Defining National Memories: The Cases of Popular Rebellions in Ireland and Québec

Shortly before his death in 1862, the Archbishop of Armagh, Lord John George de la Poer Beresford said: “When I was a boy, the Irish people meant the Protestants; now it means the Roman Catholics” (quoted in Bartlett 1992, 343). Just like that, he summarized half a century of struggle and modifications regarding the definition of the Irish nation. Indeed, after 1860, the Catholic people of Ireland were identified with the Irish nation, and it seemed that there would be no place or role for Protestants inside this definition. Protestants, of course, could continue to describe themselves as Irish, but the term “Irish” was used as an adjective. The collective noun “The Irish,” was reserved for Catholics (Bartlett 2014, 2). As I shall show in this section, this slow transformation from “an” Irish people to “the” Irish people would have important consequences for the remembrance of the 1798 rebellion, which was the triggering event of such a change.

In 1791, the Society of United Irishmen was founded upon the idea that parliamentary institutions in Ireland needed to be reformed. As seen earlier, England's negation of the Irish grievances initiated a movement toward more radical actions and complete independence of their island. They believed in a nation that would be civic, moving away from ethno-religious differences. As we can see form the society's 1791 pamphlet, in which Theobald Wolfe Tone, himself a Protestant, came to the defense of the Irish Catholics, wanting them to receive a similar quality of education; in this pamphlet, he clearly identifies the British empire as their political “enemy:”

They plunge them by law, and continue them by statute, in gross ignorance, and then we make the incapacity we have created an argument for their exclusion from the common rights of man! We plead our crime in justification of itself. If ignorance be their condemnation, what has made them ignorant? Not the hand of Nature, for I presume they are born with capacities pretty much like other men. It is the iniquitous and cruel injustice of Protestant bigotry, that has made them ignorant; they are excluded by law from the possibility of education; for I will not call the liberal connivance of the heads of our University, who suffer, perhaps by a strain on their strict duty, a few to smuggle a little of that learning, which is contraband to an Irish Papist, I will not, I say, allow that to be such an education as every Irishman has a right to demand. They cannot obtain degrees; those are paled in from them by oaths, those oaths of which they are so regardless, and, therefore, we find they do not enter our University.

As we see here, Wolfe Tone acknowledged that the Catholics of Ireland were harmed by “Protestant bigotry.” This oath of allegiance to the English monarch symbolized an acknowledgment of Protestant superiority and a legitimization of their colonial system. It was, in sum, a way of assimilation that Wolfe Tone aimed to end through his rebellion.

Overall, in his numerous public appearances, Wolfe Tone challenged the definition of a Protestant Irish nation. For him, to be Irish had little to do with religion. It was rather with the land, the island of Ireland, liberal ideals of freedom, in addition to a rejection of British imperialism. Yet, the failed rebellion and the subsequent Act of Union of 1800, ironically brought religion to the forefront of Ireland's societal division.

It is in this context, where religion became an extremely salient issue, that in 1802, the first “historical analysis” of the rebellion was published: Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland. In it, Richard Musgrave, an ultra-Protestant ideologue, described the 1798 rebellion as “a conspiracy … for the destruction of the Protestant Church” (Musgrave 1802, 14). This book's revisionism is, in part, to blame for burying the event in social amnesia, Catholics and Protestants refusing to recognize the alliance made with the other during the rebellion (Andrews 2006, 43). Nevertheless, we can say that Wolfe Tone's words, just like the rebellion itself, represented a turning point for the Irish nation, a new interpretation of what it meant to be Irish, and a change that would continue during the late 1820s with Daniel O’Connell.

Johann Gottfried von Herder once asked: “Has a nation anything more precious than the language of its fathers?” (Quoted in Oakes 2001, 22). If this question is now mostly answered in Québec, it took more than 100 years for language to surpass religion as the main unifying vector of the Québécois identity. The process of memorizing the events of 1837–1838 in Québec has long been compromised by conflicting embodiments of the nation, torn between religion and language. Contrary to the Irish case, where the rebellion was plunged into social amnesia for more than a century, the Patriotes rebellions of 1837–1838 have moved in and out of Québec national myths. In fact, these memorial shifts have been so prominent that in a historiographical review of the rebellions, Jean-Paul Bernard (1983, 16) acknowledged the various legacies of its memory: “We thus have ‘flavour of the day’ patriots and patriots for everyone's tastes.”

