L.E. Doucette
A brief survey of political theatre in French Canada to Confederation, in its rapid evolution from the paradramatic to the public and performable, exemplified in Elzéar Labelle's popular La Conversion d'un pêcheur de la Nouvelle-Écosse. There follows an analysis of the latter, music and lyrics, and a reproduction of the operetta itself, with notes.
Un tracé du théâtre politique au Canada français jusqu'à la Confédération, dans son évolution rapide du 'para-dramatique' vers une forme publique et populaire, représentée par La Conversion d'un pêcheur de la Nouvelle-Écosse d'Elzéar Labelle. Suivent une étude de ce texte, paroles et musique, et sa reproduction intégrale avec notes.
In tracing the history of drama in Quebec to Confederation, three categories of dramaturgy may usefully be distinguished. First, there is what is often designated as 'social' theatre, intended for public performance for the entertainment (as opposed to the edification, instruction or politicization) of those for whom it is composed; secondly, religious-pedagogic theatre, confined mainly to educational institutions; thirdly, political theatre and paratheatre, the subject of the present article. This is not an attempt to characterize all theatre everywhere according to these three distinctions: they prove to be, a posteriori, the most useful ones for the study of drama and theatre in nineteenth-century Quebec.
Of these categories, it is obvious that by 1867 the least well developed was the first, 'social' theatre. The reasons are obvious as well, for this is the form most dependent upon material factors, on demography and economics ... not to mention the tolerance of religious and sometimes civic authority. So that in Quebec the category of theatre which represents, in other occidental nations, the mainstream of dramatic and especially of dramaturgic activity, remains a mere tributary if not a backwater for much of that period before Confederation. It is to the other two areas, and especially to political theatre, that one must look for real evolution. The most striking aspect of that evolution is the progression from paratheatre to theatre, with emphasis here on the distinction that 'paratheatre' is not composed with performance in mind, and is generally not capable of being performed; but that 'theatre' is.
To 1867 virtually all political theatre in French Canada had been of the journalistic or armchair type, the only salient exception being Joseph Quesnel's Les Républicains français, a bitterly partisan parody of the French Revolution. It was never performed publicly, as far as one can ascertain; but it certainly could have been. For the rest, the model is rather that of the five Comédies du statu quo (1834): satires verging on libel, stiff, verbose and often repetitive, quite inappropriate for actual performance on stage without major modification. Political theatre remained a journalistic genre for the entire period between the Patriote Rebellion (to which the Comédies du statu quo were a non-violent prelude) and the advent of Confederation. After the violence of 1837-38 such theatre all but disappeared from the pages of Lower Canada's francophone newspapers until the establishment, in 1847, of Montreal's L'Avenir, voice of the nascent Rouge party. Within a few months of its appearance L'Avenir was embroiled in bitter verbal warfare with the Montreal press that supported the Bleu, or Unionist, party; and that opposition led, in the summer of 1848, to the publication in L'Avenir of two vigorous satirical playlets that quickly produced some dramatic, real-life consequences. These are generally referred to as the Tuque Bleue comedies, from the mocking signature of the first (its title is Une Scène d'intérieur) and the title of the second (Le Diable à quatre: À propos d'une Tuque Bleue).
The two principal targets of these plays are George-Etienne Cartier, then just at the beginning of his political career, and Doctor Wolfred Nelson, leader of the victorious Patriote forces at the battle of Saint-Denis in 1837, recently returned from exile in Bermuda and already a pillar of the Bleus. The other characters (in this genre, the word is consonant with 'targets') are the editors of the three Montreal newspapers supportive of the Bleus: Ludger Duvernay of La Minerve, Louis-Octave LeTourneux of La Revue canadienne, and Hector-Louis Langevin of Les Mélanges religieux, like Cartier a future Father of Confederation. The plays' background has been dealt with in detail elsewhere.1 Suffice it to mention that Cartier was so incensed by the allegations made therein about his own lack of courage during the battle of Saint-Denis that he challenged the young man presumed to be responsible for these two plays, Joseph Doutre (author also of one of the first Canadian novels, Les Fiancés de 1812, published in 1844), to a duel. That engagement led to no bloodshed, but Cartier's over-reaction ensured that he would long remain a favourite target for L'Avenir's barbs.
These two paratheatrical texts from 1848 represent a renascence of the genre, but give little evidence of evolution in form or in strategy from the plays of 1834. Eight years later a much longer and virtually unknown play appeared, again in L'Avenir, and this time a real evolution can be discerned, leading directly towards the format Elzéar Labelle would choose. Again, it was a moment of high drama in Canadian politics that saw the appearance in 1856 of La Dégringolade ('The Tumble', in the sense of the collapse of a government), whose 17,000 words, twelve characters and three acts (spread out over five issues, Feb 1 to 29) make it the longest political play before Father Alphonse Villeneuve's La Comédie infernale ou Conspiration libérale aux enfers in 1871-72. Its subject is the forthcoming collapse of the last ministry of Sir Allan MacNab, and the characters portrayed are those of the most prominent men in Canadian politics at the time, in particular John A. Macdonald and Étienne-Pascal Taché, whose government would succeed that of gruff, gouty old MacNab.
