Abstract
In 2017, the City of Montreal commemorated its 375th anniversary. Because it celebrated the city’s “creative” spirit more than its past, this 375th anniversary stands as an opportunity to explore reconfigurations of public anniversaries, which often take the shape of cultural mega-events. This article presents the different logics behind these celebrations, largely shaped by the communications and entertainment industries, and examines how they partake in developing of a cultural economy that benefits from the past. The purpose is thus not only to identify the presence of a commercial relationship but to explore how celebrations develop in light of the paradigm of creativity, which is currently a pillar of cities’ economic development policies. This article draws on interviews with people involved in the event organization, individuals sidelined by the process, and media and archives analysis.
In 2017, the City of Montreal celebrated its 375th anniversary. The event was presented as an opportunity to restore a sense of pride to Montrealers. After a decade of economic gloom and corruption scandals that undermined the ruling political class, the event was designed to celebrate the city’s proclaimed creative, resilient, and innovative spirit (Society for the Celebration of Montreal’s 375th Anniversary, 2018: 15). More than 200 activities have been organized throughout the year, featuring cultural promoter projects and citizen initiatives. 1 One common observation surfaced in the press (Nadeau, 2016a): these celebrations were oriented by a partying mood and the desire to make the city shine rather than the commemoration of its history. Activities with historical and memorial dimensions were present but not in the majority, and the most publicized of them were those that embodied the creative city’s character. Like a long festival that lasts for a whole year, mixing musical spectacles and giant puppets to small-scale citizen projects, Montréal’s 375th anniversary offers an opportunity to explore the reconfigurations of public anniversaries, whose form is increasingly similar to that of cultural mega-events.
The aim of this article is twofold. First, the Montréal’s 375th anniversary festive inclination entails a reflection on the event form, which questions commemoration as the appropriate term to describe the Montréal’s 375th anniversary. Instead, I suggest the notion of “public anniversary,” which, as I will argue in the following section, enables a better understanding of this cultural event. Shaped by the logic of a cultural economy based on a paradigm of creativity, where the economic development relies on the multiplication of entertainment and cultural venues (Hannigan, 2007), this public anniversary renders salient the value given to this paradigm. At the same time, it opens a reflection on the cultural form of commemoration and/or public anniversary and consequently sheds light on its transformations. The second aim of this article is to present how these celebrations, mainly shaped by communications and entertainment industries, partake of implementing a cultural economy that benefits from the past. This article reflects on how a cultural economy based on the paradigm of creativity informs certain memory practices and promotes the participation and funding of multimedia enterprises that already embed this paradigm. This article tackles these transformations in examining the rise of promoters to the detriment of organizations with a historical mandate struggling to find their place in this new cultural landscape. The promotion of memorial technological performances and the recent ascent of digital technology to attract spectators continue to raise questions about the implications of media (and related expectations) within this spectacular event. The article concludes by addressing the issue of the legacies of this festive anniversary.
This article draws on interviews conducted in early 2020 and spring 2021 with individuals involved in the event organization, but also with those sidelined during the process. A media and archives analysis complements the testimonials. These five individuals, here anonymized, offer us an insider’s perspective on the production of a public anniversary, the underlying power relationships, and the context of the event’s emergence. Despite the large number of people involved in various anniversary committees, only a few persons contacted have accepted my invitation to share their experience and vision of the event; those who did have expressed dissatisfaction regarding the festivities. As informant witnesses, participants’ testimonies helped to retrace the event and to access non-public information missing from activity reports, media covert, and the official website. I met a former administrator of the Société du 375e, a specialist of the content, a director of a history museum member of the OFF 375, an advisor from the Bureau du 375e (an organization emanating from the administration of the city, whose mandate was to plan the main directions of the event), and an employee involved in the implementation of citizen projects. Since they are still professionally active, these stakeholders preferred not to be identified—anonymity enables them to critique the celebrations freely. Participants shared their impressions of successes and failures, their aspirations and expectations, and the challenges faced during these celebrations. This case studies analysis also relies on media archives (event website, media interviews, and activity reports) and the city archives (Archives de Montréal).
