The Present State of Canada

This article published in the Virginia Quarterly Review was request by VQR’s editor, the late Staige Blockford who took an interest in Canada. Americans pay little attention to Canada, which is not a trouble-spot, and which they consider a small version of the United States. So it was startling to discover that north of the border, the Americans might be faced with a failed state. One American political scientist commented in a conversation to me that a similar referendum in the United States would be treasonable under the constitution. The United States has had enough trouble with secession.

The night of Oct. 30, 1995, was one of high drama across Canada. The referendum on Quebec secession that day attracted an enormous voter turnout in the province. Ninety-three per cent of eligible Quebec voters cast their ballots. The question which was put to them laid stress on a new political and economic association with the other nine provinces of Canada, which, it was assumed, would continue to be bound by the Canadian Constitution; outright secession would result only if no new agreement could be reached. The wording was not the first choice of Quebec premier Jacques Parizeau. The likelihood of Quebec ever reaching a satisfactory new agreement with the rest of Canada was slight, and Parizeau knew it. Even if some agreement were patched together, it would be unlikely to last long. But the polls had shown that Parizeau’s hardline was not winning over undecided voters, and on Saturday, October 7, Lucien Bouchard, leader of the Bloc Québécois in the federal Parliament, took over the leadership of the “Yes” campaign. The separatist strategy shifted; now the vote was to be for a new economic and political partnership which the rest of Canada would be forced to accept under pressure from international financiers.

After the referendum was over, a news story in the Toronto Globe and Mail revealed that the Parti Québécois government of Quebec was ready for action after a victory by even the slightest margin. The Quebec National Assembly would reconvene within the week to acknowledge the referendum result formally and request immediate negotiations with the federal government. The provincial Minister of International Affairs, Bernard Landry, had already sent letters to foreign embassies in Ottawa asking for swift recognition by their countries, and a press release on Bouchard’s letterhead invited Quebeckers serving in the Canadian army to join a new armed force which Quebec would set up directly after a “Yes” victory. France was expected to adopt a resolution congratulating Quebeckers on their decision and to include an offer of support. The French move should, in turn, arouse anxiety in Washington which would press Ottawa to begin negotiations leading to secession. According to this scenario, the United States would be among the first to recognize an independent Quebec.

As for the federalists, it was abundantly clear that they had no strategy in case they failed to win. The prime minister of Canada, Jean Chretien, was a Quebecker; in fact, since 1968, the federal government has been dominated by Quebeckers, first Pierre Trudeau, then Brian Mulroney, and now Chretien. There was no one in Ottawa who could speak for what used to be called English Canada, but might better now be labelled “multicultural Canada.” The premiers of the other nine provinces remained on the sidelines, except to growl now and then that they would never agree to the “sovereignty-association” which the separatists were peddling. Initially, the federalists were confident. The polls showed that Parizeau was not winning over a majority of Quebec voters. Then, about the time Lucien Bouchard took over the “Yes” campaign, separatist support began to grow until the polls showed the two sides neck-and-neck. The federalists showed signs of panic. There was high anxiety in Ottawa on the night of October 30.

The first returns showed the separatists well in the lead. The results coming in from the areas where the population was almost entirely French-speaking showed substantial majorities for the “Yes” side. These were the “pure wool” French, the pure laine, most of them descendants of the 60 thousand or so French who were in Quebec in 1760, when the Marquis de Vaudreuil agreed to the Capitulations of Montreal with Lord Jeffery Amherst, and surrendered New France. The separatists were jubilant. An elated Parizeau gave an interview to the French-language TVA network, in which he revealed that after a victory, he intended to resign and allow someone else, who would not necessarily be Lucien Bouchard, take over the task of building an independent Quebec. A woman, perhaps? Then the results began to come in from the Montreal area where the English and ethnic vote was concentrated. The “No” side edged upward, over 50 per cent. The final margin of victory was 53,498 votes. The television cameras picked up the disappointment and anger of the separatists. A bitter Jacques Parizeau went before the microphones and burst out that his side had been defeated by money and the ethnic vote.

There had always been racist undertones to the separatist cause. Quebec independence was a dream which only a “pure wool” Quebecker could fully understand. An immigrant from Haiti, Greece, or Lebanon, or even the United Kingdom, might be not unsympathetic, but the Heavenly City of the Quebecois de souche— the “Old Stock”—relegated them to the sidelines. Quebec separatism had more in common with the racial nationalisms of Serbia or Croatia than with the ethnicities of a modern multicultural state. The subtext of the platform of the Parti Quebecois, or pequistes, as the French-language media dubbed them, was not only fear of assimilation by Anglo-American culture; it was apprehension about the tidal wave of new immigrants to Canada. The “Old-Stock” Quebeckers had protected themselves in the past with one of the highest birth-rates in the world. But in the last two decades, the French-Canadian birth-rate sank to one of the lowest in the world. At one point in the referendum campaign, Lucien Bouchard mused aloud about the low birthrate of the “white race,” and the “No” side tried without much success, to paint him as a racist. Bouchard was merely voicing an apprehension felt by most of the “pure wool” Quebeckers. There is a demographic time-bomb ticking for the Quebecois de souche, and it could sink the dream of a French state within, or without union of some sort with the rest of Canada.

