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Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Alan Gordon, Making Public Pasts: The Contested Terrain of Montreal's Public Memories, 1891–1930 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 2001)

ALAN GORDON's book on the construction and uses of public memory in the city of Montreal in the early decades of the 20th century represents a notable addition to the growing body of English Canadian historical scholarship, by H.V. Nelles, Ronald Rudin, and Colin Coates, among others, on the relationship between commemoration and political identity in French Canada. Making Public Pasts draws freely upon a wide range of canonical works on nationalism and collective memory, from the classic texts of Durkheim and Halbwachs to more recent influential studies by Eric Hobsbawm, Pierre Nora, Anthony Smith, and John Bodnar. Although Gordon does not explicitly situate himself in relation to the eclectic mix of theoretical and methodological approaches represented by these authorities, he clearly shares their assumption that memories, myths, and symbols (or "mythomoteurs," to use his preferred term) both reflect and actively shape aspects of social and political reality. He is particularly concerned to show how images of the past, embodied in monuments, memorials, plaques, historic sites, and commemorative rituals, helped to constitute the competing nationalisms of English- and French-speaking Montrealers, and structure the power relations of a modernizing capitalist society.

Gordon begins by systematically describing the social, political, and geographical context of public commemoration in Montreal. He devotes particular attention to the urban landscape of the late Victorian city and its surrounding suburbs, with its squares, parks, and stately avenues, set against a background of accelerating modernization. The written text is enhanced by an extremely useful apparatus of period photographs of individual monuments, as well as maps, diagrams, and tables, which both illustrate Gordon's arguments, and enable the reader to assess his use of evidence.

With admirable thoroughness, Gordon documents and analyses the significance of the striking increase in commemorative activity that began around 1890 and extended into the early decades of the new century, which he attributes to the deliberate intervention of a new "heritage elite," drawn mainly from the overwhelmingly male ranks of the professional middle classes. Its members shared a common interest in awakening and mobilizing the historical memory of their respective communities in support of two very different nationalist projects. He provides a wealth of illuminating detail about representative members of this elite, such as the romantic Anglophone litterateur and ardent imperialist W.H. Lighthall, as well as the most important institutions through which their ideas about the past were disseminated to a larger public: the Antiquarian and Numismatic Society of Montreal, the Société Historique de Montréal, the federal Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, and the Commission des monuments historiques du Québec, among others, which were responsible for erecting monuments, placing plaques on designated heritage sites, staging lavish historical pageants and processions, and so on. Gordon captures the cultural and political contradictions of their attitudes and values, which tended to combinean anti-modern nostalgia for a vanished, more "authentic" pre-industrial past with faith in material progress and capitalist prosperity; or, in the aftermath of the Great War, attachment to a nascent, autonomous nationhood with allegiance to the British monarchy and empire.

Gordon describes the gender and class biases of his heritage elite, which had no place for the memories of Irish workers, whose histories of forced emigration, economic hardship, discrimination, and labour struggle were almost wholly ignored in the official public sphere. Women, meanwhile, were relegated to largely symbolic roles as personifications of timeless, abstract virtues, apart from the recognition accorded to a handful of exemplary figures like Jeanne Mance and Marguerite Bourgeoys. He discusses working-class efforts to forge an alternative collective memory, for example through the annual commemorative rituals of Labour Day. He also acknowledges the increasing agency of women in heritage activities in the early 20th century, through such influential organizations as the IODE, while insisting on — and perhaps overstating — their subordination to masculine agendas. But these examples of resistance to the bourgeois and patriarchal values of the heritage elite receive rather cursory treatment, especially given Gordon's stated interest in the relationship between public memory and the structures of power in Quebec society. They are subordinated to his main argument about the ethnic and religious "fissures" that divided his socially homogeneous heritage elite into two distinct, "fratricidal" camps — French, Catholic, and nationalist on one side, English, Protestant, and imperialist on the other —and how these divisions found expression in rival representations of Canada's past.

He argues, for example, that Montreal Anglophones viewed their city as a strategic imperial outpost, and sought, through monuments of British heroes and monarchs, public holidays like Empire Day and other commemorative devices, to legitimize a conception of national belonging that combined an almost feudal personal allegiance to the British crown with a solid bourgeois faith in material progress, capitalist enterprise, and political liberty. French Canadian heritage elites, under the ideological leadership of Abbé Groulx, were at the same time evoking mythologized memories of New France in the process of constructing the "historical novelty" of aunified, militant, "Catholicized" nationalism, which, according to Gordon, finally succeeded in vanquishing and co-opting its old rouge adversaries in the aftermath of the Great War. Gordon provides numerous, richly detailed examples of the ways in which these fundamentally opposed conceptions of Canadian history and identity were reflected in disputes between French and English members of heritage organizations, and embodied in strategically situated sites of memory in the ethnically segregated neighbourhoods of Montreal.

