Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d'études canadiennes

Is This a Case of Particularization?

In line with the topic of this issue of the Journal of Canadian Studies, this article intends to examine the modulations of terms and usage as a contribution to understanding the state of heritage in Canada from the joint perspective of the state of heritage studies and the state of heritage practices. In so doing, we subscribe to Harvey's proposal "to make space for a longer historical analysis of the development of heritage practices" (2001, 340). Our main focus is to shed light on the idiomatic, cultural, and historical particularization of heritage, and to do so independently of ideologies that, intentionally or not, push toward uniformization (Goody 2012), which is perhaps illustrated by the popularization of the use of heritage and patrimoine.¹² On the heels of the "internationalization of the historic monument" described by Négri (2013), the popularization of UNESCO's World Heritage List (in the context of which French influence has been well documented by Maurel [2010], a point that we will return to later) has translated more or less explicitly into legislative amendments in a number of regions around the world despite the dissimilar contexts of each country. With respect to France and Quebec,¹³ although the two countries share a civil law tradition, initially Quebec's 1922 Act to Ensure the Preservation of Monuments of Objects of Historic or Artistic Interest departed from the Loi sur les monuments historiques introduced in France in 1913—a fact to which I have drawn attention in a different publication (Morisset 2009a).¹⁴ Does the popularization of the terms heritage [End Page 15] and patrimoine, along with the false idea that they are equivalent, tend to cover up the fact that they refer to different conceptions?

Without claiming a thorough understanding of these distinctions, it is our hope that examining narratives in this article will kindle a reflection on the scientific issues associated with heritage particularization and the like, especially in the context of French studies on patrimonialization and the subsequent rise of critical heritage studies, with its own distinct epistemology.¹⁵ The fact that the English language has become the latter's lingua franca may entail more challenges and consequences than might appear at first blush.

Yet it is not impossible that by becoming a public matter, heritage absorbed a part of the concept of patrimoine as codified in spirit by government policy in the wake of the French Revolution, which has been studied by a number of authors as will be discussed below.

Our working hypothesis is threefold: patrimoine and heritage are two distinct concepts, or at least they were; in the course of theoretical evolution (patrimonial studies / études patrimoniales and critical heritage studies) and changing practices (conservation du patrimoine / heritage preservation), patrimoine has contaminated heritage owing to its conceptual specificities; and Canada offers a particular illustration of this particularization and its development, as observation of the differentiation between patrimoine and heritage, and of situations that are specific to this country seems to indicate. To verify this, we propose contrasting heritage in relation to patrimoine as the focus of our study in a number of discourses within a range of intellectual, media, theoretical, and practice-based English-and French-language environments in Canada and elsewhere. While touching on what might one day be identified as a Canadian particularization, we hope to depict corpuses of knowledge that may serve to steer future research on similar topics. In this respect, whereas our work follows in the footsteps of Taylor's study titled The Making of Canada's National Historic Parks and Sites (1990), our approach is more narrowly focused inasmuch as it first addresses idiomatic particularizations for the purpose of which we examine documents on the basis of their linguistic origin rather than according to their cultural context, although these aspects cannot be entirely dissociated. We start from the language to get to the culture and the world view that it reflects, inasmuch as these conceptions and the theoretical and praxeological consequences they entail constitute the crux of our investigation.

Consequently, our documents are heterogeneous and the resulting analysis is impressionistic. We draw from literature that claims, describes, or frames government action, and more broadly proposes a definition of patrimoine or heritage, regardless of intent. We summarize some scientific literature on heritage and [End Page 16] patrimoine (although we would have liked to bridge areas that linguistic imperviousness may have kept apart for English-and French-speaking scholars, the space allowed here and our desire to go beyond a literature review required some shortcuts in the presentation of our analysis) and span the public space of print media and archival records, in particular unpublished texts compounded in the context of preparing an anthology of Quebec heritage and mid-twentieth-century presentations made before the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences, also referred to as the Massey Commission, which was recognized as the first forum for discussion on Canadian culture.

We will explore what the concepts that are currently expressed through the terms patrimoine and heritage, denoted in the past or in other places by other designations such as monument, reveal about the public interest and the forms of action they called for or implied. In this way, we hope to identify the conceptions that these terms evoke in relation to protection, conservation, and transmission of things common or connected with a given time in history.

Admittedly, our body of literature will relate to Quebec more often that to other Canadian provinces and territories. Quebec's historical and linguistic situation, which as we know has changed from a greater permeability to English to a more homogeneous French, facilitates our study in this respect. However, we hope that it will encourage other studies with a focus on other provinces and their own historical and cultural contexts. After all, idiomatic and cultural particularizations in the sub-Canadian context are not a new topic in Canada: in the mid-twentieth century, the Historical Society of Ottawa discussed the importance of adopting a Canadian national anthem (different from "God Save the King") before the Massey Commission in the following terms: "Now as to the words sung in [the "O Canada"], the … French version … is so specifically Quebec-inspired that a translation of it for English use was never attempted." (Historical Society of Ottawa 1949) To date, these anthems have remained separate,¹⁶ although a bilingual version of the latter has commonly been used, in particular in Quebec, where the last verses are sung in English.

The institution of heritage in Canada, which has implemented more frameworks for action than there are provinces and territories,¹⁷ seems to embody a similar telescoping pattern (see Table 1). Outside of the federal government institution, the portrait of Canada's heritage is quite fragmented and we will hardly be able to present a coherent overview, let alone identify equivalent conceptions thereof. For example, as we will see (see Table 2), provincial and territorial legislation in Canada differs according to whether it targets historic/al resources or heritage: Manitoba is in a class of its own with the title "heritage resources"; Nova Scotia refers to "property" [End Page 17] (like Quebec's previous legislation, which was called Cultural Property Act); British Columbia and Prince Edward Island focus on "conservation" and "protection."¹⁸ Within these differences, Quebec stands apart by adding, like UNESCO, the qualifier "cultural" (Cultural Heritage Act).

Of course, these differences, which cannot be dissociated from the organizational and governmental cultural contexts, may also be attributed to the temporality and historicity of each piece of legislation, which we will not analyze in detail within the scope of this article. Nevertheless, and considering that the Canadian federal action and views on heritage add to these provincial and territorial particularities, blending might have occurred between contiguous provinces and territories in such a way that heritage and patrimoine in Canada have become different from what they are elsewhere. We hope to arrive at this kind of perspective, taking into account how heritage, in English, and patrimoine, in French, are generally identified across the world. We will thus try to demonstrate in what way conservation and the notion of "common" manifest differently in the contexts surrounding patrimoine and heritage, and consequently in relation to the issues that research and practice raise nowadays.

What Exactly Is Patrimoine?

In the two years preceding the writing of this article, we found 40,944 occurrences of the word patrimoine and 83,804 occurrences of the word heritage in the Canadian media identified through the Eureka.cc database, which corresponds roughly to the proportion of French speakers (approximately 21%) to English speakers (approximately 57%) in Canada. It must be said that, whereas in France the word patrimoine is frequently used in the notarial or financial sense (which may explain the adding of the qualifier "cultural" such as in the matter at hand), in Quebec, patrimoine is more ordinarily used with the meaning that we refer to in our study.

In the media, unlike patrimoine, which is evoked in a predominantly positive manner (87%), the connotation of heritage is ambivalent: 59% of recorded references are positive and 25% are negative.¹⁹ While social media, television, and radio make up a negligible portion of the patrimoine discussed, at least 1% of occurrences of heritage come from television and radio, indicating that it is mentioned more often in the context of public debate. An in-depth look at the articles reveals that English-speaking media focus on archives, historic events, and grassroots action, whereas in French-speaking media the emphasis is partly on buildings and partly on government action. In French publications, there are mentions of the City of Montreal announcing measures for the protection of Cinéma Impérial (Houde-Roy 2017), the Quebec Culture and Communications minister envisaging expropriation in order to preserve [End Page 18] a "classified national heritage building" (Laliberte 2017, 7), and the Courrier de la Nouvelle-Écosse reporting a complement to the Célébrons notre patrimoine (celebrate our heritage) project thanks to funding from the Department of Canadian Heritage and Nova Scotia's Department of Communities, Culture, and Heritage (LeBlanc 2017, 5).

