H. Bourassa — La Langue, gardienne de la Foi (1918)

I have lately been reading a most remarkable book: Henri Bourassa’s La Langue, gardienne de la Foi, published in 1918 and long since out of print. It was George Grant who switched me on to it — he quotes Bourassa at a key point in Lament for a Nation. Bourassa was a French-Canadian politician and founder of the newspaper Le Devoir. Rather than attempt to characterize his general stance I will let him speak for himself.

The physical book, and the difficulty of getting hands on it, gives me the impression that nobody has read it in a hundred years except perhaps biographers of Bourassa. I could not find any online text either, and since the book is quite flimsy (it is basically a pamphlet) I worry that it will simply break down and be lost forever in a matter of decades, and all that will remain for posterity is the paragraph quoted by George Grant. And this is a book that should not be lost. To me, it is a revelation. It speaks directly to my heart, I feel a thrill run through me every time I pick it up to read. In fact it comes to me as an answer I have been seeking for a long time: how to be a patriotic Canadian Catholic? Bourassa gives the gift of a vision, an inspiring, beautiful vision, of what a Catholic Canada could be and is called to be.

I realize there are probably very few people who are seeking in this specific way for a Canadian identity, for whom Bourassa could be a help. But to me it would seem a tragedy if this book were lost. And I find it so rich and clear and penetrating in its Catholic political thought, that I believe it should be accessible even outside the French Catholic world. For preservation I can and will scan and digitize it. But I also feel a strong pull to translate the whole into English. The book is not long, less than fifty pages. Since I have a job, and a great many other commitments, even fifty pages is probably a matter of years for me — but I shall make a start and get however far I get.

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Table of Contents

National and religious traditions of French Canadians

I. Principles of social order and natural rights

II. The Church, protector of national languages
The Miracle of Pentecost
Pagan Rome, Christian Rome

III. The Gospel preached in every language
Saint Francis Xavier, model of missionaries
Saint Francis Xavier and the idioms of Asia
The Canadian missionaries and the aboriginal languages

IV. Catholicism and the national languages in America
Msgr Langevin and the Ukrainians

V. Protestant languages, Catholic languages
The example of the Irish

VI. The French language, vehicle of Catholicism
“Canadian French” and “Parisian French”

VII. French Canadians, their civilising task
Let us speak and live our faith

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Language, Protector of the Faith

National and religious traditions of French Canadians

“More French than Catholic,” they used to say readily about French Canadians before the war — those English-speaking Catholics who conducted the campaign of ostracisation against the French language in church and in school. “Slaves of the Pope of Rome and of the hierarchy,” proclaimed the Orangists and their allies. “Too French and not British enough,” added the Anglicisers preoccupied above all with political assimilation and imperial unity. With the war and the refusal of French Canadians to forget the demands of their own national defense in order to run to the aid of the ‘little nationalities’ across the sea — a pretext whose fallacious hypocrisy was only too evident to French Canadians, coming from the lips of their persecutors — these refrains have somewhat changed. Anglicising Catholics, antipapists, imperialists have toned down their old clamours and brought their voices into harmony. “Traitors to the Empire, ingrates towards France,” such was the familiar theme during the whole of the war. All these types — a good number are sincere — appear to ignore the essential elements of the French-Canadian nationality, the duties which flow from this nationality for French Canadians, the traditional sentiments which it inspires in them. Let us recall these briefly.

In the order of national duties, most French Canadians, exclusively Canadian for almost two centuries, subordinate the vague and distant ‘obligations’ that one wants to impose on them towards their two ‘mother-countries’ — appelations equally false in law and in fact — to their certain duties towards their unique homeland, Canada. In the order of natural rights, they are attached to their language, which is the common idiom of all groups of the French race across the world, and to their French traditions, more than to the material power of France. In the moral order, they belong heart and soul to the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church; and it is from the Church herself that they have learned that patriotism is not contrary to religion, and that Catholicism, because it is catholic, ought not to be, nor ever can be, in America or elsewhere, an instrument of assimilation for the profit of one race or a factor of unification and of political hegemony in service to the British Empire or American Democracy. If one is quite willing to go to the trouble of contemplating the situation and the sentiments of French Canadians under this triple aspect, many prejudices and misunderstandings will not be slow to dissipate.

Of these false or unreliable estimations, I want, for the time being, to linger only on the first. Are we more French than Catholic? Are we more attached to our language than to our faith? Permit me to repeat here the summary response which I made to the same question, at the vigil of the struggle for French schooling in Ontario:

“One is surprised sometimes that of all privileges, the one which we demand with most insistance and which is for us the most contested, is that of language. It is so much so that people criticize us, at times, for showing ourselves to be more French than Catholic.

“If he were to judge by certain outward expressions, the superficial observer could indeed come to believe that it is so.

“The explanation is very simple. First, we believe that our language — its preservation and its development — are for us the most necessary human element for the preservation of our faith; and second, in the simplicity of our minds and of our hearts — having preserved the Catholic faith in our ‘medieval’ province just as that faith was taught in the past — we believe that the Church holds the promises of eternal life. What is more, we think that in all the claims of the Church, the first steps, as also the general direction, ought to come from those in whom we see concentrated the authority bequeathed by Jesus Christ to his apostles and handed on by them to the bishops and clergy of the following centuries; but our language, that is our own property peculiar to ourselves, and if we do not defend it, no one will rescue it for us.

“Our language has not received a divine promise of preservation, except that which God has made to all peoples and all men who have enough heart and spirit to defend their soul and their body, their national patrimony and that of their family; but that promise does not reserve anything to those whose soul is base enough to barter their birthright for a mess of pottage, and to beg as a favour what ought to be claimed as a right.”[1]

Persuaded that in spite of, or perhaps because of, the ‘triumph of Democracy’ — which is, all in all, the right of majorities to oppress minorities — the assaults against our language and our faith are going to resume more forcefully and more numerously than ever, it seems to me opportune to treat the question more thoroughly and to contemplate to its full extent this important problem of national language according to religious faith.

I. Principles of social order and natural rights

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[1] Speech delivered at the first Congress of the French Language, Québec, 28 June 1912.