The separatists were prepared for a large ethnic “No” vote. The Parti Quebecois appointed scrutineers at all the polling stations, and in ridings where there was a large ethnic population, they were particularly vigilant. Ballots which were improperly marked were rejected even when the intention of the voter was clear. The number of spoiled ballots which were rejected overall was 1.8 per cent, but in three Montreal-area ridings it was much higher: in one, an incredible 11.7 per cent were rejected. The vast majority of the rejected ballots were “No” votes: after the referendum, the Quebec Liberal party collected more than 20 affidavits stating that far more would have been rejected if the polling clerks had not put up a fight. The margin of victory for federalism might have been higher by at least one percentile if the spoiled ballots had been counted. But that is cold comfort for the federalists.

The day after the referendum, Parizeau announced his resignation as provincial premier and leader of the Parti Québécois and also admitted that his outburst against ethnics might have been better phrased. But that was as far as he went. The separatists, by and large, agreed with him. Before the referendum campaign began, a Bloc Québécois member of the federal parliament, Philippe Pare had suggested that the “other” voters in Quebec should refrain from voting and let the real Quebeckers decide the future of the province by themselves. To multicultural Canada, which takes in about a quarter million immigrants a year, his remark appeared racist, but it expressed the fortress mentality of Quebec, formed by two centuries of slights, real or imagined, and the sense of being a conquered people. It is not an outlook one can understand without delving back into the history of North America before the American Revolution bisected it into a northern and southern half, and gave birth to two separate nations.

Before the Conquest, in 1750, a Swedish professor of botany, Peter Kalm, visited Quebec after a tour of the British colonies to the south. A scientist himself, he noted with approval that the Quebeckers had a greater taste for scientific pursuits than their English counterparts, whose chief interest was acquiring wealth. Status, however, did matter a great deal. New France had its own aristocracy, the seigneurs, whose seigneuries recreated a New World version of the manorial system of medieval France, and though most seigneurs had a hard time making ends meet, they had the right to add the coveted particle ‘de to their names, and the appetite for seigneuries was such that the British found almost 250 of them, and another 200 sub-seigneuries when they took over the colony. Moreover, New France had one advantage which the British colonies to the south did not. Perched on the St. Lawrence, it commanded the river routes of North America, and while the British remained huddled between the Appalachians and the Atlantic, French explorers moved easily into the interior, following the Great Lakes and the Mississippi.

There was one historical moment when Quebec might have won North America for France. In Queen Anne’s War, or the War of the Spanish Succession as it was known in England, the Canadiens of New France swept everything before them, and hemmed the British colonists into a strip along the eastern seaboard. But while the Canadiens were victorious in North America, Queen Anne’s armies led by the Duke of Marlborough were winning a string of victories in Europe, and when the war ended with the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, the French conquests had to be returned. The historical moment passed, and the die was cast for New France.

The secret weapon of the British was population. They had no hesitation about peopling their colonies with their outcasts: religious non-conformists, convicts, debtors, persons whom Britain was glad to be rid of, and who, once in the colonies, often harbored feelings of rejection. Not satisfied with only their own outcasts, the British collected them from other countries: Huguenots from France, Palatinate Germans, and Anabaptists from Switzerland who became Pennsylvania Dutch in the New World. By contrast, the immigrants to New France were Catholic and French, most of them from Normandy, and their number was few, not more than 10 thousand. The French habitants had large families, but New France could not keep up with the disorganized growth of the English colonies. When New France fell, Voltaire is supposed to have dismissed the event as the loss of a “few acres of snow”. Voltaire’s opinion was not typical, but France’s interest in Quebec was founded on national pride, not economic considerations, and in the end, economics won.

The French regime capitulated in 1760, the French colonial officials departed and the British were left with a colony that had lost its governing elite. They were uncertain what to do next. All the English colonies had been royal charter foundations. Britain had never had to administer a colony before. Eventually, on the eve of the American Revolution, the British Parliament passed the Quebec Act, the first act it had ever passed regulating the internal affairs of a colony. In the century that followed, it was to pass a series of acts regulating Canadian government, the last of which was the British North American Act of 1867, which Canada regards as its birth date.

As for English Canada, it was a byproduct of the American Revolution. The influx of Loyalist refugees from the Thirteen Colonies gave Canada an instant English-speaking population. The society they established was American. After the Napoleonic Wars were over, Canada received new waves of immigrants from Europe, but three decades were enough for the Loyalist Americans to establish the characteristics of English Canada. They shared accents and traditions with the United States, even the American Thanksgiving: the descendants of the Mayflower captain were among the Loyalists. The difference was the monarchy. Loyalty to the descendants of King George III was to remain an important component of self-identity in English Canada. As late as 1992, a Gallup Poll showed that 54 per cent of Canadians outside Quebec still considered themselves loyal subjects of Queen Elizabeth II. In Quebec, however, 66 percent opted for a republic.

The Quebec Act of 1774 had restored the government and society of New France as far as possible. English criminal law along with trial by jury replaced French criminal law, but the civil law remained French. The great difference, however, was that there were no more royal officials sent out from France; the new elite of Quebec society were now born in Quebec. Quebec began to produce its own leaders. In 1791, after the influx of the Loyalist Americans, another act of the British parliament introduced representative government and divided Quebec into Upper and Lower Canada, including Montreal in Lower Canada against the wishes of its residents, the majority of whom were at that time English-speaking. The Quebecois adapted swiftly to parliamentary institutions and used them skillfully to assert their identity.