English publications, on the other hand, report for example on a bilingual New Brunswick reader's concern about the future of a covered bridge, citing Quebec legal protection measures, government action, and government responsibility "for preserving and protecting these bridges in the hands of specialists who know them best" (Boucher 2017, A7). Occurrences of heritage are related to topics that are more numerous and varied than occurrences of patrimoine, which refer to topic clusters: discussion of heritage in local English-language media is seldom reflected in regional and national headlines. Heritage is brought up in the columns of Community Happenings, in the Chronicle Herald, reporting that "the Friends of St. John's Arichat Society [a non-profit society] will assume ownership of the former place of worship [St. John's Anglican Church]" (Chronicle Herald 2017, A4) and under the headline "Granddaughter Keeps Love of Bagpipes Alive" (Ibrahim 2017, A3) or conversely in a large number of articles about tourist sites and foreign heritage conservation initiatives.

By all appearances, in Canada, patrimoine and heritage do not designate the same thing.

The difference between heritage and patrimoine is no doubt as much historical as it is idiomatic. It may be useful to remind ourselves of the two cardinal examples often cited to highlight two extremes of the range of actions warranted by heritage and patrimoine, those of the French architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and the English writer John Ruskin: Viollet-le-Duc addressed monuments through restoration, defined as "putting back in a condition of completeness which could never have existed at any given time" (remettre dans un état complet qui peut n'avoir jamais existé), an approach that Ruskin described as "a lie from beginning to end … the old building is destroyed, and that more totally and mercilessly than if it had sunk into a heap of dust, or melted into a mass of clay." As a matter of fact, between heritage and patrimoine, public policies range from public recognition and integration of common narratives through commemoration or listing, also appropriate for intangible heritage such as events, people, and even traditions and practices, to various degrees of physical intervention to support the conservation of heritage itself for the future, which relates mainly to artifacts and above all buildings. While the first of these two lines of thought has been recently known to dominate the Canadian (federal) most recent initiatives on heritage, in Quebec, in the period between the two world wars, the two [End Page 19] options coexisted within one line of government action through the Commission des monuments historiques, which, as discussed in a previous publication, signposted provincial routes with poles bearing bilingual memorial plaques (Morisset 2009a), concurrently with heavy-handed intervention on built heritage to the extent that commission historians agreed with architects for whom monuments became objects of creative endeavour. In 1929, the commission's minutes translate as follows:

Mr. Auger, architect, submits to the Commission the plans for the restoration of the Saint-Charles de Bellechasse parish church. According to this plan, the current façade of the church will be replaced by a front with two bell towers. It is decided to approve the plans submitted by Mr. Auger.

(Commission des monuments historiques 1929)²⁰

Aside from the debate about the objectives and means of patrimonial conservation, and on a deeper level, heritage and patrimoine reflect divergent conceptions of the historic monument as patrimoine was originally institutionalized in France. Contrary to heritage, which comes from the past and underlies a somewhat passive transmission, patrimoine has to be actively constituted in order to be handed on to posterity and thus calls for an intervention; to some extent, it is the intervention. Whereas heritage is presented as a given or an acquired gain, patrimoine manifests as a construct, which, as we will see later, creates a relationship of interdependence between this patrimoine and those who are in charge of building it. This may not be unrelated to the ambivalence evidenced in the consulted Canadian media that, unlike patrimoine, characterizes heritage as something received, rather than as a target of intervention. Of course, heritage also warrants action. However, as discussed below, the world view that it embodies results in instituting differently the regimes that govern its transmission.

A similar difference characterizes nominally the concepts of heritage and patrimoine in the English-and French-language scientific literature. While Canadian bibliography, in English, in particular, is not very extensive, publications in the world at large that address patrimoine nominally in the French language (therefore in France and Quebec) and heritage in English (mainly in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia) reflect altogether different conceptions. One may thus identify on one side a rigorous examination of patrimoine as official representation in earlier critical heritage studies, following the designation authorised heritage discourse coined by Smith, with a "variety of characteristics that serve to exclude the general public from having a role in heritage," (2006), and on the other side, for example, diachronic analyses conducted in Quebec of a patrimoine being constructed by the "nation state," then by "experts," then by "activists," and nowadays by nearby neighbours. As [End Page 20] a matter of fact, in French Canada, very few scholars seem interested in characterizing an "official" versus "unofficial" discourse, or in denouncing, as Lowenthal did in 1998, the "spoils of history" and "the cult of heritage … debasing the 'true past' for greedy ends."

Nonetheless, since the 1980s there has been a very powerful "heritage studies" current in France and in French, with a plethora of articles, and books, and dissertations written in France about patrimoine, its ties to memory and its making, referred to, in French, as patrimonialisation, whose idiomatic distinctiveness and uniqueness was underscored by Swenson (2007) as being specific to the French language.²¹ As patrimoine has to be actively constituted, the constructivist study of its making seems normal. But beyond that simple difference, could Lowenthal's "famous critiques" (Harrison 2013, 6) and their link with what we now label critical heritage studies be at all related to patrimoine penetrating into heritage as evoked earlier? What if patrimoine specifically allowed the institution of such transnational patrimoine networks, initiated in France?

It should be noted that a dominant trend in critical heritage studies focuses on UNESCO and world heritage, which is, we would argue, based on the idea of the "responsibility of the present time" inherent to the definition of patrimoine. Historically, in Canada, while UNESCO has not been much discussed in English, in French it has, specifically at the time of its establishment in the 1940s, raised several reservations about the expansionistic consequences of such a making of an "international responsibility." On behalf of the Société historique de Montréal, Olivier Maurault pointed out before the Massey Commission that "UNESCO wants to centralize everything" (Montreal Historical Society [Société historique de Montréal] 1949), and the Société historique de Québec, when asked to comment, opined that it was in Canada's best interest to "make its important cultural assets, as well as the principles that are at the root of its conceptions of culture and education, known abroad," and explained:

UNESCO is accused of wanting to have control over Member States' cultural activities. Some fear that it might be used to advance pernicious doctrines, and many believe that ultimately, the funds placed at its disposal might serve only to develop unrealistic and costly projects.

(Société historique de Québec 1949, 706)²²

UNESCO, as we know, has been based in Paris since its birth, and became ensconced there with the building of its headquarters, in 1958. Historian Chloé Maurel (2010) has described the rivalries between French and English that marked the period stretching from the 1940s to the 1970s, when France's UNESCO [End Page 21] personnel came to represent twice the requisite quota (according to Maurel 2010). This was when the Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (the World Heritage Convention) was prepared and first ratified. It is safe to say that it reflects both the "culture mondiale unique" (single world culture) promoted by French intellectuals associated with the League of Nations, and the "responsibility of the present time" inherent in the word patrimoine. In other words, there does seem to be at least as much patrimoine as there is heritage in the globalization of some heritage practices and the standardization of some legislative frameworks for governmental action (such as the Venice Charter; Berliner and Bortolotto 2013), as also seems to be the case with respect to the epistemology of critical heritage studies, focusing on the UNESCO-defined heritage/patrimoine dichotomy. Beyond the Viollet-le-Duc/Ruskin difference, how is that dichotomy characterized and what does it imply if patrimoine is to come into contact with heritage?

While there are relatively few English writings about heritage from a constructivist perspective before the development of post-colonial studies and of the "famous critiques," we do find, in the United States, Hosmer's Presence of the Past, as of 1965, and its sequel, Preservation Comes of Age, published in 1981. As is the case for most writings on heritage besides technical approaches to restoration and prior to the advent of critical heritage studies per se, these fall within the category of "histories of preservation (Murtagh 2006; Rothman 1989)." More specifically, Hosmer's books are "histories of the preservation movement." Hosmer's introduction is of special interest here, since it reminds the reader of a time when "our country was [not] directly influenced from abroad; … our own preservationists, who were relatively insulated from foreign ideas, treated old buildings in whatever manner they thought best" (Hosmer 1965, 25). Moreover, Hosmer's emphasis is on society: it is a history of people documented by numerous interviews that lead to the observation that "the American preservation movement appears to have been a truly grass-root effort" (21) and "reached an apex, with people finding old neighborhoods to be good places to live" (Hosmer 1981, 1064).