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Just like in Ireland, the rebellion in Lower Canada started after demands for institutional reforms were frowned upon. In 1791, London decided its colonies in North America could each have a legislative assembly. However, for the French-speaking population, these measures were perceived as another assimilative policy. In addition, the unsuccessful constitutional reform measures proposed by the liberal French-speaking Parti Canadien led the party and the population to radicalize their political claims. In 1826, the party changed its name and became the Parti Patriote, at the request of its leader Louis-Joseph Papineau, in an effort of filiation with the American patriots who, them, defeated the British.

Faced with the intransigence of the British authorities, Papineau and other members of the mouvement patriotes wrote, in 1834, the 92 resolutions. Each of these 92 resolutions represented a direct request to Westminster, seeking more political power for the people of Lower Canada. By analyzing the discourses of the 92 resolutions and some speeches pronounced by members of the leaders of the mouvement patriotes, we can clearly see the importance they attributed to their language and their French heritage. For example, resolution number 52 goes as follows:

Resolved, That since a circumstance, which did not depend upon choice of the majority of the people, their French origin and their use of the French language, has been made by the colonial authorities a pretext for abuse, for exclusion, for political inferiority, for a separation of the rights and interests; this House now appeals to the justice of His Majesty's Government and of Parliament, and to the honour of the people of England; that the majority of the inhabitants of this country are in nowise disposed to repudiate any on of the advantages they derive from their origin and from their descent from the French nation, which, with regard to the progress of which it has been the cause in civilization, in the sciences, in letters, and the arts, has never been behind the British nation, and is now the worthy rival of the latter in the advancement of the cause of liberty and of the science of Government; from which this country derives the greater portion of its civil and ecclesiastical law, and of its scholastic and charitable institutions, and of the religion, language, habits, manners and customs of the great majority of its inhabitants

The patriots sought here to assert their belonging to a national entity of French origin and the right of this nation to enjoy recognition equal to that enjoyed by the English-Canadians. It is clear, when reading the other 91 resolutions, that the objective of the patriots was, ultimately, to promote the project of society that they believed was most apt to ensure their national development, perceived as being undermined by the constitutional institutions in place and by Britain's colonial empire. These national demands included maintaining the social and cultural institutions specific to Lower Canada, for which the French language was an essential component. As Augustin-Norbert Morin said (1825, 11): “Now, the most important and sacred of these is undoubtedly the one by which a people give the same names to things and the same signs to ideas,”

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This national definition, which emphasizes democratic institutions, language, and culture, remained more or less stable until the signature of the British North America Acts (BNAA) in 1867. This new constitutional act established a federal system and over time, became understood in Québec as an acknowledgment of its French heritage, as one of the two “founding peoples of Canada.” Therefore, protected by this new constitution and also by the mechanisms of a decentralized federal regime, French-Canadian nationalism plunged into la survivance. Indeed, after the conquest of 1763 and the failure of the rebellions, it was clear that the social, political, and economic opportunities for French-Canadians were harmed. The political leaders thus resigned themselves to a defensive posture, focused on the past, on survival. During this period, and until 1936, religion slowly but surely occupied an increasing amount of space in Québec society. However, as indicated by Mathieu Pigeon (2017), it was only during the reign of Maurice Duplessis that religion overthrew language as the main vector of Québec's collective identity. Religion was always a distinctive aspect of French Canada, but it was understood as one element, among others, deriving from France. Language remained the main distinctive feature from other ethnonational communities in North America, especially considering the successive waves of Irish and Scottish immigrants, who shared French-Canadians’ Catholicism.

This period known as la survivance also amplified the national desire for commemorations, which allowed for the beginning of a process of memorializing rebellions. Not referring to large-scale commemorations, but at the start of the 20th century the state nonetheless funded certain monuments dedicated to the Patriotes in Montréal and in Saint-Denis-sur-le-Richelieu, place of the most important Patriotes victory during the 1837 rebellion (St-Jean 2009b, 55–8). In addition, Patriotes flags sometimes appeared on the floats of the French-Canadians’ national holiday, thus associating their legacies with Québec's nationalist narrative.