The setting is Government House in Toronto and the dramatic pretext, as for the Comédies du statu quo and the Tuque Bleue plays, is a meeting called in this case by MacNab to plot his groups strategy for the forthcoming parliamentary session. É.-P. Taché gets most of the fire: he is presented here as a shameless profiteer and as a flunkey of the anglophones in MacNab's cabinet. Taché is the author of the famous remark that 'the last cannon shot fired in America in defense of British rule, would be fired by a French-Canadian,' 2 an affirmation which serves as a fertile source of satire in this play. Macdonald, on the other hand, is depicted as a devious conspirator against his own leader, as a pragmatist hungry for power on any terms. Their exchanges are amusing but much too long, ranging over the various problems afflicting national politics, and in particular the dilemma of trying to govern both Canadas without an effective majority in each. In short, the principal innovation in this play is neither its topic nor its overall strategy, but rather the significant musical component it introduces: each act ends with a lively round of political songs composed to well-known melodies, wherein each character is made to sing a verse or two, always at his own expense or that of his party.
This was a stratagem first introduced into Canada in Quesnel's aforementioned Républicains français, where the six characters satirize themselves and the Revolution they represent with precisely this sort of vaudeville, in the strict, French sense of the word. Recently, Maurice Carrier and Monique Vachon, in their fascinating series, Chansons politiques du Québec, the first two volumes of which deal with the period 1765-1858, have underlined the importance and the peculiar popularity of that form in French Canada.3 There is no doubt that the anonymous author(s) of La Dégringolade had hit upon this embellishment as a way of heightening the play's effectiveness. And one suspects the songs themselves must have entered the public domain, for they are cleverly worded, deliciously satirical, and great fun. Their success would be remembered when the next great pretext for political adversarialism arose. Thus the topic of Confederation found predictable paradramatic expression in the French-Language press of Canada East, and the texts it elicited are not significantly different from those of 1848, 1834 or their predecessors. But for the first time (or at least for the first time since 1801 or so, if Quesnel's play was ever in fact staged) there were also public performances of works dealing with the current political controversy: Auguste Achintre's La Confédération and Elzéar Labelle's La Conversion d'un pêcheur de la Nouvelle-Écosse.
La Confédération is a cantata, or lyric oratorio, still paradramatic in form despite its frequent performance - apparently with great and repeated success - starting in Montreal in January of 1868. Its dithyrambic zeal in the cause of federal union is astounding, considering its authorship. Achintre, an expatriate Frenchman in his early thirties, had only recently arrived in Canada by a circuitous route which led from Haiti (where he had been condemned to death for his political activity, then wound up as that country's ambassador to Washington), then to Louisiana, from which, as part of a troupe of francophone actors, he had come to Montreal. Dedicated to the ubiquitous G.- É. Cartier, his work is a resounding paean to the new order of things, each of the confederative provinces striving, through their spokesmen, to outdo the other in praise of the union, special prominence being given to the well-known patriotic song composed by Cartier himself, '0 Canada, mon pays, mes amours.' The rest of the music, apart from folk-songs, is by Jean-Baptiste Labelle, the prominent musician and composer, cousin of Elzéar, for whose operetta Jean-Baptiste would also provide the music. The cantata opens with a Prayer to the Eternal Being that is reminiscent of such invocations in France during the headier years of the Revolution:
Français, Anglais, enfants d'un même père,
Demandons tous, en ce jour solennel,
Que le Très-Haut bénisse notre terre ...
A stirring recitative follows, entitled a 'Coup d'oeil sur l'histoire de la colonie,' in which the exploits of Columbus, Jacques Cartier, Champlain and George-Étienne Cartier are commemorated. After a long choral interlude the Provinces themselves appear: Lower Canada is represented by a group of farmers who describe the wonderful progress now seen in agriculture ('Jadis, errants, perdus en des plaines immenses / On vivait des troupeaux: nuls grains, nulles semences...'). Upper Canada's spokesmen are the 'Défricheurs de forêts', and their recitative recounts the hard life of that province's courageous pioneers. Achintre must have learned Longfellow's poem during his stay in Louisiana, for he next introduces an Acadian woman who first sings of her land's past distress:
Perdue, errante en ce désert sauvage
Je pleure, hélas, sur mon triste destin!
Mon père mort; éperdus au rivage
Parents, amis ...
