Carl Bergeron is a very enigmatic character. Unknown to the general public, it is held in great esteem by all those interested in the question of national identity; but its appearances being so punctual and its publications becoming even rarer, it remains a mystery even to its appreciators.
Each of his publications constitutes an event, each time the circles of intellectuals hasten to call to announce the good news: “Carl Bergeron has just published a text!”
He just makes it seem these days The great Mary or the luxury of holiness, a little book with big ideas about Mary of the Incarnation, a too often forgotten mystical figure in our history. With a pen such as one rarely finds, Bergeron draws the parallel between the fate of Quebec and that of “the great Marie”, a beautiful formula which testifies both to a closeness, but also to the verticality that it embodies.
Saints!
In 1639, after a series of mystical visions, Marie de l’Incarnation left Tours, France, to found a monastery in Quebec and teach French and catechism there. A hundred times Mary’s mission could have failed: shipwreck, fires and bad harvests. A hundred times this country could have collapsed: Iroquois raids, famine, disease and assimilation. These women who founded this country by embarking for New France, “were they saints or fools”?
Our time, which never allows itself to be fooled, sees them at worst as genuine fools or at best as poor women who had to “take refuge” in religion, because the patriarchal era prevented them from thriving fully in public life. Bergeron does not adhere to this vision which locks Marie up in concepts which are foreign to her. For him, they were saints.
And we have to prove him right. Bergeron has the intelligence to take seriously the mysticism of Marie de l’Incarnation. He remarks that she must have been animated by an infinite love to leave her son in France and go to New France to educate the native populations. Carl Bergeron invites us to reconnect – not to commune – with this history of New France which is so far from us.
Unfortunately, our memory often begins in the 1960s. And even for the most hypermnesic among us, our history begins in 1837. But are we simply able to have New France as a living reference? One of the founding texts of modern Quebec, the Global refusal, categorically rejected clericalism, and our taste for transcendence vanished at once.
This discourse was certainly necessary at the time, because the weight of the Church sclerotic society and artists, but a society, and even less a culture, cannot endure by the radical rejection of its past.
Grounding in the history of our people
Today we must take advantage of our historical situation. Quebec being essentially dechristianized, clericalism has no weight on our society. This lightness can and must allow us to take root in the history of our people who are marked by transcendence. Making our gaze less suspicious of the latter would allow us to revive a memory marked by daring and tenacity.
To paraphrase Bergeron, Quebec’s history of the past 50 years is one of democracy, but that of New France is chivalrous. How to institute a creative gesture on the basis of these two stories which imprison us and which free us, which are both contradictory and complementary? Over the course of these pages, we tell ourselves that the great writer who wrote this little book will succeed.
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– David Santarossa, teacher, Sainte-Thérèse
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