Marcel Trudel and Guy Frégault: Perspectives on an intellectual friendship
This article traces the threads of the intellectual friendship between Marcel Trudel and Guy Frégault, two major Quebec historians of the post-war historiographical revival. Its purpose is to show how this friendship, as manifested in particular in their personal correspondence and some collaborations, was forged around a powerful generational awareness and through adherence to the same historiographical configuration, namely that of the Critical Historiography, which both were ardent promoters of in the 1940s and 1950s. By explaining the origins and determinants of this friendship, the analysis questions the conventional approach—convenient, but reductionist—that emerged from the rivalry of historical schools between Montreal and Quebec City. Similarly, it allows to gauge the complexity of the specific aspirations and expectations that have developed among young secular Quebec historians of the immediate postwar period.