The History of the Decline and Fall of Quebec According to Denys Arcand
In the final scene of Denys Arcand’s L’Âge des Ténebrés (Days of Darkness), protagonist Jean-Marc Leblanc (Marc Labrèche) sits in a lakeside cottage in rural Quebec peeling a bushel of apples, having fled a life of quiet desperation in Montreal. This scene—bucolic, almost disturbing in its sentimentality—is in fact one of the most cynical and damning in all of Arcand’s oeuvre: the spiritual renewal Jean-Marc finds in renouncing the corruption and decay of urban life is also a recognition that these forces are irreversible; it is (quite fittingly, given that its title can be translated as The Dark Ages) a kind of acceptance of the Benedictine Option, in which knowledge and culture are preserved in the face of generalized barbarism through a retreat from public engagement into a contemplative life.
But Jean-Marc, sitting in the late afternoon sunlight and peeling his apple, also serves as a covert but absolute attack on the sovereignist dreams that have shaped modern Quebec. The dark age in which he finds himself is not so much la Grande noirceur, in which Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis ruled the province through a comprehensive programme of corruption and police brutality with bullish clerical support, as an era in which concepts of individual liberty have eroded any sense of civic life or communal good. What remains is only a brackish and nihilistic interest in individual pleasure.
L’Age was released in 2007, more than a decade after the 1995 referendum on Quebec sovereignty. It marks the end of Arcand’s most ambitious project as a filmmaker to date, one that began in 1986 with Le Déclin de l’empire americain (The Decline of the American Empire) and continued with the much-lauded Les Invasions barbares (The Barbarian Invasions). Audacious, serious, and bitingly, undeniably funny, the trilogy charts the aging of Arcand’s own generation, which was raised under Duplessis, threw off the shackles of the Church in the’60s, and participated in the flowering of the indépendantiste movement in the ’70s and ’80s. The first film follows a group of bohemian academics approaching middle age who spend an autumn weekend at a cottage on Lake Magog discussing history, sex, gender relations, sex, academia, sex, and the future. It checks in with them again seventeen years later when the same group reunites around the deathbed of one of their number, L’Âge ends the trilogy with the smaller, quite different cast of characters around Jean-Marc (and in many cases, in Jean-Marc’s imagination), a cast that has seen the dream of sovereignty eclipsed by the triumphant neoliberalism of the first decade of the 21st century.
“This scene—bucolic, almost disturbing in its sentimentality—is in fact one of the most cynical and damning in all of Arcand’s oeuvre ... ”
None of these films deal explicitly with the debates about Quebec sovereignty raging with unchecked ferocity through the ’80s and ’90s. Arcand had dealt directly with the issue in his 1982 documentary, Le Confort et l’indifférence (Comfort and Indifference), which earned him the scorn of more than a few journalists at Le Devoir by suggesting that sovereignty in Quebec is a lost cause so long as the Québécois have a modicum of security. However, in the deeply domestic problems explored in Le Declin, Les Invasions, and L’Âge, Arcand engages perhaps more generatively with the ideas about freedom, independence, and belonging that provide ideological structure for the program of separatist activism. In these films Arcand does not so much suggest that sovereignty is a bad thing as point out that in a sceptical age, in which individual pleasure is the only barometer of happiness, the concept of “common good” necessary to nationalism is incoherent.
Throughout the trilogy, Arcand draws attention to a paradox inherent in freedom. For much of French Canadian history, the Québécois have suffered oppression by both church and state, and this very oppression was active in creating a sense of Québécois identity. Once French Canadians were able to wrest a degree of independence from the Catholic Church and the Anglo-Canadian elite, they were also able to claim a greater degree of personal freedom. No longer were French Canadian women expected to be in a more-or-less constant state of pregnancy; no longer was homosexuality part of the criminal code; no longer was open promiscuity social and career suicide. When Bill 22 was passed in 1974, the Québécois could no longer claim that their language was marginalized in their own province. At the same time, with these social freedoms won, many of the concrete wrongs that led to the Quiet Revolution had been or were being ameliorated, and the sovereignist cause faced a bit of an existential crisis. While the characters in Le Déclin and Les Invasions were at one point committed to the cause of sovereignty, they are now too busy enjoying the freedoms they have already won—and likely, too comfortable to want to risk the economic upheaval that would come with independence—to continue the fight.
