by John English
In fact, 1963 was often an astounding year—of mailbox bombs, the rising FLQ, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. After Kennedy’s death in the Dallas afternoon of November 22, Laurendeau, Trudeau, Pelletier, Lévesque, and Marchand had the last of their meetings that evening. Lévesque mourned the president’s death profoundly, “as if the crime had wiped out a member of his family.” Trudeau was analytical, pondering other American presidential assassinations, while Laurendeau deplored the violence that, in the argot of the 1960s, seemed as American as apple pie. Their different reactions to Kennedy’s death reflected their varying reaction to the equally stunning changes in Quebec. Throughout the year, René Lévesque had been making explosive comments about the future of Quebec within Canada. He had begun to reflect publicly about Canada being composed not of ten provinces but of two nations. He often mused about the possibility of separation if the federation failed to reform itself. He startled an admiring Toronto audience when he described Confederation as an “old cow” that had to change or Quebec would leave. When asked by the television host Pierre Berton whether he would be greatly troubled if Quebec left the Confederation, Lévesque replied: “No, I wouldn’t cry long.” The controversial comments and casual quips that boldly flirted with separation did not escape the notice of Laurendeau and Trudeau.2
Laurendeau was deeply troubled. Though nationalist in his views, he was nevertheless becoming identified as a “federalist” committed to the reshaping of the Canadian Confederation. In September 1961 he had bluntly stated his position in Le Devoir: “Independence? No: a strong Quebec in a new federal Canada.” Soon after, as John Diefenbaker’s Conservative government crumbled in Ottawa, Laurendeau called for the creation of a commission that would study and report on the creation of a new bilingual and bicultural federation. Diefenbaker said no, but Liberal opposition leader Lester Pearson endorsed Laurendeau’s proposal in one of his speeches.
When Pearson took office in April 1963, he moved quickly to create the commission. After some fumbling, as his weak Quebec colleagues recommended people who commanded no support in Quebec, Pearson turned to Laurendeau and asked him to co-chair the commission he had originally proposed. Laurendeau hesitated at first but consulted widely. Lévesque gave him many reasons to refuse and one odd reason to accept—the “big bang” that Laurendeau’s quick resignation from the commission would cause. Still, after a shouting exchange in which Laurendeau declared he was not a separatist and Lévesque replied, “Neither am I,” Quebec’s most popular politician resigned himself to Laurendeau’s chairmanship. In July, Laurendeau met Pearson and accepted the position. He also convinced Jean Marchand to join him as one of the commissioners.3 The commission hired Michael Oliver of McGill University and Léon Dion of Université Laval as co-directors of research, and they created an ever-swelling research team* for, perhaps, the most significant royal commission in Canadian history.4
Trudeau watched these events warily, particularly since he worried about Laurendeau’s avowed nationalism. The commission asked him to undertake a study of the role of a “Bill of Rights” in protecting cultural interests.5 He accepted initially but put it aside as the demands of his university courses, his journalism, and the family business increased after 1963. His mother’s health was deteriorating, the manager of the family’s business had died, and Tip was now often absent abroad or at his country retreat. He had developed a reputation as a fine architect, but he and Pierre do not seem to have been close after they left Brébeuf. When Trudeau was abroad, his list of correspondents indicates that he seldom wrote to Tip although their affection was still obvious to all when they were together. He saw Suzette often at their childhood home in Outremont, and they bantered as they always had. She was a shrewd financial manager, and Grace and Pierre both valued her advice. Her role at the centre of the family intensified as her mother’s health began to fail quickly in the sixties. Trudeau took over more responsibility for the management of finances and, when he was in Montreal, met weekly with his advisers. They included the lawyer Don Johnston, who later joined his Cabinet. Trudeau’s “office” was a spare room with a metal desk, filing cabinets, and bare floors located on the burgeoning rue St-Denis. No doubt Trudeau enjoyed lunch in the nearby bistros much more than the accounting details.6
