Letter from Montreal
Quebec City, 2017. Wilfredor / Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
On April 25, Quebec Premier François Legault (Coalition for the Future of Quebec, nationalist, center-right) opened up about his vision for the future institution when he announced the creation of Quebec’s first national museum of Quebec history. He described the museum as “a place where Quebecers can feel even prouder to be Quebecers.” Located in the modest Camille Roy Pavilion of the Quebec Seminary, where the province’s first university was founded in 1852, the museum is scheduled to open in spring 2026.
“This is where explorers began 400 years ago. [Jacques] Cartier and [Samuel de] “We will commemorate the great men of Champlain, the founders of our country,” said the government leader as he announced the project in the provincial capital. In his role as curator, he explained exactly what he wanted to honor in the future museum: “great men” and a few “founding” women, like Jeanne Mance, a pioneer of New France who founded Montreal’s first hospital in 1642, and Marie de l’Incarnation, a 17th-century missionary who worked to educate girls and evangelize Native Americans.
He also cited artists (Gilles Vigneault, Robert Charbois, Céline Dion), writers (Michel Tremblay, Dany Laferrière), athletes, and even companies like “Bombardier and Hydro-Québec,” symbols of Quebec’s economic success, as worthy of inclusion in the Quebec Pride Hall of Fame. But he only mentioned Indigenous issues in a brief statement. “We also have Indigenous people who helped us,” he said, simply. He thought it was more important to emphasize the need to celebrate the French language first: “It’s quite an achievement that we can still speak French in a situation where we’re surrounded by a sea of English speakers!”
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“A return to the dusty national narrative”
The new museum’s largely unrevealed intentions have angered some in Quebec’s historiographical community. “This is nothing more than a return to an old national narrative born here in the 19th century, which runs counter to all the historical and museological work being done today,” said Camille Robert, a lecturer in the history department at the University of Quebec at Montreal. “This view of history is not only outdated, it’s dangerous,” said Catherine LaRochelle, a history professor at the University of Montreal, “because this narrative of a people who only speak French and culture promotes a sense of identity that is totally at odds with our current collective identity.”
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