Jacques Godbout, French-Canadian writer, film-maker and quiet revolutionary, tells Lara Marlowe about the challenge of maintaining his Québecois identity in the face of pressure from outsiders
The Canadian film-maker, novelist, essayist, radio journalist and poet Jacques Godbout has been at the forefront of artistic and political life in the French-speaking province of Quebec for nearly half a century. The 72-year-old has made close to 35 films, both fiction and documentary, and published two dozen books. On April 15th and 16th he will participate in the Franco-Irish Literary Festival, at Dublin Castle, where he will show four of his short films: profiles of the Canadian writer Anne Hébert and the painter Paul-Émile Borduas, and the documentaries In Saint-Henri on September 5th, shot in a working-class suburb of Montreal, and The World Will Think We're Savages, about the Micmac Indians of Canada.
Salut Galarneau!, Godbout's funny, anarchic 1979 tale of a French-Canadian dropout who sells chips and hot dogs from a van, became a Canadian classic. When François Galarneau's girlfriend Marise takes up with his brother Jacques, the young man walls himself in his house. In a 1993 sequel, Galarneau becomes a guard in a shopping mall, marries a Cambodian girl so she can immigrate to Canada, and volunteers for a space mission with his brothers, in the hope of establishing a French-speaking colony in outer space.
Galarneau sometimes curses "this pig of a country where you freeze or you roast"; "to hell with Jacques Cartier" he adds, referring to the man who discovered Montreal in 1535. But affection for the French-speaking province is nonetheless at the heart of Godbout's oeuvre. "Of all the groups who emigrated from France, the French-Canadians were the only ones who took root and stayed," says Godbout. "A Québecois writer has a much stronger attachment to Europe than an English-speaking North American, because Paris remains the centre of French language and literature."
Unlike Parisians, who readily incorporate English into everyday language, the Québecois say courriel instead of email, pourriel instead of spam and terrain de stationnement instead of le parking. "The confrontation is no longer with English," says Godbout, "but among Québecois. Should we speak French like the francophones in other countries or should we speak our own kind of French?"
In 1760 France lost Canada to Britain. For 245 years the Québecois have been ruled by English speakers. Added to that was the overbearing presence of the Catholic Church; Quebec missed the French Revolution and received thousands of priests and nuns who were expelled from France in the secular frenzy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. "We have accounts to settle with three capitals: Rome, Paris and 'Ottawashington'," says Godbout.
Claude Laverdure, the Canadian ambassador to France, says Canadians are taught they have two motherlands, France and Britain. "For 400 years we've been searching for the father," he adds. Godbout laughs when I tell him the anecdote. "We have two mother-in-law-lands," he corrects me, "because we no longer suckle at the breast of either. If there is a father, it's the United States, because our cultural influence comes from Hollywood and our economic influence from the US companies that invest in Canada."
Of these often contradictory influences, Godbout says it was easiest to shake off Rome. When he was born in Montreal in 1933, there was no civil birth certificate, only the baptismal record. Godbout was educated by Jesuit priests - like Galarneau, his most famous character - and when he attended the University of Montreal it was still a pontifical institution. "The power of the clergy had nothing to do with competence," Godbout says. "A bishop could decide that boys and girls couldn't dance together; that happened in Rimouski diocese [in Quebec]. Television was censored by the clergy. In 1965, a programme made by Québecois journalists in Paris was censured by the archbishopric of Montreal because they interviewed Jean-Paul Sartre, a notorious atheist, and Simone de Beauvoir, a dangerous woman who might lead the Catholic women of Quebec into depravation." As a leading figure in Quebec's Quiet Revolution, Godbout founded the magazine Liberté and co-founded the Secular Movement. "I was anticlerical because I wanted meritocracy, not authority based on the cassock," he says. "The clergy in Quebec were our aristocracy."
In France, Godbout says, secularism became a new religion. "I was barely 30 when a secular movement in Paris sent us a delegation - they thought we were doing exactly what they'd done in 1900. When I went to collect them at the airport they were all in their 60s and 70s. They arrived from old France with an attitude almost as paternal as the Catholic Church's. We told them, 'Thanks messieurs, we'll sort it out on our own,' and put them back on the plane." Quebec has a large immigrant community, but there has been no debate on the Islamic headscarf there. "Contrary to what they say in France, the Anglo-Saxon influence is not always bad," Godbout says. He believes the presence of English speakers made Quebec more tolerant, and he praises the cleverness of British schools that ruled that Muslim girls could wear headscarves provided they be in school colours. Godbout's scorn for the church gave way to scorn for North America's consumer society. "It's the same thing," he says. "We replaced the spiritual appetite with a material appetite. If you're religious, they promise you paradise and you never get it; in consumerism, they promise you happiness without ever giving it to you either."
Quebec's independence movement reached full pitch around the time Charles de Gaulle shouted "Vive le Québec Libre" in Montreal, in 1967. Godbout believes the modernisation of Quebec in the Quiet Revolution took the steam out of the movement. He advocated independence for the French-speaking province until 1980. "I realised that we would never attain the support of 75 or 80 per cent of the population." If there were a referendum today, he says, Quebec nationalists would probably obtain 50 per cent of the vote. "But the consequences of independence desired by only half the population would be disastrous for everyone, most of all us. I am seen by the independence movement as a traitor and by the federalists as a dangerous person. In the middle stands virtue."
Among the films he has made, Godbout's favourite is Le Sort de l'Amérique, or The Fate of America, about the conquest of Canada by the British in 1760. He tracked down the descendants of the British general James Wolfe and the defeated French general the Marquis de Montcalm.
"The Englishman is a journalist at the BBC and plays the guitar and sings in a rock band," Godbout says. "The Frenchman is a civil servant in a ministry, belongs to a royalist group and spends his weekends renovating a chateau."
The obvious conclusion is that Britain is modern while France wallows in the past. "I don't need to say it; it's true," Godbout says. "France is a museum. That's why I go there. I can live in a modern way in Canada, and from time to time I visit the museum. They are the curators, not me. Look at their trade unions, the way they go on strike. Look at the way they see the world: c'est pas possible! Every morning my wife and I read the newspapers and we howl."
The Franco-Irish Literary Festival is at Dublin Castle, April 15th-17th. See www.alliance-francaise.ie