Pelletier’s demanding work as editor of La Presse meant that he had less time to devote to Cité libre. And the journal’s troubles were many. In the 1950s Trudeau had been a rare voice on the left; now many others had leapt over him, shouting Marxist slogans and scrawling revolutionary mottoes on school corridors and street signs. The intellectual boundaries that Cité libre had established in the early 1950s expanded quickly in the early 1960s, to the great distress of the founding editors. In 1963 these boundaries burst. Young members of the Cité libre team quit to establish the strongly leftist and nationalist journal Parti pris, but not without bitter farewells. In Cité libre itself, the twenty-five-year-old journalist Pierre Vallières argued that the founders should realize that the torch should be passed to a younger generation. The original team recognized the strength of the sentiment and, despite Jacques Hébert’s doubts, made Vallières “editor” of Cité libre in 1963.7 In the summer issue, not long after the night of the mailbox bombs, Vallières wrote an article on Cité libre and his generation. He began with the journal’s stirring 1950 declaration of purpose. Those once-young men who had made that declaration were, he cruelly pointed out, “now forty or over.” They had fought worthy battles against Duplessis and for the workers in the dark 1950s, but now they felt no need to engage in a “dialogue with the younger group.”8
In February 1964 Pierre Vallières published another article in Cité libre which discussed a speech Walter Gordon, the federal finance minister, had given in Toronto alerting the audience to the “revolution” in Quebec. Vallières scorned this term as a description of events in the province since 1960 because, he argued, there could be no revolution without the destruction of bourgeois capitalism. It was time to choose the streets instead of the salons of Westmount, to prefer action to dreams. Gérard Pelletier, who had known Vallières in 1960 when he was “a member of the Little Brothers of Jesus, a mystic, something of a dreamer,” deplored this revolutionary rhetoric. He recognized the creativeness of the revolutionaries, the seriousness of their work, and the important literary efflorescence occurring on the left. Their aims, however, were unacceptable: “a separatism wholly secular and anti-religious, a totalitarian socialism installed by violence, with the inevitable civil war provoked by the systematic agitation of a revolutionary party.”9
Trudeau was not as polite as Pelletier in his rejection of the incendiary new dreams of youth. A generation earlier, he had mused about revolution himself. When the Catholic Church and Senator Joseph McCarthy excoriated and pursued Communists with terrifying and destructive zeal, he had dared to visit Russia and China and to declare himself a socialist. Now, in May 1964, he rejected any link with the Parti pris editors, who had, in their first issue, declared the founders of Cité libre “our fathers.” He refused to acknowledge these self-declared offspring and attacked Vallières and the new nationalist socialists as separatist “counter-revolutionaries.” Deep “upheaval” was characteristic not only of revolutions but also of counter-revolutions, he warned. Think of fascism and Nazism, of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Franco, and Salazar:
It cannot be denied that they all claimed to be serving the destiny of their respective national communities; further, three of them called themselves socialists. But who would call the whole of their work revolutionary? They upset a great many institutions, they even opened the way for some material progress; but they abolished personal freedom, or at least prevented it from growing; that is why history classes them as counter-revolutionaries.
And so I get fed up when I hear our nationalist brood calling itself revolutionary. Quebec’s revolution, if it had taken place, would first have consisted in freeing man from collective coercions: freeing the citizens brutali
zed by reactionary and arbitrary governments; freeing consciences bullied by a clericalized and obscurantist Church; freeing workers exploited by an oligarchic capitalism; freeing men crushed by authoritarian and outdated traditions.
That revolution had never occurred, although “around 1960, it seemed that freedom was going to triumph in the end.” There were the victories of Roncarelli in the freedom-of-speech case, the retreat of the church from dogmatism, and the entry of previously barred professors into universities. In 1960, he exulted, “everything was becoming possible in Quebec.”
A whole generation was free at last to apply all its creative energies to bringing this backward province up to date. Only it required boldness, intelligence, and work. Alas, freedom proved to be too heady a drink to pour for the French-Canadian youth of 1960. Almost at the first sip it went at top speed in search of some more soothing milk, some new dogmatism. It reproached my generation with not having offered it any “doctrine”—we who had spent the best part of our youth demolishing servile doctrinairism—and it took refuge in the bosom of its mother, the Holy Nation.