French Quebeckers in their kindlier moments will admit that their British conquerors did not treat them badly. But the humiliating factor was that they were conquered at all. The Conquest blighted a great future that grew all the more splendid in imagination because it had been lost. When Quebec premier Jacques Parizeau tabled the 1995 referendum question in the Quebec National Assembly, he accompanied it with a “Declaration of Sovereignty” which went to the heart of the matter. Now is the time, it declared, to reap the fields of history, to achieve the promise of those 17th-century pioneers who rooted themselves in the soil of Quebec. It hailed a land whose heart beats in French, and a language which celebrates “our loves, our beliefs and our dreams.” English Canada heard this trumpet call with a mixture of astonishment and amusement. The soil of modern English Canada may grow wheat or timber, but it does not provide potting soil for pioneer myths. Unlike Quebec, English Canada has never developed a home-grown intelligentsia, and it finds its history dull. The United States can look back on a true Heroic Age, complete with revolution, civil war, Indian Wars and the taming of the frontier. Canada has only the dry bones of constitutional development.

Canada, nonetheless, is a product of the accidents of North American history. The American Revolution ensured that it, and not the United States, was heir to the British possessions in America. Anxious to reduce her commitments and withdraw her troops, the British smoothed the path for the federation of her North American colonies. The British North America Act of 1867 created the Dominion of Canada out of Ontario, Quebec and two maritime provinces. The west coast colony of British Columbia joined three years later and in the same year, Canada got the vast territory of Rupert’s Land which covered the prairie provinces and the whole northern part of the continent. Ten years later, without the benefit of legislation, Britain handed over to Canada her claims to the Arctic islands. Newfoundland held aloof until after World War II when, following two referendums and some prodding from Britain, she became the tenth province. Then the British Empire faded away, and Canada, which had been self-governing for more than a hundred years, not only became independent; she felt independent.

In Quebec at mid-century, a revolution got under way. It was called a “Quiet Revolution” but quiet or not, it was far-reaching. The Quebecois revolted against both the Roman Catholic hierarchy and the English managerial class which used to dominate commerce in Quebec. They were determined to be masters in their own house, and make their own language paramount in the province. The tone of Quebec culture changed sharply, and the federal government attempted to accommodate it.

In 1965, a Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism produced a report. It was to be followed by many others, but this one is worth rereading. Several features stand out. One is the degree to which both French and English were ignorant of each other. Not a great deal has changed; the English media now report Quebec affairs regularly, but their French counterparts are as insular as ever. Another was the fact that separatist sentiment was already present in all its degrees, from a moderate reform movement to a push for complete independence. But the events of the last three decades give an ominous meaning to one of the report’s paragraphs: “Finally it should be emphasized that (French) society is not only distinct, but also that its individual members, sometimes to a surprising degree, lead a life quite separate from that of English-speaking Canada. We are speaking here of separation in fact, created by the barrier of language, and not of doctrinaire separatism.”

Events were to move quickly. In 1967, the Canadian centennial year, Charles de Gaulle came to visit and shouted “Vive le Quebec libre!” from the balcony of the Montreal City Hall. There was splendid irony to De Gaulle’s intervention, for French Canada had been a tepid supporter of Free France during World War II, and the newspaper of the Quebec chattering classes, Le Devoir, had been markedly hostile. Three years later came the October crisis. A terrorist group called the Front de Liberation du Quebec (FLQ) had been setting bombs and committing hold-ups for seven years, and already had claimed four victims, but in October, 1970, it captured headlines by kidnapping the British trade commissioner, James Cross, and murdering a Quebec cabinet minister, Pierre Laporte. The Canadian prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, called in the army. His approval rating in the polls shot up immediately to 59 per cent, and terrorism was stopped dead, though one FLQ terrorist, Paul Rose, has since become a minor pequiste saint.

In 1980, Quebec held its first referendum. The question which the Parti Québécois put to the voters was long and confusing: not independence exactly, but sovereignty-association, a quasi-independence which the Parti Québécois founder, the charismatic René Lévesque, had outlined in a book titled An Option for Quebec. A fraction more than 40 per cent of the Quebec electorate voted for it. But at a rally four days before the vote was taken, prime minister Pierre Trudeau promised constitutional reform following a victory for federalism. What direction the reform would take he did not say, but with a little wishful thinking, it could seem to be a promise of a moderate form of sovereignty-association. And so a myth was born. Trudeau, the myth had it, had promised Quebec special powers, and instead protected federal prerogatives in a new constitutional framework.

Canada’s Constitution in 1980 was still an act of the British Parliament, which could be amended only by the British Parliament. What Trudeau’s constitutional reform turned out to be was not to revamp the constitution, but to make it a Canadian statute, and attach to it a Bill of Rights. The result was a furious struggle between the provinces and the federal government and Trudeau got a “Charter of Rights and Freedoms” only with an escape clause which allows a provision in the Charter to be suspended at the will of any government, federal or provincial. The Quebec government was to make good use of this clause: it had banned the use of English on signs, and when the Supreme Court found the ban in violation of the Charter, it invoked the escape clause and suspended the right of its English-speaking minority to use English. But Trudeau won a qualified victory, and Queen Elizabeth II came to Canada to proclaim the Constitution Act on April 17, 1982. The signature of the Quebec premier was not on the document. A new grievance for Quebec was born.