Both from an ontological and an epistemological point of view, this can be contrasted with the patrimoine and its literature, starting with what is one of the first extensive histories of preservation in France: La vie des monuments français by Léon²³ (The Life of French Monuments; published in 1951, after a previous essay in 1917). Léon focused on the Middle Ages as the starting point for the idea to "maintain" (he uses the word conserver) what he organically names "monuments"—that is, monuments historiques, which represent the core business of patrimoine in France. But he also brings into the history of the idea to maintain (and not of the people who maintained) the notion of "vandalizing" based on the use of the word vandalisme by [End Page 22] Henri Grégoire in 1794, itself extended by Léon as far back as Greek antiquity, to which he attributes not yet the idea of maintaining, but rather the origins of medieval architecture, as reflecting what would later ignite the spark to "maintain." In this regard, Léon cites Viollet-le-Duc: "Le parthénon et Notre-Dame, c'est papa et maman" (the parthenon and Notre-Dame are like mom and dad).

Léon inaugurates a vast tradition, which would definitely mark the French literature and the patrimoine. While most "histories of preservation" in English (both in the UK and in the United States, despite the obvious differences between the two regions, as with other English-speaking countries) roughly start with the twentieth century, from then on, the French historiography would go back much further in time. This could explain how we went from Hosmer and Léon to Lowenthal's dubious heritage, or to Harrison's "all-pervasive piling up of the past" (2013, 3).²⁴ Through a body of French literature, which established that worldwide heritage was historically dominated by Western Europe, patrimoine seems to have penetrated our mindsets to the point that when we talk about heritage, we in fact talk about patrimoine as it developed in France as an object of knowledge, with its connection, according to Michel Foucault's writings, to power and social control.

A Historiography Marked by a Teleology of Patrimoine

By the 1970s, it had become a commonplace to trace the birth of heritage preservation to France and the Révolution—the French Revolution of 1789.²⁵ That knowledge about the French tradition of Monuments historiques, then of heritage, became a commonplace in the plethora of French books on patrimoine, before and after they shifted to the use of the word patrimoine and then of patrimonialisation in place of "monuments." This is summarized in many ways by Choay in L'allégorie du patrimoine, published in 1992 (and translated into English, an exceptional occurrence, in 2001):

My examples are often borrowed from France. They are nonetheless exemplary: as a European invention, the historical heritage (in French: le patrimoine historique) partakes of the same mentality in all the countries of Europe. To the extent that it has become a global institution, it eventually confronts all the countries of the world with the same questions and the same urgencies.

(Choay 1992, 25)

Rooted in this notion of the historic monument, the French literature on patrimoine can be separated into three general bodies. One quite recent study analyzes intangible heritage, especially in the wake of the much-discussed creation of an [End Page 23] ethnology division within the department of culture in the French government. Another refers to patrimoine in terms of "heritage development,"that is, in economic terms. A third, by far the most important with respect to volume, begins in the 1980s, around the bicentenary of the French Revolution. This literature expanded quickly in the 1990s, coinciding with, and perhaps stemming from, the entry into force of the Treaty of Maastricht. It picks up where Léon's La vie des monuments français left the historiography and offers histories of heritage, mainly in France. But, starting with Choay in 1992, a subtle shift occurs. Choay's Invention of the Historic Monument, for example, starts in 1420. However, she is not seeking traces of the vandalisme that would eventually cause a safeguarding reaction. Choay asserts that the historic monument was born in 1420, that is, around the same time as those medieval monuments said (later) to have been saved (at a later date) by the Service des monuments historiques in France. But Choay's 1420 is not in France: "The birth of the historic monument can be located in Rome around the year 1420" (2001, 17).

The vast majority of publications in French-speaking Europe adopt a chronology of that sort, or at least a point of view reflecting this historical perspective. Examples like Andrieux's (1997), Auduc's (2008), Bercé's (2000), Davallon's (2006), Debray's (1999), Heinich's (2014), Lang's (2014), Laurent's (2003), Leniaud's (2002), Poulot's (2006), Rousso's (2003), and so on can be found in our reference list. Although it never neglects the French Revolution as a turning point in the history of patrimoine, this historiography extends far beyond the eighteenth century and the boundaries of France, as it was validated by the republishing in 1994 of an article by Babelon and Chastel, La notion de patrimoine (The Notion of Heritage), which traces back the use of the word patrimoine to the Latin patrimonium.

As these constructivist histories of patrimoine are all characterized by the assimilation of said patrimoine by the Service des Monuments historiques (historic monuments department) created in 1830, they also have in common the continuity they trace from that period to the patrimoine of today and their firm intention to date a coherent history of patrimoine, which may start in Rome, but inevitably ends in France. Patrimoine ends up encompassing much broader origins beneath what turns out to be described, implicitly at least, as a French phenomenon.

This process of recapture is best exemplified by a more recent French anthology, published in 2009 and entitled Le patrimoine en question: Anthologie pour un combat (Heritage in Question: Anthology for a Struggle; Choay 2009). Mostly representing a collection of ancient texts, the book nevertheless includes an introduction of interest here, as it defines the monument historique, as a synonym of patrimoine, by referring to the Austrian art historian Aloïs Riegl ([1903] 1984), the Latin monumetum, Saint [End Page 24] Peter's Basilica in Rome, and the Shinto sanctuaries in Japan. In French, the foundations of patrimoine are to be found in France, or at least in the histories from which the notion of monument stems. Patrimoine is studied as a narrative construction, as patrimonialisation defines it, but a construction that can be accessed by way of the realm of France. The anthology is composed of texts by, notably, Henri Suger (France, 1081–1151); Bracciolini (Italy, 1390–1459); Pius II (Italy, 1405–1464); and Raphael (Italy, 1483–1520); alongside Quatremère de Quincy (France, 1755–1849); Victor Hugo (1802–1885); John Ruskin (England, 1819–1900); Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879); Gustavo Giovannoni (Italy, 1873–1947); André Malraux (1901–1976); the Venice Charter; and, last but not least, the 1972 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Whether confined to France, or rooted in the quattrocento or in Greek antiquity, this teleology leads to a purpose, even unconscious in each of the steps taken. As is the case for the French Revolution in the modern history of France, it participates in the establishment of a nation-state that, in turn, draws upon ancient roots and, crucially, a tradition (Boulad-Ayoub 2012). It establishes an institution, an act that relies on tradition. And this institution happens to bear the same name as an object, even translated the same way in other languages: Monuments historiques.

One recent French publication on heritage (Bady et al. 2013) cannot be clearer in this regard. Entitled "1913," it traces a history, not of monuments, nor of people making monuments, but rather the history of the law on monuments (which its publication in 2013 intends to commemorate), that is, of the expression of the centennial institution, more especially of the institution as it is understood in French and as it frames a social order. Patrimoine is an institution, and in this form it has been contaminating heritage and, obviously, historic monuments.