As mentioned, the Act of Union of 1800 harmed the Catholic position in the new institutional design known as the United Kingdom. The Anglican Church was to be recognized as the official Church of Ireland and more importantly, no Catholics were allowed to hold public office unless they renounced their religion through the oaths. The union solved none of the sectarian problems over land, religion, or politics and basically had no social dimension at all. The only thing the Act did, in the end, was increasing the sense of grievance among the Catholics (Hill 2001, 52). The Act of Union quickly became a liability as the message of Daniel O’Connell spread upon the Irish Catholics. As he said: “every man who feels with me proclaim, that if the alternative were offered him of Union, or the re-enactment of the Penal Code in all its pristine horrors, that he would prefer without hesitation the latter, as the lesser and more sufferable evil” (O’Connell 1828).

For O’Connell, the Protestants were colonizers and foreigners to the island and should not be able to rule over the Catholics. With his charismatic personality and his appealing message on emancipation, O’Connell quickly became the voice of Ireland's renewed cultural nationalism (Hutchinson 1987, 78). Moreover, Westminster did not devote much attention to its Irish colony and tardily realized the influence of Daniel O’Connell had started to gain. A tremendous process of politicization had begun among the Catholic peasantry and working class. A Catholic consciousness increased significantly, and a Catholic nation started to emerge, “shaped by history and the sense of the past, but also shaped by the realities of contemporary Irish life” (Bartlett 2014, 13).

By the 1840s, O’Connell managed to organize what has become known as his “monster meetings,” where more than 100,000 Catholics gathered in various locations to hear his talks about his vision of the Irish nation and his desire to repeal the Act of Union (McCaffrey 2015, 53–60). It was during such a gathering in 1843 that O’Connell said: “I want to make all Europe and America know it – I want to make England feel her weakness if she refuses to give the justice we the Irish requires – the restoration of our domestic parliament” (O’Connell 1843, quoted in McCaffrey 2015, 52). It is here that we see the real fracture between O’Connell's speech and that of other nationalist leaders who preceded him, including Theobald Wolfe Tone. Indeed, given the context in which the discourse takes place and the ideology underlying it, we can conclude that when O’Connell says “we the Irish”, he refers to the Catholic population. By then, for O’Connell and his supporters, the Irish nation and Catholics were two terms for the same meaning (Bartlett 2014, 25).

However, the redefinition of Irish nationalism did not, in the beginning, lead to the memorialization of the 1798 rebellion. As it will be demonstrated later on, specific conditions, all linked to the newly formed nation, were necessary for the event to be publicly commemorated. Daniel O’Connell, today known as “The Liberator,” which says a great deal about his place in the Irish collective memory, sought to distance himself from any form of revolutionary nationalism. Moreover, his discourse, gave few, if any, place to the Protestants. Therefore, remembering an event where Protestants and Catholics fought side by side would harm his message. That's why O’Connell always claimed no Catholics participated willingly in the 1798 rebellion: “In the county of Wexford, where the greatest part of the rebellion raged, there were no United Irishmen previous to the rebellion and there would have been no rebellion there if they had not been forced forwards by the establishment of Orange lodges and the whippings and torturing and things of that kind” (O’Connell 1841, quoted in Collins 2004, 10).

Moreover, the Catholic Church never approved of the rebellions, for its liberal ideals mostly, but also because of the links between Wolfe Tone and the French revolutionaries. Indeed, the rebellion of 1798 was greatly influenced by the French Revolution. The Church feared that acknowledging the rebellion would place them in a situation similar to the Catholic Church in France, post-1789 (Foster 2001, 87). O’Connell's discourse was a continuation, and extension of the Church's fear of being erased.