But by now, everybody else nursed grievances as well. The Western provinces were deeply resentful. Trudeau and his team from Quebec which had dominated Ottawa for some 15 years had a vision of Canada which extended no further west than the Great Lakes. His economic policies left the country mired in debt. Quebec had absorbed all his creative juices. But Trudeau in retirement still commanded respect and continues to do so yet, at the age of 75, though more among English-speaking Canadians than in Quebec itself. A poll taken in June 1993 showed that 62 per cent of Canadians overall judged Trudeau a better prime minister than his successor, Brian Mulroney. But then, 43 per cent judged Mulroney the worst prime minister in Canadian history.

The judgment was less than fair. Mulroney’s worst failure was the budget deficit which defeated him, and he left Canada in the unhappy position where some 35 percent of national revenues go to service the debt. He increased Canada’s immigration intake to a quarter million annually, thus subtly changing the old French-English constitutional duel: by 1995, the quarrel was between French Quebec and the new multicultural state that Canada had become. Yet twice Mulroney came within an ace of finding a formula that would have persuaded Quebec to put its signature on the Constitution. Power would be decentralized; Quebec would be recognized as a “distinct society.” The 1965 Report on Bilingualism and Biculturalism had said as much, and yet English Canada was deeply suspicious. To many Canadians, what was distinct about Quebec was that it fined people who put up signs in languages other than French. But Mulroney’s greatest error was that he inadvertently created a new high priest of the separatist cause, Lucien Bouchard.

After the defeat of sovereignty-association in the 1980 referendum, the Parti Québécois retreated from quasi-independence to quasi-federalism. But the die-hard core remained intact, chief among them Jacques Parizeau, who had served as minister of finance in the Parti Québécois government. A scion of one of Quebec’s leading families and a graduate of the London School of Economics, Parizeau is a combination of hard-headed economist and romantic, a closet monarchist and hard-core separatist. If he had had his way, the question that was asked in the 1995 referendum would have been a simple choice between independence and continued federalism. But the verdict of the pollsters was that a “Yes” vote could not win with that question, and Parizeau wanted badly to win. The referendum was to damage his political career and destroy his reputation. It transformed him from a statesman into a snake-oil salesman peddling a brand of sovereignty-association which he himself believed would not work, and it uncovered racist undertones in his mindset which only his enemies had previously suspected.

Lucien Bouchard was one of five children born to a deeply religious family on a farm 400 miles north of Quebec City. He grew up to become a small town lawyer and a supporter of Pierre Trudeau. But at the Universite Laval law school in Quebec City, he had met Brian Mulroney and the two students became close friends. When Mulroney became prime minister, he made Bouchard Canadian ambassador to France. He worked hard at mastering the intricacies of government, learned to speak English, and acquitted himself well as a diplomat. In 1987, Mulroney, who never forgot a friend and expected his loyalty to be returned, recalled Bouchard to serve in his cabinet. He won a by-election thanks more to Mulroney’s electioneering skills than his own. He also got married for the second time, to a Californian named Audrey Best, and became a father of two sons.

His resignation from the Mulroney cabinet was carefully timed. Mulroney came closest to a constitutional formula that Quebec would accept with the so-called “Meech Lake Accord” of 1987, which was put together by the first ministers of the federal and provincial governments meeting at a retreat on Meech Lake east of Ottawa. The polls gave it an approval rating of 59 per cent in Quebec. Western Canada disapproved by an even higher rating, but it was not that which killed “Meech Lake.” A lone native Indian member of the Manitoba legislature refused to make the province’s approval unanimous, and Newfoundland took that as a signal to withdraw support. “Meech Lake” died within a hair’s breadth of success. It was a sharp reminder that Canada’s native peoples had grievances that were far more justified than Quebec’s. But Bouchard had already resigned before “Meech Lake” perished. He founded his own separatist party to contest the next federal election, the Bloc Quebecois. In the next federal election, it won enough seats in Quebec to form “Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition” in the Parliament of Canada. The Conservatives whom Mulroney had led to victory twice were reduced to two seats, though one of them was won by an attractive young Quebec politician who had also learned what it was to trust Bouchard as a friend, Jean Charest. In the referendum of Oct. 30, 1995, he was the one politician to emerge with an enhanced reputation.

Bouchard was not the only reason for the collapse of the Conservatives. Out of the West emerged a new party with populist, evangelical roots, led by Preston Manning, the son of a former Alberta premier. One politician whose vocal chords are attached weakly to a light-weight brain, compared him to Darryl Duke, who was running for governor of Louisiana at the time. After Duke faded out, the media pundits decided that he was Canada’s Newt Gingrich. Manning himself was interested in the comparison until he took a closer look at Gingrich’s platform, after which he carefully distanced himself. The American statesman with whom Manning likes most to compare himself is Abraham Lincoln, and he draws analogies between the political scene in the United States before the Civil War and Canada’s present situation. He is the one English-Canadian federal politician who is quite willing to contemplate a Canada without Quebec, and to take a hard-headed look at the advantages and disadvantages. Quebec at present receives from the federal government more than 3.5 billion dollars more than it contributes in taxes. Ontario loses more than 4.5 billion dollars, and the province of Alberta not a great deal less. Manning is a native of Alberta. In the Quebec referendum of Oct. 30, 1995, the position of Manning’s Reform Party was that a “No” majority was preferable, but that a “Yes” victory should be accepted, and the rest of Canada should plan for its own future.

