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Curieux corpus

Guy Berthiaume

François Du Creux, historien et apologiste

Amélie Hamel
This two-part article examines Du Creux's rewriting of the Relations, with a view to understanding the Jesuits' reasons for publishing the Historiae canadensis (François Du Creux, Paris: Cramoisy et Mabre-Cramoisy, 1664). The first part deals with the content of the Historiae canadensis as historical truth. To begin with, it presents the coherence of the work as envisaged by Du Creux in the front matter. Then, it focuses on the relationship between the history and its sources by analyzing the construction of the ethos of the historian, able to defend the truth transmitted by the work by presenting the rewriting in a certain way. The second part is devoted to the way in which Du Creux employs the historical genre to serve the Company of Jesus. It begins by examining the passages in which the author uses his status as a historian to take a prudent position on the delicate issue of sainthood. Then, it demonstrates the apologetic use of this history to deal with trade issues and, especially, theological ones. These considerations lead to the formulation of hypotheses on the reasons that may have motivated the rewriting of the Relations.

Poétique de la rature – La fabrique épistolaire chez les dames Harnois

Mylène Bédard
The correspondence of Marguerite and Reine Harnois sent from Lower Canada to Ludger Duvernay while he was still in exile in the United States between 1838 and 1839 is a corpus that lends itself to analysis of letter-writing conditions in the mid-19th century. These letters reveal the moments when the writing was tentative, in search of a more personal style or one better suited to rendering the writer's intent. The purpose of this study is to identify and analyze the trace of these back-and-forth movements of the pen by which the writing in a letter was honed, made more complex or put to the test through the deployment of discursive strategies. If the crossing out bears witness tore-reading, by which the final touches were put to the writing of a letter in gestation, can this work on style be likened to negotiating the conditions of discursive acceptability? To what extent did going back over the writing influence the way in which the writers represented themselves and established their relationship with the other party? Whether the crossing out was intended to conceal or to reveal what it purported to hide, it provides food for thought about the history of epistolary practices.

Les Éditions de l’Oeuf, la contre-culture et l’essor du livre-objet au Québec

Sophie Drouin
Éditions de l’Oeuf, founded in 1971 by Yrénée Bélanger and Guy M. Pressault, had as its goal to be at the service of book object literature. This underground editorial production, which was part of the Québec counterculture movement at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, contributed to a certain esthetic renewal of the poetry book based on the conceptual principles of détournement. Through an editorial policy advocating the use of the book object, and through various strategies to set aside, even abolish, cultural hierarchies, the publishers challenged the concept of what constitutes literature and a book. Taking as its starting point the book objects produced by Éditions de l’Oeuf that are in the heritage collection of artists' books and bibliophile books of Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, this article analyzes the publishers' position on literature, and the publishing house's contribution to a counterculture esthetics of the poetry book. The objective is twofold: underscore the originality of Éditions de l’Oeuf's little-known production and discuss some of the means used by the publisher-authors to challenge literature and its principal medium—the book.

Montréal érotique : pin-up et imagerie de nus chez le photographe de presse Conrad Poirier, 1912-1968

Julie-Anne Godin-Laverdière
This article deals with a little-known part of the work of Conrad Poirier (1912-1968), a Montréal photojournalist who worked between 1930 and 1960. Fonds P48 of Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, where Poirier's negatives are kept, is comprised primarily of press photographs, but also includes a personal production that borrows from pin-up esthetics. A pin-up is a pop-culture image of a sensual woman whose nude or semi-nude body is shown in teasingly voluptuous poses. This article is an invitation to reflect on the presence of these images in the 1940s and 1950s in Québec, despite the censorship practised in Montréal, as well as on Poirier's production during the same period. To analyse characteristic pin-up images, the photographer's work can be divided into four categories: the pin-up images collected by Poirier and the photographs he himself took, namely, nude shots, photographs of women in bathing suits and even bodybuilders.

