A joy to read: Lionel Groulx
Unofficial translation of Andrée Ferretti, « Un bonheur de lecture: Lionel Groulx », in L'Action nationale, vol. 84, no 6, juin 1994, pp. 840-850.
Lecturer invited to the third lunch-talk of the L'Action indépendantiste du Québec, which, on November 22, 1993, gathered more than 130 people including Mrs. Louise Harel, Andrée Ferretti paid this vibrating homage to the work of our national historian.
Introduction
I read or read again, in a few days, more than one thousand pages of the work of our famous historian. I then rediscovered with pleasure an intellectual of an immense scope, as much for the extent of his erudition as for the innovation of his conception of history and his methods of rebuilding of the past, comparable with that of the best social science thinkers and researchers of the first half of the XXe century. I moreover enjoyed the beauty of a language and a style which make the erudite work of Lionel Groulx a true literary work.
However, this joy of reading could only, for someone like me who loves to share my enthusiasms, be accompanied by the desire to see other people read this considerable author, particularly today where as much his epigones as his detractors serve him, either by in magnifying him in glorifying and obsolete presentations and analysis, or by reducing him to the defamatory formulae of their vision as ignorant and malevolent essay writers.
It is important indeed, to read him today with intelligence, not to regard Lionel Groulx as a contemporary, however current his work may remain under several aspects, but as a historical figure marked by his time. His vision of the world and ours were nourished at too different sources not to be shaped by often divergent values.
We should never lose sight of the fact that Lionel Groulx was born in 1878, that at the end of the Great War (First World War), he was 36 years old, that he was thus an already accomplished man, more especially as he had been remarkably precocious. However, if it is true, as the majority of the historians supports it, that the XXe century really begins only at the end of this war, one must admit that Lionel Groulx, until approximately 1920, was a man of the 19th century, entirely impregnated by the ultramontane ideology.
It is well-known that in French Canada the ultramontane Church imposes then, and since a long time already, its faith, its dogmas and its ideas. Received almost universally by the French-Canadian population of all social backgrounds, its lesson and its values are indissociably tied to all the intellectual activity, an activity which is not restricted to compose with this given, but which conforms to it. The bonds of thought and this Catholicism are not, indeed, only those of belief, but those of culture and institution, with all that this comprises of monolithism in the fields of education and knowledge. Now, is it necessary to point it out, Lionel Groulx was, since 1891, pupil, then student in a seminar, trained for priesthood.
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