But for the ruling Liberal Party in Ottawa, there was no choice but to fight for a “No” victory and win. If Quebec became independent, its leading members, including prime minister Jean Chrétien himself, would become citizens of a foreign country. Its problem was that the separatists were chameleons; they managed to be for independance and against it at the same time. “Sovereignty” is a slippery word. A large number of voters who cast their ballots for the “Yes” side thought that after Quebec independence, Quebeckers could continue to send members of parliament to Ottawa, use Canadian dollars, and carry Canadian passports. Bouchard himself expected that, after Quebec became independent, the government in Ottawa would still pay him the generous pension to which Canadian Members of Parliament are entitled. The “No” side, led by the leader of the Quebec Liberal Party, Daniel Johnson, grew panicky in the last days before the vote, and prevailed on Chretien to promise another round of constitutional reform, which would include recognition of Quebec as a “distinct society.” “Yes” lost by a whisker and Chrétien is left with a promise he will find it hard to keep.

In Canada’s constitutional game, democracy has taken on a peculiar complexion. For the separatists, a majority vote for independence, however narrow the margin, should be respected by the rest of Canada as a genuine expression of democracy. But a vote for federalism is only an invitation for another referendum. So another referendum will take place and a poll taken early this year showed that separatist support had grown. The charismatic Lucien Bouchard as separatist as ever, has succeeded Parizeau as premier of Quebec, but the Quebec economy, which is in deep recession, needs his attention first. The prime minister of Canada, Jean Chrétien, is mortally wounded. The referendum revealed him as the first prime minister from Quebec who could not command widespread support in his home province. In Ontario, Canada’s richest and most populous province, the business elite is taking a serious look at Preston Manning of the Reform Party, for he is the only political leader with a coherent strategy for the rest of Canada in case secession takes place. Moreover, without being another Newt Gingrich, Manning does promise to tackle Canada’s budget deficit.

Meanwhile the resentment among the “Other” groups in Quebec is bitter. The péquistes have emerged as the faction of the “Pure Wool” Quebeckers, determined to exact revenge for the defeat on the Plains of Abraham in 1759. The “Others”: English, Jews, Greeks, and the varied mix of other immigrant groups, feel marginalized and persecuted. The referendum has left them alienated and angry, and the Québécols de souche, insular and insensitive to the feelings of those outside their own ethnos, remain unaware or indifferent. For them, what is important is to reverse the verdict of a capitulation 236 years ago, no matter how many referendums it takes.

The Parthenon Marbles - Past and Future

THE PARTHENON MARBLES -- PAST AND FUTURE

Reprinted from Contemporary Review. Copyright The Gale Group

I first saw the Parthenon in 1954 from the deck of an elderly liner named the Nea Hellas as she approached the dock at Piraeus. Two weeks earlier she had departed New York. After seven days at sea we touched at Lisbon, and then on to Naples where the view of Mt. Vesuvius from the harbour was not yet clouded in smog, and we took on a group of English tourists in search of the sun, for 1954 had been a year of almost continuous rain in Britain. They sprawled on the Nea Hellas' deck in various states of undress, while their white flesh seared bright red. But they were on the deck, sore but game, to watch the old liner enter harbour. The atmosphere was limpid, with the marvellous Mediterranean light which once bathed Athens. Rising above the city in the distance was the Acropolis and on it, the Parthenon.

Distance hid its scars, and it had many, for it was almost two and a half millennia old. It was begun in 447 B.C. when Athens was the leader of an alliance put together thirty years earlier to check the ambitions of the Persian Empire. By mid-century, it was clear that Persia's expansionism was well in check, and Athens redirected the revenues of her alliance into a building programme in Athens. As the history textbooks put it, the 'Delian League' which began as an ancient version of NATO, matured into the Athenian Empire, and the income from it financed the Parthenon. The cicerones who guide the hordes of tourists around the Acropolis nowadays like to refer to the Parthenon as the symbol of Athenian democracy. In fact, it is a monument to profitable imperialism.

But great works of art and architecture transcend the motives of their founders. Imperial Athens became a model for the ancient world. Less than two decades after the Parthenon was begun, Athens and her empire were plunged into a life-and-death struggle with her rival, Sparta and her allies, and when it was over, Athens had lost her empire, her navy and much of her prestige. But not all: Athens' reputation as the heartland of classical culture was something that Sparta could not take away. The Parthenon helped guarantee that. It may not have symbolized democracy, but it did come to symbolize what the classical heritage was all about.

The building remained more or less intact until the fifth century anno Domini. The Emperor Augustus had built a round shrine in front of it to put a Roman hallmark on Greece. The Emperor, Hadrian, had treated it kindly: it was he who restored the gold-and-ivory cult statue of Athena Parthenos -- Athena the Virgin -- for the original by the great sculptor Phidias had been damaged by fire beyond recall. Athena still had her followers long after Emperor Constantine I united the Roman Empire's future with the Christian religion. In Athens, paganism took a long time dying. When the cult statue of Athena was removed at last from the Parthenon in the fifth century, the head of the Neoplatonic Academy, whose house is now underneath Dionysios the Areopagite street, dreamed that Athena appeared to him and told him that since she had been ousted from her house, she must now move in with him. The Neoplatonic Academy remained faithful. Its philosophy had only a tenuous connection with Plato, but it kept the faith until 52 9, when the Emperor, Justinian, closed it down. For those who love lost causes, 529 is a notable year.

