Valteron, I hate to interrupt a good rant but I think you need to remember that your side won. You’re a Canadian not a Frenchman. Those guys wearing redcoats and cheering King George and General Wolfe were your side.
Yes, I am a Canadian, but as I noted, when you are a French-Canadian, you get the fucking battle thrown in your face regularly, all your life, the last time as recently as 1998.
And when the decision was made not to re-enact the Battle, Canadian news comment forums (with a lot of Albertans especially) kept demanding that the battle be fouight over to put those Frogs in their place. Look up some archival stuff from March, man.
Tom would be calling him his uncle. Jeez-louise, get a clue! French Canadians always say mon oncle and ma tante.
http://www.solon.org/Constitutions/Canada/English/PreConfederation/qa_1774.html
By recognizing the rights and customs of the inhabitants prior to the conquest which were established in the French language, the British Crown established (de facto, not de jure), a right to employ French in a legal capacity–a right that has continued uninterrupted to this day.
And here (bolded), the seigneurial system–all the contracts of which were drawn in French–were confirmed in Law.
You said, “And if your aunt had balls she would be mon oncle.” Excuse me if I’m unaware that French Canadians use personal pronouns differently than do other Francophones, but I could swear you meant to say, “And if your aunt had balls she would be votre oncle,” Which in English would read as, “And if your aunt had balls she would be your uncle.” Or in Babel Fish French, “Et si votre tante avait des boules elle serait votre oncle.”
But what do I know, being a Yank and all and not speaking French. :rolleyes:
Well, that might be because it is an example of you getting so many things wrong.
The Boyne was not fought on the banks of the Liffey, but, (surprisingly enough), along the Boyne. So, moving the reenactment to Dublin would be ahistorical whereas a reenactment on the Plains of Abraham would be, (unsurprisingly) historical. Beyond that, of course, is that the annual disturbance in Northern Ireland regarding the Boyne is also carried out, many miles from the Boyne, in an ahistorical manner that exacerbates the hostility. It was, in fact, initially created by people with absolutely no historical connection to the battle expressly to deliberately flaunt much later political developments in which their ancestors were not involved.
Note that I have not argued that you have no point regarding a suppression of a reenactment, only that you have, typically, seized on bad logic and inflammatory rhetoric to make your point.
Equating the Plains of Abraham with the Battle of the Boyne is pretty ridiculous. If there had been sectarian violence in Canada between French and English for the past couple hundred years, and the Plains of Abraham used extensively as a symbol of dominance of the one group over the other, then yeah celebrating its anniversary would be in pretty bad taste. But none of that is the case.
That is a pretty weak argument, Tom. All you are really referring to is a couple of transitory measures after the Conquest. There is a difference between tearing up existing contracts, which would have resulted in complete social chaos that the British did not want (or paying to have them all translated, an absurd notion at the time) and actually GRANTING the survival of a French-speaking society, which is what most anglos think the British did in the Quebec Act.
Besides, what were the English supposed to do with lawyers, notarial deeds and documents that were already all in French? Demand that everyone immediately start using a language they did not know how to use? All over the British Empire of the time, languages other than English were in daily use. There was no great generosity involved.
The survival of Quebec as a French-speaking society with radio, television, films, internet websites, industries, literature, universities, colleges, were all the work of generations of French-Canadians fighting and struggling to survive as a society, not, as your couple of references would allege, a gift handed down from on high by English generosity.
These two small administrative and trsitory measure notwithstanding, French survived in Quebec in the face of and English attitude that varied from indidfference to outright hostility, banning of French schools in western provinces, etc.
But since you are not a Québécois, Tom, I doubt if you could understand what I am talking about. Close down this thread why don’t you. It’s like talking to a wall.
Naturally the battles are not the same! But they are both used as shorthand to stress the dominance of one group over another. I am not making this up. My references to having the Plains of Abraham thrown up at me many times in my life (as lately as 1998) are not a matter of fiction.
You hear these comments on radio ralk shows in English Canada and in English-Canadian web forums.
If some wounds remain open, maybe we should wonder which side keeps them open.
That resulted in multiple provinces in Canada continuing to employ French as official languages.
Straw man. I made no claim for generosity. It was a calculated decision to bring about a better attitude among the Francophone inhabitants toward the British Crown with the intention of keeping those inhabitants separate from the colonies to the south.
As to tearing up contracts: another straw man. The contracts and deeds could easily have been left in the original language with a requirement that all future negotiations be conducted in English. That is exactly how the U.S. treated Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and California.
I am not disparaging the efforts undertaken by Francophones to maintain their culture in Canada; I am simply reacting to the bombast and acrimony with which you saturated this thread when you could have used better arguments and less whining to argue your position.
As with most internecine battles, (typically seen among pre-schoolers but often continuing into senescence), generally both sides enjoy the battles and take equal delight in the feud.
People mention the battle every ten years and you’re this sensitive about it?
Generally the one’s that whining.
Which would make them Quebecois. Quebec after all is the only officially monolingual province in Canada.
And my family’s roots in Quebec go back to the 17th century.
I’ve heard plenty of anti-French sentiment, and I can’t think of a single time any of it has referenced the Plains of Abraham. And by your own admission, you haven’t heard it for a decade.
More to the point, there isn’t a centuries-old tradition of killing each other over linguistic differences in Canada - that’s the huge, glaring disanalogy with the Boyne. Re-enacting the Boyne would cause problems because of the depths of hatred between the two groups, and the recentness of the latest round of violence. Scores of other historical battles are re-enacted regularly without the descendants of the losers whining. 200th anniversary of Waterloo is in 6 years. Care to wager that a re-enactment is already being planned without the French getting all worked up about it?
