We were taught Canada as if it had fallen from the sky in 1867, with a maple leaf and a railway. That is a polite lie.

The word was born here. In 1534 Jacques Cartier plants a cross at Gaspé. He winters at Stadacona — where Quebec now stands. From the Iroquoian word kanata, village, he draws a name. That name did not belong to Ottawa. It belonged to the river.

For two centuries, Canadien meant us. French of America. Habitants. Filles du Roy. The others were called the English. Then the name was stolen, a leaf was stuck on it, and we were told the “real” Canada was in Toronto. We are not a region. We are the beginning. The rest is an administration.

He does not discover. He founds.

On 3 July 1608 the Abitation of Quebec rises at the foot of Cap Diamant. Champlain is not decorating a backdrop. He plants a palisade, an alliance, a language. Four centuries later we still speak it. A founder does not ask permission to exist.

Old Quebec is the only fortified city north of Mexico. Stone, copper, slopes. It is sold as a postcard. It is a proof: we were a capital before we were a province.

The Patriotes were not a club

Saint-Charles, 1837. Papineau. A green-white-red flag. Then Saint-Denis — a victory. Saint-Eustache — the church cannonaded, the men burned in the stone. Twelve hanged. Fifty-eight deported to Australia.

Lord Durham then wrote the instruction manual: assimilate the French, because a people without a history does not deserve a state. He is still taught as a reformer. He was a liquidator. The Patriotes did not lose a riot. They kept the first appointment of a country.

Three men, one sentence

Duplessis held the legal border — provincial tax, hydro, refusal of the subsidies that buy jurisdictions. He was covered with the word “darkness” so that we would no longer have to read him.

On 24 July 1967, from the balcony of Montreal City Hall, Charles de Gaulle said what our polling institutes no longer dare: Long live free Quebec. Ottawa spoke of interference. A people spoke of recognition. One does not forget a public baptism.

Lévesque turned desire into government. Bill 101. The 1980 referendum. The Night of the Long Knives. A people’s word was cheated, then the people were asked to be sportsmanlike. A missed appointment does not cancel the country. It adjourns it.

Why we are not the rest of Canada

French is not a bilingual service. It is the house. Civil code against common law. Custom of Paris against Westminster. Saint-Jean is not a long weekend: it is a birthday. The sugar shack, the arrow sash, the Plains of Abraham — this is not folklore. Folklore is what remains when the country has been removed.

1867 was not a tenth tenant moving in. It was the pact of two peoples. The pact was diluted by adding chairs. A founding people is not one seat among ten.

A heritage without a country is a costume

You can sing Gens du pays, eat the taffy, raise the fleurdelisé on 24 June, and go home on the 25th into a federation that decides who enters, who speaks, who teaches. That is folklorisation.

Heritage demands something else: borders, a language that no longer has to apologise, a school that tells of our dead, a state that says no. Independence is not nostalgia. It is the only way not to betray Champlain, the Patriotes, Lévesque — and our children.

Masters in our own house. Not tenants. Long live free Quebec.

Let us bring back common sense.