Promenade des Premiers-Ministres

The bronze René Lévesque on the promenade stands two meters sixty centimeters tall. Lévesque himself, premier of Québec from nineteen seventy-six to nineteen eighty-five, was about one meter sixty-three tall. This difference arose here after an unsuccessful attempt to commemorate him at life size.

It all began in nineteen ninety-five. Pierre Boucher, chair of the new Québec National Capital Commission, calculated that of the twenty-six previous leaders of the provincial government, only two had monuments in the capital. The commission decided first to give each of them a place at least on information panels, adding sculptures gradually. Building the promenade cost fifty thousand dollars. On May twenty-ninth, nineteen ninety-seven, it was opened by the premier at the time, Lucien Bouchard.

The count here begins in eighteen sixty-seven, when Québec became a province of the Canadian Confederation. That is why the panels list the heads of the provincial government specifically, rather than governors and leaders of earlier colonial administrations. Today fourteen panels tell the stories of thirty premiers and carry the sequence through two thousand fourteen.

The first of the promised monuments appeared two years after the promenade opened. The Association des amis de René Lévesque, together with the National Assembly of Québec and the Québec National Capital Commission, commissioned the sculptor Fabien Pagé to create a figure of the late premier. Pagé made it life size. On June third, nineteen ninety-nine, the bronze was installed near the Parliament Building, on the boulevard that already bore Lévesque's name.

The short figure stood almost at the same level as passersby. Some people placed a cigarette between its bronze fingers. Debate began: critics believed that the monument's size diminished the historical importance of the man and looked poor in the open space before Parliament Building. Lévesque's friends raised another sixty thousand dollars in donations, and Pagé made an enlarged version.

On August twenty-eighth, two thousand one, the new figure was placed in the former one's place. The first bronze was taken to New Carlisle, the settlement where Lévesque grew up. After several moves, it was installed at the entrance to a museum space bearing his name. Here, on the Promenade des Premiers-Ministres, the second version remains—almost one meter taller than the man it depicts.