After Sir John A. Macdonald, Quebec institutions debate pulling Lionel Groulx’s name

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This article was published 11/12/2024 (628 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

MONTREAL – In 2020, Montreal activists yanked down and decapitated a statue of Canada’s first prime minister, in protest of Sir John A. Macdonald’s role as the architect of the residential school system.

Now, another larger-than-life historical figure is coming under scrutiny, as Quebec municipalities and institutions are mulling whether to pull the name of priest and historian Lionel Groulx from public places over views described as antisemitic and racist.

Earlier this year, a Quebec-based history organization that Groulx founded in 1946 decided to remove his name from its prestigious annual prize, following a consultation with its members in which about 60 per cent advocated for the change.

“Today, with the recognition of diversity and the necessary reversal of perspectives towards colonialism in Quebec, the name of Groulx can hardly act as a unifier,” read a line in the 24-page document released by the Institut d’histoire de l’Amérique française.

Thomas Wien, the institute’s president, said in an interview that Groulx was someone who was “eminently complex, and eminently fascinating.”

Groulx was born in 1878 near Montreal. He was a historian who helped professionalize the field, an intellectual and a Quebec nationalist figure who inspired pride. Born of modest means, he went on to become a priest, writer and thinker who penned the slogan “maîtres chez nous” (“masters in our own house”) that later became a rallying cry of the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s.

However, he was also a conservative nationalist whose views were “tinted by racism and antisemitism,” including a belief that French-Canadian Catholics were a “chosen people” guided by divine providence, Wien said.

While the comparisons are inevitable, Wien maintains that Groulx and Macdonald have little in common. While Canada’s first prime minister was a direct architect in the forced removal of Indigenous Peoples from their land and other atrocities, he said, Groulx was a historian whose legacy is more complex.

However, he noted that Groulx was a figure of controversy and criticism even when alive, suggesting he was not merely a product of his time whose views are being unfairly reinterpreted through a modern lens.

Renaming the prize, Wien said, doesn’t amount to denying history or “killing the father,” but rather an acknowledgment that his legacy is better kept alive in more nuanced forms, including a forthcoming page on the institute’s website.

Other historians disagree.

“I can understand why English-Canadian historians have renamed the John A. Macdonald Prize,” wrote Éric Bedard, a historian who has studied Groulx. “It is difficult for me to explain that Quebec historians are imitating them for Lionel Groulx, since what was recognized with this prize was not his religious, social or political ideas, but the pioneer of a discipline.”

Of the 20 or so Quebec municipalities that are recorded as having places named after Groulx, only two — Gatineau in western Quebec and Ste-Julie, on Montreal’s South Shore — indicated that they intend to broach the subject of a possible renaming.

In Montreal, more than 26,000 people signed a petition started in 2020 to rename the Lionel-Groulx subway station after jazz legend Oscar Peterson. However, the city decided to keep the name on the station, as well as on a nearby street, on the grounds that despite criticism of his work, “no consensus” had emerged around Groulx’s legacy.

The Université de Montréal considered whether to rename a building on its main campus, following a request by several history department professors in 2020. After a lengthy debate, the school decided to keep the name of the Lionel-Groulx building “while contextualizing this recognition and casting a critical eye on the more controversial aspects of his work,” the school wrote in a September news release.

“Although some of his positions are contrary to Université de Montréal’s modern-day values, particularly those related to diversity, equity and inclusion, the majority of the experts consulted by the committee were of the opinion that the racism, misogyny and antisemitism expressed in Groulx’s work were not central to his thought,” the authors wrote.

Vice-rector Jean-François Gaudreault-Desbiens said the school carefully considered the decision based on a number of criteria, including historical context and whether the name was aligned with the university’s values.

He said most of the experts consulted concluded that Groulx’s criticized remarks reflected “the prejudices of his time.” Also considered was the fact that Groulx made specific contributions to the school, both as founder of its history department and “as a person who valorized the humanities at a time when they were not (valued),” he said.

Instead, the school decided to commission a public art installation by Huron-Wendat artist Ludovic Boney to sit in front of the nine-storey building on the school’s main campus.

The art piece, called Parallaxe, is named after an optical phenomenon that causes an object to apparently shift position as the observer’s viewpoint changes, the school said. “It’s the artist’s way of asking us to look at the legacy of UdeM alumnus Lionel Groulx from another angle, or several other angles,” it wrote.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 11, 2024.