Public anniversary as cultural form inspired by mega-events
Although several activities displaying the city’s past(s) took part in the anniversary program, commemorating Montréal and its inhabitants does not appear as the main trope of the event. Indeed, many activities that have received significant funding 2 did not propose historical anchoring or representation of the past(s). Many of them put forward festive and entertaining orientations. This inclination can be explained by a commissioner from the entertainment industry, at the helm of the Just for Laughs empire, 3 and the affiliation to tourism and communications industries shared by two presidents in a row of the Society for the Celebration of Montréal’s 375th Anniversary. 4 In this case, the public anniversary took the form of a celebration of a present to be valued and showcased rather than a commemoration of the city’s founding act. As one participant mentioned during our interview, two calls for projects have been launched to build the 375th’s program. While the importance given to the past was part of the selection criteria for citizen projects, this dimension was somewhat neglected for projects with an international reach. With very modest financial means, citizens have notably set up activities that perform a particular conception of Montreal’s vernacular memory. However, some major projects with an international wingspan deserve to be mentioned for their spectacular manner to exhibit Montreal’s history. References to the city’s past were thus present in the festivities’ content, without nevertheless being the dominant trope of the activities. This particularity regarding the nature of the activities funded and the room let to memory practices made me question the commemoration status generally associated with these celebrations.
National holidays, military parades, and erection of monuments dedicated to the nation’s heroes are generally analyzed to understand the valorization of a particular version of history, the voluntary or unconscious omission of certain voices, and the recurrence of dominant interpretations of the past. They act as a reminder of a singular event. As Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1983) argued in the pioneer book The Invention of Tradition, such practices celebrating the origins of a political entity produce official, often hegemonic, narratives about the so-called past and the founding act of a collective entity. Contemporary researchers have continued to investigate commemorations in this way, for instance, Daryl Leroux (2010)’s analysis of the Quebec City 400th anniversary held in 2008. As Leroux argued, this anniversary was built around a joyful—and naive—theme of the “Encounter” between Indigenous and European peoples, while failing to situate this encounter within colonial relations. To paraphrase Ekaterina V. Haskins (2015), these commemorative events—as producers and broadcasters of collective representations of a past—constitute a form of “technology of citizenship.” To describe the 375th anniversary, I instead propose the term “public anniversary,” because although this event inherently carries a temporal dimension, commemorating Montreal’s foundation (or any phases of its development) was not the central aim of these celebrations. Paradoxically, celebrating the past does not appear as a necessary condition of public anniversaries. As Helen Davies (1999) stated in the Canada centennial anniversary analysis, some celebrations rather aimed to promote citizen participation and grassroots small-scale project to build the nation to come without necessarily referring to the country’s past(s). To take up the expression used by Haaland and Gustavsen (2021) to describe the transformations of mnemonic practices of the Danish military activities, sometimes, traditional commemorations have given way to celebrations.
As mentioned above, even though the organizers did not have the mandate of celebrating the city’s history, the relationship(s) to the past(s) was not wholly excluded from the festivities. Showcasing history and heritage was part of the selection criteria for neighborhood projects, and some multimedia shows have staged certain parts of the city’s history (Interview, 2021). Also, in its way, Montreal’s 375th anniversary participated in the current boom in commemorative culture (Doss, 2010; Sturken, 2008). Indeed, this anniversary coincided with Canada’s, which celebrated its 150th anniversary the same summer. As mentioned above, in 2008, Quebec City celebrated its 400th anniversary with many large-scale activities. The Montreal professional sports team Le Canadien did the same in 2009, organizing various activities for a year and a half to mark its centennial anniversary (Valois-Nadeau, 2014). Each of them was a major event part of this blooming cultural economy that benefits from the past, whose magnitude is measured as much in the duration of the event, colossal budgets, and various activities set up for the occasion. Public anniversaries seem to have become a unique and popular memorial genre due to the conjunction of the entertainment and event sectors professionalization and a political context favorable to their development. As one participant mentioned during our interview, since the 1990s, Montréal has been known for its numerous cultural producers established in the city and their high-level expertise in cutting-edge multimedia spectacles. As this participant mentioned, “we are the master” in organizing such cultural and public events.