When Athena the Virgin vacated the Parthenon, the Virgin Mother of God moved in. An apse was built at the east end, and the sculptures of the east pediment, which showed the birth of Athena, were probably destroyed at that time. The west pediment's sculptures, which depicted the contest between Athena and Poseidon for the land of Attica, were more fortunate. The Turks took Athens in 1456 and built a mosque in the Parthenon and added a minaret, but the transformation did no great damage. In the 1670s, the French ambassador in Constantinople, the Marquis de Nointel, had his artist, Jacques Carrey, draw the Parthenon. It is usual to refer to Carrey as the 'so-called Jacques Carrey' which highlights our ignorance of the man. But his drawings feature in every art historian's attempt to reconstruct what the west pediment looked like on the eve of the great catastrophe, which took place in 1687.

In that year, Venice and the Ottoman empire were at war. A Venetian army was bombarding the Turkish garrison on the Acropolis, which was storing its gunpowder in the Parthenon, thinking it would be safe there. The Turks were reckless with gunpowder; a generation earlier, the Propylaea, as the great monumental entrance to the Acropolis is known, had suffered when gunpowder stored there was ignited by lightning. In 1687, a well-aimed shot from a Venetian cannon struck the Parthenon and the powder magazine exploded. I once had a Danish friend, now dead, who told me that his ancestor had aimed the ill-omened cannon, and claimed that it was out of penance that he became a professor of classics in a Canadian university. In fact, there seems to be some doubt about the identity of the man who aimed the cannon. An unnamed Hanoverian gunnery expert seems to be a prime candidate.

With the eighteenth century, the rediscovery of Greece began. In Britain the Society of the Dilettanti was founded in 1732. Its members were noblemen who had visited Italy where they ate and drank and acquired an appreciation of classical architecture. Europe still knew Greece through a Roman filter, for until Napoleon closed western Europe to Englishmen taking the Grand Tour, only the rare, eccentric traveller visited Greece which was an out-of-the-way corner of the Ottoman Empire. Roman classicism had inspired Palladian architecture which was favoured by the Whig ascendancy in Britain. The Dilettanti were not a Whiggish lot, and perhaps for that reason they wanted to promote Greek architecture through eyes uncorrupted by Palladianism. In 1748 they commissioned James Stuart, a painter-architect, and Nicholas Revett, an architect draughtsman, to visit Greece and produce drawings of as many of the ancient monuments as they could. Stuart and Revett's first volume of The Antiquities of Athens (1762) dealt with minor works and did not cause a great stir, but the second volume in 1787 was a revelation. The last volume appeared in 1794. Stuart and Revett founded the Greek Revival style, and though it was followed by many other 'revivals' such as the Gothic, the Romanesque and the Egyptian, the Greek Revival was the most successful of them all. It would ride the full flood of the nineteenth century romanticism and, in the United States, it became virtually the official architecture of the new republic.

The collectors soon followed. The French were in the forefront. Comte Marie-Gabriel de Choiseul Gouffler became Louis XVI's ambassador to Turkey in 1784. As a young man he had fallen in love with Greece and his pro-Greek sympathies nearly got him into trouble with the Sultan, but he smoothed ruffled feelings adroitly. His agent in Athens was Louis Fauvel who contrived to corner the antiquities market, and imported a wagon from Toulon which was the only conveyance in Athens sturdy enough to carry off large pieces of sculpture. If all had gone smoothly, the Parthenon Marbles', as the Greeks call them, would not be in the British Museum but in the Louvre, which does, in fact, have a small collection including a slab of the Parthenon frieze. But with the French Revolution, Louis XVI lost his head and Choiseul his job. Fauvel continued collecting, and Choiseul eventually returned to live in Paris where he died in 1817. His great collection was sold to the Louvre and to private collectors. But the greatest haul of Parthenon sculptures was to be made by Thomas Bruce, the Earl of Elgin, who was inadvertently to impart a new word to the French language: 'elginisme', which the Grand Larousse defines as a 'form of vandalism consisting of taking works of art from their countries of origin to put them in public or private collections'.

In fact, the French play a supporting role in the Elgin affair. On the 'ninth and tenth Thermidor of the sixth year of the First French Republic', 27-28 July, 1798 that is, the first fruits of Napoleon's plunder from Italy reached Paris. The Vatican and the Capitoline museums in Rome had yielded the Apollo Belvedere, the Venus di Medici, the Discobolus, the Laocoon and the Dying Gaul plus sixty or more other pieces. Much more was to come from the Netherlands, Prussia and the smaller German states, but it was Italy that was most thoroughly robbed. The bronze horses over the portal of San Marco in Venice were transported to Paris, and when the Arc de Triomphe was built, they were placed on top of it. They are Roman horses, and not Greek at all, but that was small comfort to the Venetians who attributed them to the great Lysippos.

Not quite two months before Napoleon's first shipment of Italian loot reached Paris, his great armada had set sail to conquer Egypt, and it, too, carried scientific experts, with the collection of artifacts on their minds. Napoleon did not expect British opposition, for Britain had withdrawn her fleet from the eastern Mediterranean two years before. France was on friendly terms with Turkey, and Egypt was at least nominally part of the Sultan's empire, though in fact it was ruled by the Mamelukes. But the Sultan recognized an insult when one was offered and when, on 1 August, Nelson destroyed the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile, the Sultan was pleased and grateful. In Athens, Fauvel was sent to gaol. Lord Elgin, who arrived in Constantinople as a British ambassador, received a friendly reception.

