Citizen of the World

by John English

  Ditreau has a diploma in “commercial psychology” from McKill University, and he offers to help Couture assess his clients. “Your business,” he explains, is in a French-Canadian area, but francophones “prefer to buy from Jews, firstly because they don’t want to enrich one of their own and then because they believe they will get a better price.” His solution: Put up the sign “Goldenburg, tailor” in place of “Chez Couture.” He also advises Couture to sell “American magazines” and to install a “soda-fountain”; people will then come after Mass to drink “Coke.” While he is speaking, Ditreau tears down a sign that reads “Help our own” and replaces it with a new English sign that says: “We sell for less—Goldenburg, fine goods. Open for business.”

  Once all the signs have been changed, Couture tells his first customer, in the “manner of a Jew,” that he has the latest fashions from Paris, New York, and London and then whispers, “in spite of our repugnance [for Hitler] we even follow the fashions of Berlin.”80 The deals continue—and the confusion mounts. Ditreau is finally rejected as a suitor by Camille because he is a politician, the lowest of all professions. The evil ways of politicians are also demonstrated by another customer, Maurice Lesoufflé, clearly modelled on Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis, who proposes having six “heroic” Canadians split the vote so a “Hebrew” candidate can win an election.

  Dupés was a great triumph for Pierre Trudeau at Brébeuf, and the priests, parents, and students who attended the performance vigorously applauded its young author—youthful but complicated. It reflected not only the mood of Outremont but also a time when the Canadian prime minister could compare Hitler to Joan of Arc; when his major adviser, O.D. Skelton, an eminent liberal, could fret about the “Jewish” influence that was pushing Britain towards war; and when Vincent Massey, the high commissioner to Britain and future governor general, could declare that Canada needed no Jewish immigrants.

  Like most students, Pierre Trudeau responded to what his teachers, his peers, and his family wanted of him—most of the time. But certain unresolved contradictions appear in his personal journal, where his private activities and views are expressed. On the surface, he seemed to conform to the nationalist, anti-Semitic, and anti-English environment of the time. Yet, just a few days before Dupés was performed, after careful supervision by the Brébeuf staff, Trudeau had his “encounter” with Laurin about his mixed blood and his American and English ways. Without doubt, this incident made the final text of Dupés more reflective of the general mood at Brébeuf. Pierre had written to his mother on January 24, 1938: “One of the qualities of the letter is tact. That is to say that when one writes, one should take account of the circumstances and adapt the letter to the one who will read it.”81 It was meant to apply to a specific letter, but the comment describes well how Trudeau believed he must adapt to particular circumstances. Yet, as he told his mother, he found it a “complex” task. He conformed, yes, but in his heart he often rebelled, and in his acts he sometimes contradicted.82

  Three days before Pierre wrote Dupés, he made some notes about the “pros and cons” of the religious life. Here doubt and belief abound. The pro side emphasized how the priesthood would always lead him towards perfection and closer to Christ. It would grant him a better place in heaven and, more generally, make him a better man. But the cons won. He was not much attracted to the vocation. He was not humble enough; he was too proud and too independent. He liked an active life, and he would not be good at confessions because he lacked the necessary spirit. Moreover, he would not be a good teacher: “I’m not open enough,” he concluded. It was a shrewd assessment.83 Pierre Trudeau was a good Catholic, but he would have made a poor priest.

  * Grace’s mother was a Catholic and, in the practice of the day, she took her mother’s religion. She also spoke fluent French, even though her mother died when she was ten years old. Trudeau later explained, “Obviously she always spoke French too because otherwise she wouldn’t have met the gang that my father was hanging around with in the time of his studies in Montreal.” Trudeau also said that they met at a church attached to Collège Sainte-Marie, adding, “It’s a good place to meet, I suppose, at least in the stories you tell your kids.” Interview between Pierre Trudeau and Ron Graham, April 28, 1992, TP, vol. 23, file 3.

