The launch of Refus global elicited varied, even divided, comments in Quebec newspapers and magazines. We unearthed these few words from the digital archives of the newspapers.

“Exhibition of ‘automatists’ at Tranquille,” headlines an article that appeared in Le Petit Journal on July 25, 1948, 15 days before the launch of Refus global. Very short, the text devotes only its first paragraph to the event without giving it a precise date.

“In some time, a new group of artists, the Automatists, will launch their manifesto at the Librairie Tranquille,” reads the text, which adds this nebulous remark: “It is said that we will see their works through a screen pierced with “small holes”. »

The weekly returns to the subject on August 8 without much more detail, except to add that the manifesto will include 400 copies.

A few days later, on August 16, Le Canada, a Montreal daily close to the Liberal Party, published a more detailed article. While calling the Automatists a “surrational group in painting”, the journal clarified that the manifesto was made up of eight separate texts and gave some details about each. It is added that reproductions of Barbeau, Borduas, Ferron, Riopelle and others accompany the texts.

In her book Refus global: Histoire d’une receptionpartiel, taken from her doctorate, the author Sophie Dubois estimates that a hundred texts approach the subject between July 1948 and September 1949. With 37 texts in 42 weeks, it is The Canada that “devotes the most media space” to the manifesto, she analyzes.

While it “denotes fervor for life’s audacity,” the contents of the manifesto “are nothing new,” he wrote. Lafcadio even goes so far as to compare Refus global to “du sous-Jean-Charles Harvey”, who, he claims, had already developed the same themes. No doubt he was referring to the text of the lecture entitled The Fear delivered by Mr. Harvey before the Canadian Democratic Institute, May 9, 1945.

At least, concedes Lafcadio, these young authors, if they “are better when they confine themselves to painting”, launch here a “sincere cry”.

The weekly Le Clairon of Saint-Hyacinthe, a town practically neighboring Mont-Saint-Hilaire where Borduas and his friends met, was much more enthusiastic.

In an analysis published on August 27, the journalist Charles Doyon does not hide that the text is “outrageous intransigence”, which has the good fortune to please him in this “irremovable and undivided country of Quebec”.

“It’s a cry of distress aroused by the disgust of young people in front of a generation of seers and censors”, he launches about this “literary and artistic explosion”.

He also comments on several of the texts of the manifesto, but deplores, like others, an “original, but impractical” presentation because of the “scattered pages”.

In his biography Monsieur Livre about Henri Tranquille, author Yves Gauthier also believes that columnists and editorialists are “unanimously” against the manifesto, its credo and its authors, with the exception of Charles Doyon.

Catholic Action, Catholic Social Action daily, is one of the most virulent detractors of the pavement launched by Borduas and his gang.

In a heated text published on September 22, Father Hyacinthe-Marie Robillard warns his readers not to simply “play ridiculous” “this proclamation of Methodists breaking the ban with their Greek or English teacher”. For him, the hour is serious: “There are relatives, friends, who carry like a thorn in the heart – offering it to God for them – the spectacle of their revolt. »

He too was unimpressed with the originality of the content, believing that “surrational automatism is only a plagiarism of pre-war French surrealism”.

The dismissal of Borduas from the École du Meubles, a decision signed by Paul Sauvé, Minister of Social Welfare and Youth in the government of Maurice Duplessis, was made public on September 18 and caused a reaction.

“I wonder what the artistic abilities of the Hon. Jean-Paul Sauvé, or the prerogatives that made him decide recently that after sixteen years in the service of education in this province, an art teacher is no longer competent”, rages Charles Doyon in Le Clairon.

Le Devoir of September 22, 1948 quotes Borduas the day after a press conference: “In the eleven years that I have been at the School, no one has ever criticized my teaching. In short, it is only for having written the Refus global manifesto that I am fired, ”says the painter and leader of the group.

“The discourse on the work fades in favor of the discourse on dismissal”, notes Sophie Dubois.