The pathetic Patriot (The Patriot and the Quiet Revolution) (French Canada)

This article examines some narratives of the 1906s depicting a revolutionar y patriot. Paradoxically, during the years of the Quiet Revolution, while p oems, manifestoes and song loudly proclaimed the progress of the Revolution , no work of fiction presented a lively attachment to the homeland in its c onquering and triumphant aspect. The novelistic character is a pathetic, wh impering patriot, in love with his own little locality, wanting to stay the re in the cozy warmth of love and to live there in quiet peace, forgetting the world. This may be related to the nature of the patriotic feeling itsel f with its strong attachment to the soil, to the motherland: an earthy pass ion, irrational and resistant to doctrines. The revolutionary patriot may w ant to be a warrior, but he is already living in the aftermath: like Ulysse s, he aspires to nothing else but his native land and final rest, i.e., to a euphemism for death.