  * Charles Trudeau’s death attracted considerable attention in the Montreal press, with similar responses. The Montreal Star, April 12, 1935, mourned the death of a major sports figure, the owner of Belmont Park and the major investor in the Montreal Royals, while La Patrie, April 11, lamented, in a key editorial, the loss of a French-Canadian businessman who had attained “the prestige and influence of the rich,” yet did not lose his friends even when he reached the highest steps on the ladder of success. Trudeau, Le Devoir claimed, had served superbly on its board as a financial consultant. The April 11–12 issue even speculated that although Charles Trudeau had become disillusioned with politics, he might some day have entered politics as a reformer.

  * On April 10, 1938, the third anniversary of Charles’s death, Pierre went to Mass and took communion for the sake of his father’s soul. He wrote in his diary: “Time heals all. Maybe it’s true that you are able to become accustomed to an absence, but the more time passes, the more I miss his firm but kind goodness, his advice so full of wisdom. Without doubt, he guides me from Heaven still but it would be so good to be able to talk with him and discuss things with him once again.” He lamented that he had been given only fifteen years to profit from his father’s wisdom. He accepted that it was God’s will that Charles was with Him. The loss is expressed constantly in the diaries he kept from 1938 to 1940. Journal 1938, April 10, 1938, TP, vol. 39, file 9.

  * Trudeau also liked to go to Montreal Royals’ baseball games, and he tracked the scores. He won some popularity among the priests at Brébeuf by using the family interest in the Royals to get opening-day tickets. He was rewarded with a day off school when he accompanied Father Toupin to the game. Personal Journal, 1937–40, TP, vol. 39, file 9.

  * While the fare was highly nationalist and, in economics, corporatist in the fashion of Catholic economic thought at the time, there was some diversity and balance. André Laurendeau, for example, condemned Communism strongly, but said that all collective property—“propriété collective”—was not bad, giving the examples of electricity and railways. Father Omer Jenest, SJ, said that the church’s support for corporatism distinguished it from fascism. He argued that the imposition by force of corporatism in Italy must be condemned. Gérard Filion, the future editor of Le Devoir, spoke on cooperatives and said they were most advanced in the Nordic countries. He added that Italy, because of fascism, was better off than France. Trudeau’s notes are in TP, vol. 4, file 6.

  CHAPTER 2

  LA GUERRE, NO SIR!

  In the late spring of 1938, after the success of Dupés with the students and their parents at Brébeuf and his decision not to enter the priesthood, Pierre Trudeau began to wonder, as older adolescents often do, what his fate might be. He disliked business, and his father’s career and death had left him ambivalent towards law. He wrote in his diary as the school year came to an end in June 1938: “I wonder whether I will be able to do something for my God and my country. I would like so much to be a great politician and to guide my nation.”1 This dream never died, though his conception of both his nation and its politics certainly changed.

  When Pierre began the quest for his destiny at Brébeuf in the 1930s, the stream of world events quickly turned into rapids. The Great Depression altered its direction, Hitler’s Germany disrupted its flow, and the confluence of war in China and in Spain created a torrent that crested in September 1939 when the world burst apart once more. Like others, Canadians became immersed in the flood of current events. Some were swept away by the martial spirit. Farley Mowat, the son of a soldier who gloried in memories of the First World War, saw his gleeful father come down the country lane bearing news of war, and the dutiful son set out to fight through six cru
el years of war.2 In the poor parts of Montreal, recruiting centres were clogged as the unemployed and the young with few prospects (including the future hockey star Maurice Richard) viewed the dangers of war as more alluring than the pain of their present plight. Among Pierre’s classmates at Brébeuf, however, few answered the call, and most of this young elite probably opposed the war as a British imperial conflict that would spill Canadian blood and bitterly divide the country. Charles Trudeau’s close friend Mayor Camillien Houde did not hide his agreement with that view.