Commemorations, especially joyful ones, are known to tie in with strategies to boost tourism and raise a city’s profile internationally, particularly when they go hand in hand with a well-established public relations operation (Beaton, 2017; Brun, 2003; Gordon, 2001). Public anniversaries thus tend to become synonymous with major projects initiated by public authorities, within which the logics of contemporary cultural economies are intertwined. As one participant involved in the direction of the event said: There were two things [in the 375th anniversary]. Pride and legacies. That was a lot of pride. We are no longer in the same state of mind as we were in 2010, 2011 and 2012 in terms of the city’s gloom; the city’s economy was not doing well . . . It was a lot “we’re going use the 375th to provide tourist and cultural reception infrastructures” but also a lot of pride through events, celebrations and speeches. That was very much the political objective of the council at the very beginning, even before we stated how we would get there. [. . .]. Basically, it’s a pretext. Because normally the celebrations . . . there was a 325th, the 350th . . . 50 years was a long time to wait, but it’s because we needed pride. (Interview, 2020)
Public anniversary forms seem thus to share similarities with contemporary cultural mega-events. Always political, these events share the will of outcomes in increasing social and economic development, and citizen participation (Valois-Nadeau, 2018). While public anniversaries—and commemorative activities in general—are widely studied for their ways of bringing questions of identity and belonging into relation with various space-times, the 375th anniversary instead provides an opportunity to examine political questions through new alliances and networks. The Montréal 375th celebrations have put forward another relation to hegemony, which is felt through the persons invited to participate in its organization and the value of “innovative and creative” projects. For instance, the low presence of the First Nation projects funded by the Society for the Celebration of Montréal’s 375th Anniversary (Boulais and Wattez, 2019) and their quasi-absence in the organizing committees (Saint-Louis and Blanchard-Gagné 2019) reveal a lack of consideration for their traditional commemorative activities. Public anniversary acts here as a technology of citizenship, defining what it means to be creative, resilient, and inclusive in the Montréal of tomorrow, in supporting predominantly projects and actors from a particularly “innovative” event sector.
At this time, the paradigm of creativity was omnipresent in the public discourse of the City of Montréal. In 2017, the same year as the 375th celebrations, the City of Montréal launched the 2017-2022 Cultural Development Policy, entitled Combining Creativity and the Citizen Cultural Experience in the Age of Digital Technology and Diversity. A photo of Avudo, a historical multimedia show that received significant funding from the 375th, also made the cover page (Ville de Montréal, 2017). As Hye-Kyung Lee (2017) points out, discourse on creativity is an important addition to contemporary cultural policies, enabling the mobilization of significant public funds for the cultural sector. In this context, innovative projects (which generally mean those with digital and multimedia components) perfectly suit this idea of “creativity.” How this idealized conception of Montrealness took shape and the implications of such a shift in the way of celebrating public anniversary deserve to be interrogated.
A creative city that develops its margins
Despite the will to create an “inclusive” event that will “build bridges” (Société du 375e, 2018), the 375th anniversary was driven by logics that excluded several groups and actors from the planning and the program of these commemorations. With the rise of cultural promoters, the presence of small- and medium-sized museums of history has declined within the activities’ program. Perceived as too classical, little interest was given to their projects (Interview, 2020). As one museum stakeholder pointed out: at first, we said to ourselves, “we’ll be consulted.” [. . .] It never happened. Nothing was presented to us for approval or anything. No one listened to us either during or after. [. . .] They told us, “you just have to submit a grant application, like anyone else.” So we were like anyone else. (Interview, 2020)
The participation in the event (and the funding of activities) was thus conditional to a selection following a common call for project. History museums had to submit their proposition and compete alongside cultural promoters. As the same interviewee noted, only 4 of the 15 museums have been selected by the Société du 375e and were allowed to be a part of the official program (Nadeau, 2016b). As one of the former directors of the Society noted: It was mostly the big players who benefitted.