But she immediately goes on to describe
a happier, contemporary Acadia -at the very moment, incidentally, of its
cultural renascence of the 1860's:
Larmes séchez! La douce Evangeline
De l'Acadie exprima le malheur;
Le passé meurt sous le temps qui le mine
Et l'avenir m'offre paix et bonheur.
Nova Scotia is represented by fishermen
and sailors, whose songs include the Acadian classic, 'Partons, la mer
est belle.' New Brunswick's workmen then introduce themselves, to the beat
of their hammers and anvils. Finally the four confederative provinces join
in a resonant quartet:
Unis tous quatre à la cause commune
Dès aujourd'hui lions-y notre sort;
Nous n'auron's plus qu'une même fortune:
Restons amis, frères, jusqu'à la mort.4
Obviously Achintre's La Confédération
belongs
more properly to the history of music in Canada, than to that of theatre.
But its visual dramatic appeal must have been strong as well, to judge
from the lengthy, glowing analysis of its performance which appears in
La Minerve for 11 Jan 1868, four days after the work's premiere.5
And if it is not entirely theatre, it is very public, very partisan paratheatre,
just as one-sided as the journalistic versions of previous decades. Of
course, if partisan political theatre is to become 'social', as in this
case, it is not surprising that its bias be in favour of the political
establishment and blatantly laudatory of the hero of the moment, George
Étienne Cartier.
This is the context in which Elzéar Labelle's one-act operetta must be placed. It clearly represents a natural evolution - the apogee to that date, in fact - resulting from the interaction of politics and theatrical forms in French Canada. In subject, first of all, for its focus is politics, specifically the shoddy scramble for personal gain that characterized, at least in this author's view, the period immediately before and after Confederation. As to its form, one observes that the musical element, an important innovation in La Dégringolade a decade earlier, and the dominant aspect of Achintre's cantata, remains central in La Conversion d'un pêcheur, without subordinating its theatrical content. There is no doubt this is theatre, theatre intended for public performance; and as the history of those performances to the end of the nineteenth century demonstrates, eminently successful in the formula its author had devised.
We shall leave the music of Jean-Baptiste Labelle for a better qualified colleague to assess, focussing instead on the structural and thematic evolution displayed in La Conversion d'un pêcheur de la Nouvelle-Écosse. The choice of a single act for presenting a satirical political stance and the heavy reliance on musical accompaniment had had only one potential model in Canada, and that was Quesnel's Républicains français, probably never performed, as we have mentioned, and accessible only in manuscript. Almost certainly unknown, in other words, to Elzéar Labelle and to the author(s) of La Dégringolade. (The fifth Comédie du statu quo includes a brief excerpt from a well-known vaudeville on L.-J. Papineau, but there is no suggestion that the character is to sing it, as is the case with each act of La Dégringolade.) On the other hand, the choreographed actions of the two actors in Labelle's play, carefully detailed in its stage directions, have no real parallel in any of the preceding political texts, including that of Quesnel. The first meeting of the Nova Scotian fisherman and the Quebec habitant, for example, where, during their first duo, the two are to perform a stylized mime routine:
En chantant ce duo, tous deux s'avancent à reculons, l'un la figure tournée vers la droite des auditeurs, et l'autre vers la gauche, jusqu'à ce que, venant à se rencontrer, ils se heurtent l'un sur l'autre; après quelques secondes d'attente et d'étonnement, ils chantent:
MORUFORT: Pardonnez-moi cette secousse, c'est bien involontairement!
PIERRICHON: Quoi! parce qu'un homme vous pousse, faut-il se montrer mécontent?
Moreover, the significant use of props,
such as the drinking-flask, Morufort's codfish, Pierrichon's moneybag and
his côté de cuir, the conniving winks and asides all
serve to underline the distance between this text and its unperformable
ancestors in a genre than can be traced back to the first newspapers to
appear in French Canada. The play is a great vehicle for experienced actors,
and the two who first interpreted the roles soon became famous for their
stylized portrayal of Morufort and Pierrichon.6
Just as obviously, the relative impartiality of tone here displayed breaks
the norm observed in all previous political theatre in French Canada. Labelle's
satire is generously but fairly evenhandedly distributed to both sides
in the Confederation debate: Joe Howe comes off marginally worse than G.-É.