It would be hard to prove that the French example influenced Elgin directly, but it was no doubt at the back of his mind. All the French artists had signed a petition presented to the Directory in October, 1796, which said, in part, that the 'more the (French) climate seems unfavourable to the arts, the more do we require models here to overcome the obstacles to the progress thereof ... The French Republic, by the strength and superiority of its enlightenment and its artists, is the only country in the world which can give a safe home to these masterpieces'. Elgin also sought models for English taste, but his initial purpose was to make drawings and plaster casts of the Parthenon Marbles. He engaged the court painter of the King of Naples, Giovanni Battista Lusieri, who was at work on a royal commission to sketch the antiquities of Sicily. The long-suffering Lusieri, who was to be on Elgin's staff for twenty years, became a victim of the Parthenon Marbles. So, as it turned out, did Lord Elgin himself.

The person most responsible for diverting Elgin's project from its original intention was his chaplain, Philip Hunt. Ottoman control in Athens was in the hands of the Voivode or governor, and the Disdar, the commander of the Acropolis garrison, and neither was inclined to cooperate with Elgin's men. A firman from the Sublime Porte was necessary. The first firman made its way slowly from Constantinople to Athens, but events had overtaken it by the time it arrived. A second was sought, and, the question of whether or not Elgin had a legal right to remove the Parthenon sculptures centres on this firman. It survives in Italian, the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean of the time, and William St. Clair, in his new edition of Lord Elgin and the Marbles, has printed it in an appendix, with his translation. It clearly gave Elgin's party the right to measure, draw, make plaster casts of the sculptures, and to dig round the temple's foundations to find inscriptions. But it is the final clauses of the firman whi ch are controversial. They were inspired by Philip Hunt and they instruct the authorities in Athens not 'to make any opposition to the taking away of some pieces of stone with inscriptions, and figures, and in the aforesaid manner you should act and comport yourselves'.

On the basis of this vague authorization, Elgin took away 247 feet of the frieze that ran round the outside of the cella wall (originally it was 524 ft. long), fifteen metopes from the temple entablature, seventeen figures from the pediment and assorted architectural fragments. He also removed a caryatid from the Porch of the Maidens belonging to the Erechtheion a few steps north of the Parthenon ... In fact, Hunt contemplated taking away all of this exquisite temple, but the British Navy would have had to contribute a frigate if it were to be transported to Britain, and no ship was to be had. Hunt's acquisitive instincts far surpassed anything the Sublime Porte had in mind when it granted the firman. At Mycenae, Hunt cast a speculative eye on the Lion Gate, but it was too large to be moved. Louis Fauvel's wagon, which Elgin's agents commandeered while Fauvel himself was temporarily hors de combat, was the only vehicle in Athens which could transport heavy sculptures to the port. It was fortunate that the ea rly nineteenth century did not have modem moving equipment.

Elgin was not immune to the profit motive, but he made no money out of the 'Elgin Marbles'. When he sold them in 1816 to the British government, which bought them only after an exhaustive inquiry into the legitimacy of his ownership, he retrieved only about half his expenses. Bad luck clouded his later life. His career stalled. He lost his fortune on the Marbles. He also lost his wife to another man and the eighth Earl of Elgin, who became Governor-General of Canada, was to be the son of his second marriage. He lost his nose to syphilis, and though his ailment was probably misdiagnosed, it appears that he himself, at least, suspected syphilis. He also lost his reputation, for which Lord Byron was partly responsible, for in the controversy surrounding the removal of the Parthenon sculptures from Athens, Byron's voice carried special weight. He spoke for the Romantic Hellenism movement which was to colour the European view of Greece for the next two centuries. 'Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth/Immortal , though no more; though fallen, great!' he wrote in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. His brief poem, The Curse of Minerva is mere doggerel, but it was an effective anti-Elgin invective. Byron popularized what was a novel idea at the time, though it has by now gained international currency and informs the 1970 UNESCO convention on cultural property. It is that a country's art is its heritage. Art -- if it is old enough -- consists not merely of articles to be bought and sold at Sotheby's. It expresses the spirit of a people.

The debate on the purchase of the Marbles for the British Museum in 1816 took place against the backdrop of a bitter dispute in France. After Napoleon abdicated at Fontainebleau on 6 April, 1814, the Bourbons returned and the peace treaty did not mention the art treasures Napoleon had looted. The victors preferred to let Louis XVIII handle the question privately. But it was soon clear that Louis intended to return only those treasures which had not been displayed at the Louvre or the Tuileries, and after the Battle of Waterloo, the victors took a stronger line. They rejected a French effort to insert a clause in the Convention of Paris of 1815 which would guarantee the 'integrity of museums and libraries'. Yet the Convention did not explicitly demand the restitution of the looted treasures, and so the French cherished hopes of keeping most of them. They might have succeeded if the British delegation had not taken a strong line, and Prussia, Spain, the Pope and smaller states followed the British lead.