The emergent commemoration of the Lower-Canadian rebellion abruptly stopped after the provincial election of 1936, one year prior to the rebellion's centenary. Maurice Duplessis and his traditionalist-conservative party, L’Union Nationale, gained control of 76 out 90 electoral seats in the National Assembly of Québec, and his party would reign over Québec for 20 of the following 24 years. As mentioned, Maurice Duplessis wanted to revive Québec national pride. However, his nationalist revival built a different vision of the nation, where culture and language were no longer the main distinguishing factors. Rather, religion, traditionalism and ruralism occupied this place, as shown in the first two directives of the 1935 party manifesto: “What was the first law imposed on men with regard to life in society? The law imposed on men by nature, by God himself is to come together, to unite and to live in society.” And later on, “What are the main rights that belong to every citizen? There are certain rights which are inherent in every citizen and which he cannot alienate himself; such is the right of life, that of seeking happiness, and of worshiping the Supreme Being”

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This renewed national definition impaired the memorialization of the rebellions. A good example of this was what happened to the painting L’Assemblée des six comtés, by the painter Charles Alexander. It represents one of the most notorious iconographies of the rebellion, where Papineau delivers a speech to its supporters. The province acquired this painting in 1930 and, in 1937, the year of the centenary, Duplessis transferred the artwork to the National Museum of Arts, where it was stored and forgotten for more than 50 years (St-Jean 2009a, 438). Duplessis's reign demanded new myths that would be more in line with the definition of the nation that was promoted at the time. The memory of the rebellion did not help to promote a Catholic nation, since the liberal ideals of the patriots contravened the religious conservatism imposed by the government of Duplessis. Therefore, other myths were promoted such as that of St. John the Baptist who had been, by then, officially declared the patron saint of the French-Canadians.

After O’Connell's death in 1847, a new chapter in Irish nationalism began. With the failure of O’Connell's repeal movement, and the terrible management of the great famine by Westminster, discourses on nationalism radicalized, and in 1858, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), the most important organized Irish paramilitary group of the 19th century, was founded. Moreover, the 1860s were also marked by increasing demands for commemoration from a new generation whose parents or grandparents fought in the rebellion and were seeing its memory erased. In sum, the late 1860s saw the conditions for remembering the 1798 rebellion coming together as revolutionary nationalism was growing once again, in addition to a new Catholic middle class that made explicit demands towards commemorating the events (Foster 2001, 70).

Even if the Catholic Church continued to be refractory to commemorations, in the face of the popular pressure, and most importantly, to avoid giving the IRB a free hand on commemorations, the Church allowed the publication of numerous books relating the history of 1798, in order to adapt and shape the memory of the event (Collins 2004, 26). The most important of them was a story promoting “Faith and Fatherland,” A Popular History of the Insurrection of 1798, published in 1870 by the Reverend Patrick F. Kavanagh (Foster 2001, 71). Focusing on County Wexford, the book portrayed the rebellion as a Catholic one, downplaying the role of the United Irishmen: “When Wexford stood at bay the United Irishmen were not to be found” (Kavanagh (1870) 1880, 171). Moreover, Father Kavanagh discredited the 1802 interpretations of Richard Musgrave: “whose veracity in almost every instance appears equally questionable” (Kavanagh (1870) 1880, 83). In sum, for Kavanagh, the Catholics were the true heroes of 1798. As Collins (2004, 27) mentioned: “Kavanagh's version tells the story of the ‘morally pure’ Catholic peasantry of Wexford, led by their heroic priests, which fought bravely in defence of their homes and churches in the face of the utmost provocation of their sectarian tormentors.”

Shortly after the publication of Father Patrick F. Kavanagh's book, and given the willingness to publicly commemorate the rebellion, his Catholic interpretation gave politicians a narrative that they could use in order to finally introduce the rebellion to public memory. In addition, the centenary was approaching and was seen as a great opportunity to unify and publicize the demands for more autonomy. Many “98 clubs” were founded across Ireland in order to commemorate the rebellion locally. In 1897, a National Commemoration Committee was put in place to manage the different projects and to provide a sort of national overview (Collins 2004, 29).

