is no reason to blame France for any of this. Most of its citizens are indifferent to Canada, whether francophone or anglophone. They know and care as little as do citizens in Britain or America, all of which is normal. They have their own concerns and problems and challenges. They have their own strategic and tactical obsessions. And most of the officials who are charged with handling Canadian affairs are of goodwill and do a professional job.
Situations such as that involving the general are of our own creation. The attitudes adopted by our élites in Paris have often been as unwise, even craven, as in London or Washington. By dragging their home problems through the Parisian halls of power, the negative nationalists have not so much embarrassed Canada as humiliated Quebec. They have turned themselves, in the eyes of the Quai d’Orsay, into just another unstable group, of the sort they deal with in their African empire, begging for imperial benediction, if not intervention.
There is always a faction in the Quai d’Orsay—as there would be in the Foreign Office or the State Department—eager to launch itself into someone else’s business in the vague hope that they might drag their whole country along with them. They rarely succeed in this. Sophisticated government systems have the equivalent of institutional elasticized leashes, designed to allow officials some tantalizing play on the edges of diplomatic adventure. The moment any larger national interests are put at risk, they are snapped back into line.
And there will always be a handful of députés nostalgic for empire and bored by France’s democratic and institutionalized rejection of Maurrasian nationalism for itself. After all, they have rejected the old attitudes in favour of a more complex European federal approach, not unlike the Canadian model. What is no longer acceptable at home or in Europe—unless you belong to a party on the extremes—can of course be toyed with elsewhere. It’s a pleasant way to let off steam. So on Monday they might rise to argue vociferously for iron-clad Europe-wide standards on social services, training, professional credentials, immigration policy and budgetary practices, then fall back into their seats, suffused with the sentiments of a good European. Then on Tuesday they might offer a sympathetic arm to a Quebec politician who has come to ask support for a theory of breaking up each of the areas I’ve just mentioned, in order that they might represent the particular character of particular regions.
No matter. Like the officials in the Quai d’Orsay, these députés are used to the lobbying of various central European minorities and ex-colonies in Africa. It is the destiny of empires and ex-empires to meddle in the affairs of weak countries; that is, countries which offer themselves up as weak. There is always the expectation in these cases of picking up bits and pieces from other people’s disorder—some useful information, a contract, perhaps testing grounds for a missile system, a distribution monopoly and, at the very least, some regional influence. Who knows? It depends on how desperate the supplicant is. The empires have had a long experience with client-states, which is exactly the context in which the negative nationalists present Quebec.
But surely much of this is unfair. Surely we have garnered far more from London, Paris and New York than these unpleasant political experiences. What about the literatures, the ideas, the culture, the post-graduate educations, the food, the styles?
What of them? They have nothing to do with our colonial relationships. Everyone has access to them. For better and sometimes for worse, they are part of international culture.
What I am writing about is quite different. At the heart of these unsatisfactory imperial relationships lies a mythological missed rendezvous, between an expectant child and an anxious mother, waiting patiently for us to pay a visit to London, Paris or Washington. Thus, each time the mother acts in a non-maternal manner, the child becomes more expectant and troubled.
But if the mother isn’t one at all, but is just another country looking after its own interests, well then, indifference is transformed into normalcy. And if the child, or more specifically, that part of the national élites which mistakes itself for an offspring, refuses to see the self-evident, well then, it will demonstrate by its actions what Fernand Dumont accurately identified as a mépris de soi. In order to put this in its historical context, I would call it the Lord Durham syndrome.