Jump to content

Esther Delisle

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Mayumashu (talk | contribs) at 17:48, 17 October 2005 (refined cat). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Esther Delisle (born 1954) is a French-Canadian political scientist and author of historical works.

Raised in Quebec City, Esther Delisle earned a Ph.D. in political science from Laval University in Sainte-Foy, Quebec and did post-doctoral studies at the department of history at McGill University. In 1993, she published a historical work, a version of her doctoral thesis, short-titled The Traitor and the Jew in which she adduced evidence of a history of anti-Semitism and support of fascism among Quebec nationalists of the 1930s.

In her book, Delisle documented hundreds of anti-Semitic quotations from the nationalist review L'Action nationale and the influential Montreal newspaper Le Devoir. However, her attribution (whose validity has been seriously questioned) of vicious pseudonymous anti-Semitic articles to the nationalist priest, Lionel Groulx and her assertion that he was an active Fascist sympathizer caused the greatest controversy. Groulx was one of French Quebec's most revered icons for two generations of Catholics – a station on the Montreal Metro as well as schools, streets, lakes, and a chain of mountains in Quebec are named for him.

Delisle claimed, for example, that Groulx, under the pseudonym Jacques Brassier, had written in 1933 in Action Nationale.

Within six months or a year, the Jewish problem could be resolved, not only in Montreal but from one end of the province of Quebec to the other. There would be no more Jews here other than those who could survive by living off one another.

A claim, never substantiated, that Delisle had been subsidized by Jewish organizations, was made in an article in the magazine L'Actualité and repeated on television by former Parti Québécois cabinet minister Claude Charron while introducing a broadcast of Eric Scott's documentary about the book. Other commentators (for example, Gary Caldwell, a professor at Laval) contended, without proof, that Delisle's work was intended to denigrate Québécois and lead English Canadians to conclude that Quebec was incapable of sovereignty. These nonacademic aspects of the debate created considerable heated controversy about the book.

On March 1, 1997 L'Actualité published a cover story titled The Myth of a Fascist Quebec: Ignorance or Defamation, which saw its editorial and cover story devoted on fascism in Quebec in the 1930's. A profile on Abbe Groulx also appeared in the same issue. The two articles acknowledged Groulx's anti-Semitism and the general favourable attitude of the Roman Catholic church to fascism during the 1930s, but concluded that the only truly Quebec fascist movement during the period was the Parti national social chrétien led by Joseph Ménard and Adrien Arcand.

The article's veracity came under attack after former Le Devoir editor [Claude Ryan] tempered his support of Groulx after reading Delisle's book. Ryan had defended Groulx in the article but subsequently told the article's author [Luc Chatrand} that "he discovered in Groulx a fascist temptation - the yearning for a chief - more important than what he had suspected.

Substantive methodological criticisms have been made of Delisle's work, chiefly by historian Gérard Bouchard (links to an article and a related article by Gary Caldwell are provided below).

These assertions, most of which appear not to have been validated or even seriously debated, include:

  • her attributions of pseudonymous articles are often invalid (in particular, her argument depends heavily on the assumption that Groulx wrote under the name Lambert Closse, although she frankly states she has no evidence that he did; some historians have adduced evidence from Groulx's archives which suggests that Lambert Closse was the pseudonym of another priest whose correspondence Groulx did not reply to)
  • she ignores articles which present more moderate opinions
  • many of the articles cannot be found as referenced by her (she has corrected some of these citations)
  • the extracts from the articles she selected often misrepresent the ideas in them
  • she fails to distinguish Catholic anti-Semitism from fascist sympathies
  • she fails to deal adequately with the contradictions in Groulx's attitudes towards Jews (he publicly denounced anti-Semitism as unchristian, for example)
  • she ignores the possibility of interethnic rivalry between two minority groups (French Canadians and Jews)
  • she does not compare the texts drawn from Le Devoir or l'Action nationale to texts from French Canadian publications generally considered to have been fascist.
  • she presented an admittedly exploratory study as a test of several linked hypotheses (for example, by drawing inferences from isolated texts rather than by estimating the frequency of anti-Semitic themes in Le Devoir and l'Action nationale and comparing it to a control frequency, such as the frequency of anti-Semitic references in English Canadian or foreign publications of the same period).

In 1998, Esther Delisle published, Myths, Memories and Lies, an account of how some members of Quebec's elite, nationalist and federalist, supported Nazi collaborator Marshall Philippe Pétain and his Vichy government in Nazi-occupied France World War II.

A 2002 documentary film by Eric Scott titled Je Me Souviens, recounts Delisle's story using rare archival footage with speeches and commentaries by some of Quebec's leading nationalist figures of the time.

As of 2002, Delisle had been unsuccessful in obtaining a full or part time position at any of Quebec's junior colleges or universities.

Bibliography:

Sources

[1] "Elm Street, April, 1998

  • Francine Dube, "Exposing Quebec's Secret"

[2] National Post, April 27, 2002 [[Category:Canadian political scientists|Delisle, Esther]

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Esther_Delisle&oldid=25754703"