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 an exhaustive historical work 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 whom a station on the Montreal Metro as well as schools, streets, lakes, and a chain of mountains in Quebec had been named.
Delisle's work was repudiated by many Quebec scholars who acknowledged Groulx's anti-Semitism and the anti-Semitism of some nationalist figures of the 1930s, both of which had been well established by historians, but believed that Delisle had not made her case that Groulx was an active Fascist. Some also made unverifiable nationalist political arguments, such as that her thesis and book were attempts to depict Québécois as incapable of governing themselves should Quebec achieve sovereignty. 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. These nonacademic aspects of the debate created considerable heated controversy about the book.
In 1997 L'actualité published a cover story titled The Myth of a Fascist Quebec, in which it 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 substantive methodological criticisms which have been made of Delisle's work (without necessarily having been validated) include assertions that:
- 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 sumpathies
- 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).
These issues have been neglected in the anglophone Canadian media, which has shown little interest in the issue generally.
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. In this documentary Delisle notes that although she believes Quebec nationalist leaders of the 1930s and 1940s were antisemitic, she also believes that evidence supports the contention that French Canadians as a people were less antisemitc than English Canadians.
Bibliography:
- (Antisémitisme et nationalisme d'extrême-droite dans la province de Québec 1929-1939) - (1993)
- (Essais sur l'imprégnation fasciste au Québec) - (1998)
- Le Quatuor d'Asbestos - co-written with Pierre K. Malouf (2004)
Sources
- Gérard Bouchard, "Réplique à Esther Delisle - À propos des deux chanoines", Le Devoir, May 1, 2003
- Gary Caldwell, "La controverse Delisle-Richler: Le discours sur l'antisémitisme au Québec et l'orthodoxie néo-libérale au Canada, L'Agora, June, 1994
- Luc Chartrand, "Le mythe du Québec fasciste," l'Actualité, March 1, 1997, vol. 22, no. 3
- David Lazarus "Canal D asked to re-broadcast film on anti-Semitism," Canadian Jewish News, May 23, 2002
- Gérald LeBlanc, Le chanoine et les Juifs, La Presse, March 30, 2003