Here Arcand’s intellectual debt to Edward Gibbon is obvious. In his opus, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the 18th-century British historian argues that Rome’s fall was caused in part by the growing apathy of the Roman people, who, as they were Christianized, came to prefer a comfortable life in the present and dreams of ultimate justice in the next world to the hard, self-sacrificial work of building a virtuous republic. While Arcand clearly follows a similar line of reasoning, he is not simply updating Gibbon for secular late-capitalism. Where Gibbon is preoccupied with the way in which civic virtue is eroded by hope in a deferred, transcendent Good, Arcand is fascinated by the ways in which one of the fundamental Goods of secular liberal democracy—the freedom of the individual—has itself a corrosive effect on civic life.
“ ... sovereignty in Quebec is a lost cause so long as the Québécois have a modicum of security.”
Having freed themselves of some of the more oppressive elements of the traditional Québécois identity, elements deeply rooted in Catholicism, the characters in Le Déclin and Les Invasions have not replaced them with much of anything that is tangible or positive.
Arcand does not beat around the bush when it comes to spelling out the problematic consequences, from a nationalist point of view, of this freedom from the Church. Le Déclin opens with a shot of a Vietnamese student listening to history professor Rémy tell his class at the Université de Montréal that when it comes to history, three things matter: “numbers, numbers, and numbers.” In the context of a province with one of the lowest birth rates in North America, the scene is either playful or ominous—depending on how you feel about ideas like “racial purity.” This is followed by an even more pointed commentary about Québécois society from Dominique, head of the history department at the university, as she argues in an interview with the CBC that the pervasive desire for personal fulfillment and happiness is a sign of a society in decline.
The rest of the film, with its gleeful dissections of human sexuality and wildly apolitical banter about the good life, is a kind of case-in-point of Dominique’s argument. If the characters in Le Déclin are strikingly—or at least, strikingly for a bunch of left-leaning academics—free from the usual kinds of sovereignist or socialist ideological commitments, it is because they are operating on such a purely hedonistic plane that striving for anything beyond the narrow boundaries of their own comfort is pointless. As Pierre, another historian, explains to his callow and wide-eyed junior colleague, Alain, “I know I’ll never be a Toynbee or a Braudel. All I have is sex or love. That’s what age leads to—all I have left is vice.”
The first film builds up to a climax in which Dominique suddenly and unexpectedly destroys bon-vivant Rémy’s marriage by casually mentioning to his wife that she—along with, apparently, most of the women in Montreal—has slept with Rémy. In this bourgeois turn, the film’s argument that investment in individual happiness inevitably leads to decadence is textured by a critique of the sexual revolution’s failure to dismantle the fundamentally objectivizing and instrumentalizing treatment women receive at the hands of men. What one might call the official policy of patriarchy in Catholic Quebec may have begun its slow death in the 1960s, but the emphasis on individual liberty has, perhaps unsurprisingly, lead to an individual application of liberation. Rémy wants to be able to stop off for a bit of adultery on his way home from work, but he definitely also wants dinner to be on the table when he gets there. He wants freedom for himself and, at least ostensibly, everyone else, but he also doesn’t want it to be an inconvenience.
“ ... Arcand is fascinated by the ways in which one of the fundamental Goods of secular liberal democracy—the freedom of the individual—has itself a corrosive effect on civic life.”
Seventeen years later, in Les Invasions, we see a rather different set of problems. Rémy is old, bald, and dying alone in the hospital from a rather nasty form of cancer when Sébastien, his son, returns from England to “Do The Right Thing” despite his clear contempt for the old man. They are, to say the least, rather different people. As Rémy puts it, “My son is an ambitious and puritanical capitalist, whereas I was always a sensual socialist”—a rather generous take on his guiding ideology insofar as it glosses over the many ways in which this sensuousness has cost the people around him quite a lot, emotionally speaking. Nevertheless, Sébastien gathers Rémy’s old academic friends around and does his best to ease his father’s passing.
