Pierre Elliott Trudeau

by Nino Ricci

  After leaving Brébeuf, Trudeau kept up contact with Hertel, who was a frequent guest at the Trudeau home. In Young Trudeau, the Nemnis have made a convincing case that Trudeau was involved with Hertel and several of his old Brébeuf schoolmates in a secret society called “les X ” or “L.X.,” also referred to as les Frères chasseurs. The society’s mission was the establishment of an independent Quebec organized on Catholic and corporatist—in other words, fascist—principles. Through the summer of 1942, Trudeau and his friend Jean-Baptiste Boulanger worked on what they called the “Plan,” using writers like Trudeau’s beloved Plato to direct them, but also the anti-Semitic and anti-democratic Charles Maurras, a strong supporter of Marshall Pétain’s Vichy government. After several drafts they came up with a manifesto that summarized their aim as a “national revolution,” which they saw as “a permanent struggle aimed at the human excellence of the community.” The country to emerge from this revolution, the manifesto concluded, would be “Catholic, French and Laurentian” and would express itself “in a State that is at the same time authoritarian and the guardian of freedoms.”

  The Nemnis were able to track later references to the society by some of its former members. Hertel, for instance, admitted Trudeau’s involvement in it to La Presse in 1977, even ascribing its formation to Trudeau. The playwright and actor Jean-Louis Roux, meanwhile, wrote about the society in his memoirs, recalling a document that was passed around explaining how the city’s police and fire stations would be captured and its radio stations occupied when the day of action came. Roux later paid heavily for his own antics during the war, losing an appointment as Quebec’s lieutenant-governor when it became known he had worn a swastika as a part of anti-conscription protest. But Trudeau, for some reason, was spared, even though many of the details about his wartime activities would have been readily available to journalists during his lifetime.

  On the eventual fate of les X, the Nemnis have been unable to offer much direction. The paper trail ends in 1943; the society may have gone on working for years in deepest secrecy or may simply have collapsed from its own irrelevance. “Parfaitement loufoque,” Roux said of the enterprise, perfectly nutty, and it had enough of the same suspicious tone of highhanded irreverence of many of Trudeau’s earlier projects for one to wonder how seriously its own members took it. At the end of the manifesto for the group that Trudeau and Boulanger had written up, they had tacked the line “God approves.” Another document that outlined methods for dealing with traitors included “temporary kidnapping” among its suggestions. Roux, who announced he was quitting the group when it gave him the ludicrous task of recruiting to it the secretary general of the Université de Montréal, Édouard Montpetit, was made to believe that severe repercussions awaited those who tried to drop out. “The days, the weeks, the months went by,” Roux recalled later. “Nothing occurred. I’m still waiting.”

  We may never really know if the young man whose rebelliousness at Brébeuf had seldom risen above the level of throwing snowballs was truly plotting a fascist coup—with what would have had to have been a nearly psychotic level of delusion—or if the whole project was merely an intellectual exercise to relieve the boredom of law school or confound his future biographers. This last possibility is a real one. In a commentary he wrote at Brébeuf on Pascal’s Pensées that is reproduced by the Nemnis, the young Trudeau reflected at length, with eerie foresight, on his future biographers. After admitting that pride—the fear he might later look ridiculous—often prevented him from putting down his true thoughts, he then admitted to the greater pride beyond this fear, namely the assumption “that some day biographers will delve into all that we have written down to follow therein the development of our thinking.” He went on in that vein, trying to find the way around a selfconsciousness that only became more tortuous and inescapable the more he explored it. “Pascal, writing down his thoughts,” he concluded, “was more assured of surviving than I am (more assured because of his previous success, but not more convinced! Such is my assurance.) (I have this assurance because I’m role playing, and not so much because it’s definitely within me.)”