The Patrimoine and Its Metalanguage

Although the patrimoine of Quebec is not necessarily, or not quite, the same as France's, the literature produced in this country is nonetheless essential to a study such as ours for two reasons: on the one hand, it is both more substantial and often older, and, on the other hand, the legislative frameworks of Quebec government action stemming from the distinct foundations that we have evoked have throughout the twentieth century drawn closer to French legislation. Understanding patrimoine and its influence, including on the Canadian or North American imprint of heritage onto Quebec conceptions, entails getting a grasp of this patrimoine of France that was becoming increasingly influential from the middle of the twentieth century onwards, perhaps even earlier. [End Page 25]

To summarize what we have seen until now, it could be said that, contrary to what Ruskin might have thought in the nineteenth century, patrimoine is not a dubious concept, or is not merely dubious, because of some French fraudulent will to intervene on the passage of time and on the "relics" it leaves behind for our delectation or our yearning for nostalgia. As a matter of fact, as we will see further on, patrimoine is not about a specific object, be it a monument or a relic. For instance, the text of Quebec's 1922 Act to Ensure the Preservation of Monuments of Objects of Historic or Artistic Interest / Loi sur les monuments et les objets d'art ayant une valeur historique ou artistique²⁶ originally aimed at explaining what the state was to do with the power that the law gave it to intervene with respect to the said monuments and objects, French law, at the time, concentrated on describing all the parts of the apparatus of the Monuments historiques and the function of each in relation to the others. However, neither Quebec law nor the corresponding French legislation clearly defined a historic monument, or heritage, or patrimoine, because such definitions were a given: if the item is under the control of the Monuments historiques, it is an historic monument, as if it is under the aegis of the institution patrimoniale, it is patrimoine. Consequently, patrimoine can hardly be isolated as a sole political project, because it is an institution that is by definition immanent. Patrimoine, as an institution, transcends material existence and goes beyond a single individual or collective experience. This is why patrimonialisation does not distinguish between the past and the present: patrimoine is a transcendent institution.

The best illustration we can find of this fact is already known in English, since 46 of its 132 articles were translated (see Petitier 1989, 103–10) under the title Realms of Memory, the Lieux de mémoire, edited by Nora (1992) and first published in France, in 1984²⁷ when Lowenthal was writing The Past is a Foreign Country (1985). Nora inaugurated what would be a great quest around collective and public memory in France, just before the bicentenary of the French Revolution, that founding event in the universe of patrimoine. "Lieux" refers here to patrimoine in French as it is traditionally understood, that is, in terms of the localized, built, and very material monument historique. But the real subject of the books is not such material lieux (places) or mémoire (memory) per se, as is shown by the titles of its three volumes. They could have been West France, East France, and South France, if it had, in fact, been about places; the title could have referred to this or that century if the work had been about memory, or anything other than a transcendent institution, in this case the institution responsible for the production of memory. The three titles of the Lieux de mémoire volumes are, in fact, The Nation, The Republic, and The Frances.²⁸

Moreover, besides the fact that patrimoine goes far beyond any consideration of a given object, the French word patrimonialisation implies uses—be they political, [End Page 26] economic or other—in specific ways. The French conception of patrimoine as an institution serves to distinguish the French body of literature from the English corpus through another characteristic, which also necessarily draws upon a certain acceptance of Viollet-le-Duc's views on monuments (thus on patrimoine): the French implicitly acknowledge patrimonialisation as a political instrument. It is thus without qualms that a rehabilitation plan for the Champs de bataille nationaux (on the Plains of Abraham, in Quebec City) was submitted by French-speaking Quebec stakeholders "in order to better express, and cultivate on a large scale, a true national spirit by enhancing its tourist appeal in the form of various evocative manifestations that can be materialized from history" (Georges Morisset 1949).²⁹ In archival material as in literature, the political uses of heritage denounced in English (see, for instance, Harrison 2009; Kaufman 2009; Littler and Naidoo 2005; Peacock and Rizzo 2008) are far less discussed in French than in English, and almost never in French before the tail end of the 1990s. It is as if these uses, be they political or economic, were an established fact, if not always in the French-speaking world, at least in France, and as such are beyond discussion.

It is true that in recent years, particularly with the emergence of critical heritage studies and through a disciplinary shift of heritage studies toward anthropology, some études patrimoniales (studies of patrimoine) (among others Le Goff 1998; Jeudy 2008; Rautenberg 2003; Veschambre 2008) have joined the nascent field that Smith has characterized as stemming from a preoccupation with uses of heritage in politics (Smith 2012), especially in the wake of UNESCO's "cultural diversity" projects and endeavours. With respect to this most recent trend, largely focusing on the uses of a given object, some Quebec publications in French have been notable precursors, as they have scrutinized the ways in which heritage serves political ends, very much in line with studies on commemoration. As a matter of fact, these francophone bodies of study stem from a certain anglophone influence on the conception of patrimoine in Quebec (Gordon 2001), as reflected in the particularities of Quebec's first law on heritage, as well as Quebeckers' historical predilection for the word reliques (synonymous with the English word relics), which we have documented in a previous study (Morisset 2009a), and most probably, as we will see, the most recent of Quebec's law on patrimoine culturel (Cultural Heritage Act).

But the briefs presented in English in the 1940s to the Massey Commission illustrate both a deeper difference and the reasons for such critiques of the uses of heritage, as is corroborated by Lowenthal (1985, 328) denouncing the "evil" jeopardization of "relics" that invalidates heritage itself, for, "We must concede the ancients their place … But their place is not simply back there, in a separate and foreign country; it is assimilated in ourselves." While French briefs acknowledge and even encourage such uses, we can read for example the Historical and Scientific Society of [End Page 27] Manitoba, proud to act as "one of the mediums for increasing the interest of Canadians in their heritage." (Historical and Scientific Society of Manitoba 1949, 159) As a matter of fact, heritage rests in people acknowledging or promoting their inheritance, and as such can be seen as causing harm to people when it is misused. On the other hand, patrimoine implies, not people but rather artifacts or practices that acquire significance from the institution in which they are absorbed, mainly, as we shall see, through the status that they are given, which are still predominant in the most recent Quebec Cultural Heritage Act. If we were to borrow from Barthes's (1957) explanatory scheme of cultural myths³⁰ to grasp these connotations (see fig. 1), we might say that while the material form of this heritage or this patrimoine signifies something that has to be preserved or transmitted in some way, patrimoine involves status whereas heritage involves people, both status and people acting as concepts through which a second-order sign is built, that of the institution in the case of patrimoine, which we could differentiate, as we shall soon see, from that of the community, as in the case of heritage.

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Figure 1.

Patrimoine and heritage as myths. Based on Roland Barthes (1957).

This relation to the concept of status sets patrimoine apart, if only in reference to the quotation from Gérard Morisset in the introduction of this article, where monument historique is defined by the classification to which it should be subject. In this respect, the regimes of transmission of patrimoine and heritage also vary greatly.

Status versus People: Different Frameworks

Within Canada, Quebec's body of heritage is a compelling demonstration of patrimoine's defining feature, which is to be the expression (or a signifier, to use Barthes's terms) of an institution, namely, as we will see shortly, through classement, thus constituting a gesture translating action and legal status at once. Although its numbers [End Page 28]

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Table 1.

Provincial, Federal, and Municipal Places Recognized as Heritage in Canada (numbers extracted from CHP)*

translate a more complex structure than we can present within the scope of this study, the Répertoire du patrimoine culturel du Québec (Quebec Register of Cultural Heritage) (2017) contains no less than 15,296 buildings recognized under the provincial act, with 1,546 by the Ministère de la Culture et des Communications and 5,481 by municipalities; 8,669 buildings are part of larger sites referred to as "arrondissements historiques" (historic districts) until 2012 and as "sites patrimoniaux déclarés" (declared heritage sites) since 2012. These, together with the buildings recognized by the federal government, represent an unusual figure; as Table 1 shows, the likelihood of coming across a listed building is greater in Quebec than it is elsewhere in Canada, and even more so a building with legal protection status. Although it does not produce a complete picture,³¹ as its difference in numbers with the Répertoire du patrimoine culturel du Québec shows, the Canadian Register of Historic Places allows us to compare the situation in Quebec with the rest of Canada, in so far as it provides a general impression of the will of the country's respective authorities to collaborate with the federal initiative that it represents. Called Canada's Historic Places, Lieux patrimoniaux canadiens [End Page 29] in French (not Canada's Heritage Places, nor lieux historiques du Canada as would be expected in direct translations), the register counts a total of 10,532 historic places recognized³² by provincial, territorial, or municipal governments under a provincial or territorial legislation and 2,515 historic places recognized by the federal government. British Columbia, New Brunswick, Quebec, and Ontario have, in absolute figures, the greatest number of provincial historic places; among these four provinces, New Brunswick has significantly fewer "federal" places, Alberta ranking fourth in this classification. However, in relation to population density, the order of rating is different: among provinces, Quebec comes first with a population density among the lowest and a larger number of historic places. If we combine provincial and federal recognition, Quebec has almost twice as many historic places as Saskatchewan, which rates second. There does not seem to be a correlation between the number of recognitions and the dates of enactment of pioneering provincial legislation in this regard.