This mostly involves bribing his way through the numerous and labyrinthine absurdities of the provincial healthcare system. While his father resists at first (“I voted for Medicare, I’ll accept the consequences”), the improvements money can buy are ultimately irresistible; after all the medicine and drugs available have proven to be no use in curing him, Rémy returns to the cottage by Lake Magog, where he takes his own life surrounded by the ones he loves.
As Réal La Rochelle points out in his 2005 biography of Arcand, the filmmaker uses the term “barbarian” in its classical sense—denoting less a negative judgement and more a state of being outside of the civilized world. Sébastien, the well-dressed, risk-managing son of neo-liberal capitalism, completely uninterested in art and culture, is, in his father’s phrase, the “prince” of the barbarians. And if Le Déclin, as La Rochelle puts it, “emanates an archaeology of disintegration—of people, feelings, civilization, and history,” then Les Invasions gives us a picture of those who will inherit the earth. It is a picture calculated to provoke complicated feelings.
In the hopelessly corrupt and dystopian workings of the hospital, where patients crowd into rooms while entire floors are left empty, and where handing over money to the union is literally the only way to make anything happen, the freedom that the Quiet Revolution promised is shown to be hollow. The only real freedom is purchased by capital, and there is no capital in modern Quebec. Because of Sébastien’s job as a risk-assessor for a brokerage in London, Rémy is given the option of bypassing the socialist paradise of the public hospital in favour of death in the bosom of friends and family. It is not, obviously, an option open to everyone, and Rémy’s willingness to take it shows once again just how weak his ideals are when his own comfort is on the line. By heading south of the border for medical treatment, Rémy is not simply taking the easy way out for himself, but he is weakening the entire system. Personal freedom, once again, erodes civic virtue.
The bitterness of this assessment is carried to even greater extremes in L’Âge des Ténébres. Jean-Marc, a frustrated, sad civil servant is a comic exaggeration of a pretty familiar type.
As a student I wrote satirical pieces for the college newspaper, I did politics, I was vice president of the student council. At university I joined the drama workshop. I played in 12 Angry Men. I did photography, video. I was in a rock band. I demonstrated against nuclear reactors and the seal hunt. I marched for Quebec independence. I was even arrested once. Now my wife has gone to Toronto to get laid by the company CEO. My daughters give blowjobs to the neighbourhood guys. Every working day of the year, I travel 20 minutes by car, 45 minutes by train, and 25 minutes by subway to listen to people even more desperate than I am.
While there is more than enough of the Poor Put-Upon White Man about Jean-Marc to make the film slightly distasteful at times, its assault on life in neo-liberal, post-referendum Quebec still manages to hit a lot of the right notes. The barbarians whose money eased Rémy’s passing have had a complete victory. In the distant Montreal suburb where Jean-Marc lives in a castle-sized house, money has inoculated him against the misery he sees around him but not left him impervious to it. Despite her own successful career as a realtor and apparent emancipation, Jean-Marc’s wife is still burdened with a heavy load of patriarchal expectation. They live in a society where freedom is only ever the freedom to consume, and there is no longer a way of imagining an alternative.
A lesser filmmaker might have left it this, settling for a series of vignettes pointing out the awfulness of our materialistic society, but Arcand is insightful enough to push beyond that banal observation and point out that consumption is almost always about fantasy—and L’Âge is a study in fantasy. Initially, we mostly watch Jean-Marc’s own personal fantasies of eroticism or petty revenge. Then Arcand starts exploring the more complicated fantasies that require a group of people to buy into them; for example, he investigates the bizarre fantasies of meaningful relationships and fulfilling work cultivated by government-mandated team-building workshops. Jean-Marc goes on to discover a far more extreme kind of fantasizing, however, when he is thrust into the unkind world of speed dating, and meets “Countess Béatrice of Savoie,” whose husband “died in the third crusade, felled by a Saracen archer at Antioch.” The “Countess” takes him on a weekend retreat to a medieval live-action roleplaying event where he has to participate in a jousting match with “The Black Prince” if he wants a chance to further their relationship.
