 Notre maître l’avenir or the land of our ancestors? Temporal ambivalence in the work of Fernand Dumont (1956–1967)
In the early 1960s, Fernand Dumont examined Quebec’s past and noted the ravages caused by fatalism and the Grande-Peur québécoisée. The young sociologist saw it as the role of historians to liberate their contemporaries from being fixated on obsolete myths and proposed that old values be transformed into new ones. In this article, rather than studying said role on the basis of the predominant emancipatory narrative of Quebec, I propose to insert this narrative in the regime of historicity in order to better grasp Dumont’s notion of the transformation of this relationship to historiography and to bringing the past into our present-day awareness. While the question of the traditions encountered in (or ascribed to) Quebec that keep it stuck in an impasse mobilized an entire intellectual generation, Dumont displays a temporal ambivalence that oscillates between futurism and an homage to ancestors. By no means sparing with critique of French Canadian historians and drawing unabashedly from French history, Dumont at times traced a “path to freedom” while at other times identifying a “socialist tradition” peculiar to French Canada. At all times, however, does he recognize the fragility and evanescence of these past references, which in fact lead him to draw on French history. In that context, did the historiographical voluntarism of the 1960s suffice to even out these incongruities and provide contemporaries with inspiring places of memory?