Unveiling a political statue is an eminently risky move.

When I saw, yesterday morning, at the end of the street that bears his name, the packed monument to Jacques Parizeau, which will be unveiled today, an anecdote came to mind.

October 19, 2006: the day of the inauguration of another prime minister's bronze, that of Robert Bourassa.

Jacques Parizeau was there. Lucien Bouchard, who had just made his famous statement on the productivity of Quebecers, in his eyes too low, too.

Gathered around Monsieur, the reporters ask the great economist what he thinks: “Once again, Quebecers have disappointed Mr. Bouchard. One more time. I find it a pity ". Piqué, Bouchard would later retort: ​​"Mr. Parizeau himself disappointed me a lot on a certain evening in October 1995".

The ceremony for Bourassa? Eclipsed. His grin on the bronze (by the sculptor Jules Lasalle, who cosigned that of Parizeau) gave the impression that the former Liberal leader was amused by the quarrels tearing his "friends across the way".

Risks

There is always a risk to remember. Some, reducing the giant Parizeau to "money and ethnic votes", will be reluctant to see him reach posterity in this way.

They may add that he was a short-lived prime minister (less than two years). Playing the devil's advocate, I submit these arguments to the biographer Pierre Duchesne. He becomes animated: "But Parizeau is a commitment over decades, from the 1960s for the State of Quebec". He was also a "great parliamentarian" and one of the "greatest finance ministers in the history of Quebec". Not to mention this: as head of government, he came within a whisker of a winning Yes.

According to Duchesne, Parizeau would not have balked at being made statue: "He assumed himself." A line from Chesterton comes to me: “A monument must, properly speaking, be pompous. The pump is its very object.

The Parizeau will have eight feet, confirms artistic adviser John Porter.

Aesthetic

The other risk is aesthetic. Since the time of our great sculptors – Louis-Philippe Hébert and others Alfred Laliberté – political, figurative statuary has ceased to be taught; seems to be lost.

René Lévesque, the poor, paid the price: a first statue, deemed too small, was replaced by a larger one. Who has other faults... to be polite.

The Parizeau Foundation has done everything to avoid this type of scenario. Lisette Lapointe, former deputy and widow of Monsieur, has worked there for six years. There was a contest. Choice (stormy) of a duo of sculptors (Lasalle with Annick Bourgeau, author of Jean Lesage). "We worked with hundreds of photographs," Porter explains. “So you go beyond mere resemblance, it becomes a presence. »

A sort of return, therefore, of this great inspiring man, who left us seven years ago today.