However, this heightened disposition toward granting patrimoine status is not necessarily indicative of the reality of heritage conservation, nor of who is responsible for it or mobilized in it. In Canada, we see that heritage also proceeds from the scale of the government action, ranging from (multi-level) national recognition (by a distant institution) to programs developed and implemented locally, at least in some regions. A quick glance at the provincial pieces of legislation, especially the earlier ones (see Table 2), also shows a growing tendency toward the constitution of a body of experts (centralized commissions and committees, for example) whose role is to determine the heritage nature of elements and the effects that they may be subject to.³³ Such shifts confirm that although patrimoine and heritage sometimes seem to converge, they do not consistently warrant the same action throughout the country, nor at the same point in history.

Former Quebec legislation, similarly to most provincial laws relating to heritage that have since come into force within the division of powers and jurisdiction between federal and provincial levels of government laid out in the Canadian constitution, focused chiefly on granting fairly broad intervention powers to the government in matters of monitoring and prohibition of works that are likely to alter components deemed as heritage, including elements that are part of private property, on the basis of coercion principles which appeared relatively late, that is, in 1957 in Quebec and more recently in most of Canada. This corresponds to what continues to be referred to as classification (classement; or the act of classifying, classer) in France and Quebec, and in Gérard Morisset's definition that refers explicitly to France. This action hardly corresponds, especially historically, to designations and other listings in English, and even to the pre-legislation situation in Quebec, when the views of historical societies and similar local associations decided on what could be seen as monuments or patrimoine. [End Page 30]

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Table 2.

Earlier and Present Legislation in Provinces and Territories

[End Page 31]

Moreover, whatever the historicity of legislation, we note that in addition to the legislation on heritage in the strictest sense, a number of provinces have passed complementary laws to clarify and specify lines of government action in a framework that is not associated with culture. Cases in point are the Ontario Planning Act, Alberta's Main Street Program, and to a lesser degree Quebec legal frameworks: following the 1985 Cultural Property Act that, pursuant to the Act Respecting Land Use Planning and Development, gave municipal authorities jurisdiction to act on matters of heritage protection on the territory of their municipality, the Cultural Heritage Act henceforth grants municipalities jurisdiction to take action in regards to heritage designated as such by the federal government. In the French-speaking world, Quebec's situation is in stark contrast to France's, where legislative amendments with a potential to grant a certain degree of autonomy to municipalities in relation to some designated heritage components raised an outcry in the country in 2016 against what was perceived as condoning the dis-memberment of the state.

Although, as we saw previously, the literature would seem to show that heritage (and its critiques) remains in keeping with Ruskin's view and patrimoine is still in line with Viollet-le-Duc's, a glance at the implications of heritage and patrimoine through the involvement of status and the constitution of a body of experts, that is, on the modulations of the institution at stake, tends to unveil differences between the means of government action and, hence, a differentiation of the action itself and its purposes. Together with our previous considerations on ontological and epistemological differences between heritage and patrimoine, the range of situations in Canada, and the conjunction of heritage and patrimoine at various levels on the Canadian scene, further explain what distinguishes patrimoine from heritage and how that made possible its hegemonic expansion.

From Institution to Exclusion: Patrimoine as a Social Order

While more studies would be needed to ascertain whether it happened through UNESCO, as a consequence of the concept's somewhat expansionist foundational ideology, or as a result of government action, patrimoine and patrimonialisation have to some extent contaminated heritage. A simple glance at current laws and actions on heritage, notably in English-speaking Canada, shows that Ruskin lost his battle against restoration à la française and similar attempts to intervene upon the passage of time: most affirm the responsibility of stakeholders (we shall look at whom) in the active preservation of heritage, even by means of restitution, which is quite different from just inheriting and passing things on to descendants intact. [End Page 32]

While UNESCO's initiatives in the field, from the Abu Simbel campaign to conversations on the rebuilding of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, have been widely discussed, we should recall that serious interventions to counteract time or its effects on heritage were already widespread in English-speaking America when heritage was still a private-sector matter, as the restoration of Williamsburg, supported by John D. Rockefeller, exemplifies. However, they seem to have become widespread in Canada with the growth of government action on heritage in the country. While the Quebec City zoo and the project of erecting an open-air museum in Montreal to commemorate the third centennial of the founding of Ville-Marie (Morisset 2011, 119–59) are early examples of heritage and patrimoine matters beyond Ruskin's mindset, in Canada, so are Fort Malden, Ontario, and Fort Langley, British Columbia, (re)constructed in the 1940s and 1950s following initiatives by local heritage groups and with the co-operation of the federal Historic Sites and Monuments Board; Prince of Wale's Fort, in Manitoba; the Port-Royal Habitation, in Nova Scotia; and, later, in the 1960s, Louisbourg, also in Nova Scotia. All these heritage sites have basically been recreated under the supervision of the Canadian government's agency in charge of heritage.

Taylor (1990, 121) writes (in English) that these Canadian endeavours "can be considered to be more like museum [initiatives] than exercises in historic conservation." They nonetheless are representative of Canadian government action in heritage, and even of the conceptions of some local groups scattered across Canada, operating both in English and in French, during a segment of the twentieth century. However, at a more provincial or local level, it is also significant that this Canadian government action has triggered very different responses: among most of the briefs submitted to the Massey Commission, very few of those written in English even refer to the Historic Sites and Monuments Board—the commission chair even reported a criticism from the Prairie provinces decrying the unsuitable choices made by the board as opposed to the appropriateness of those that would have been made locally.³⁴ Meanwhile, some French-language briefs describe in great detail how this government action should be expanded and receive sufficient public funding. The brief presented (in French) by the Société historique de Québec explicitly expresses the need for government action in heritage, especially concerning built heritage:

It is hardly bold to say that in the area of the systematic preservation of historical memories, everything remains to be done in Canada. … Valuable historical sites deserve to be developed; buildings of historical or architectural value should be preserved; and artistic objects are regularly destroyed or exported abroad. … [End Page 33]

These riches have an undeniable cultural value, and are all the more valuable because they cannot be replaced. They belong to the entire Canadian nation. We are aware that their preservation through classification is a provincial responsibility. Private initiative can play only a very limited role in the conservation of this cultural capital. [This problem …] could be solved by way of an agreement and through collaboration between the concerned governments.

(Société historique de Québec 1949)³⁵

Through the government action that their process requires, these kinds of endeavours are closer to what is described as patrimoine, whether they are referring directly to patrimoine, as in the Société historique's brief, or incorporating the principle of government intervention that seems to have been adopted more promptly by the Canadian Historic Sites and Monuments Board. Moreover, the uses and means that patrimoine and patrimonialisation so imply further explain the critiques raised in English, from a Ruskinian-heritage point of view, but even more since the questions of authenticity addressed in Ruskinian debates on restoration have given way, in our postcolonial context, to questions of representativeness and exclusion. As we saw, it is in such a line of thought that France switched from monument historique (historic monument) to patrimoine, reportedly in order to seem inclusive to a broader public, which would feel shut out by the internal jargon of the Monuments historiques. And this is precisely how patrimoine integrated the institutional process and the social order that mark so clearly the difference between media narratives in Canada and government action on patrimoine and on heritage through social events: while rhetorically based on the same notion of commonality that it shares with heritage, patrimoine is exclusive by nature.

This might call for a more precise definition of the French term institution: an institution is a social relationship system endowed with stability through the passage of time. The definition of the English term institution is not exactly the same, with institution referring also to a social order, which influences people's behaviour, but broadly speaking, may or may not address the passage of time or the tradition that testifies to it. Hence the importance of the history of patrimonialisation in French and the argument about the distant roots of what is now precisely called, in common language, le temps long du patrimoine.

