The Hero and the Historians

Book excerpt: Historians have long engaged in passionate debate about collective memory and the building of national identities. This book focuses on one national hero – Jacques Cartier – to explore how notions about the past have been created and passed on through the generations and used to present particular ideas about the world in English- and French-speaking Canada. The cult of celebrity surrounding Cartier by the mid-nineteenth century, Gordon reveals, reflected a particular understanding of history, one which accompanied the arrival of modernity in North America. This new sensibility, in turn, shaped the political and cultural currents of nation building in Canada. Cartier may have been a point of contact between English and French Canadian nationalism, but the nature of that contact, as Gordon shows, had profound limitations. The Hero and the Historians is necessary reading for anyone interested in the underlying culture of national identity – and national unity – in Canada.