Opérations Clandestines O'Canada

Canada may be the peaceful kingdom, but that peace tends to evaporate fairly quickly when the subject is Quebec and its relationship with France, as Charles de Gaulle would discover in Monetral in 1967. Esther Delisle is one of the more controversial young historians in contemporary Canada. In the early 1990s she wrote a doctoral dissertation, subsequently published, on the legendary French Canadian nationalist of the 1930s, the abbe Lionel Groulx. Both the dissertation and the book created a major fuss among Quebec nationalists. They were incensed by her penchant for using terms like anti-semite and fascist to describe Groulx and his followers, and by and large they saw her writings as a gratuitous attack on a figure still revered in nationalist circles in Quebec. The affaire Delisle was also something of a sensation in English Canada, albeit for rather different reasons. Few English Canadian historians were much troubled by her depiction of Groulx as an anti-semite; what bothered them was the tendency for their Quebec colleagues to deny the uglier dimensions of French Canadian nationalism. It did not help matters very much that the whole debate about Delisle more or less coincided with the referendum on sovereignty of 1995.

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