La Revue populaire et Le Samedi – Objets de diffusion de la modernité photographique au Québec, 1935-1945

Zoë Tousignant
Studying illustrated magazines is a pursuit that has the potential to yield rich findings about the history of Québec photography. It has a lot to teach us about the type of photographs that were not only produced, but also seen daily by a vast segment of the public. In the early 20th century, general-circulation magazines were one of the primary means of disseminating photography. Poirier, Bessette & Cie, the Montréal company that published La Revue populaire and Le Samedi, two such periodicals, made extensive use of the genre. By publishing in these magazines, photographers Paul-Marc [Mark] Auger, Henri Paul and Conrad Poirier were instrumental in fostering the emergence of an aesthetic of modernity in Québec. In the case of Auger, La Revue populaire and Le Samedi provide an opportunity to rediscover a compelling photographic production. In the case of Paul and Poirier, the magazines provide a context for their work, and shed light on how their images were used and perceived by a public for whom photography was part of everyday life.

Les six manuscrits de musique du fonds De la Broquerie Fortier, 1753-1852 – L’héritage musical de la famille Boucher de la Bruère

Louis Brouillette
Most of what we know about musical life in Québec during the period between the Conquest and the Act of Union comes from the printed press. An analysis of the six music manuscripts in the De la Broquerie Fortier fonds, which is kept at the Québec archives centre of Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, sheds new light on the period. The music manuscripts, transmitted by six generations of people in or close to the Boucher de la Bruère family, are studied here from a musical, historical and social standpoint. To examine these documents, copied between 1750 and 1850, is to have access to political, artistic and family networkings during the English Regime. The documents are also an excellent source of information on quadrille dance figures and organ accompaniment of motets. In addition, the fonds contains a violin manuscript from the late French Regime, and a guitar manuscript, assembled around 1841, that provides a rare example of 19th-century guitar tablature. Finally, the manuscripts dating from the first half of the 19th century show the gradual Americanization of the vocal and instrumental repertoire in Canada and provide evidence of the first Canadian compositions.

Les guides touristiques d’hôtels montréalais, 1857-1917 – Une stratégie publicitaire

Michèle Lefebvre
In the latter half of the 19th and the early 20th centuries, the major Montréal hotels were engaged in fierce competition. To stand out from the rest or simply to survive, and in an effort to meet the inclinations of the day, they had to constantly improve their facilities: expanding premises, revamping decor, adding hot water, electricity, telephones, elevators, and so on and so forth. The new luxury standards demanded huge expenditures. To be able to afford them, the owners of the major hotels had to make sure there were no vacancies. Perhaps that is why they launched into publishing tourist guides featuring their establishments to the exclusion of the other hotels in Québec's largest city. This article takes a look at 25 such guides—held by Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec and published between 1857 and 1917 by 10 major Montréal hotels: Donegana, St. Lawrence Hall, Montreal House, Ottawa, St. James, Albion, Queen’s, Windsor, Balmoral and Grand Union—exploring their origins, stated objectives, borrowings, and advertising strategies. Despite the pretence of offering tourists correct information, the producers of these guides eventually eliminated true tourism content from them and transformed them into pure advertising vehicles.

L’industrie de l’hospitalité et l’édition de guides touristiques – Le cas de Québec et des hôtels d’escale, 1874-1917

Danielle Léger
An inventory of the tourism guidebooks published by Québec hotels before the end of the First World War identified 11 publishing projects involving hotels in the city of Québec and stop over hotels owned by shipping and railway companies in Québec. The author draws on stories of advertising, and of the hotel industry, regional development and tourism, to put these publishing projects in context and interpret them according to the unique development of each hotel. The author then considers the tourism communication strategies of the hotel guidebooks. The broader phenomenon of the provision of tourism services by hotel operators is also evoked as a milestone in an as-yet unwritten cultural history of Québec hotels.

Les « Vieux dossiers » du ministère de l’Agriculture

Rénald Lessard and Monique Lord