Citizen of the World

by John English

  At month’s end, however, they fought again. She sent him a note telling him to meet her on the pier if he was not tired; her tone was cold. Pierre noted in his journal: “I found the proposal comic and I would have responded to her in the same tone, but I wasn’t able to do so because I was in the bath.” Resentfully, he met her and reproached her for her bad mood. They went to Camille’s summer place, where he told her that she was beautiful and enchanting but he would not be pulled along by “the end of the nose.” He confessed to himself that his behaviour might have been impolite, but, he reasoned, “it seems to me that the woman should not push the man around.”36 The next evening, as the Second World War began, she begged him not to do anything dangerous. Rather, she asked him to visit her at Smith in the autumn and to attend her graduation the following June. As she wept, he kissed her tears and whispered poetry in her ear before they finally parted at 2:45 a.m.37

  The summer of 1939 was the best, he told his diary: “I read little, but I kissed a woman.”38 In September, school resumed: Pierre became the editor of the college newspaper, Brébeuf, and prepared to wrest class leadership away from Jean de Grandpré. He thought constantly of Camille, but among his peers the news of war incited considerable debate in the college corridors. He avoided the discussions and deliberately cloaked himself with ambiguity. On October 9 he wrote in his diary: “It’s true that there is a certain charm to surrounding oneself with mystery.” He preferred to have people say “Trudeau? No one knows him. Friend of all; intimate of none.”

  Pierre remained publicly aloof from the controversies about conscription. His journal provides convincing repudiation to anyone who argues that his nationalism made him an immediate opponent of the “British war.” He found the declarations of many students—that they would resist conscription and flee into the bush—simply foolish. “Everyone is talking for and against conscription,” he noted in one entry. “It is a sad thing but I would not do what many others are promising to do: hide themselves in the bush. I would sign up and go and come back for the sake of adventure.” Then he hesitated: his own preference was to avoid the war and go to England—not as a soldier but as a Rhodes Scholar—or maybe to the States.39

  Within the next months, war, as it so often does, changed everything, notably Canadian politics. Trudeau attended two election rallies in the fall as Duplessis challenged the federal government’s war authority under the War Measures Act. On October 20 he went with his mother to the Montreal Forum for a Liberal rally. A family friend had given them tickets, but Pierre, whose father had been a Conservative, was offended by the Liberal crowd, which “cried like babies with each invective against the bleus.”40 Still, he found Mackenzie King’s French lieutenant, Ernest Lapointe, very impressive. The federal Liberals had warned francophone Quebec that the re-election of Duplessis would mean the resignation of the Quebec Liberal ministers and, inevitably, the emergence of a conscription coalition, as in the First World War.

  Six days later he attended yet another Liberal rally with his mother, where he heard the brilliant orator Athanase David speak. Pierre could not yet vote, but in his first Brébeuf article dealing with the war he cast a plague on all the older parties and expressed his belief that Quebec needed a new movement that was neither bleu nor rouge, conservative nor liberal. About the war, he was remarkably taciturn. He made no comments on the defeat of Poland or on the alliance of Communism and Nazism in its destruction. He attacked the tyranny of public opinion, where “soldiers dare not say they would like to halt war … and generals dare not call for peace.”41 Camille and plans for his future career preoccupied him more than politics, and he said nothing publicly when the provincial Liberals defeated Duplessis.

  Camille had asked him to visit her at Smith. He hesitated, writing in his diary: “2,000 women. Ouf!” He admitted that he understood neither her nor women generally. He was jealous; he was suspicious. Perhaps recalling Father Tobin’s warnings, he wondered about the summer day when Camille had revealed a “naughty” character. He finally decided that he would go to Smith, and he borrowed Suzette’s impressive Buick for the occasion. Once again they went to the movies, where they saw All Quiet on the Western Front, the film based on Erich Maria Remarque’s novel. Its anti-war message impressed Pierre, but this time Camille did not. She was too materialistic and too independent. She was, to be sure, charming and pretty, but “My God,” he exclaimed, “I am too much an idealist and an intellectual for her.” Although Catholic and French, she was, regrettably, too American.42 He returned home, worried about the war, and with one goal in mind: to win the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship and go to Oxford.

  If the Rhodes had been granted, Pierre Trudeau would have embarked on a path that took him away from his companions and the whirlwind of Quebec political life. His teachers at Brébeuf recommended him strongly for the award and, in January 1940, his chances seemed excellent. Indeed, the letter from Father Boulin, the head, or prefect, of the college, listed the astonishing number of prizes that Pierre had won (a hundred prizes and honourable mentions in seven years) and stated that he had performed with great distinction in all fields. Pierre was, he added, diligent and intelligent, though a bit timid and his own most severe critic. He was “a manly character, a desired companion, and a perfect gentleman.” His determination was exceptional: in the past year, when he broke his leg in a skiing accident, Boulin continued, Pierre chose not to take a comfortable break at home; “instead, he became a boarder at the college, prepared for classes in the sick room and went to each course in a wheelchair. The decision was entirely his,” he explained, “because his mother and his sister had not yet returned from a trip to Europe.” He had demonstrated the manliness that Cecil Rhodes so prized, and he was developing a strong personality and character little by little. Boulin sent the letter to Grace, requesting that she not reveal its contents to Pierre. One suspects she did.