  Pierre was nineteen years old when the Germans stormed across the German-Polish border that September. His own attitude towards the war was not predictable, and he understood its bloodiness. In the debate at school on the Sino-Japanese conflict in which he took the Japanese side, he admitted they were ruthless: “But in war can such things be avoided?” he asked. “Did not Germany use gas in 1914 and bomb the Red Cross of the Allies? Did not Italy use very crude means in Ethiopia, did not China massacre Europeans in the Boxer rebellion, did not Franco render thousands of Spanish children orphans, did not France execute unscrupulously certain of her enemies in the last war, did not Great Britain herself use the inhuman explosive bullets against the Boer?”3 Trudeau obviously knew much about war, but he displayed none of the generous views towards Mussolini’s Italy and Franco’s Spain that were common among the clergy and the commentators in Quebec at the time.

  Camille Corriveau, his American girlfriend, wrote to him at the outbreak of war, begging him not to enlist. He did not answer directly but described the immediate signs of war in Montreal: “Soldiers guard the Jacques Cartier bridge; airplanes often survey the city. The regiments hunt for recruits. Parliament is now sitting to decide if there will be conscription. There are some anti-conscription gatherings across the city. One hears some threats.” He admitted he had not read any newspapers and was not well informed, but he confided that he personally believed Hitler was near the end.4 Many who had read the newspapers shared this view when Hitler’s war machine halted during the “phony war” of that first winter. But they were wrong.

  Pierre could have enlisted, but he did not. There was no military tradition in his family, despite Étienne Truteau’s celebrated seventeenth-century triumph over the Iroquois, and he later recalled that only one of his cousins enlisted.5 In general, francophones were poorly represented within the Canadian military. French was spoken only in the famed Royal 22e Régiment, and military administration in Quebec was conducted in English despite the controversies of the First World War. Among the higher ranks, francophones were scarce, and not one of the brigade commanders of the First Canadian Division was francophone.6 In Pierre’s last year at Brébeuf, 1939—40, he concentrated on his studies for his bachelor’s degree, on editing the school newspaper, and on his future plans. Meanwhile, he carefully guarded his opinions about the war.

  “I’m not open enough,” he had decided when pondering a religious life in his future. Certainly, Pierre had become less open as his teenage years progressed and as his own sense of identity reacted to his understanding of external events. He told his mother in the fall of 1935 that the priests at Brébeuf might be worried about the election results, but he expanded no further and passed quickly on to another subject.7 He also grumbled that there were three Masses each day and no fewer than fifty-six religious exercises of various kinds in the Brébeuf regimen. But despite his complaints, his Catholic piety was increasingly and devoutly expressed: with exhilaration he told her how the lights were turned out at a retreat so they could better see the magnificent cross that loomed above them on Mount Royal. At another retreat house, in modest rooms near a quiet river, he told her he enjoyed the sermons but valued most the silence during meals—and, after the experience of those few days, he began his lifelong practice of meditation.

  Pierre wrote this letter to his mother on November 26, one day after Quebec politics changed completely with the near defeat of the corrupt and capitalist Liberal government of Louis-Alexandre Taschereau; six weeks after the victory of Mackenzie King’s Liberals in Ottawa; three months after Mussolini’s dive bombers, in attacking Abyssinia, demolished the fragile hopes of collective security through the League of Nations; and nine months after Germany denounced the disarmament clauses of the Treaty of Versailles and introduced conscription. It was also only eight months after the death of Charles Trudeau. Quebec turned inward as it confronted the new realities; so, for a while, did Pierre.8

  Although he turned inward, Pierre, contrary to his frequent later statements, remained deeply immersed in politics in two important ways: in the sense, set out by Aristotle, that the end of the science of politics must be human good; and in the specific Quebec context where the rights of francophone and Catholic citizens must be upheld. The cross on Mount Royal, after all, symbolically linked Roman Catholicism with the national mission of the descendants of New France in North America. Pierre’s Jesuit education mediated his understanding of contemporary politics in the 1930s, and his youthful play Dupés illustrates how closely he followed political events despite his later claims of ignorance. His views, as expressed publicly, were conventionally nationalist—what one would expect of an adolescent Brébeuf student in 1938. He supported the “Buy from our own” movement that arose as Jewish shopkeepers proliferated in the francophone districts of Montreal. He deplored the tendency to create constituency boundaries so that Jews could have electoral representation, although he wrongly blamed Maurice Duplessis rather than the federal Liberals for that chicanery. In common with most Quebec nationalists of the time, he portrayed active politicians as corrupt and craven, a view that he expressed bluntly in a Brébeuf essay that year where he said that anyone who entered politics risked acquiring “the reputation of an imbecile.” Yet he and many others dreamed of a new kind of politics, not so corrupt, and he fancied a future political career for himself.9

