Joseph-Charles Tache Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Joseph-Charles Tache

Joseph-Charles Taché was one of the most vigorous founders of the Patriotic School of Quebec, the literary movement which transformed writing from a sporadic occurrence into a distinctive French-Canadian tradition. His activities extended from his own writing to founding and directing periodicals and writing articles in defense of Canadian language and culture. At the same time, he was a medical practitioner, distinguished journalist, member of Parliament, and deputy minister. Both as politician and as author, he was a passionate defender of traditional French-Canadian values, which he largely identified with language, religion, and folklore, but also with forest industries and economic development. He is best remembered for his arch-conservative but sympathetic representation of backwoods life and his love of the forests, lakes, and rivers.

Taché, born on 24 December 1820 in Kamouraska, about one hundred miles from Quebec City, was the son of Charles Taché, captain in an elite militia regiment, and Henriette Boucher de la Broquerie Taché; his uncle, Etienne-Paschal Taché, was distinguished in military, medical, and political life. Joseph-Charles studied at the village school and at the Quebec Seminary (the only existing type of secondary school and not necessarily training for the priesthood). In 1844 he qualified to practice medicine; he was awarded the then-unusual M.D. thirty-four years later. Taché's practice, in Rimouski, Lower Canada (now Quebec), included regular visits to lumber camps. In 1847 he married Françoise Lepage, the daughter of a local farmer, and was elected, as a Conservative, to the House of Assembly, where he began writing political correspondence for his constituency. In 1854 he published his first book, a long brochure expressing his views on proposed reforms in the land tenure system. He had actively participated in the debate and persuaded the major landowners (seigneurs) to accept commuting their privileged system. However, his compromise did not satisfy the Liberals, whom he attacked in a pamphlet entitled Le Pléiade rouge (1855).

Representing Canada at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1855, Taché campaigned to encourage French-speaking immigrants to Canada. From this he developed his Esquisse sur le Canada considéré sous le point de vue économiste (1855), and attracted enough interest in France to be elected to the legion of honor. In 1857, after ten years in electoral politics, Taché founded the journal Le Courrier du Canada, not only to advance his political views, but also to encourage the nascent literature of his country. Here he published Henri-Raymond Casgrain's first stories; they were versions of traditional French-Canadian folktales. He himself wrote articles proposing a union of the then-separate provinces of British North America (which became Canada in 1867 after Confederation); these essays were collected and published in volume from (Des Provinces de l'Amérique du Nord et d'une union fédérale) in 1858. Taché's arguments did much to prepare the Confederation.

The year 1861 saw the first volume of Les Soirées Canadiennes, the first all-literary periodical in Canada, dominated by Taché, whose orientation thus had long-term effects in literature. Preliminary discussion had included two conflicting views: Canada should have a French-language publication open to all French literature, or else the journal should be strongly national, fostering distinctively Canadian material such as folklore. Taché had his way and practically filled the first volume with three folktales inspired by regional folklore.

Taché's Trois Légendes de mon pays was published as a book in 1871. The three independent stories are firmly welded together by authorial comment that stresses the genius of French Canada and the triumphant progress of Christianity. They depict the Indians of the Gaspé peninsula, whose historic misfortunes and proud resistance are chronicled with admiration in two stories, while the third, set in Taché's own time, appeals to Christian pity for Indians as victims of superstition. Each story is based on an incident remembered in local tales and in place-names such as Massacre Island. Taché's theory that primitive art has led him to natural truths, however sketchy, constitutes a striking new assessment of folk myths.

In 1863 Les Soirées Canadiennes published the entire text of Taché's Forestiers et Voyageurs (issued as an independent volume in 1884). The same basic ideas are present: simple folks are wiser than intellectuals because they are closer to the truth of nature; there is a Canadian character linked to Canadian geography; these truths find their synthesis in the folktale, which is essentially moral and Christian. Taché's art has here developed: the idealized figure of the backwoodsman, for example, is often free from the author's doctrinaire purposes and even quite humorous. Nevertheless, the main story line brings the loosely connected episodes together in a glorious conversion that symbolizes the triumph of French-Canadian Catholicism over English-Canadian secular authority. Taché works into his narrative considerable documentary detail about the last days of the fur trade, the rising lumber trade, and other forest occupations. At the same time, his version of a lumber camp may be read as a manifesto for the autocratic society dear to Taché's heart. Yet Old Michel, the main character, a poacher, runaway criminal, voyageur, trapper, and lumberman, is depicted as a lovable rogue; his presentation seems astonishingly like a stand for personal freedom. Old Michel is also a fervent Catholic, but he has never hesitated to mix with superstitious Indians and practice their magic for his trap line. In defiance of logical consistency, Taché creates a humorously complex world.

Taché continued to seek written forms for oral legends, sometimes using verse narrative, sometimes mixing documentary, personal, and legendary material, but always stressing the fusion of language, memory, and place. Les Sablons (1885) is of particular interest, being a by-product of his report to the government on the possibility of establishing a new penal colony on the uninhabited Sable Island. His forthright expression of opinions never wavers, as he attacks both Benjamin Sulte for anticlericalism and Father Casgrain for dubious appropriation of copyright income.

Taché literally put Canada on the cultural map, both by his dynamic promotion and by his own imaginative fusion of voice and place. He placed the French-Canadian backwoodsman, including rebellious aspects of the character, firmly among the heroic collective figures of his people. However, his best work has never been translated into English. Taché himself was not free from the contradictions that are seen in Old Michel--though Taché tried to fit him into a mold that suited a middle-class public. The roguish individualist is nonetheless outstanding, and his inherent contradictions are a valid part of Taché's complex worldview. Anglophobe and federalist, primitivist and classicist, moralizing and humorous, conservative and maverick, Taché captured the essentials of his time in highly readable fiction.