Denise Bombardier, a Quebec that has shaken the French

The journalist and writer in quebec has never mince words. This is on the grounds of sex, politics, or French. And the pedophilia.

In the beginning of the year 2020, the storm is blowing hard in France on the small world of the "left bank" of the literature. The case Matzneff the headlines... until in Quebec. Because a woman has never given in to the seductive literary and transgressive writer. Most young people in France don't know, Canadians love it or hate it because his big mouth never stops, with soon to be 79 years of age, to create the controversy on the airwaves or on the television.

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Denise Bombardier, journalist and writer in quebec, is a personality of the cultural heritage of francophone. Thirty years ago, it was she (and she alone), which, on the plateau of Apostrophes was indignant, and roundly practices of Gabriel Matzneff in judging it to be "pitiful" and denounced its acts of "sodomy" to young girls of 13 or 14 years old. Which had earned him at the time, on live television, and then in the French press, comments unkind, she summarized herself as well recently in the Journal de Montréal : "I'll always be the evil-fucked". In France as in Québec, it has not ceased to denounce pedophiles.

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Denise Bombardier, it is a certain idea of feminism, of the francophonie and Quebec, traced in his memories published almost a year ago. Willingly provocative, it has been nourished by the irreverent spirit of 1968, she had lived as a student in political science at the university of Montreal. After a modest family, marked by a catholic education (like all Quebecers of her generation), she first wanted to be an actress - she took courses in diction - before switching into journalism 17 years ago. She is of that generation that became adult in Quebec at the end of the 1960s, at the same time that the quiet Revolution, the emancipation movement, which saw francophones to take their fate into their own hands after decades of domination in English. She was part of the independence of the first hour.

Fierce fighter from québec culture

Love of the French language ("wealth" that his mother taught him to cultivate), and France (which has not prevented it to beat yourselves up about it in a book published in 2000 these "French who believe themselves to be the navel of the world"), Denise Bombardier is a fierce fighter of the quebec culture in the face of american imperialism and the canadian multiculturalism. The author of a fascinating Dictionary lover du Québec (Plon, 2014), it has always defended the specificity of québécois culture, convinced that "the sustainability of the quebec identity in the French north-east of North America will never be ensured". Last year, it provoked a fierce controversy in the canadian media by stating that francophones outside Quebec had almost disappeared.

Denise Bombardier has also taken vigorously advocate for the law on secularism enacted this summer by the quebec government. A columnist for the popular Newspaper of Montreal, she greeted in an editorial of march 29, 2019, "the end of a cycle in which the religion has isolated the French Canadians folded on themselves and on the parvis of the churches, now deserted or turned into condos". It assumes without any difficulty (and without nuance) his intolerance of the face of the islamic veil : "We are all at the mercy of the offensive islamisante in the West," said it in another column, on 25 June 2019 in The Journal de Montréal.

This Frenchman, too seductive and, therefore, less attractive

Finally, Denise Bombardier is and has always been deeply feminist. As all in Québec, that have long been the mainstay of the catholic society of francophone Canada, and who have become, as from the explosion of the intruder in 1966, "women standing". No wonder his reaction is sincerely outraged in the face of Matzneff on the set of Apostrophes in 1990. Twenty years later, she published with his French counterpart Francoise Laborde a test of vitriol, Will you shut up more (Fayard), on the case DSK and on the behaviours of machismo of the French political class.

In his Dictionary for lovers of Quebec, Denise Bombardier summed up as the difference in vision between the French and the Québécois : "The French are the feminists in québec 'attractive in spite of everything', while Quebecers believe that the French are the attractive 'even if they are not feminist'. The French considered the 'loggers' quebec attractive and sometimes seductive, while Quebec is the 'peasant' French winemaker before all, too seductive, and because of this unattractive".

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Moral of the story: the cultural distance is sometimes a great help to identify deviant behavior. Then, with humility, let us dare to thank Denise Bombardier for its intransigence oh how salutary.