The French were incensed, for Britain had no direct interest: Napoleon had taken nothing from her. A rumour circulated in Paris that the Pope had promised the Prince Regent the Apollo Belvedere in return for British help in pressing the Vatican's claims, but the Apollo Belvedere went back to Rome. The British seemed motivated merely by Anglo-Saxon morality, which was not recognized as a virtue in France, and perhaps, too, out of a sense that Paris was an improper repository for great works of art. William Hamilton, who was one of Britain's representatives on the committee overseeing the return, hinted as much to the director of the Louvre, Vivant Denon. He told him that the Louvre was too near the Palais Royal, at the time the hub of Parisian prostitution, to be a centre for art study. Hamilton had been Lord Elgin's secretary. Tu quoque! France could reply.

What about the Elgin Marbles? It is little wonder that elginisme was accepted in the Grand Larousse.

The question of the repatriation of the Marbles began virtually at the same time that Britain decided to purchase them in 1816. During the parliamentary debate, one Hugh Hammersley proposed an amendment stating that Britain held the Marbles in trust, and when Athens demanded them back, Britain should return them. In fact, Greece did not officially ask for them back until 1983, by which time there was already a good deal of sentiment in the U.K. for their return. In 1983, Melina Mercouri, who became famous for her role as llya, the generous Athenian prostitute in the film Never on Sunday (1960), and then entered politics to become Minister of Culture (1981-89; 1993-94), held an emotional press conference in London on the Marbles. 'This is our history; this is our soul', she said. 'You must understand us... They (the Marbles) are the symbol and the blood and the soul of the Greek people'.

Mercouri played to the gallery and the gallery responded with playbacks. President Bill Clinton, who was met with riots protesting the bombing of Serbia when he visited Athens in 1999, stated that he was for the repatriation of the Marbles. In Britain, the Labour Party, in opposition, favoured the Marbles' return; once in power, its enthusiasm waned. A 1998 MORI opinion poll in the U.K. found a large majority in favour of the Marbles' return. When the European Parliament voted (15 January 1999) for the return of the Marbles by a slim majority, a third of the British members supported the resolution. William St. Clair, in the second edition of his Lord Elgin and the Marbles, revealed what insiders already knew, that in the late 1930s, the British Museum had subjected the Marbles to harsh cleaning to restore their whiteness, and in the process, some remnants of the original paint were removed. The Greeks who are sick of hearing foreigners gripe about the Athenian smog and the havoc caused by acid rain on ancie nt monuments, took note with some satisfaction. There is no easy solution for the nefos, as the Athenians call their smog.

Articles began to appear in law journals, for the Elgin Marbles case opens a can of worms in international law. Other treasures too have reached the world's great museums by dubious means and most were exported without any firman, not even one with ambiguous wording. The legal scholar who has concerned himself most with the Elgin Marbles is J. H. Merryman, Sweitzer Professor of Law at Stanford University and co-operating professor in the Stanford Art Department. He agrees that Elgin exceeded the terms of his firman, but points out that there were two additional firmans from the Sultan sanctioning the export of the marbles. As a lawyer, he is suspicious of all appeals to cultural nationalism, which are too close to the doctrines of Nazi Germany for his taste. If the Parthenon were actually being restored, Merryman would admit a moral argument for returning the Marbles to the temple whence they came, thus restoring its integrity, but the Greek plan is to transfer them from a museum in London to one in Athens. They cannot be exposed to the Athenian smog. The sculptures which Elgin spared have now been taken down and put in the Acropolis Museum here the remaining caryatids from the Porch of the Maidens now peer at visitors from behind glass. Is it more spiritually satisfying to see the Marbles in an Athenian museum gallery than one in London?

But lately the Greek argument has adopted a softer tone. Who owns the Marbles does not matter; what matters is location. In return for giving the Marbles a home in a new Acropolis Museum which will be ready in time for the 2004 Athens Olympics, God willing, Greece would pay for replicas to be exhibited in London, and would provide the British Museum with a permanent rotating collection of Greek art. Greece wants cooperation, not confrontation. The Greek Foreign Minister has assured other museum directors that they need have no apprehensions about other treasures taken from Greece before the War of Independence. Greece's ambitions extend only to the Elgin Marbles, and since she asks for possession rather than ownership, the Elgin Marbles case would establish no legal precedent.

The subtlety of the argument is truly Hellenic. But it does bring the problem closer to resolution. Greece has tacitly recognised that the exhibits of classical art in the British Museum are good ambassadors for Greece. The Elgin Marbles were always that. Their silent presence in the British Museum helped Greece win her freedom from the Ottoman Empire and expand her boundaries in the nineteenth century. Moreover the mission of the world's greatest museums has changed. No longer are they storehouses of artifacts. Rather, museum directors are impresarios who mount splendid exhibitions which draw thousands of visitors, and travel from museum to museum. As I write, an exhibition on Cleopatra VII of Egypt is drawing crowds to the British Museum, and from London, it will travel to the Field Museum in Chicago. Such exhibitions are international projects and often profitable ones. The Greek museums and the B.M. could make good partners.

But there is another reason why the Elgin Marbles case will probably soon be resolved. In the multicultural world of the future, classical art will matter less. The Duveen Gallery may someday house exhibits from Africa or Central America. As the Elgin Marbles become more the 'soul of the Greek people', as Melina Mercouri put it, they will become less the cultural heritage of the West. Greece will not entirely lose the special place it has in the affections of the western world, but attitudes will change.