  By the end of the passage we feel as if we are in a house of mirrors, with no basis anymore for ascertaining which image is the true one. Trudeau, in a tone at once whimsical and troubled, gave us a window here onto a complexity of character that was both a sort of freedom and a sort of prison, that multiplied his possible selves but left him caught up in a selfconsciousness that then gave the lie to each of them. “If you want to know my thoughts,” Trudeau started his journal of 1938, “read between the lines!” The self-consciousness, the presumed audience, was always there, making every statement somehow doubly suspect. It would be a risk to take at face value the writings of a young man in whom selfrevelation and self-concealment were so interwoven.

  John English notes in Citizen of the World that radical groups like les X were quite common in Quebec during the war. Gérard Pelletier recalled in his memoirs that Jean Marchand, too, “had been recruited into one of the innumerable leagues that existed at the time (each one with twelve or fifteen members), all of which wanted to overthrow the government and put an end to democracy. That was the spirit of the age.” That same spirit would return some years later in the FLQ, only this time with real bombs and with real kidnappings. Trudeau by then would find himself on a very different side of the question, though some of the parallels between the two periods may provide insight into the younger Trudeau. There was something reminiscent of the young Pierre Trudeau in Hubert Aquin, for instance, the author, intellectual, and would-be felquiste who served time in a psychiatric hospital after announcing he was going underground to become a terrorist. In Aquin’s semi-autobiographical novel Prochain épisode, a narrator imprisoned for an unnamed revolutionary crime recounts a sort of spy story set around Lake Geneva that is a complex allegory of Quebec’s oppression and of the narrator’s, and Aquin’s, own experience. In its self-consciousness and reflexivity, where reality and fantasy become difficult to separate, the book recalls the writings of the young Trudeau, refusing ever to settle squarely on a clear self-characterization or on a single plan of action or point of view. Aquin was arrested after he declared his terrorist intentions but was never convicted of any crime, and his life reads much less like that of a revolutionary than that of a tortured intellectual who was unable to escape the straitjacket of his cultural identity or the frustration of his own inaction. After discussing suicide with the people around him for many years, in a running dialogue that almost became a kind of farce, he finally shot himself outside a Catholic girls’ school in Montreal.

  Aquin was perhaps the extreme end of the kind of circular self-consciousness the young Trudeau manifested, one that intellectuals in the hothouse culture of Quebec would have been particularly prone to whenever the calls of nationalism and collective loyalty made it difficult to indulge the usual ambiguities and doubts of an intelligent mind. The portrait of Trudeau that emerges from the war years is of someone living a divided identity, throwing himself full force into a lunatic revolutionary movement as if to prove he would never be the one to betray his race, as his anonymous accuser at Brébeuf had suggested, yet still winning his accolades at school, and still living out his Englishness at home.

  Over the years there would be many casualties among Quebec nationalists of men who, like Aquin, were never able to reconcile the contradictions between collective and self. It may have been the church, again, that helped save Trudeau. His extracurricular readings of the time included not only reactionaries like Charles Maurras and André Tardieu—and his commentaries on these were disturbingly uncritical—but also Catholic writers like Pascal and François Mauriac and Henri Bergson, who were somewhat more in the mainstream of Western thought. From them he would draw the ideas that became the basis both for his later “personalist” approach to his faith and for the values that would come to define his view of the individual and of human rights. The faith that had bound him to a regr
essive nationalism would also be his way free of it. In the 1950s, his personalism would make him one of the leading critics in Quebec of a church hierarchy whose paternalism and authoritarianism he had sought to glorify during the war.