  The family’s Liberal friend Alex Gourd was asked to supply a letter of support for Trudeau’s nomination for the scholarship. In it he listed the many awards Pierre had won and drew particular notice to Dupés, the work by the young playwright. After mentioning the numerous sports in which Pierre participated, he noted that he was fluently bilingual, his mother being “Scottish”—a description increasingly used by Pierre himself. Like Boulin, Gourd also suggested that the young man was “timid,” but, in his view, the reserve derived from a lack of life experience. A final letter came from a Montreal city official, who emphasized the “affection mixed with respect” that Pierre showed towards his family, particularly his mother.

  Pierre had to compose an essay for the Rhodes Committee. He offered to write it in English, but “being a French-Canadian student of a French-Canadian college,” he thought the committee would prefer that he present it in French. He began by admitting the difficulty of writing about his interests and hopes, and then he continued with a defence of his education. First in his life came religion, which had universal application; then came study at Brébeuf, which had prepared him well for future public life. He pointed to the diversity of his studies and to his own tendency to grasp new experiences. He was, he noted in English, a “Jack of all trades.” After listing an exhausting number of extracurricular activities, he said that this thirst for diversity had affected his career choice. Very simply, he stated, “I have chosen a political career.” He defined politics broadly and indicated that both his own capacity and his particular circumstances would determine whether such a career was in politics itself, in the diplomatic service, or even in journalism. In any case, Pierre said that he was choosing his educational path so he might prepare quickly for public life.

  To this end, he continued, he had studied public speaking and had published many articles in Brébeuf. He rejected demagoguery and political jobbery, arguing that the politician must have “a perfect understanding of men and a knowledge of their rights and duties.” That was a tall order and good reason to study “Philosophy-Politics-Economics” at Oxford and, if it was no
t too much, modern history as well. His ultimate goal was a law degree. Finally, after raising the issue of what Oxford would mean for his “French self,” he provided his own answer that the intimate contact with English culture would serve to broaden him. Rhodes himself had famously said, “So much to do, so little time in which to do it.” Like Rhodes, Pierre Trudeau stated that he, too, possessed “an inextinguishable passion for action.”43

  But it was not to be. In January 1940 the Rhodes officials awarded the scholarship to another applicant. If Trudeau had won the Rhodes and gone to England, he would have become much less French and more a part of the Anglo-American world. He seemed to anticipate that fate. As editor of Brébeuf, he wrote that the journal had decided not to express any defined opinion on the subject of the war during the fall of 1939.44 That public position echoed the private thoughts expressed in his diary. He did not initially oppose the war, reflecting the attitude of his church and probably that of most of his teachers. The archbishop of Quebec, Cardinal Villeneuve, took a clear stand for the Allies by asking God “to hear our supplications and that the forces of evil may be overthrown and peace restored to a distracted world.”45 Trudeau’s presence at Liberal rallies with his mother and Liberal family friends suggests that he probably would have voted Liberal against Maurice Duplessis—as his mother surely did. But because he was not yet twenty-one, the voting age, he did not have to make that choice.

  Everything changed in 1940. Jerome Kagan has noted how “adolescents, who are beginning to synthesize the assumptions they will rely on for the rest of their lives, are unusually receptive to historical events that challenge existing beliefs.” Whether in Ireland at Easter 1916, Prague or Paris in spring 1968, or Montreal in 1940, adolescents are keen witnesses as history “tears a hole in the fabric of consensual assumptions.” Young minds fly through that hole, Kagan wrote, “into a space free of hoary myth to invent a new conception of self, ethics, and society.” With Pierre, some myths lingered, but in 1940 the conception changed.46

  His contemporary and friend of the 1950s, the sociologist Marcel Rioux, later wrote that, for him and his generation, the war completely changed the direction of their lives. Their understanding of society and, especially, of the relationship between the economically dominant anglophone minority and the poorer francophone majority altered dramatically. Rebellion took many forms, whether at classical colleges or in the working-class areas of Montreal. For Pierre Trudeau, son of a French businessman and an English (now always termed Scottish) mother, this transformation was very turbulent.

  The war made Trudeau into a Quebec nationalist. The ambiguities that had marked his writings and thought in the 1930s began slowly to disappear. He was well prepared: he knew the nationalist arguments and had repeated them to the nationalist priests at Brébeuf and to a broader audience in Dupés. Although he had serious reservations about the stronger nationalist arguments made by “our exalted patriots,” he increasingly regarded his heritage as primarily French, and his education constantly strengthened that belief. When the Canadian government imposed the Defence of Canada Regulations that limited free speech and invoked conscription for Home Defence in 1940, Pierre suddenly saw history differently. He became, in his own phrase, deeply concerned about the fate of his “French self.”