Cartier, but then his public about-face had no real parallel in the latter's
career, after his switch from the tuque rouge of the Patriote rebel
to the Tuque Bleue of the Unionist militant. In fact, La Conversion
d'un pêcheur winds up being an ingenious assault against the
electoral system itself, with its innate corruption and patronage. This
relative impartiality appears to have been typical of the author's own
political stance. Elzéar Labelle's biographer, A.-N. Montpetit,
recounts that from 1862 until his untimely death in 1875 he took part in
'toutes les luttes politiques et municipales, soit à Montréal,
soit dans les environs,' and that his satirical interventions were feared
by all sides: 'À la veille d'une élection, il.était
sûr de trouver à sa porte les hommes les plus importants,
qui recherchaient son appui ou à défaut, qui lui demandaient
de rester neutre.' 7
No doubt a major reason for the success of the recipe used in La Conversion
lies in its malicious neutrality: public performance thereby becomes
more feasible.
The record of the play's success is clear. Edmond Lareau, writing in 1874, assures us that 'chaque fois que ce morceau désopilant fait partie d'un programme de concert, les organisateurs s'attendent avec droit à une recette abondante et à un auditoire nombreux.' 8 Even at the very end of the century La Conversion continued to be staged, the last known performance taking place in 1899. It remained popular, in other words, throughout a thirty-year period in which homegrown social theatre continued to experience great difficulty in French Canada, in the face of growing competition from touring French professional companies. It remained popular because it shared many of the characteristics of the only other theatrical genres to know any degree of public success at the end of the nineteenth century and throughout the bleakest years of the twentieth: the musical revue, overflowing with irreverent satire and generally couched in the same sort of popular speech used by Pierrichon and Morufort; and the satirical monologues and burlesques that, as recent research has shown, are so integral a part of the evolution of modern theatre in Quebec.9 Gratien Gélinas' Fridolinades are completely faithful to that tradition: they are a culmination, like Labelle's play, of the genre whose roots go back to the very beginnings of theatre in Canada, and which managed to survive because those roots remained fixed in the fertile subsoil of political topicality.
Finally, a few notes on the author himself:
Elzéar Labelle was born in Montreal in 1843. He studied at the Collège
de l'Assomption and at the Collège des Jésuites, both of
which featured theatre and paradramatic teaching techniques as a central
part of their pedagogy. He then studied law, being admitted to the Bar
in 1862 and working for a time in the law firm of a future Premier of Quebec,
Alfred Mousseau. With his brother Ludger, Elzéar was soon involved
in journalism, contributing articles of a humorous, political nature to
Le
Colonisateur. Ludger was an unsuccessful opponent of George-Étienne
Cartier in the general election of 1867, but Elzéar preferred to
snipe from the sidelines. Like his mother and his brother before him, Elzéar
contracted tuberculosis at an early age: after a long struggle with the
disease he died on 24 Oct 1875. His brother-in-law, André-Napoléon
Montpetit, published Elzéar collected works (mainly occasional poems
and satirical songs) as Mes Rimes (Québec: Delisle, 1876),
including the text, without music, of La Conversion d'un pêcheur
de la Nouvelle-Écosse. This seems to have been his only venture
into theatre.
THEATRE AND THE POLITICS OF CONFEDERATION: ELZÉAR LABELLE'S LA CONVERSION D'UN PÊCHEUR DE LA NOUVELLE-ÉCOSSE
L.E. Doucette
1 In my book, Theatre
in French Canada, 1606-1867 Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1984,
pp 154-65; and in a long article in French, 'Théâtre, parathéâtre
et politique, 1847-1868' in vol 5 of Revue d'Histoire littéraire
du Québec et du Canada français
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2 See JACQUES MONET, The
Last Cannon Shot Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1969. La Dégringolade
has been treated in detail in the two works mentioned in preceding
note
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3 In CARRIER and VACHON'S
second volume Montréal: Leméac, 1979 the words and music
of the songs from La Dégringolade are reproduced, pp 340-49
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4 CANTATE, La Confédération,
Paroles de M.A. ACHINTRE, musique de M.J. BTE. LABELLE. Dediée
a L'Hon. George Étienne Cartier Ministre de la Milice. Although
undated, the text was printed in 1868, words and music comprising 8 pp
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5 La Minerve had
informed its readers on 19 Sept 1867 that 'M.J.B. Labelle, organiste de
la Paroisse, est à composer une grande Cantate sur la Confédération.'
The same newspaper, on 11 Jan 1868, provides a long analysis of La Confédération,
beginning on p 1, then reproduces the entire text (without music)
Return to article
6 According to the review
in La Minerve, these performers were one J. Boucher and O. Labelle,
the latter apparently another relative of the librettist and composer
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7 From MONTPETIT'S Preface
to Mes Rimes, p 27
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8 EDMOND LAREAU, Histoire
de la littérature canadienne Montréal: Lovell, 1874,
p 109
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9 Cf. LAURENT MAILHOT and
DORIS-MICHEL MONTPETIT, Monologues québécois, 1890-1980
Montréal: Leméac, 1980; and CHANTAL HÉBERT, Le
Burlesque au Québec: Un divertissement populaire Montréal:
Hurtubise, 1981
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