Arcand, it may not come as a huge surprise, does not view the event as harmless weekend fun. As Jean-Marc gets out of his car, he hears the man next to him explain over the phone, “The hospital, my job, my union, they all make me puke. TV, radio, and papers make me puke. Even the city of Montreal makes me puke … my degree of nausea is very, very high. The one place I feel good is here.” Things get rather grimmer when Jean-Marc witnesses a police officer dressed as celebrated medieval war-monger St. Bernard de Clairvaux railing against the Muslims that “roam freely in our streets.” The cheers that greet his celebration of the crusaders who “cut the throats of a million infidels” are uttered by grown men waving wooden swords in the air. The whole thing cuts uncomfortably close to the bone given the large number of Muslims who do indeed “roam freely” on the streets of Montreal. After his speech, the crusader explains to Jean-Marc that the costumes and the roleplay are all “secondary,” that people are here “for something else.” When Jean-Marc asks him what that might be, his response is equally worrisome. “The people seek order,” he says, “and faith.”
Thus, in L’Âge, Arcand suggests that though the Quiet Revolution may have overthrown one kind of totalitarianism, it was a purely negative act. The Quiet Revolution rejected one set of political and social ideals without positively instituting another. The result is society’s inevitable regress toward totalitarianism. The freedom so precious to revolutionaries, when instituted in a broad fashion, is not an unmitigated good.
“Arcand is fascinated by the ways in which one of the fundamental Goods of secular liberal democracy—the freedom of the individual—has itself a corrosive effect on civic life.”
As Dostoevsky argued in The Brothers Karamazov, real, existential freedom is a terrifying business that demands not a little strength; few can be convinced that the struggle is worth the trouble. In the Quebec Arcand presents in all three films, sovereignism—the institution of complete political freedom—is an impossible dream not because les autres will never let it happen, but because political freedom is exceedingly hard work and requires great sacrifice. The Québécois who populate his films are not necessarily bad people, but they have no stomach for the kind of self-abnegation that nation-building requires.
In this way, the philosophical narrative of the films is not so much a dialectic, in which contradictory ideas are explored and a synthesis posited, as a kind of reductio ad absurdum. Arcand takes the logical implications of not only a generation, but an entire intellectual heritage to their ridiculous conclusion. The balance between sexual freedom and domestic comfort that the younger Rémy tries so hard to strike is, in the first film, shown to be patriarchal and self-serving. Seventeen years in the future, Rémy’s beautiful death is made possible because of Sébastien and his charmingly neo-liberal bank account. In L’Âge, completely individual freedom is shown to lead to the personal decision to embrace fantasy as a way of life.
Arcand’s critique reaches further still. While separatism as a fully-fledged political program has, by the time L’Âge comes around, largely been discredited, Quebec has been drinking the rhetoric of independence for so long all that is left in the cup are the dregs. These are the nasty bits of nationalism that involve veiled suggestions about who really counts as a Québécois and who doesn’t, not to mention legislating what people can wear on their heads.
Arguments for Quebec sovereignty from the ’60s onward have rested on two claims: first, that Quebec is a distinct society, and second, that it can never fully self-actualize while under the thumb of (English) Canada. If either of those claims weakens, so weakens the cause—for if the Québécois can be fully Québécois and also fully Canadian, why leave? If there is no such thing as a distinct Québécois identity, what can be gained by setting the province up as a separate country? The matter, in short, is one of identity and independence.
