Lionel Groulx (; 13 January 1878 – 23 May 1967) was a Canadian Roman Catholic priest, historian, professor, public intellectual and Quebec nationalist.
Biography
Early life and ordination
Lionel Groulx, né Joseph Adolphe Lyonel Groulx, was the son of Léon Groulx (1837–1878), a farmer, a lumberjack and direct descendant of New France pioneer Jean Grou, and Philomène Salomé Pilon (1849–1943). Groulx was born and died at Vaudreuil, Quebec. After his seminary training and studies in Europe, he taught at Valleyfield College in Salaberry-de-Valleyfield, and then the Université de Montréal. In 1917 he co-founded a monthly journal called Action Française, becoming its editor in 1920.
He was ordained to the priesthood on 28 June 1903.
Study of Confederation
Groulx was one of the first Quebec historians to study Confederation: he insisted on its recognition of Quebec rights and minority rights, although he believed a combination of corrupt political parties and French Canadian minority status in the Dominion had failed to deliver on those promises, as the Manitoba conflict exposed. Groulx believed that only through national education and the Quebec government could the economic and social inferiority of French Canadians be repaired. Groulx was quite successful promoting his brand of ultramontanism.
His main focus was to restore Quebeckers' pride in their identity by knowledge of history, both the heroic acts of New France and the French Canadian and self-government rights obtained through a succession of important political victories: 1774, the Quebec Act recognized the rights of the Quebec province and its people with respect to French law, Catholic religion and the French language; in 1848, responsible government was finally obtained after decades of struggle, along with the rights of the French language; in 1867, the autonomy of the province of Quebec was restored as Lower Canada was an essential partner in the creation of a new dominion through confederation.
Lionel Groulx called the Canadian Confederation of 1867 a failure and espoused the theory that French Canada's only hope for survival was to bolster a French State and a Roman Catholic Quebec as the means to emancipate the nation and a bulwark against English power. He believed the powers of the provincial government of Quebec could and should be used, within Confederation, to better the lot of the French Canadian nation, economically, socially, culturally and linguistically.
His curriculum and writings de-emphasized or ignored conflicts between the clergy and those who were struggling for democratic rights, and de-emphasized any conflicts between the "habitants" or peasant class and the French-Canadian elites. He preferred the settled habitants to the more adventurous and, in his view, licentious coureurs des bois. His work, under the pseudonym Lionel Montal, was part of the literature event in the art competition at the 1924 Summer Olympics.
In 1928, the Université de Montréal insisted that Groulx sign a paper saying that he would respect Confederation and English-Canadian sensibilities as a condition of receiving a respectable salary for his teaching work. He would not sign, but finally agreed to a condition that he would limit himself to historical studies; he resigned from the editorship of L'action canadienne-française soon after, and the magazine ceased publication at the end of the year.
Lionel Groulx's major writings include the novel L'Appel de la race (1922); Histoire de la Confédération; Notre grande aventure (1958); Histoire du Canada français (1951), and Notre maître le passé.
Writings on New France
In order to inculcate pride in a nation he considered degraded by Conquest, Groulx engaged in national myth-making, celebrating the days of New France as a golden age and elevating Dollard des Ormeaux into a legendary hero. He has been described as the first French Canadian historian to consider the period of French colonial rule superior to that of the British control that followed it, evaluating the conquest of New France as a disaster rather than the common 19th-century Canadian view of it as a 'blessing' that saved Quebec from the atheist terrors of the French Revolution.