Francois-Xavier Garneau | Biography

François-Xavier Garneau of Quebec City was the first major Canadian historian to write in either English or French. In his one great work, a liberal-nationalist history of Canada (4 volumes, 1845-1852), he took the story of French Canada only as his central theme, beginning with the earliest explorers and ending with the legislative union of Upper and Lower Canada in 1840. This latter event was regarded by Garneau as an affront to French-Canadian national hopes. His interpretation of it determined the thrust of his entire work, which was intended to provide French Canadians with a written history of which they could be proud. This view of history influenced subsequent historical writing in French Canada for more than a century. The best-known modern historian writing in the Garneau tradition was Lionel Groulx, and he, too, has had influential successors.

Garneau, the son François-Xavier and Gertrude Amiot-Villeneuve Garneau, received little formal education after the age of fourteen, but like many other distinguished Victorians, he was fortunate in the interest certain able individuals took in him during his formative years, J.-F. Perrault and Archibald Campbell among them. He was also introduced into the circle of French-Canadian politicians and public figures who were to be active in the politics of the "Patriote" era. They included such men as Etienne Parent, Denis-Benjamin Viger, and also Louis-Joseph Papineau, who took part in the rebellion of 1837. As a young adult Garneau was well informed and possessed considerable independence of mind.

For men of the professional class jobs were few. Garneau became a notary. His precarious means of livelihood was eventually put on a sounder footing when he became an official translator to the Quebec legislature in 1842. Garneau traveled little, his major traveling being to London and Paris as Viger's secretary from 1831 to 1833. The effect of these visits can be seen not merely in his grasp of English politics but also in the fear of violent revolution that always marked him; according to his Voyage en Angleterre et en France (1855), the London mob at the time of the 1832 Reform Bill debates made a profound impression upon him. Throughout these formative years Garneau continued to read widely in both classical and contemporary literature and history. He read the most recent French historians, August in Thierry being the most influential on Garneau's thinking. Thierry's theme of unending struggle between conqueror and conquered, both occupying the same territory, seemed to Garneau to have clear Canadian parallels, especially after 1840.

With his comparatively limited experience behind him and restricted also in access to the materials needed for his projected Histoire, his achievement was the more remarkable. In the "Discours préliminaire" prefixed to his first volume, he displays his grasp of the liberal historian's task, and throughout his work he marshals the evidence in effective support of his major thesis. Simply stated, French-Canadian history has been about struggle and conflict against over-whelming odds, against the intractable forces of nature confronting settlers in North America, against Indians, against indifference from metropolitan France, against clerical domination of colonial life, and, finally, against the English, a conflict that came to its tragic climax in 1760. The second half of Garneau's Histoire turns attention to that same conflict now diverted into political rather than military channels. From his work emerged the individual themes that were to be pursued by French-Canadian writers for decades: heroism, survival, endurance, struggle, and French and Catholic civilization. There was in Garneau's work a messianic note, and Catholic readers soon abstracted theological themes of their own. There emerged in popular understanding the notion that Garneau had told the story of a "Catholic people," struggling, suffering, and at last rising to bear enduring witness to the eternal higher verities, little valued by the more numerous, prosperous, and commercially successful Anglo-Saxon Protestant Canadians. His tale of harsh struggle against vast odds was thus vindicated.

Garneau's work was in itself a solid achievement worthy to have survived on its own merits, but the appeal of the Catholic-nationalist view of him cannot be disassociated from his long-continuing popularity. Certainly in the countless histories, novels, and poems his work inspired, the Catholic element is more in evidence than in Garneau himself. He was, nonetheless, in his own right French Canada's most influential writer for a full century after his death.

Garneau's minor works deserve some notice. His poems are regarded today as among the best French-Canadian poetry of the time. He followed some outmoded and some contemporary French models, and in many of his poems the heroic picture of French Canada's past that was to appear in the Histoire is already present. They belong mainly to the 1830s. The Voyage has little in it that is authentically personal. It is of great interest for Garneau's views on politics in France and England in the 1830s, but it is overcrowded by quotations from his reading. It is a disappointing little work.

Garneau's writing as a whole has little stylistic verve. His most deliberately provocative judgments do not alter the tone of his writing, but he deals well with social and economic matters and is a good narrator. He engaged in much editing of his text in response to hostile Catholic critics, but only a certain laconic humor may be gathered from such passages, changed as they are in form but never in substance. In a historian he seems to have valued "gravity" above all.

In 1835 Garneau married Marie-Esther Bilodeau. His son Alfred and his grandson Hector Garneau both produced major editions of his Histoire. Writers descended from Garneau include Saint-Denys Garneau, Simone Routier, Anne Hébert, and Sylvain Garneau.