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Small museums did things, but they remained on the sidelines. It’s hard to be any different in a big celebration when you want to convey messages of pride and achieve impact. Small museums [. . .] struggle to stand out from the crowd. Maybe things should have been done differently for the small players. They would have needed to come together or receive a little more money to be able to grow a bit. . . But it’s the big institutions that benefited [. . .] from both the event and its legacy. (Interview, 2020)
Approximately 6 months before the official launch of the celebrations, 15 Montreal history museums came together to create the Off 375 to participate in the festivities in their way. The Off festival allowed them to give a more meaningful place to the past within the celebrations while also valuing the work of their institutions. With their proposals largely rejected following the call for projects, these organizations did not want to remain silent or absent from this major event; on the contrary, their participation in the festivities of the 375th appeared to them as a given, considering their chief mission. As André Deslisle, spokesperson for Off 375, put it, “the museums considered it their duty to bring their own touch” to the celebrations (Nadeau, 2016b). As one interviewee from the history museum sector pointed out, “the 375th is an opportunity to showcase history, it’s our job” (Interview, 2020). Participating on the sidelines of the 375th was their only option to be heard and to signal their presence within the Montreal cultural landscape.
The Off 375 was designed with the (relatively modest) means. Thanks to a Facebook page specially created for the occasion and followed by 7000 history enthusiasts, each member organization was able to give regular news updates. The page also broadcasted a specially organized competition for the 375th anniversary: There was a historical question to be able to enter the final draw. Prizes were offered every month. The museums got together and pooled resources. Each one donated items, and every month, we had a draw worth $100. . . in the form of books, shop items, and things like that. So there was a monthly draw and at the end of the year, we held a draw for a big trip. It was the grand prize. [. . .] A few days in Paris and then a few days in Champagne. (Interview, 2020)
This modest initiative has mainly contributed to allow these museums to be part of the festivities, even if their participation remained on the margins. The impact and scope of their activities remained limited, as one of the interviewees confirmed: “I don’t think it benefits the positioning of museums. It wasn’t a turning point” (Interview, 2020).
While the Off allowed these small- and medium-sized organizations to group together to secure media visibility that they would not otherwise have obtained, it did not give this sector the means to get structured or to develop relationships with other actors, particularly with cultural promoters. As one participant involved in the organization stated, regrettably, the event did not help ensure the sustainability of Montreal history organizations or renew their practices: If you organize a commemorative celebration and you don’t give most of your funding to your museums, to your organizations, to those who are active and knowledgeable, who were there before and will be there after the celebration, there will be no continuation. It would have been a fantastic opportunity to structure them, help them and feature them prominently during the year. Plus, they’re all networked, you give them tools and means that will stay after. (Interview, 2020)
Unlike these small- and medium-sized historical organizations, the cultural promoters that submitted projects combining new technologies, performances, and historical content received significant funding to participate in the celebrations of the 375th. The organization Montréal en Histoires, which has created Cité Mémoire 6 and the Montréal en 375 temps participatory app, established itself as a benchmark in producing historical content and transposing it into augmented reality in the streets of Old Montreal. Montréal en Histoires especially aptly embodied the development of this spectacular memorial event scene, which developed outside the official spaces usually devoted to the history production (such as museums). This project thus follows others that render the city (its streets, buildings, alleys, etc.) as the scene of memorial production and exhibition, and by the same token, open the space for the circulation of unofficial knowledge of the past (Roberts and Cohen, 2014). Through this augmented reality show, the city (in its infrastructures, thoroughfares, and materialities) became a venue for exhibiting and performing relationships to the past.