What has happened over the course of the past 30 years, even as the province has twice voted on the matter of sovereignty, is that the very real restrictions placed on the Québécois in regards to their linguistic and cultural freedom have not merely relaxed but been reversed. By the mid-1980s, the argument in Quebec was not about whether street signs and place names should be in French or English, but about whether or not the owner of a shop had the right to use any language but French in their signage. At the same time, the concept of a distinct Québécois society has been drawn into question through immigration and demographic changes. The high birthrate that characterized Catholic Quebec in the first part of the 20th century, the (in)famous revanche des berceaux, was one of the lowest in North America by the latter half of the century. The province relied on immigration to keep its population at sustainable levels, and because it went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that immigrants would have a difficult time educating their children in English, many immigrants preferred moving to Ontario to having their children grow up monolingual francophones.
“The result is society’s inevitable regress toward totalitarianism.”
Immigrants from other French-speaking countries and former colonies like Morocco, Haiti, and Vietnam—on paper, ideal candidates for Quebec citizenship—did not find themselves welcomed with open arms for reasons that will only surprise readers unfamiliar with the strong xenophobic undercurrent that has tainted some streams of Quebec nationalism.
What Arcand lays bare in his examination of freedom is that in order to contribute to civic virtue, freedom needs an object. Freedom needs to be for something as well as from something. Viewed in the negative terms of the Quiet Revolution, freedom just means that the Québécois don’t have the English boot on their throats—it is assumed that this will allow Québécois-ness to flourish. But a large part of the Quiet Revolution was about dismantling the strong Catholic culture that had historically constituted a large part of Québécois identity. What is left? Socially, there is the vapid pseudo-freedom of consumption; politically, there is a general sense of grievance and a fear that in a few generations the Québécois as a distinct ethnic group will wither away. Someone else must step in to fill the role of les autres in order to provide an enemy against which the nationalists can unite. As Mordecai Richler argues in Oh Canada! Oh Québec!, this enemy will almost certainly take the form of the Indigenous peoples, immigrants, and Jews who are often (though not always) considered by nationalists not to be properly Québécois. Writing of the spectre of Anti-Semitism in Quebec sovereignist and nationalist movements, Richler drily notes that “when thousands take to the streets, chanting “le Québec aux Québécois,” we can readily understand why our children continue to leave.” The word “Québécois” can mean anyone who lives in Quebec, but it is often used to mean something much more specific: the descendants of the French settlers of the 17th and 18th centuries.
If there were something philosophically positive behind a vision of a French nation in North America, something ideological rather than ethnic, something that could attract the loyalty of the many different ethnic and religious groups who currently make their homes in Quebec, then it might be possible to imagine a separatism that would have broad support. If the only reason for independence is to provide an ethnic and linguistic homeland for the descendants of those first French colonists, then how can a movement fighting for independence not in turn become something monstrous and oppressive toward those within its borders who do not speak that language or share that ethnicity?
This is the question that lies at the heart of Arcand’s trilogy, both in the domestic spheres his characters inhabit and the political sphere that stands in the background. Freedom, for Arcand, is an ambiguous virtue. For a character like Rémy, freedom is nothing more than a total capitulation to the id. For the 21st-century Quebec that Jean-Marc inhabits, it is a choice of the totalitarianism of the market or the fantasies of fascism. To be free, in both a personal and a political sense, is to be faced with the terrifying task of finding or creating something positive in which to believe.
Viewed through this light, Jean-Marc’s retreat to the country can be seen not simply as an assault on decadence, but as a retreat to an alternative conception of what it means to be Québécois. Jean-Marc and his bushel of apples do not exactly offer us a political programme, but they do point toward an older version of the Québécois identity, one that is dependent on neither endless consumption nor narrow nationalism. The apples Jean-Marc is peeling are his neighbour’s, whom he has offered to help with some of the work around her farm. In a symbolic way, the trilogy ends with Jean-Marc in the role of habitant, the peasant farmer who cares for the land and whose freedom is both constrained and empowered by being embedded within a web of relationships. In closing the trilogy on this note, Arcand accepts both that in the modern world there can be no collectivist visions of paradise, and that individualism goes all the way down. The paradox of freedom goes both ways: an individual, by choosing to give up his or her freedom and participate in a community, can weather the dark ages of neo-liberal consumption until a fairer day dawns.
