By Hubert Bauch,

If Mordecai Richler were still around to offer running commentary on the vagaries and absurdities of Quebec politics, these days would likely find him more cheerfully disposed than back when he dropped the big one on Quebec’s political class.
That was 20 years ago, when the New Yorker ran his 20,000-word assault on Quebec nationalist sensibilities, one that in the moment made his name a household word in his homeland, raised from the relative obscurity of internationally acclaimed anglo-Canadian novelist to leading Quebec political writer. This, thanks largely to the furious, bordering on hysterical, backlash it incited. More than famous here, he became a mythic figure; to hear the nationalist bien pensants tell it, the most abominable Québécois basher since Lord Durham.
Those were darker days if you were anglo and a federalist in this town.
Two preceding years of language strife over commercial signs and the failure of the Meech Lake constitutional initiative to bring Quebec closer into the Canadian fold had revitalized the separatist movement. The Parti Québécois had been revived from losing power and the passing of René Lévesque by a Jacques Parizeau in his prime. Even Liberal premier and supposed federalist Robert Bourassa was musing about calling a referendum.
These days, he’d have wicked fun with the current tribulations of the PQ, the humiliation of the Bloc Québécois in the spring election, the runaway poll support for a hitherto nonexistent party, and the complaint of Quebec City civic authorities that St. Jean Baptiste observance in La Vieille Capitale had degenerated to a mass piss-up that shames the Québécois nation. He’d have reason to be cheered by the more pacific state of his cherished Montreal; things are far from perfect, but they’re better, more uplifting for an anglo-federalist living here than they were then, back when you had to take the separatists more seriously.
But he’d also have cause to lament that some things here never seem to change.
In the New Yorker piece, he took Quebecor founder Pierre Péladeau to task for his notorious remark that Jews take up too much space in the city. Today you have a neighbourhood campaign in Mile End against the modest extension of a small synagogue on Hutchison St. Back then, he deplored that the Champlain Bridge had been allowed to slide into such disrepair that it had been adjudged dangerous, that Quebec’s hospitals are notoriously understaffed and its universities underfunded. Sound familiar?
The article for the most part is actually a fairly prosaic compendium of Quebec political history leading up to the situation in the day when he wrote. He takes his cracks. (Jacques Parizeau is cast as “a sybarite of considerable girth (who) seems to have sprung larger than life out of a P.G. Wodehouse novel.”) He makes hay with the farcical intricacies of the inside/outside sign law in force at the time. (The piece was titled Inside/Outside.) He inconveniently harps on the streak of anti-Semitism in Quebec nationalist discourse. (He fingered nationalist icon Lionel Groulx as a raving anti-Semite abetted by the venerable Le Devoir, which published his Jew-baiting screeds.) But most of what he said had been said by others, if not quite as acerbically.
If anything, the most vicious slash at the nationalists was a quote from Pierre Trudeau, who had called them “politically stupid ... perpetual losers ... a bunch of snivellers who should have been sent packing and told to stop having tantrums like spoiled adolescents.”
The single line most remembered and routinely invoked to this day is typically misrepresented. He wrote that the much glorified “revanche des berçeaux,” whereby Catholic authorities bent on augmenting the francophone population encouraged large families of a dozen or more – and discouraged birth control and rational family planning with threats of eternal damnation – imposed a cruel hardship on those expected to do the hard labour of reproduction. This imposition, he famously wrote, “seemed to me to be based on the assumption that women were sows.”
The way it’s told when people cite Richler as the quintessential mange-Québécois of modern times is that he outright called Québécois mothers sows. Never mind that he freely allowed that he considers Hasidic rabbis guilty of the same. The twisted version of the tale stands tallest.
For this, and for the followup book-length expansion on the theme, Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country, he was denounced as a racist traitor spewing hate propaganda. Bloc Québécois MP Pierette Venne paid him the ultimate compliment by calling in the federal Parliament for the book to be banned.
What really rankled was not so much what he said as where he said it – off the reservation in a prestigious U.S. journal read by the kind of people with whom Quebec nationalists like to curry favour and respect. It’s been said the book was the most criticized in the history of Quebec letters and also the least read. The nationalists’ anger was further stoked by Richler’s merry unrepentance. “It’s rather gratifying to know they’re embarrassed,” he said in a CBC interview.
The local nationalists who think Richler had it in just for them flatter themselves. He was very much an equal opportunity slagger. He called the prime minister of the day, Brian Mulroney, a pathological liar who lies just to keep in practice, and his predecessor Joe Clark a pathetic striver. He got all of Edmonton on his back for calling it the boiler room of the country. His stiletto send-ups of Jewish foibles got him tarred as an anti-Semite and self-loathing Jew in straitlaced Jewish circles. He called Canada a “cloud-cukoo land, an insufferably rich country governed by idiots, its self-made problems offering comic relief to the ills of the real world.”
A lot of that famous piece and the book that followed was written in anger.
Anger at the pettifogging follies of the Quebec nationalist elite, its history of anglophobia, Vichy sympathizing and Jew baiting. Anger at how the reigning political foolishness was diminishing his beloved Montreal. But he could also laugh about it; if anything, his rapier sense of humour and extravagant capacity for merriment comes across more pungently in his political writings than in his literary endeavours.
At the height of the inside/outside controversy, Richler and his local happy-hour political warriors concocted the Twice-As-Much Society, devoted to lobbying for a language-law amendment that would call for French to be spoken twice as loud as English, both inside and outside, and have language cops outfitted with sound meters. He founded the short-lived “Impure Wool Society,” which held some memorably jolly meetings for the purpose of conferring a “Prix Parizeau” on a Quebec author bereft of “pure laine” heritage.
And he didn’t just hector from the refuge of his study. He took it to the streets.
When his old barstool companion Richard Holden, whom he’d backed when he ran as an anglo-rights Equality Party candidate in the 1989 election, defected to the Péquistes four years later, he had a ribald flyer printed up mocking Holden’s perfidity. It was illustrated with an Aislin cartoon of the subject flashing his corpulent form from a bathrobe to reveal a fleur-de-lys cache-sexe. For the text Richler harked to Plato: “When blind Diogenes set out in his lantern in search of an honest man it was obviously Richard Holden he was seeking. Support integrity. Vote for Holden.”
The text was in both French and English, twice as large even in French. But retribution was as swift as it was against his New Yorker indiscretion. This time, it came in hand with the law. Police confiscated a pile of the flyers Richler was distributing at the Lionel Groulx métro station with a warning from the chief electoral officer that he was liable to a $1,000 fine for unauthorized electoral advertising.
In a posthumous tribute, fellow Canadian novelist Timothy Findley celebrated Richler as not just a wordsmith, but a doer. “He had the guts in every aspect of his life to do what a person forever regrets not doing himself. A champion of doing things.”
It amused him to pass off his political writing as “scribblings” and a source of easy money. But writing that New Yorker piece and the book were things he felt compelled to do, and had he not, he might have regretted it knowing he could have.
On that score, he could have cued Edith Piaf at the last: “Non, rien de rien/ Non, je ne regrette rien ...”
hbauch@montrealgazette.com