According to one interviewee, Montréal en Histoires, founded around 2014–2015, originally had the mandate to reinvigorate the Old Montreal by bringing together cultural and historical organizations. However, during the 375th anniversary, Montréal en Histoires abandoned its role of mediation to position itself as an event promoter and put forward its own projects. As one interviewee from the history museum community summed it up: The project slipped between our fingers. These people [from Montréal en Histoires] left with the project, and they got 14 million [. . .] they brought more people on and came out with more experiential things. And then the governments got on board, but it was no longer in our hands. It was gone, we didn’t have any connection to any of that. So we could have done the same thing [i.e., experiential features]. But a promoter took it in hand and saw it through to success. But initially, we had the idea, the capacity. . . but we lacked the money and the time . . . The City can tell us, “create something for us, we’re giving you a little money to be able to hire help,” and we’re able to build it, and we’re going to do it. We would have been able to create Cité Mémoire, too—that isn’t where the problem is. (Interview, 2020)
The disappointment was greater given at the end of the celebrations, the Society for the Celebration of Montréal’s 375th Anniversary handed over the unspent money to the governments (Société du 375e, 2018, p.11), without providing any further funding for these small organizations. Although the public consultation on the 375th anniversary showed that the Montrealers wanted that the event serves to showcase the Montreal’ institutions (Office de la consultation publique, 2011), the Society has allowed few resources to the smallest ones. In the words of one interviewee, a member of a history museum: We should build on the existing [historical] institutions. They can contribute with their expertise, and will be happy to contribute to all this. For sure, today, we’re in an era of innovation, creation, and all these “experiential” things. The experiential dimension, it can be done, it’s not a problem. But maybe authorities—which I won’t name—have an image of museums as being more traditional. On the other hand, there may also be a willingness—and I won’t speak of cronyism—to fund promoters and big multi-million dollar projects that have a significant, visible impact on elected representatives and promoters alike. I feel like it’s all playing out on another level. Today this also extends to “culture.” Museums often ask themselves, “Are we even really in the cultural sector?” Culture means shows, creators, artists, and musicians. It’s like we no longer fit in this vision. (Interview, 2020)
The 375th anniversary put forward projects that grew out of a “creative” event-based economy to the detriment of many long-established historical actors and institutions whose “traditional” image seems inadequate to fulfill such a mandate. Aesthetic, poetic, and often interactive, the funded memorial activities very often introduced a sensitive relationship to the past. In the words of France Chrétien-Desmarais, president of the Society, “the program choices [were] made based on the return they would generate, in terms of standing and pride as well as the socio-economic and tourism spinoffs. Beyond the festivities, the 375th has to offer Montrealers a springboard to the future” (Société du 375e, 2018: 29).
A legitimacy based on innovation: leveraging digital experiences to build a relationship to memory
Embodying the paradigm of creativity at the heart of the official discourse and the newly launched cultural policy, digital and multimedia memorial experiences became an ideal on which the anniversary would capitalize to allow Montreal to take a “step forward.” Thus, as Hye-Kyung Lee (2017) suggests, the discourse on creativity is articulated not only to a particular effort to showcase the digital creative industry but also to the hopes of having a highly skilled economy on site. More than “innovative” memorial shows, these activities were part of a new economy widely promoted by politicians and actors in charge of the 375th anniversary. The program of the 375th, underpinned by the logic of spectacularization of cities (Bélanger, 2005), was also intended to act as a “catalyst” for renewing the city’s vibrancy and simultaneously creating “a new hub for the digital creativity industry” (Société du 375e, 2018: 12). As one interviewee involved in the celebrations recalled: Since they [references to new technologies] took up space in the official discourse, the budget and the spirit of the festivities, they seem an important aspect, and indeed they were. But I think the place given to entertainment and technology was greatly amplified by public communications. Because they wanted to sell this image of Montreal. It wasn’t the image of a historical metropolis, something like “come to Europe but in America”; that was no longer the message sold in 2017. (Interview, 2021)
Although they embraced various forms and scales, the innovative/creative activities of the 375th’s program have affected the ways to experience the city’s past. Playful, sensitive, and often participative, these activities relying on the city’s past were taking place in the streets or on online, which is to say outside the museum wall and other classic institutions. The city (its arteries, its buildings, etc.) thus became the stage where the relationships to the past(s) have been enacted and performed. In addition to the project Cité Mémoire, another key project of the celebrations, the multimedia show Avudo mentioned above (Compagnia Finzi Pasca, 2017), was held outdoors. This show, projected onto containers and the basin in Montreal’s Old Port, consisted of the choreography of images, water features, and sound effects. The dreamlike show featured significant stages in the city’s development, such as the first encounters with Indigenous peoples, the industrialization phase, the arrival of various waves of immigration, and so on. Alongside Cité Mémoire, designed by internationally recognized multimedia artists Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon and directed by playwright Michel Marc Bouchard (Montréal en histoire, 2017a), these outdoor multimedia shows became the icons of avant-garde celebration and of the local expertise in the design of major cultural public event. A few years earlier, the Moulin à Images show, designed by playwright Robert Lepage and the theater company Ex Machina, have made a similar impression at the 400th anniversary of Quebec City (Radio-Canada, 2019). Moulin à Images was one of the first to project parts of the history of Quebec City onto massive outdoor infrastructure (in this case, silos).