Without harking back to Reinhardt Kosselleck (2004), Maurice Halbwachs (1925), or even to Karl Marx ([1895] 1984), and besides the narratives of time and history inherent in the term institution, we can draw on Louis Althusser to better grasp this social order in France, as he described it, in 1970, to be anchored by "Ideological State Apparatuses" that embody it (and the exercise of power characteristic of each [End Page 34] faction in the social order) in a said epoch or period of time. Without embracing Althusser's whole theoretical frame, we can surely concur that patrimoine is (or has become) one of these apparatuses. It gives power to whomever seizes it and, first and foremost, to the institution that maintains the social relationship system according to its order and, also thanks to patrimoine, through the passage of time. As we have seen, this is how patrimoine involves status, whereas heritage involves people. Given the status upon which it is based, patrimoine engenders an intercessor that delineates the social order, excluding all those simply in its thrall.

To continue with this sort of analogy, we can use Krzysztof Pomian's (2003) metaphor picturing patrimoine (more precisely collections, in this case) as a sacrifice, being extracted from the sphere of utilitarian activities to be passed on to invisible beings known to inhabit the hereafter. As a matter of fact, the abundance of references to religious rites when we speak in French of patrimoine inspires an analogy of simple heuristic value. The contrast between patrimoine and heritage could be seen like that between (ornate) Roman Catholic churches and their (bare) Protestant counterparts. The church decor embodies this distinction, as does the Roman Catholic priest, defined in most dictionaries by referencing, precisely according to tradition and the hierarchy of the early Christian Church, "as an intermediary between deity and worshipers." This is very different from the typical definition of the Protestant pastor, who, according to Webster's, is an individual in charge of a parish, a church, a congregation, or a community.

In one of the social orders in question here, an intercessor is required to access patrimoine. Contrary to the heritage described in the mid-twentieth century by the Historical Society of Toronto, for whom "a better understanding of Canada's past necessarily implies a return to local historical societies and a drawing from the past of small villages and towns in order to complete this understanding of the Canadian past," (Father J.H. Lévesque, Montreal Historical Society 1949) patrimoine does not arise from the communion between people and their inheritance. Patrimoine embodies a social relationship system organized by the act of intercession, expressed according to an ideology and a system of values validated by history and through a status proclaimed by an expert. This process is apparent in the opening quotation of this article where Gérard Morisset defines monument by the status he would give to it, or, outside the realm of historic monuments, when the French Canadian folklorist Madeleine Doyon demands that the government differentiate authentic folklore (folklore authentique) from folklore generated by sentimental souls (personnes sentimentales), asserting, to this end, that "we count on specialists to ascertain the authenticity of folklore traits to be used in certain events or displays" (Doyon 1949, 893). This very intercession process has dominated the main corpus of French literature on [End Page 35] patrimonialisation and has also become part of twenty-first century writing, which has integrated museum studies and patrimonialisation as a communication process (Poulot 2001).

This is how patrimoine acts as an ideological state apparatus in the French (and, one might say, culturally Catholic) world³⁶ and may explain why the founders of the Archives de folklore, in Quebec, told the Massey Commission, to general surprise, that they were the only experts of their kind in America to be ensconced in academia and tied to a university (Doyon 1949). Hence the French concept of patrimoine cannot be understood outside of the interceding "institution," rooted in a historical tradition before and beyond the French Revolution as a sort of postcolonial translation of the Siècle des Lumières and organizing a social order around knowledge held by an expert who enables the state, or some other authority, to decide for the people. As an institution, as an ideological state apparatus, patrimoine serves to perpetuate this hierarchy.

This could also explain how patrimoine seems to have penetrated the Canadian (federal) government action in its early stages, as it was precisely needing to define a state apparatus, and moreover how patrimoine got transposed into so many geographical and political contexts, contaminating other terminology as it has the word heritage. It also surely illustrates why patrimoine, while almost systematically crying out, as it were, for government action (as opposed to being related to this or that community), can seem of dubious value, or Eurocentric to say the least. However, in this line, the Quebec situation testifies to an interesting particularity: while Quebec's patrimonial studies (études patrimoniales) differ from studies of the "authorised heritage discourse" and from the official/non-official paradigm behind it, neighborhood heritage (patrimoine de proximité) and related concepts that some Quebec authors have been describing, most probably in a line of thought closer to heritage than patrimoine, correspond to what authors in France refer to as "small heritage" (as opposed to grand heritage?) and to "heritage appropriated by non-governmental organizations" (patrimoine saisi par les associations) (Glevarec and Saez 2002), that is, renegade bodies outside the Monuments historiques institution per se. French patrimoine is "authorised" by definition.

Commonality, Property and Public Value

Thus, patrimoine, however it is defined by the active constitution and physical intervention it calls for, is much less concerned with objects and the past than with social order—by definition rooted in the culture of the place where such an order prevails—dominated by the Monuments historiques expert (the intercessor) and validated by [End Page 36] the tradition (le temps long du patrimoine) of patrimonialisation in France. That patrimoine or the monument historique seem centred on some artifact is just a pretext, as is the decor in the Roman Catholic Church: it validates the intercession process along with the intercessor. Hence, the object embodying this patrimoine is interchangeable, be it music or a monument, as long as it sustains the process of intercession and the institution that regulates it: in this light, the emergence of patrimoine immatériel, and quite probably of "intangible heritage," is a case of duplication (of an institution) more than an act of inclusion (of things and conceptions). In any case, this is why one can manipulate the object, the artifact, the castle, or whatever, and bandy it back and forth from the nineteenth to the thirteenth century: its material form is of no importance in the social order that it serves.

By moving, as we do, from the literal meaning of words to their metalanguage, and then to the connotations which their use confers on them, we see in Table 2 that this pre-eminence of intercession on its object in the case of patrimoine temporally distances it from the situation of the "resources" identified in the title of six provincial or territorial heritage laws in Canada, that of Manitoba (where such resources are translated in French as "richesses du patrimoine"), the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nunavut, and Alberta. As a matter of fact, even where it is referenced as "historic," heritage can be considered initially as a resource or as the subject of protection or conservation measures. In general, as the legislation titles in Table 2 show, the word heritage tends to replace the phrase historic site or variations thereof and the notion of property. Although this may be corroborating the trend toward uniformization that we have already mentioned, it most probably indicates a bi-directional sub-Canadian linguistic contamination between French and English inasmuch as "heritage" appeared in the title of several pieces of provincial legislation long before patrimoine was used in Quebec legislation, and even prior to its becoming established as a common term in France. Such linguistic contamination is all the more plausible considering the fact that aside from the particularities of the 1922 Quebec Historic or Artistic Monuments Act that we have already set in contrast to the French legislation, certain links have been noted between Quebec legislation and legislation found elsewhere on the continent throughout history and in regards to the objectives of heritage-focused government action. In 1919, notary Gustave Baudouin advocated investing funds toward saving "monuments d'un caractère historique" (monuments with historical character) from the "devastation" (désolation) that they were subject to and proposed looking into what legislation and means were implemented in the United States where he considered that the situation relating to heritage had been considerably improved, and which seemed to be the country that provided the most analogies with Quebec in this and other respects (Baudouin 1919, 33).³⁷ [End Page 37]

This continental perspective should not be ignored, as it is most probably how the "resources" got discussed, if not necessarily on the patrimoine scene, at least on the heritage scene in Canada. While it is increasingly used in economic studies in French, such as those of Xavier Greffe (2003, 29–38), the term resources is in fact historically quite a bit more common in English and in North America, as evidenced in the mid-twentieth century by the creation of the Department of Resources and Development within the Government of Canada, under whose auspices we find the Historic Sites and Monuments Board, responsible for federal government action in matters of heritage. As it is also well known, the main model for this, the US National Parks Service, remains to this day infused with the same principle of resource management that frames governmental action with regard to parks and monuments viewed from the same perspective, that of education and recreation.³⁸ This mission was similarly reflected in the conception of heritage expressed by the English-speaking and bilingual stakeholders of the Montreal scene who presented the Antiquarian and Numismatic Society of Montreal's perception of the role of the museum to the Massey Commission as being to "engender in the people who visit our Museum the love of their country, the historical value of the country [and as such … ] they will tend to be perhaps better citizens" (1949, 838).