  Much later, in minimizing his nationalist views, Trudeau recalled that he had joined students at a demonstration against the French writer André Malraux, who was touring Canada to advocate the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.10 Similarly, his views on international affairs, as expressed in his schoolbooks—which the priests read—followed the line taken by Quebec Catholic nationalists. For an English rhetoric class, he wrote in October 1937: “Do we want to go to war? We do not. Ask those who have been if they enjoyed the horrors, if they enjoyed the terrors, the misery and the uncertainty of war.”11 The memories of the last war and the bitter divisions it caused were still strong in the province.

  The anti-Semitism of Dupés was as conventional in its time as it seems deplorable today. It lacks the ferocity of Quebec fascist leader Adrien Arcand or, for that matter, the Canadian-born Catholic priest Father Charles Coughlin, who spread hatred and fear of Jews in Roosevelt’s America—a fear that grew rapidly as he denounced American Jews for drawing the United States into a European war. It was less extreme than the exaggerated view of Jewish economic power expressed in 1933 by Les Jeunes-Canada, a Quebec Catholic youth group that in a famous April rally, “Politicians and Jews,” heard speakers denounce the “Jewish plutocracy” and argue that Canadian politicians were quicker to condemn discrimination against Jews in distant Germany than against French Canadians in Ontario or the West.12

  Pierre’s anti-war sentiments echoed the strong isolationist sentiment not only in Quebec but also among English-Canadian intellectuals in the 1930s. His rhetoric pales beside that of University of Toronto history professor and war veteran Frank Underhill, who called on the Canadian government to make clear to the world, “and especially to Great Britain, that poppies blooming in Flanders fields have no further interest for us … European troubles are not worth the bones of a Toronto grenadier”—or, Pierre would have added, a Brébeuf student.13 The conventional, history reminds us, is frequently badly wrong. The moral quandaries of the time lay elsewhere, and Pierre’s manuscript for Dupés was revised several times not for its anti-Semitism but for its suspected sex
ual nuance.*

  After 1935, Pierre began that period of adolescence when, in psychologist Erik Erikson’s well-known phrase, individuals ask, “Who am I?” The voices he most often heard after the death of his father were those within Brébeuf—his teachers and his classmates. He immersed himself in books, especially in the Catholic religion, French literature, and Catholic philosophy. In a more general sense, he followed the outline, or ratio, established by the Jesuit founder Ignatius of Loyola in the sixteenth century. It laid out the first international system of education, one whose method and content were similar in Peru, Poland, or Quebec. For its time, it was utilitarian, a method to provide the human resources for good government and to create a Catholic elite. Its design was “intended to ensure an immersion into classical culture, mastery of material, quickness of mind, sensitivity to individual ability, and personal discipline.”14

  In this sense, Pierre Trudeau was an exceptional student. His discipline, a quality that Jesuit education inculcated, was extraordinary, and it remained so throughout his life. His notebooks are remarkable in their detail and conscientiousness; even when he was writing the compulsory letter to his mother, he made numerous corrections to individual phrases so as to find exactly the right word. He wrote reviews of every book he read while at Brébeuf, and the commentaries were perceptive beyond his adolescent years. He maintained his enthusiasm as he studied the differences between Aristotle and Plato, Rome and Athens, Jerusalem and Rome. He mastered his academic material in every class, whether classical Greek or, in 1939, political economy. His record was outstanding: in competition with an elite student body, he stood first in most of his classes, won more prizes than anyone else (to his delight, they were often in cash), and, in his final year, he bested his strongest competition, Jean de Grandpré, and stood first overall. He was extremely ambitious, a quality Ignatius of Loyola also valued: he carefully recorded de Grandpré’s marks and cheered those occasions when his rival finished second.