These new ways of staging a relationship to the past nevertheless prompted criticism about the quality of their historical content. As one interviewee noted: A lot of money went into the Avudo’s project, it was a large-scale event. The show was imagined by someone very sensitive, they were highly competent people. . . the artistic sense. . . in that respect, I’m happy with the result, but I thought to myself, “my God, fundamental things are not there.” (Interview, 2020)
The quality of the content in addition to the fact that not a single historian has been invited to sit on the program committee (Nadeau, 2016a) have been largely criticized. The (in)accuracy of the facts presented, the selection of specific historical moments and/or characters considered relatively marginal in the city’s history, or the fact that “communications people watered down the content” have been deplored. (Interview, 2020). Isabelle Pelletier, the media relations manager, tackled these criticisms by saying that the Society “works closely with Montréal en histoire [the multimedia firm behind Cité-Mémoire]” (Nadeau, 2016a). Thereby, this multimedia company, which had previously for mandate to stimulate the economic vitality of a neighborhood through cultural activities, obtains the legitimacy to showcase and produce various pasts. It must be said that this cultural producer had hired history advisors to carry out its projects. Beyond the issues of authenticity and validity of these spectacular contents, this special relationship between the Society and the producer Montréal en Histoires also raises the question of the voice(s) heard and allowed in the 375th.
The paradigm of creativity also seems to be implicitly accompanied by the promotion of a new memorial experience that would ensure popular success. Embodying the image of accessible and inclusive celebrations, new digital tools have been described as a way to “bring the public closer” to the city’s past. As Pierre Bellerose, current vice-president of public relations at Tourisme Montréal and former director of the Society, suggested, mobile apps [such as those of Cité-Mémoire] make it even easier to explain the DNA of heritage. For local visitors, they’re a way to rediscover sites. For tourists, they tell a story. It’s spectacular. Those who come to Montreal have rarely ever seen such a thing before. (Corriveau, 2018)
Digital innovation, therefore, symbolizes popular success and is seen as a means of drumming up interest and curiosity about the past. A symbol of innovation and popular appeal, digital technology is also valued for introducing a form of democratization to relationships with the city’s history (Casimiro, 2019). The issue of democratizing public anniversaries through greater public participation is hardly new: at the time of Canada’s centennial celebrations in 1967, a desire to involve citizens in developing the program and carrying out activities was already there (Davies, 1999). Fifty years later, participation in these major projects 7 contrastingly brought into play the interactivity made possible by digital technology. Projects such as the participatory timeline designed by Montréal en Histoires and the McCord Museum have contributed to feature historical content outside the physicality of museums. This last project invited citizens to add their digitized personal archives to an existing historical chronology (Montréal en histoire, 2017b, 2017c). In the wake of citizen encyclopedias such as Wikipedia, the project aimed to gather and display stories written by various organizations (religious, school-related, etc.). Unfortunately, this project failed to achieve its goal due to insufficient citizen involvement. According to a participant, the multitude of activities related to the 375th has in fact contributed to dilute public attention, which was too much solicited during this time (Interview, 2020). This timeline hosted by the Montréal en Histoires website—now entitled Montréal en 375 temps (“Montreal in 375 points”)—is still online today without receiving any new updates (Montréal en histoire, 2017c). Despite the attractive potential described above, digital activities associated with remembrance do not always meet with success. By distancing themselves from museum authority, these projects that rely on digital technology’s promises put forward other forms of memory relationships through which questions of participation and duration will be at stake.
In addition to these issues, Eliane Belec, a historian consultant, pointed out in a media article about the 375th anniversary that these new technological tools are not within reach of all museum organizations and institutions. The budgetary constraints prevent them from acquiring such tools, and developing the expertise to use them “creatively” (Corriveau, 2018) are some of the limits mentioned in the article. Another constraint mentioned about new digital public activities is the rapid obsolescence and high maintenance costs of these tools (an US$800,000 per year investment is required to keep Cité Mémoire’s projections up and running) (Rondeau, 2018). The valorization of digital memory practices also has the consequence of setting aside those that occur through other material relationships, such as those arising from archives and artifacts from original collections. As André Delisle, Executive Director of the Ramezay Museum and spokesperson for the Off 375, mentioned, despite the promises of digital technology for bringing the public closer to the past(s), a person’s experience of an object can never be replaced by the experience procured by these various technologies (Rondeau, 2018).