  At Brébeuf, where Trudeau valued his religion classes above all others, he jotted down these notes inspired by a teacher, Father Lamarche, for whom he had had a tremendous respect. “See the truth wherever it is to be found. If one is not strong enough to act accordingly, that is too bad. But one should at least be loyal enough to recognize that what is true is true.” These words sound like the Trudeau we would all eventually come to know. But if something in him during his war years in Quebec saw through to the truth, he was not “strong enough to act accordingly.” He went with the current. When the atrocities in Europe began to be widely known he dismissed them as propaganda, as many Quebecers did, writing a vicious parody of Mackenzie King’s renewed call to arms for the university paper. Meanwhile he attended rallies that turned into anti-Semitic riots. He also staged a play in which Adam Dollard des Ormeaux, killed by the Iroquois in the 1600s, stood for the embattled French Canadians and the Iroquois, as in his anti-conscription speech, stood for the savage English (although Trudeau, always layering in his ambiguities, played an Iroquois in the actual production). In one of his more bizarre escapades, related by the Nemnis in Young Trudeau, he turned a debate on gallantry into an elaborate anti-British protest, lacing his comments with double meanings and planting his fellow Frères chasseurs in the audience to help further the spectacle. In the final moments, one of Trudeau’s plants pretended to heckle him and Trudeau pulled out a gun loaded with blanks and fired it at him. He then turned his back to the audience and made a gesture of being hanged, ending by pointing to his backside and suggesting a Union Jack be planted there.

  We may recognize the later Trudeau in the style of these antics but not so much in their intent. In 2004 the CBC released a peculiar drama called Maverick in the Making, in which the young Trudeau was depicted as many of us would have imagined him in these years: attending anti-Franco meetings, getting beaten up by the Montreal fascists, fighting the church establishment at every turn. Many of these scenes have so much the ring of truth that one has to keep reminding oneself that they are pure fabrication. At one point Pierre goes to confession, and just before launching into a diatribe against church authority he asks the priest if it is possible that the war against the Nazis is a just one. But there is little evidence that this question ever occurred to the real Trudeau at the time.

  Trudeau’s flurry of public actions ended abruptly when he graduated from law school in 1943, as did his subversive activities with les X and a period of intense reading and writing and publication. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, he had also grown suddenly bitter and disillusioned. In a jotting that was never published he wrote, “If the ordinary people truly realized what sort it was they were relying on to ensure salvation … they would not wait another day before giving up altogether.” He had been disappointed by his own co-conspirators, or perhaps by the whole future elite of Quebec with whom he had just spent three years at law school, and whom he accused of being utterly “two-faced” and lacking in character.

  Obviously “two-faced,” in Trudeau’s lexicon, was much more heinous than many-faced, as he was. Yet his bitterness seemed genuine: he had seen past some scrim, had seen the divide between talk and action. He himself, despite a legitimate claim to divided loyalties, had been willing to give over the whole of his energies to the call of the collectivity. He may have found that others, for all their talk, were not quite so ready to rise to the challenge.

  A YEAR OF ARTICLING was enough for Trudeau to grow bored, as his father had, with the practice of law. “[T]hat’s the problem when you have an office,” he told George Radwanski. “People come to you with their problems.” Then, in 1944, he finally received permission from Canadian authorities, denied the previous year on account of the war, to leave the country to study in the United States. The next years would prove crucial. As John English shows in Citizen of the World, through Trudeau’s correspondence and other writings of this period, the man who left Quebec feeling intellectually bankrupt and hollowed out would return to it five years later with an outlook that was much changed from that of his youth, and that would come to define him for the rest of his life.

  Trudeau had chosen to go to Harvard, to study “Political Economy and Government.” In his memoirs, he said he had been torn “between law, psychology, sociology, and political science.” After consulting many people, including the great Quebec intellectual and political leader Henri Bourassa, by then in his seventies, Trudeau finally took the advice of André Laurendeau, at the time a Quebec MNA, who pointed out to him that Quebec was sadly lacking in economists. In his Harvard application, however, Trudeau stayed true to the hope he had expressed when he had applied for a Rhodes Scholarship to follow a career in politics. “I need not hide my conviction that Canada is decidedly lacking in statesmen. We French-Canadians in particular have too few political thinkers to lead us, and the sight of such splendid people going to ruin appalls me.”

