Quebec [antikvár]

"These few acres of snow are not worth the blood of a single French Grenadier," Voltaire wrote in his novel Candida, feeling that it was an absurd waste of money to contest English possession of Canada, a land twice the size of China. It must be noted that at that time the Iroquois were allied to the English and the Hurons to the French, and that both tribes excelled at European warfare, a fact which detracted from the image of the noble savage so popular during the century of the Enlightment. Sieur Arouet had not realized that the French Grenadiers were in fact defending Candide's garden. Candide is still cultivating his garden in the 1980s, while Pangloss has only the ever-fluctuating market price of otter and beaver-skin to philosophize about. Quebec is a land in the wings of History whose citizens would appreciate advancing occasionally to the front of the stage. The situation isextremelydifficultwhen one is so close to the domineering United States and to the Ontarian English, who are more English than the English, especially when they are Scots ! These are the people who direct the course of history, under the Union Jack and the Star-Spangled Banner, and who, from time to time, when necessary, allow the French Canadians, for glory alone, to take part in their gruesome games. For instance, to sacrifice their lives on the beaches of Dieppe, ostensibly to test the German defence system, in one of the most ill advised and futile operations of the Second World War. After that they were told to make their way home as quietly as possible to tap their maple trees. This is, of course, merely a rough outline of the situation. Nevertheless, since the time of Montcalm, Quebeckers have been living through a semi-covert existential crisis. Repeated but veiled hints, which are far more unpleasant that direct criticism, insinuate that all their history is in the past, that they have no present and no future. With sombre Hegelian ferociousness, they constantly attempt to transform that past, to galvanize it into a future. They are, to borrow the words of the German philosopher, "conscious of their unhappiness". The garden of Candide Patriotic fervour in Quebec has nothing to do with age.