This notion of "resource," in so far as it includes operating and development policies, was also omnipresent in Quebec, in French, in the 1930s and 1940s, no doubt given the influence of the anglophone context, which tended to wane thereafter. Thus the ethnologist and folklorist Marius Barbeau, stated in 1936 that

rustic art, sculpture, knick-knacks, and pottery for sale here would not be imported from Switzerland, Germany, or Japan, as they usually are for our counters; they would instead be fashioned by our artisans. And there are as many as one wants, if only one takes the trouble to look for them or to encourage the industry. There would also be flannels and doors. Why not take advantage of this other provincial resource?

(Barbeau 1937)

Admittedly, this use of "resource" in a French discourse in Quebec cannot be dissociated from the issues linked to such a term in the context of institutional apparatus; given its educational dimensions, a resource fosters expertise, since, as the historian Victor Morin argued before the Massey Commission, "le peuple est un grand enfant" ("the nation's people are in fact big children) (Antiquarian and Numismatic Society of Montreal 1949). This is the reason why the Quebec government integrated works of art, libraries, and archives into the inventory of natural resources (ressources naturelles), a process launched in the 1930s, because "nations and individuals … have a heritage [patrimoine in the original] which the state must attempt to not only [End Page 38] conserve, but also to increase. … Our people, a minority, in particular can only look toward the future with confidence if it is well informed about its past, its inherent worth, and the possibilities that it carries within itself" (Bruchési 1939).³⁹ Priest and historian Albert Tessier (1939) gives further precision on these "natural resources," assimilated to a "capital":

One of the first values in the hierarchical scale of our natural resources. The state of our soul depends to a large extent on the intensive use of this material wealth … and as the solving of almost all our problems (social, economic, political, etc.) is a direct function of our personality, of the state of our soul, it follows that the intense exploitation of our historical capital becomes a duty of prime importance, a duty which the civil authority has no right to shirk. …

But what is the essential difference between the government-run national parks used for fishing and hunting … and the proposed historic parks? In one case, we develop the outdoor-sports capital; in the other, we reveal a little of our rich historical capital. …

We will provide just a few suggestions in passing. What needs to be remembered is the exceptional scope of an extensive revaluation of our historical capital. By creating a couple a year, in five or six years, we could have a number of open-air museum parks that would transform the face and atmosphere of our province. A project of this magnitude cannot be improvised. It presupposes a thoughtful assessment, an analysis of the various possibilities offered by our regions, so as to cover almost the entire province; it would be necessary for each region to have a park, with its own original features, in order to avoid monotony and tedious repetitions.

(Tessier 1939)⁴⁰

Such an appropriation of patrimoine in the more North American resource register can illustrate how, without completely opposing it, this resource departs from the pre-eminent notion of preservation into another application of patrimoine, that of a good or property disseminated through the development of government action in the area of heritage after the Second World War.⁴¹ Nevertheless, that notion of "property" is also undoubtedly linked to the origins of the French institution of the Monuments historiques and its associations with confiscations during the French Revolution. In other words, the notion of property is inherent to that of patrimoine and it seems to have become increasingly antagonistic with resource, at least in French Canada.

As a matter of fact, unlike a resource (to be exploited) and capital (to be increased) the notion of property, as in "cultural property," is characterized by its [End Page 39] inertia. In 1972, in Quebec, this term replaced historical monuments, enshrined in previous legislation. Cultural property is indeed the repository of an action (preservation), while resource concerns the fact of use (for purposes of education or recreation, for example). This distinction was highlighted in 1951 by the Canadian government's archivist, who was called upon to express an opinion on the possibility of extending federal action in the area of heritage, as recommended by the Société historique de Québec, that is, as a result of what he called "the basic recommendation that the Federal Government should undertake the preservation and restoration of historic sites and buildings on a considerable scale":

The Commission perhaps overlooked some of the difficulties that are encountered when the restoration of old buildings is undertaken. In particular nothing is said about the difficulties that arises when the building in question is off the beaten track in a relatively desert locality … unless a building when restored can be used for a practical purpose of some kind, the cost of looking after it and supplying a custodian usually becomes very troublesome indeed.

(Lamb 1951, 24)

Generally speaking, while among the government action frameworks that we have enumerated, the word resources is more commonly used in the traditionally English-speaking provinces, protection, preservation, and property are the prerogative of the provinces with traditionally large Francophone communities, that is, Quebec and New Brunswick, and to a lesser extent, Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, and Prince Edward Island. Manitoba, whose Historic Sites Preservation Act became its Heritage Resource Act, is thus an exception in this regard, as it has moved in the opposite direction from Quebec, a development that might be explained by the loss of almost half of its francophone population since 1951 (Statistics Canada 2017).⁴²

This distinction between resources and goods or property is not without consequence in view of the mechanisms of exclusion at the heart of critical heritage studies discussions today, but also at the centre of the concerns of governments increasingly susceptible to the issue of social acceptability. We have furthermore seen that this concern was behind the proliferation of governmental initiatives, of which the Canadian Register of Historic Places is one example. However, while the density and complexity of the corpora generated by the proliferation of policy frameworks in Canada may explain the social misunderstanding behind this initiative, more broadly speaking the notion of property goes hand in hand with the exclusive mechanisms of the patrimoine institution: an opposing of the will of the institution for participation of the people and a logic of integration of the people and the community they form together with their heritage. [End Page 40]

Historically and still today, the notion of property is a corollary of a characteristic method of patrimoine creation, that is, alienation, whether of property in its entirety or with respect to part of its enjoyment (represented by the obligation contracted with a private party to conserve a particular disposition of said property). Based on expertise (defining what constitutes patrimoine) within the institution, which, through a status, decrees a priori the common interest (as opposed, in a way, to public value, based on observable fact), it usually marks the action of classification and the entry of the patrimoine asset (and with the patrimoine influence, as we argue, of heritage) into the domain of the common interest by justifying the government's rights of expropriation and pre-emption, found today in most legislative frameworks for government action. This alienation process, initially regarded as a necessary evil in France, Quebec, and elsewhere, has furthermore marked francophone historiography, notably in Quebec, where it is customary to emphasize the objection of anglophone capitalists to the adoption, in the first decades of the twentieth century, of a law on heritage that was hoped to be more coercive with regard to private property. It is moreover revelatory that the government's purchasing power has been considered by historians in Quebec as a key component in the evolution of Quebec government action in matters of heritage, and that, historically, questions regarding the issue even precede classification, as shown in the testimony of the Société historique de Montréal concerning the Château de Ramezay, protected because it was "decreed public property" (Montreal Historical Society 1949), thus conferring legal impact on this status a few years prior to any changes in legislation.

However, with regard to the question of commonality, this concept of patrimoinebien (heritage property), as it is replicated in many legislative frameworks,⁴³ is in fact closer to the notion of public property (ager romanus) than to collective ownership (ager publicus): it stems from a transfer to the state of rights and responsibilities previously held by private owners. It explains why such heritage, and especially patrimoine, depends so heavily on intervention by the state, which Emile Poulat (2003) rightly refers to as the "propriétaire magnifique" (lordly owner). Heritage goods thus become proprietary goods of the state, always to a greater extent than assets of the community, which only very fortuitously makes use of them. In Canada, at least one piece of legislation, as a counterexample, reflects the difference between the concepts of patrimoine and heritage in this regard and gives some precision on the anglophone heritage-driven view on that matter: the British Columbia Heritage Conservation Act, stipulates, in its first sections, that owners who eventually incur loss because of state-ordered disposal of property shall receive compensation for heritage designation.

As opposed to the notion of a resource for community use, this turning of patrimoine and heritage into a property asset is an outgrowth of a closed system involving [End Page 41] the state and the object endowed with a particular status, necessarily to the exclusion of the people, who participate in this closed system only to the extent that the state represents them, never by way of their actions or their real intentions.

