When the metaphorical dust has settled on the Plains of Abraham—metaphorical dust being the only kind you’re allowed to kick up on the sacred sod a quarter-millennium on—the larger question remains:
What’s the future of the past?
That’s to say, the lesson of the last few weeks is that the latter depends on the former. In 1759, General Wolfe won a decisive victory that led to the end of French rule on this continent: that is what we used quaintly to call a “fact.” To take another unfashionable word, the “reality” of North American life today derives explicitly from that fact.
Once upon a time they used to teach Wolfe in schools. I don’t suppose, between diversity studies, anger management classes and Ritalin shots, he gets much of a look-in these days. Yet it is still startling to discover that to observe 2½ centuries of this transformative event would be a ghastly social faux pas (pardon my French) in the province (pardon my English) of Quebec. When I first heard that the long-scheduled re-enactment of the battle had been cancelled on “public safety” grounds, I roared my head off: the notion of a warrior nation now too fainthearted even to stage re-enactments seemed too obvious a parody of Canadian squishiness. But it turned out to be true. The British won the battle but the French won the re-enactment—which may yet be what counts. As the separatist bruiser Patrick Bourgeois couldn’t resist crowing, it was a glorious victory over the old enemy.
I say “separatist bruiser” but, of course, the pseudo-separatists never do separate and M Bourgeois will end his days a subject of the same Crown that has already inflicted 250 years of humiliation on him. “Je me souviens,” as the licence plates say, although given Quebec’s advanced state of societal dementia maybe they could switch quotations to: “a British subject I was born and a British subject I will die.”
In other countries, they épater les bourgeois. But in Canada les bourgeois épater everybody else. I warmed up to Quebec’s newest hero after listening to everybody else’s response to him. The British victor’s successor as gauleiter of Quebec, the federal government, turned out to be a Wolfe in sheep’s clothing, and abandoned the National Battlefield Commission to its fate. The commission chair, André Juneau, conceded that it is “an ex-tremely painful page in our history,” apparently mostly for the winning side, but he said a commemorative book would still be issued, and—who knows?—it may even be legal to distribute it in Quebec. A spokesman for the organizing group, the Quebec Historical Corps, said they might go ahead and hold the re-enactment in Ontario, which would be as funny as it gets, short of moving the venue to the garden of Buckingham Palace, where presumably it would fall foul of European Union “xenophobia” laws.
Meanwhile, Michael Ignatieff displayed the characteristically bold leadership we’ve come to associate with him since he momentarily wandered off the Liberal reservation and accidentally supported the Iraq war. The leader of the Opposition declared that he wasn’t saying he was for or against the re-enactment per se but that any commemoration of this “defeat and tragedy” ought to be respectful. You remember Lord Nelson at Trafalgar? He put the telescope over his eye patch and said “I see no ships.” That’s Iggy. He put a patch over both eyes, swivelled in all directions, and declared, “I see no re-enactment, but if it’s out there I hope it’s sober and dignified.”
Speaking of Trafalgar, couldn’t we have opted for the solution adopted by the British on the bicentennial in 2005? Worried that the French and Spanish dignitaries would be embarrassed at seeing their side routed, they decided to stage the re-enactment not as a battle between Britain and the French and Spanish navies, or even between “the good guys” and “unspecified shifty foreigners,” but instead between “the Red Team” and “the Blue Team.” And just to be on the safe side the commemorative booklet referred not to “the Battle of Trafalgar” but only to “an early 19th-century sea battle.” It doesn’t exactly fire the blood—“the Red Team expects every man to do his duty”—and I’m not sure whether the dying Nelson turned to Hardy and said, “Kiss me, fellow Red Team member.” But surely the same dodge might have worked in Quebec? The Red Team battling the Blue Team, with perhaps an Orange Team led by Jack Layton coming in at the last minute to do all the commemorative TV interviews about how this battle establishes the Orange Team as the real choice of working families.
But no. Instead, General Wolfe’s historic victory is history in the robust sense of that useful Americanism: aw, he’s history—as in fuhgeddabouttim; he’s gone, he’s over, put a fork in him—he’s done. John Robson wrote a splendid column arguing that not even Quebecers should be dumb enough to want to exchange 250 years under the British Crown for 250 years under absolute monarchy, the Revolution, the Terror, Napoleon, the Second Empire, the Fourth Republic, etc, etc. As for France, she was happy to trade “quelques arpents de neige” (a few acres of snow) for the security of her Caribbean colonies. How’d that work out? See the riots in Guadeloupe the other week? I mean, real riots, not just a staged re-enactment of riots from hundreds of years ago.
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