  It did not take Trudeau long to realize how blinkered his life in Quebec had been over the previous few years. In his memoirs, he recalled that in the “super-informed environment” of Harvard, he began to grasp, for the first time, the “true dimensions” of the war. Harvard had on faculty several professors who had fled the Nazis, including Hitler’s predecessor as chancellor, Heinrich Brüning. “I realized then that I had, as it were, missed one of the major events of the century in which I was living.”

  A great deal seemed to go unstated in this recollection. He ended it thus: “Did I feel any regret? No. I have always regarded regret as a useless emotion.” But as the war was ending in 1945, he wrote to the girlfriend he had left behind in Montreal expressing exactly that, regret, seeming mortified at the mindset that had allowed him to remain caught up his own partisan pursuits while unimaginable horrors were occurring across the sea. His laments had the quality of a cri di cœur—understandably so, given that the “true dimensions” of the war had been well enough known for some time by then, and he had chosen to discount them. As much as he later downplayed this moment of revelation, it was likely determinative for him in setting the future course of his thinking.

  Trudeau’s notes from the time show he had been reading up on Fascism and National Socialism and understanding how narrow and unreflective his own political thinking had been. Commenting on one of his readings he noted that “democracy is not synonymous with capitalistic exploitation,” with the tone of someone who had just emerged from a pampered dictatorship to discover that the wider world was not the den of iniquity he had been led to believe.

  Trudeau mentioned that Heinrich Brüning, a Catholic, had fled the Nazis for Harvard, but he didn’t mention any Jews who had found refuge from the Nazis there, probably because none had. Despite the massive influx of Jewish intellectuals into the United States before and during the war, Harvard, in addition to a tacit quota on Jewish students, maintained a virtual moratorium on the hiring of Jewish faculty well into the 1940s. This “super-informed environment” was not exactly super-enlightened. Trudeau, however, an outsider now, keeping to his room in the graduate residence much of the time despite the “Citizen of the World” tag pinned to his door, and making few friends, might have grown more sensitive to other outsiders. A friend he did make, in fact, was fellow graduate student Louis Hartz, who became a sort of mentor. He was one of the few Jews who had managed to slip in under the quota and would later go on to become a full professor at Harvard and one of its most influential political scientists.

  Though Trudeau later spoke enthusiastically about his time at Harvard, his letters of the time, quoted at length by John English, show he was not very happy there. From having been the centre of attention he was suddenly a provincial; and everything he had learned and thought, his entire formation, must suddenly have seemed a bill of goods
. Outside the conformist atmosphere of Quebec, where it had been possible to indulge his rebelliousness simply by subscribing to the views of his superiors, he was discovering ways of making sense of the world that he had never considered. Much of his later intransigence toward Quebec nationalists likely went back to this time, when the scales fell from his eyes and he realized how blinded he had been by his own nationalism.

  Even so, he allowed himself to ease toward a new understanding only by a kind of “étapisme,” not so much renouncing old views as reasoning toward new ones, as if to save himself the shock of complete reversal. One part of his past education he was happy to leave behind, however, was his time at law school: he now had confirmed for him what he had suspected all along, that much of what he had been taught there was beside the point. It was at Harvard that he came to understand the law not as a dull collection of jots and tittles but, as he would later tell Peter Newman when he became justice minister, as a structure for “planning for the society of tomorrow,” the very warp and woof of what held a society together. He also received a solid grounding in economics at Harvard, one of the reasons, after all, he had chosen to go there. He later tended to downplay his understanding of economics, always stressing his cultured side over his political one, but at Harvard he studied with people like the pre-eminent post-Keynesian economist John Kenneth Galbraith and the eventual Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief. It was at Harvard that he was first exposed to the Keynesian theories of interventionism that would guide his own years in office. But there were also many opponents of Keynes at Harvard who left their mark. In Citizen of the World, John English makes the argument that what many people later took as a lack of rigour in Trudeau’s economic thinking was really the understanding he took from the divergent views he was exposed to at Harvard that “economic judgements were not the product of a science but more often the result of special interests.” What in Trudeau the politician came across as indifference to economics, then, may more properly have been distrust of it.