Canadian Hybrids

Today it seems that many Canadian laws have incorporated various provisions that our review leads us to link more systematically to patrimoine than to the origins of heritage. While we have found little evidence to indicate that Quebec's proximity is systematically at issue, certain memoranda from organizations from other provinces, as well as various publications in today's media, testify to the knowledge of heritage stakeholders concerning the means available in scattered corners of the country, a fortiori in Quebec, where, as we saw, the legal framework is at the same time more venerable and more extensive than in certain other regions. Our previous considerations on heritage responsibility and property allows us to further identify some crossovers.

Whereas, during the interwar period, Quebec's French Canadians demanded greater governmental action, including various property disposal measures ranging from subjecting owners to "special regulations" (Tessier 1939, 11) to expropriation pure and simple (Dumas 1937),⁴⁴ the art historian Gordon Antoine Neilson, whom we cited above, proposed a bill of a different order, providing that a corporation managed by various socio-economic stakeholders should be given the power to acquire

Any house or other building of such nature that the Corporation considers it should be acquired as aforesaid after such house or building has been empty vacant for a period of five years together with a right of way to the nearest public road together with an area of fifty feet width measured from the walls outside of the walls of the said house or building and a strip of land fifteen feet in width by the nearest route to the nearest high public road.

(Neilson n.d.)⁴⁵

In addition to such appropriation possibilities without any real property disposal powers (since any such power would have applied only to buildings that had been deserted for five years), less institutionalized and consequently less exclusive formulas than the notion of the property of the "lordly owner" were also put forward on the Canadian scene. In this regard, we have the example of the following proposal by the British Columbia Historical Association (1949) on the work of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada:

[We feel] that there should be greater financial support … so that it may expand its work of marking historic sites and so that it may have funds to [End Page 42] maintain the monuments it erects. It would be desirable that this Board be empowered and given sufficient financial support to make possible its holding in trust for the citizens of Canada, historic buildings, and that wherever practicable, it should establish local museums associated with events of national importance, as it did in the case of Port Beausejour, in Nova Scotia.

Obviously, "English" Canada is no more monolithic than Quebec, and neither has been limited to a single universe of references, that is, France for francophones and the United States (or Great Britain) for anglophones. On the contrary, it is much more plausible to assert that an extensive circulation of ideas has taken place many times, and furthermore we believe that this exchange of ideas makes Canada a goldmine for such an exploration, whose possibilities we wish to suggest. The following plea, published in French by Neilson, Traquair, and Maurault in 1941, bears witness to these sometimes unrealized possibilities:

In other parts of this continent, old buildings are jealously preserved. At the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and in several other American museums, we see colonial type rooms perfectly recreated. In addition, many buildings in the United States have been classified as national monuments to be preserved.

(Neilson, Traquair, and Maurault 1941, 2)⁴⁶

However, the sole encounter of francophone and anglophone actors in this writing, and the understanding expressed by the above actors tends to confirm that heritage and patrimoine have evolved in tandem more often than in isolation in Canada. That brings us to the Cultural Heritage Act, adopted in Quebec in 2011, which replaced the Cultural Property Act and introduced, from the outset, three characteristic elements of federal law: historic "figures," "events," and "sites," all of which are reserved in Quebec legislation for measures that have no legal significance other than inclusion in the Registre du patrimoine culturel (Register of Cultural Heritage), without any impact on property. This rather unexpected development, occurring in the palimpsest of a legal framework almost 100 years old and concerning which we have observed some changes in this article, goes hand in hand with the introduction in the legislation of the word "transmission," obviously closer to that of "people" than of "status," and with the explicit desire to engage Quebeckers more actively in matters of institutional heritage. In one respect, we are moving back here to the notion of resources that imbued public discourse regarding heritage in the province in the mid-twentieth century and that still punctuates such discourse in several regions of the country. The actors behind this development, which in their view defines patrimoine culturel as opposed to cultural goods, openly declare it to be a borrowing from a context that they identify as more Anglo-Saxon than otherwise.

[End Page 43] Could it be that Quebec's patrimoine culturel / cultural heritage has passed through the heritage of the province's English-speaking neighbours before joining its UNESCO namesake? Could there be a "Canadianization" at work here? As we did in this article by going back and forth between ontology and epistemology, it would then be worth remembering that such a hybridization, if it is the case, further occurs in the context of a prevailing trend, also shown by scientific programming on patrimoine in Canada,⁴⁷ reflecting a desire to modify patrimoine so that it incorporates, as heritage seems to do according to our overview, subjects of public conversation and, in general, grassroots action. While the legal frameworks of predominantly Anglophone provinces in Canada increasingly embrace the role of the "lordly owner" (propriétaire magnifique), what might otherwise have been perceived as a process of maturation may now perhaps be better explained by a shift in conception, especially since local territorial heritage management, which itself became part of Quebec legislation in the mid-1980s, continues to define the immediate fate of heritage in several of these guises, ultimately based on a "grassroots" vision, a notion for which there is no obvious French equivalent.

Closing Notes

In this article, the terms patrimoine and heritage have been used as poles, a sort of parenthesis between which to put forward our arguments, particularly with respect to the specificities of patrimoine and certain issues concerning these specificities in the context of the rise of heritage studies (études patrimoniales) and of critical heritage studies. It goes without saying that this pairing is of rhetorical value only, and that it should, in a more exhaustive work, be put forward in the many cultural, historical, and social contexts where it is applicable, as well as in contexts concerning, for example, resources and property, given the many resulting connotations, whereas these contexts have been only briefly touched upon in this work.

Nonetheless, all the types of discourse cited in this kaleidoscopic overview clearly point to an element that has been little discussed, that is, the idiomatic, cultural, and historical differentiations of heritage, in this instance concerning patrimoine. Without outlining all the details, it is our hope that this overview also serves to confirm the differentiation of such conceptions in Canada, and consequently, albeit imperfectly, the plausibility of an appearance over time of Canada-specific conceptions, although these are not likely to be homogeneous or shared across the entire country.

Since the 1970s, a number of works have highlighted the differences from one country to another as regards heritage restoration or its legislative framework, which we have reiterated herein by way of the dispute between Viollet-le-Duc and Ruskin.⁴⁸ Nonetheless, exploring the foundations of heritage discourse that these practices [End Page 44] express, makes it possible to explain such manifestations, as we hope to have done, including so as to understand that these practices and the resulting actions, even when they are related, are not necessarily ordered or understood in the same way. Such a Foucauldian "archeology of knowledge" also seems to reveal the conditions for possible but still unknown transformations of patrimoine and heritage in Canada as a whole. What might seem to some as a praxeological and epistemological impasse, that is, the inappropriate character, to say the least, of patrimoine in a postcolonial world and in the information age, sheds light on new avenues of investigation and action when examined from the point of view of an idiomatic and semantic construction developed over time and already existing for more than a hundred years.

Just as Aloïs Riegl observed, at the turn of the twentieth century, the appearance of a new category of knowledge linked to a new form of Denkmal, the thick descriptions of the patrimoine and heritage metalanguages, to name but these two forms, might perhaps enable us to think beyond the state heritage apparatus, the growth and spread of which we have observed. Considering the existing situation, if those who conduct heritage research, as called for in this issue of the Journal of Canadian Studies, intend to engage in a dialogue with actors of this same heritage as to what can, everywhere in the world, at one point or another, be understood as reflections or as vehicles of a common identity, focusing on the foundations of such discourse will at least serve as a reminder that these reflections or vehicles are not designated by the same word or do not connote the same mythology.

To this end, the state of heritage in Canada certainly reveals a specific and relatively accessible version of this situation of particularization and differentiation; we have seen strange and unique things in our land that call for more extensive explorations in this regard. Without absolutely insisting that this is a one-of-a-kind case, heritage studies in Canada, as well as elsewhere, could certainly draw from such explorations a scientific, methodological, and praxeological contribution likely to transcend our borders.⁴⁹ One thing is clear: knowing now how much time, culture, and vocabulary have been required for the particularizations that we touched upon to see the light of day, to ignore them, at the risk of obliterating them, would be tantamount to annihilating a true intellectual heritage, this time in the English sense of the term. [End Page 45]