Conclusion: what remains of the event-focused remembrance activities
As mentioned in the introduction, retracing this cultural event, its composition, and the room given to activities featuring the city’s pasts entails a discussion on the reconfiguration of the commemorative forms. This public anniversary, whose activities were not mainly focused on the city’s foundation or telling the story of the past(s), challenges us to ponder commemorations outside their traditional framework. The testimonies of actors involved in various roles and tasks associated with the 375th anniversary, as well as the media archives, focused on aspects other than identity politics and issues of belonging, which are widely discussed in the literature on commemorations and public anniversaries. Owing to its connection with the paradigm of creativity and its festive intentions, the 375th anniversary highlights how the organizers attempted to take advantage of a booming sector and, through its program choices, emphasized the directions that were being promoted for the future of Montreal. The configurations of this public anniversary raise a whole series of questions about digital technology uses (and divides) in commemorative activities and/or public anniversaries, the role given to specialists and experts (from the world of entertainment and/or the museum and history sectors), the very different means allocated to projects dealing with the past(s), as well as the transformation of sites and spaces devoted to the practice of memory. This public anniversary, which borrows a mega-event’s form and articulates the paradigm of creativity relying on the proms of a new cultural economy, also sheds light on the privilege of being “creative” and the limits of the traces remained by this kind of event.
The ephemeral nature of this cultural event was also an element discussed in the meetings with participants. All of them shared a common desire to learn about their city’s history, “to return to history,” and a more classical form of celebration—or commemoration—which will leave some traces beyond the event. Despite the criticism voiced in the media upon the unveiling of the official program, along the lines that the 375th anniversary would only be “a party that leaves nothing behind” (Nadeau, 2016a), the official discourse of the Society as well as the budgets allocated to infrastructure legacies expressed the will to create a celebration that lasts. This wish, however, did not carry over into digital memory activities, which disappeared after the celebrations because of a lack of maintenance. As one interviewee noted: The 375th was an adventure with all the communication tools needed to keep it going, but we didn’t succeed enough. We create content, but it gets erased. We create routes, but they fade away. [. . .] I know there was an intention to leave web pages with links. We need to go further than that. We need people who offer and maintain educational products. A web page isn’t enough. (Interview, 2020)
The Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube accounts devoted to the public anniversary celebrations were also taken down a few years after the event. As suggested by another interviewee, the 375th anniversary was treated like an advertising campaign, which has no enduring purpose after it is over (Interview, 2021). This desire for perdurance appears as a paradox to the creativity paradigm marked by a culture of events and the omnipresence of ephemeral projects.
Thus, except for the amenities set up expressly for the 375th, the continuation of creativity-focused remembrance activities appears as one of the key issues of this celebration, even if it was more than a mere communications operation. In light of this observation, several interviewees expressed the wish to return to traditional forms of commemoration, such as public memorials, which serve as a reminder of a commemorative activity year after year. As one of them stated: Yes, some people might laugh—the communications people laughed a lot at the idea of a [commemorative] plaque, saying they didn’t want the conventional nameplate, but that nameplate stays there from one year to the next. And it lives on. (Interview, 2020)
By seeking at all costs to set the event apart from the more traditional forms of commemoration and to make it a festive occasion to revive the image of the city, the 375th anniversary seems to have broken with certain standard practices and institutions for promoting and raising awareness of the city’s pasts. With the emergence of a new scene of cultural economies of the past dominated by event promoters, a cleavage has occurred with the community of historical organizations mandated with protecting and safeguarding collections. This dominant approach has nevertheless had a deterrent effect on the stakeholders we met with: the next anniversary of Montreal will feature the past more prominently. This observation also meshes with the desire of the citizens consulted 5 years before the celebrations, who hoped to be able to “go beyond laughter, fun, and entertainment” and better get to know the past(s) of the city (Interview, 2020).
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author want to thank the Centre Arts Cultures et Sociétés (CELAT) for its financial support for the research and the publication of this article.