Yet again, the paramilitaries and the Church fought in order to control the narrative of these commemorations. Many Fenian organizations proposed monuments as tributes to the role and legacy of the Society of United Irishmen. Among them was planned a statue of Theobald Wolf Tone, to be erected in Dublin, and meant to be one of the biggest monuments of the centenary (Foster 2001, 77). However, because of Church opposition and because of Kavanagh's narrative, which downplayed the role of the United Irishmen, the statue was never built, as James Joyce famously states in Ulysses: “Five tallwhitehatted sandwichmen between Monypeny's corner and the slab where Wolfe Tone's statue was not” (Joyce (1922) 2013, 412).

Rapidly, the Catholic Church gained control over the commemorations. In County Wexford and Wicklow, for instance, Father John Murphy, who was immortalized and elevated to the status of a national hero in the work of Patrick F. Kavanagh, saw many of his portraits altered in the weeks preceding the beginning of the celebrations in order to add a Roman Catholic collar (Johnson 1994, 89), thus transforming a hero into a Catholic hero. Moreover, many of the official memorials designed by the artist Olivier Sheppard depicted the actors of the rebellion in peasant clothes rather than United Irishmen uniforms (Collins 1999, 40), again disassociating the narrative from the secular ideals of the United Irishmen and paramilitary. In sum, the late 19th century offered a set of conditions that were perfect for the introduction of the 1798 rebellion, a now-Catholic rebellion, into public memory.

In Québec, the 20 years following Duplessis's death in 1959 have been described as the “Quiet Revolution.” Over this period, as Geneviève Zubrzycki (2016, 151) convincingly shows, the promotion of an alternative nationalism emerged as an aesthetic revolt against national religious symbols. With its successive liberal governments, Québec politics rapidly moved away from the Church narrative and renewed its aspiration to become an independent nation. A process accelerated, in part, by Pierre Bourgault, who founded, in 1966, the Regroupement pour l’Indépendance Nationale (RIN), the first openly sovereigntist party in the history of Québec, which drastically redefined Québec's nationalism. Bourgault was an ardent defender of the French language and a remarkable speaker. For example, in a public speech, referring to Québec Prime Minister at the time, Robert Bourrassa, Bourgault said:

The prime minister says: “Even France is not unilingual French” which is stupid. France is unilingual French, as England is unilingual English, Sweden unilingual Swedish and Mexico unilingual Spanish. It is obvious that in France, one works in French, one earns his income in French, one governs in French, one studies in French and one spends his money in French. ... Which does not prevent a lot of French from speaking English, German, Chinese or Japanese. This does not prevent the French from having international relations, to trade with the rest of the world, to do international politics. The French, like the English, like the Swedes and the Mexicans, put themselves in a normal situation, they gave all the priority to the language of the majority. … This is abnormal. No nation in the world accepts this situation except us. ... in our situation, while we are forced to speak the language of the minority, being bilingual is synonymous with slavery

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It is interesting to note that Pierre Bourgeault, and several other promoters of Québec independence, were questioning the norms regarding the language situation in Québec. By assigning the status of norm to speaking French in the province, Bourgeault came to conceive the nation through the language spoken by its members. As Joseph Yvon Thériault (2007, 117) demonstrated, the relationship of French-Canadians and later Québécois, to language is completely unique in the world. In the particular case of Québec during the subsequent colonial ventures, the French language did not carry the stigma of a colonizing language for French-Canadians; it first asserted itself as indigenous, and logically, in the 1960s, as a national language.

Through this national restructuration, patriotic memory and iconography became closely linked to the sovereigntist movement. One is often reminded, in fact, that struggles for independence are, in a way, a pursuit of the ideals defended by the Patriotes. However, after the failure of two referendums on Québec independence (1980 and 1995), the sovereigntist movement needed to be unified. As in Ireland, given the rehabilitation of the Patriotes, this unification was made through the memorial legacy of the rebellion. In 2001, nationalist Prime Minister of Québec Bernard Landry officially asked the National Assembly that the first Monday before May 25 of each year, a day used in all other provinces to celebrate Queen Victoria, becomes National Patriots’ Day. He declared wanting to “emphasize the importance of the Patriots’ rebellions of 1837–1838 for the recognition of our nation for its political freedom and for the establishment of a democratic government”

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