Un combat d'école? : le champ historiographique vu de Québec (1947-1965)
After the shocks of the Depression and the Second World War, the conditions of historical production and representation in Quebec changed in important ways. In the midst of passionate debate concerning Quebec’s “late” accession to “modernity”, a young generation of academic historians offered new interpretations of francophone Quebecers’ existence as a collectivity. The “Quebec Historical School,” whose main members were Marcel Trudel, Fernand Ouellet and Jean Hamelin, took form in this context. In a sustained dispute with their counterparts of the “Montreal School”, these Laval University historians helped shape a fundamental matrix of contemporary Quebec historiography. With its prominent place in scholarly memory and in the Quebec profession’s origin myth, the “Quebec School” has bequeathed a legacy that seems self-evident. Yet those who have studied it employ utilitarian or ideological criteria rather than properly heuristic ones. The very obviousness of the meaning usually attributed to the “school” hides a complexity that this thesis submits to close analysis. What kind of historians were Trudel, Ouellet, and Hamelin? What was the place of their work in Quebec and Canadian historiography? To what influences were they exposed? What “origin narrative” did they endorse? To what extent did they serve a political cause? Placed before the difficulty of speaking of a school in the strong sense of the word (on account, notably, of the diversity of the members’ work, the absence among them of a strongly articulated intellectual doctrine, and the presence of two generations and three individual trajectories), the thesis seeks to identify common strains of thought within the group and to assess its contribution to reshaping post-war Quebec historiography. It argues that the three Laval historians’ defining characteristic was to have formed not a school of thought but a “school of activity” (Gilmore) organized around a similar conception of practices and historical method rather than an orthodoxy or a unified and coherent explicative model. Of course, this disposition did not prevent the three historians from acknowledging a kind of “family resemblance” and from tending toward a common interpretative horizon. Combining the approaches of historiography and intellectual history, this study follows three major contributors to Quebec historiography whose paths both converged and diverged as they responded to the challenges of their intellectual, institutional and political worlds. To this end, the thesis takes a close look at the intellectual environment at Laval, the group’s national and international networks, and its contacts with post-war antinational, liberal and federalist thought. Through the prism of the “Quebec school”, this study affords a view of the changing relations between historical knowledge and culture in mid-twentieth-century Quebec.
Canada Quebec Laval University “Quebec School” "Laval School" Historiography Intellectual history Historians