La communauté du dehors : imaginaire social et représentations du crime au Québec (XIXe-XXe siècle)
Quebec society, like all societies, has its own legendary crimes and criminals. Yet if these famous faits divers have been recently made into historiographical re-enactments, the cultural and historic manner in which they are transformed from local news reports into national myths – what we call mecanisms of “ légendarisation ” –, is practically unknown. It is this mutation that this thesis examines : drawing from four famous crimes of the 18th and 19th centuries (the Seigneur of Kamouraska’s murder [1839] as well as the crimes committed by “ La Corriveau ” [1763], by the “ docteur l’Indienne ” [1829] and by the “ brigands du Cap-Rouge ” [1834-1835]), our analysis recollects their two-hundred-year-long genealogy into collective memory. Through this collective memory, a complex discourse system arises for each crime : by intertwining newspaper reports and stories from oral and written traditions, social imagination manufactures great antagonist figures, incarnations of evil and avatars of the devil from ordinary criminal acts. This vast antagonizing process is in fact dependent on a whole epoch – the 19th century – where, in the western world, “ crime ” was suddenly placed at the heart of all social and political preoccupations. This era seemingly created a literary craze for crime, as well as a whole arsenal of specialized notions, ideas and technologies designed to understand, mesure and eliminate criminality. During the Lower Canada period, the phenomenon spreads across this side of the Atlantic. In the wake of this movement, the great criminals who impacted the collective mind are made to become especially rallying imaginary enemies : figures of a radical otherness, they become the foil against which Quebec society, from the 19th century onwards, instituted itself.
Crime Institutions judiciaires Social imagination Quebec literature Newspapers Collective memory Oral tradition 19th century Cultural history Judicial institutions