How is this any different from reenacting Gettysburg? Sourtherners have no problem taking part in that.
Well maybe if you guys quit trying to separate and whining about how hard done by you are, then maybe people would forget about it and get on with their lives.
Otherwise, consider it a small price for all the money you get from the ROC. When you start paying your way, then you’ll have the right to really bitch.
From what I remember from discussions on this board there wasn’t just a single battle re-enactment planned. There was also one being held which the French won. How many people in Quebec were getting their shorts in knots over that?
Hell, you should have seen the hordes of Zulus who signed up for a re-enactment of Rorke’s Drift in '99. Good times.
I hate the way these sorts of debates usually go, but I have to address this.
I went to a French high school in Québec, but continued to an English-language CEGEP. Taking a history class, I was unexpectedly shocked to learn that battles that I thought we had lost, we had in fact won, and vice-versa. As it turns out when my French-speaking history teacher said “we” and when my English-speaking history teacher said “we”, they were talking about different people.
Many years later, and in another continent, during last year’s riots in Tibet, the local news aired a discussion between two women, one was a Han Chinese close to the Party, the other a Tibetan political refugee. During their short talk, the Chinese woman consistently referred to the other as “Chinese,” which prompted some rather dry “I’m not Chinese” replies. At one point, the Chinese woman, exasperated, let out: “Why do you keep on saying you’re not Chinese? All Tibetans are Chinese, why do you reject your cultural identity?” At this point, the Tibetan woman was still calm, but you could see in her eyes that anger was brewing.
I’m not bringing up this story because I think French Canadians are, or have been oppressed like the Tibetans. I’m bringing it up because cultural identity is entirely self-defined. If you don’t identify primarily as Canadian, or Chinese, or human, it’s infuriating to have people tell you otherwise. For better or for worse, a large proportion of people in Québec identify as Québécois first, or uniquely. Some of them are federalists, others are sovereigntists.
Now, it’s true that Canada, as a political entity, derives much more from the British rule than the preceding Nouvelle France. However, regardless of political affiliation, you won’t find many French-speaking Québécois who will identify with Wolfe’s troops as “our side”.
Anyway, sorry for the rambling post. As far as the re-enactment is concerned, looking at things half a world away, I think it’s mostly much ado about nothing.
You’d think so, but as far as I know the Battle of the Plains of Abraham wasn’t all that important in the actual Conquest thing. Last time this was discussed I quoted the following paragraph from the Wikipedia article on the Seven Years War:
In other words, the fact that the British were going to capture Canada was almost never in question. The Kirke brothers, privateers for the English Crown, had actually already captured Quebec more than a century earlier, around 1628, but nobody knows about it today since it was handed back to France after the war. The French did hold on to Quebec in a few subsequent wars (see Frontenac and Phipps), but by the time we reached the Seven Years War it was unlikely that Canada could resist the British assault by itself.
Really, what led to the Conquest is the fact that Canada’s economy wasn’t diversified. We mainly produced furs and fish. When the Seven Years War ended, France was given the opportunity to regain either Canada or Guadeloupe. Guadeloupe was an important producer of sugar, while Canada was, by comparison, nothing. This is seen as a betrayal by some people in Quebec today, but really it only made economic sense at the time.
If Parliament hadn’t passed the Quebec Act, French-speaking Catholics wouldn’t have been allowed to hold office in the new British province of Quebec. Yeah, sure, maybe they’d all have started to speak English instead of French and Canada would be a linguistically united country today (objectively it would probably be better, but excuse me if subjectively I disagree with the idea) but they probably would still have held on to their Catholicism. I’d say that without the Quebec Act, Canada’s history might have looked more like Ireland’s.
And no, the Conquest wasn’t an unmitigatedly good event. It did lead to Canada getting more democratic institutions in time, but at the same time it led to a nation being subjugated up to… well, some would say up to this day, but let’s say at least up to 1960. I know some English Canadians like to believe that they are largely responsible for the fact that people in Canada speak French today, but the fact of the matter is that people in Canada speak French today because they have since the 17th (or 16th, depending on what you count) century and making their culture disappear wasn’t possible.
And yes, the Battle of the Plains of Abraham is still used as a political argument today. By people of very different political viewpoints. It’s not ancient history, it’s something people (of both sides) have an emotional connection to today. So that’s why reenacting it is controversial.
Actually the French near-feudal system lasted until 1854. That’s when the seigneurial system was abolished in Canada. (A few English-speakers had become seigneurs in the years following the Conquest, interestingly enough, even if it was a system they were supposed to be culturally opposed to.) And when it was abolished, the state took the utmost care in preserving the seigneurs’ rights by leaving them the ownership of the land. The habitants had to buy them, and even today some tracts of land still haven’t been bought and seigneurial rent must still be paid yearly, only to the municipal administration rather than to any seigneur. (This information comes from the chapter on the seigneurial system in the very informative book Mythes et réalités dans l’histoire du Québec : La suite by Marcel Trudel, one of our greatest historians.)
I guess it’s possible. The US did try to conquer Canada in 1775 but failed; they wanted to try again until as late as 1781 or so. I wonder what would really have happened. Remember that some early Canadian liberals (Louis-Joseph Papineau and the like) were quite pro-American and probably wouldn’t have disliked seeing Canada become one or more American states, or else a republic with an American-like constitution.
Er, no. Those were Brits, not Canadians. I don’t know by which measure they can be said to be Canadians. Really, the English Canadian nation only started sometime during the 19th century, and even during the 20th many anglophones in Canada still saw themselves as “British” first, especially since many of them were actually first-generation immigrants. Since Canada changed its immigration policy to accept people of non-British or Germanic “White” background, it’s become quite different, but it’s still struggling to find its identity.