Parizeau, a man in the grip of an idea

The thing is, it’s the rationalists who are the real romantics. Pierre Trudeau famously took as his motto “reason over passion,” but when it came to his own ideas there was no one more passionate. Stephen Harper is supposedly cold logic made flesh, and yet can dig in, once he has decided on some idea, with a quite unreasoning stubbornness. And Jacques Parizeau, he of the steel-trap mind and the banker’s stripes? He, too, gave his life to the passion of an idea.

The idea, in his case — as, inverted, in Trudeau’s — was nationalism. And it is only that: an idea. Nationalists are in the habit of asserting its central credo, every nation in its own state, as if it were self-evident, a kind of law of nature; when they say, as Lucien Bouchard did, that Canada is not a “real” country (or, in Pierre Karl Péladeau’s homage, that it is an “imaginary” country), it is because they have assumed, consciously or otherwise, that “real” countries are ethnoculturally homogeneous: same language, same blood lines, and so on.

But there’s nothing selfevident in this idea. It’s contradicted everywhere by the facts — you’d be hard pressed to name a country nowadays that was genuinely homogeneous — and in any case there are any number of other ways in which to define the boundaries of nationhood: a common religion, say, or a common allegiance, or the classic civic nationalist idea of a nation bound together by common ideals, ambitions and rights as citizens. Each is an idea; each is a choice.

Nevertheless, the idea of nation, the desire for a transcendent sense of community, beyond the immediate bounds of the familiar, is clearly one of the most powerful ideas of modern times, bewitcher of several generations, rationalists and romantics alike, to ends at times inspiring, at other times hateful. If, of late, it has given way somewhat to other terms of identity — race, sex, sexual orientation and so on — it is in the service of the same fixation.

No, not “difference,” the mask of pluralism that identity politics likes to put on. It is not the differences between groups that excite the nationalist, like the racial or gender theorist, so much as sameness within the group.

To construct a theory of the unbridgeable difference between two groups, after all, you have to have in mind a broad stereotype of each, to be compared and contrasted.

You have to have an idea, before all, of the group: nation, race, sex, etc. — the idea that what really matters about people, deep down, is not what makes them unique as individuals, or what they have in common as human beings, but what makes them members of the same group.

And not just any group — for we are all members of any number of different demographic or sociological groups — but only one particular group, the sole demarcation line of identity that it occurs to its advocates to draw around themselves.

Hence the significance of the Parizeau “nous.” The “money and the ethnic vote” crack on referendum night in 1995 may have been the id escaping, under the pressure of drink and disappointment, but that “nous” — the notion, as he urged upon his fellow francophone Quebecers, that when speaking of Quebec, as when speaking of themselves, “on va parler de nous,” coterminously, the one a substitute for the other — was his soberest self talking.

He had had enough of attempts to turn Quebec nationalism into something broad and inclusive — the notion, then being espoused by some sovereigntists, that “a Quebecer was anyone who wanted to be,” as if it were just another species of civic nationalism.

He could see the danger in this. For if Quebec were just another liberal society made up of rights-bearing citizens, English and French, old stock and immigrant, how was it to be distinguished in that regard from Canada?

But the dilemma, for the movement if not for Parizeau, remained. For Quebec is, in at least half its mind, a liberal, pluralistic, North American society, and as such inclined to recoil at any attempt to issue too crude an “appel de la race” — as, for example, in the matter of the values charter. On the other hand, downplay it, as Parizeau understood, and the whole thing fizzles. Sovereignty? Why?

Or indeed, how? Here again Parizeau broke with his colleagues. Here again he could see the trap into which they were headed. He knew, as they did not, that separation could never be negotiated; the attempt would lead straight into a bog. There were too many players, too many issues, too uncertain a process — and in any case, it conceded too much, constrained too much, especially if some sort of post-separation “association” were involved.

Mind you, he was not above pretending that was what he had in mind, as he was not above pretending that an independent Quebec would continue to use the Canadian dollar. (It would almost certainly jettison it at the first opportunity.) But whatever Quebecers were led to believe in the campaign, what Parizeau really intended, we learned afterward, was a kind of coup — a unilateral declaration of independence, most likely within days.

It’s madness, really. Just the thought of it is enough to set your hair on fire: capital flight on a grand scale, native groups taking down hydro towers, the courts clogged with citizens petitioning against this illegal and revolutionary act, the promised international recognition nowhere in sight. It couldn’t possibly have succeeded, though it could certainly have created unimaginable chaos in the attempt.

But what was all this to a man in the grip of an idea? Parizeau might have been less obviously deluded than Bouchard, more methodical, more determined, more outwardly rational, but inside him burned a passion that was all the more intense for being thought through.