  But the change came gradually, as he worked diligently to stand first at Brébeuf and as he edited, rather eccentrically, the student newspaper. As editor, he took a “hands-off” approach and put much energy into a “Tribune libre” edition where free expression was permitted. He was too busy to write to Camille very often, but at last on March 30, 1940, he sent her a long letter to fill her in on his activities. He wrote in English, even though Camille’s French had improved after her time in Paris, but he took her to task for her earlier comment that his meanings were often obscure and his prose too complex. He admitted, however, that others at Brébeuf had made the same complaint. The letter gives the flavour of his life at the time and contrasts with the impression presented in his notebooks, where he concentrates on philosophical works and ignores the movies and concerts he attended and the popular books he read. After a long apology for the delay in writing, he began:

  And to make a long story less long, you find me with a pen in my hand, a happy Easter on my lips, and very little in the back of my head. But shall we get down to facts?

  During the past month I have done a great deal of most anything. Naturally we were overworked in school. As we finish a month ahead of the other classes, our teachers want to cram everything in at once.

  Then I have been reading quite a bit of “Dominique” by Eugène Fromentin [a French author and painter]. In the line of plays, I was at [Canadian director and actor] Maurice Evans’ staging of Hamlet. It was a masterpiece of producing. I found his playing very comprehensive yet too declaratory. I saw Rostand’s “Aiglon” which had some very high spots.

  He went on to say that he had read Charles Péguy’s Notre jeunesse and Frivolimus ’40, a good example of Montreal low humour. He also saw French director Sacha Guitry’s movie Le roman d’un tricheur, which he declared “insipid.” He went to two concerts, one a Red Cross benefit which combined “the two Montreal Symphonic Orchestras,” but “it was remarkable by its lack of anything remarkable.” To all that, he told Camille, “you can add a few conferences [lectures] by the French philosopher [Jacques] Maritain,” who strongly supported the Allied war effort. Given Trudeau’s increasing nationalism and opposition to war, it’s interesting that he listened carefully to the liberal and pro-Allied Maritain at this time.47

  Pierre told Camille that his hockey team was in the playoffs and that he was simply “crazy” about skiing. He boasted that he had bought “jumping skis” (which, unhappily, were soon to break his leg). He said that the whole family had skied during the Christmas holiday and he and Tip had spent time together on the “superb” hills at Mont Tremblant. He went on to describe the controversies he had proudly stirred at Brébeuf:

  And now to end this one topic (myself conversation), I will please you by admitting that you are not alone to find my style obscure and incoherent: the last edition of “Brébeuf” had a “Tribune libre” in which several fellows took a few cracks at my essays. Evidently I could not let them have the last word, so I answered right back with good style …

  By the way I also published an article on Rut-thinking and standardized education that we have discussed together. It caused a scandal in the cloister, and I was called up to explain my views. It was even funnier because Tippy at the same time wrote an article on individualism. But I leave this to some other time for I am anxious to talk about you, my dear Camille.

  After inquiring about her college, how she looked, and what she planned to do, he made a characteristically lame joke: “I think I’ll have my graduation diploma pickled; that’s because I can’t get stewed.” In France, Camille had developed an interest in philosophy and in Freud and Proust.* Suddenly, Pierre, in a pattern that he followed later in his relationships with women, became earnest with her:

  Such deep thinking brings me to the subject of Philosophy and to your concept of philosophical ethics. Honestly, I think we could have a peach of an argument on the subject. Firstly, I would tell you to read [Alexis Carrel’s] “L’homme, cet inconnu” to find out how bad it is to always do what pleases you. Secondly I should ask you to demonstrate, either by examples of metaphysics, your theory on how “one thing that might be wrong for the whole world to do, might be perfectly alright in one particular case.” In other words, if all men are participants of the human nature, why shouldn’t all men obey one universal natural law? Thirdly, I should inquire why you say it took over 2000 years for society to catch on to itself. Do you mean that the birth of Christ marked the beginning of the period when society misunderstood itself, or of the period when it understood itself? But don’t bother answering; true to your sex, you have probably changed your mind about everything in the past month, exchanging Freud’s theories for Aristotle’s
.

  Camille must have read Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, a study that had its faults but was infinitely superior to Carrel’s book. L’homme, cet inconnu is highly elitist and racist and, because of Carrel’s repute as a Nobel Prize winner in medicine, his argument gave intellectual weight to Hitler’s extermination policies. The book’s “woman is weaker” strain is also reflected in Pierre’s comments to Camille. He indicated no understanding of how Carrel conflicted with Jacques Maritain or, for that matter, Tip’s article on individualism.

  In an addendum to his letter, he signalled his confusion about himself and his beliefs. Apologizing for failing to write to an apparent mutual friend, Pierre wrote: “I should like to call it laziness; yet it truthfully is nothing but lack of genius. I, who always believed myself simple and ‘like unto a little child,’ have realized that I am, unfortunately, a complicated adult unable to speak a simple thought, without forethought and afterthought.” He was, very slowly, becoming an adult, but a complicated one.48 Given that Trudeau would turn twenty-one that year, he appears astonishingly adolescent in this letter. He wants to be a contrarian, to escape the “ruts,” but his education seems to have left him adrift as powerful new waves swept over his world. He was well read but not yet well educated.