The Art of Nation-Building: Pageantry and Spectacle at Quebec's Tercentenary

Terry A. Crowley is a professor of history at the University of Guelph,
and the former editor of the journal Ontario History. He is the author
of Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality and Canadian History to
1967, and the co-author of The College on

When historians interpreted their craft as an adjunct to politics and
their production as contributing to Canada’s standing in the world,
events such as Quebec’s Tercentenary celebrations in 1908 were given
short shrift. The recent reconstitution of the discipline as one
interested in diverse cultural phenomena has led to books on such topics
as how the Loyalists were invented as part of Ontario’s provincial
identity and how Toronto’s Canadian National Exhibition served as a
vehicle that let the city’s residents participate in a modern world in
which they did not want to be left behind.

Central to such glimpses of a broader past, including this book by York
University historian Viv Nelles about events in Quebec in 1908, is the
contention that contestation stood at the centre of public
commemoration. The celebration of Quebec City’s founding by Samuel de
Champlain in 1608 required the involvement of a vast range of
characters: federal and provincial politicians, the colonial governor
general and the British government, commoners and nobility, francophones
and anglophones, religious and secular authorities, newspapermen and
journalists, women, and Aboriginal peoples. Seeing the Tercentenary as a
microcosm through which many of the tensions in Canadian society were
revealed, Nelles is forced to conclude pessimistically that Canada is
too large a country to be projected so summarily as these
government-sponsored spectacles attempted at the beginning of the 20th
century. In democracies, though not in dictatorships, such displays were
soon replaced as films, television, and then computers began to provide
vicarious thrills of a different order that involved mass culture more
thoroughly.

Nelles succeeds in transporting readers back into a world that the 19th
century had created and that the 20th century largely destroyed.
Recounting his personal encounters with the ephemera that ultimately
constituted the residue of the Tercentenary, he pays particular
attention to illustrated print materials, stamps, photographs,
artists’ renderings, and contemporary marvels such as stereoscopic
cards. Historians like Nelles remain skeptical about the ability of
organized spontaneity to express Canada’s pluralism, but people
interested in creative anachronism will find many pleasures in this
book.