Gordon is less interested in exploring the question of how the apparently irreconcilable tensions between Anglophone and Francophone discourses of memory and identity were negotiated and resolved, or at least contained. Yet one of the more surprising aspects of Gordon's account is how little overt controversy and conflict accompanied the attempts of the two communities to represent and promote their respective versions of Canada's past in a contested public sphere. Despite their frequent sophistication and originality, Gordon's readings of monuments and commemorative rituals do not always fully capture the "multivocal" nature of lieux de mémoire, in particular their ability to serve as vehicles of social and political reconciliation and harmony. For example, Gordon plausibly describes the unveiling of the imposing monument to George-Étienne Cartier in Jeanne Mance Park as an occasion for symbolically mending fences between English and French Montreal after the traumatic battles over conscription. Less convincingly, he attributes its role as a unifying symbol to the success of Anglophone heritage elites in recasting Cartier as a symbol of loyalty to the British connection. Gordon characterizes the monument as "a strange mix of British imperialism and Canadian nationalism," (89) without seeming to recognize that its effectiveness as a vehicle of reconciliation depended precisely on this element of political ambiguity. Neither the members of the committee that commissioned the Cartier monument, nor the racially mixed crowd that attended the unveiling ceremony shared a common, homogeneous memory of Cartier — or of Confederation, the Great War, or the British Empire, for that matter. But Montreal's "heritage elites" seem to have tacitly agreed to disagree about the significance of symbols like Cartier, whose monument represented him as both an Angophile imperialist and as the defender of the rights of the French Canadian patrie. Spectators were free to pick and choose which Cartier they wished to remember and venerate. (Or they could accept both meanings at once — or neither.) But the fact that Cartier could be publicly claimed and memorialized by both groups helped to foster at least the illusion of consensus and bonne entente after the bitter conflicts of the war years. In other words, public memory both divided Anglo phones and Francophones — as Gordon convincingly argues —and provided the means for overcoming or at least obscuring these divisions and mitigating their potentially corrosive effects. And if French Montrealers took issue with hegemonic British Canadian and imperialist constructions of the city's history, nothing prevented them from commemorating the past and honouring their heroes —Dollard, the martyrs of 1837, among others — on their own, counter-hegemonic terms.

A similar case can be made for the 1930 celebrations surrounding the unveiling of the monument to Jean Vauquelin, the commander of the French fleet which, against overwhelming odds, tried to relieve Quebec after its capture by Wolfe in 1759. Gordon dismisses the efforts of its organizers to use the event as an object lesson in ethnic harmony, mocking its supposedly "confused' and "comical" melange of French and British symbols, and "bizarre mix of contemporary politics with history." (118) But public memory, as Gordon himself argues, is almost always shaped by the political concerns of the present. In any case, I would once again argue that the variety and "confusion" of the symbolism surrounding the monument and its unveiling, which Gordon derides, contributed to its popular appeal as a site of memory. The ceremony, which was staged by the local Saint Jean Baptiste Society on the eve of the fête nationale and attracted over 20,000 spectators, clearly struck a chord among the people of Montreal. By simultaneously allowing Francophones to celebrate their heroism and gloire in defeat, and Anglophones their magnanimity in victory, it could serve as another example of how the ambiguity of commemoration was used to empower both group identities, while masking the intractable points of difference between them behind a ritualized display of reconciliation.

A greater appreciation of the ambiguous, multivocal nature of symbols and rituals would also have strengthened Gordon's suggestive account of the redefinition of French Canadian nationalism in the 1920s. As it stands, his argument about the "Catholicization" of Francophone memory and national identity under the influence of Abbé Groulx and his followers can even, on the strength of his own evidence, be turned on its head. The rehabilitation of the Patriotes in 1926, for example, might just as easily be cited to demonstrate the accommodation of Groulx's elitist, clerical form of French Canadian nationalism to the forces of liberalism and modernity in Quebec society. The historical pageantry of the reinvented fête nationale, to which Gordon devotes an entire chapter, can be interpreted as a product of the moderately liberal nationalism of lay intellectuals like Victor Morin and Joseph Massicotte of the SSJBM. The extraordinarily elaborate, hugely popular défilés inaugurated by Morin and Massicotte in 1924 presented painstakingly detailed images of French Canadian history, organized around a series of grandiose themes, which, upon closer inspection, lent themselves to a surprisingly wide range of meanings and purposes (including the development of a mass tourist industry). These complex, multilayered spectacles, rather than forcing Francophone memory and identity into the mould of a reactionary messianic Catholicism, arguably allowed all the disparate elements that made up modern French Canadian society —rouge and bleu, clerical and secular, rural and urban, industrial and agricultural — to unite under the banner of an increasingly pluralistic patrie.

Gordon's stimulating study of how the collective memory of the two "founding races" was shaped and exploited by contending elites in the ethnically polarized urban landscape of Montreal yields fresh perspectives on a number of important issues: the genealogy of the uneasily coexisting nationalisms of English and French Canada, the relationship between historical consciousness and civic identity, the origins of the heritage industry, and the Canadian experience of modernity, among others. One could wish for a more nuanced reading of certain key lieux de mémoires; important points are at times simply asserted rather than empirically demonstrated; and the theoretical framework does not always do justice to the complex and elusive subject matter. But the same reservations can be applied to almost every other contribution to this nascent field of historical research. They do not detract from the overall value of Gordon's book, which provides yet another example of how cultural approaches drawn from a variety of disciplines are breathing new life into the study of Canadian history.


Robert Cupido Dalhousie University

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