The Morning-Star of Memory is an important book. Michael Cross has devoted a good part of his life to understanding the anglophone half of the democratic movement in Canada, as personified by Robert Baldwin.
Of course, telling the Canadian story is often complicated by our peculiar reality — we specialize in more than one leader at a time. And this sits uncomfortably with the Western tradition of the all-consuming heroic figure.
The team in question here was Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin, each the leader of their community. Cross brings to their story a remarkable originality in that he led the way in uncovering the personal side of what drove Baldwin during the incredibly difficult campaign to make Canada a democracy. In the aftermath of the disastrous 1837 rebellions, LaFontaine and Baldwin found themselves the leaders of their respective communities. But how could they lead when the communities were so shattered and under shock from the trials and the hangings of the pro-democracy rebels? More important, how could they lead when there was no clear model in place for such a situation?
Cross brilliantly lays out the way in which they created a new approach towards democratic government by developing a non-European style of society. And he shows what drove Baldwin. First there was an all-consuming love — yes, love — for one woman, his wife Eliza, which went well beyond 19th-century romanticism. I often think Baldwin’s personal life involved the most extraordinary love life of a modern leader anywhere in the Western world. It was Cross who first explained just how that love and the effect of his wife’s early death were to play such a central role in Baldwin’s life, turning him into a singularly driven but also highly depressive figure.
I believe we misunderstand our own country when we attempt to see it in the light of influences from England, or France, or the United States, although these influences did exist. Equally, we do a disservice to ourselves when we attempt to see the country as something that had to pop out of a hat in 1867, because the British didn’t want us anymore and the Americans were a looming danger. This strange approach turns the creation of Canada into a kind of fearful negativity. If we could drag George-Etienne Cartier and John A. Macdonald into the room and ask them what it was that inspired them, they would almost certainly reply that it was LaFontaine and Baldwin and their model for a new country.
What I have just said was widely accepted and understood until the early twentieth century. Somehow, in the blast of violence and nationalism headlined by the two world wars, our more interesting, complex heritage was written out of our own history in favour of a classic European-style interpretation of our creation in 1867.
For the last twenty years, a growing group — of which I happily admit to being part — has been working hard to re-establish the central roles of Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine. Michael Cross is a leader of this movement. And this biography truly is the fruit of a lifetime of work. It is an important book for all of us because it helps us to actually understand who we are.
The importance of this cannot be underestimated. This is a difficult, confusing and, yes, dangerous time for all societies, all nation-states. We are living through a widespread insistence on a utilitarian view of society, the return of ugly nationalisms, the return of racism, the falling back on old-style militaristic nationalism, and an inflating obsession with security issues that somehow trump citizen rights. All of these threaten the underlying sense that societies are about citizens and the well-being of the whole.
Michael Cross puts on the table the story of one of the most unusual if not peculiar leaders we’ve ever had. Baldwin — as, indeed, did LaFontaine — gave his life to making Canada a democracy, and a democracy built on an ideal of justice. The struggle was so tough emotionally, and physically, that by the time they actually got to power in March 1848 they were already exhausted and almost broken. Three remarkable years followed. They survived a prolonged attempt at a coup d’état by the anti-democratic forces, and they put through literally hundreds of laws that would become the basis for the society we are today.
I wrote about the close friendship between the two men in my Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin in the Extraordinary Canadians series. Éric Bédard brought back the reality of LaFontaine and his allies in Les Réformistes: Une génération canadienne-française au milieu du XIXe siècle. And now Michael Cross has added a very important piece to this puzzle, with his The Morning-Star of Memory, which brings Robert Baldwin fully alive. He does so in a way that helps us to understand what makes this country so unusual and its ideas so hard to explain in classic Western terms. I feel very much indebted to Michael Cross for this very fine book. I think we all should.
— John Ralston Saul (Read bio)
An award-winning essayist and novelist, author of A Fair Country, and general editor of Penguin Canada’s extraordinary Canadians series of books, John Ralston Saul has contributed a double biography of Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin. His latest novel is Dark Diversions.