But the dogmatism of the cleric was giving way to the “zealots in the Temple of the Nation,” who, like the authoritarians of the past, “already point their fingers at the non-worshipper.” Indeed, in its April 1964 issue, Parti pris had acknowledged that there was “a necessary totalitarianism,” while attacking Trudeau not for his ideas but because he was rich. Trudeau responded angrily.
He began with a discussion of his own previous and contemporary writings that had praised revolutionary figures in Russia, Algeria, and Cuba. “Genuine revolutionaries” such as Lenin, Ben Bella, and Castro had stressed “collective freedom as a preliminary to personal freedom” in situations where personal freedom had “scarcely been protected at all by established institutions.” That was not the case in Quebec: “True, personal freedom has not always been honoured in Quebec. But, I repeat, we had pretty well reached it around 1960.” Those who now talked of revolution had not been in the vanguard: “Thanks to English and Jewish lawyers (ah, yes!), thanks to the Supreme Court in Ottawa, personal freedom had at last triumphed over the obscurantism of Quebec’s legislators and the authoritarianism of our courts.”
Every week, Trudeau complained, “a handful of separatist students” told him they were “against democracy and for a single-party system; for a certain totalitarianism and against the freedom of the individual.” Like the most traditional and reactionary individuals, they believed that they possessed “the truth” and all others must follow them. When others didn’t, they turned to violence, all the while claiming persecution. In their privileged places “in the editorial rooms of our newspapers … at the CBC and the National Film Board,” he said, “they lean with all their weight on the mass media.” Others went underground to plant bombs and became “fugitives from reality.” The separatist “counter-revolution” served mainly to protect the interests of the francophone “petit-bourgeoisie” and the professional classes, who would have diplomatic limousines, offices in the new national bank towers, and tariffs to protect their fragile businesses. “Rather than carving themselves out a place in [twentieth-century industrial society] by ability,” Trudeau sneered, “they want to make the whole tribe return to the wigwams by declaring [their] independence.”
As this privileged minority gained more status, he warned, society would lose. Algerian rebel Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth was a book that militant separatists “kept beside their bed.” Trudeau cleverly turned to Fanon to support his assault on the nationalist separatists. In Fanon’s own words, “A national bourgeoisie never ceases to demand nationalization of the economy and the commercial sectors … For it, nationalization means very precisely the transfer to the native population of the favours inherited from the colonial period.” Trudeau acidly concluded: “Separatism a revolution? My eye. A counter-revolution; the national-socialist counter-revolution.”10
Trudeau’s angry eloquence erupted not only in this article but also in Cité libre’s editorial meetings, where he directly confronted the nationalist and often separatist tendencies of the new editorial team. Pierre Vallières, whom Pelletier also employed at La Presse, was a particular target as he became more vigorously separatist and flirted romantically with revolution and the FLQ. In his remarkable autobiographical tract, Les Négres blancs d’Amérique, written after he became an FLQ leader committed to the violent overthrow of the state, Vallières described his encounters with Pelletier and Trudeau. Although they rejected his article for a special 1962 issue on federalism, he said, they encouraged him to write for Cité libre. Pelletier may even have believed that hiring him in 1963 to write for La Presse and later to edit Cité libre would restrain his separatist inclinations. Vallières also believed, probably correctly, that his references to the French liberal philosopher Emmanuel Mounier appealed to them and that they did not really understand his broader arguments.
Vallières’s views were initially opaque. They became more transparent and unacceptable during 1963, and his efforts to reach out to earlier Cité libristes, notably Pierre Vadeboncoeur, who had become a champion of the literary separatists, upset the founders. Then, in March 1964 Vallières and other new voices used Cité libre to attack the journal’s former editors directly. Some articles mocked them, including a clever satire by the poet and future separatist politician Gérald Godin comparing federalists and separatists to Hurons and Iroquois. In Vallières’s opinion, Trudeau and Pelletier believed they had created “a monster.” The young, for their part, suddenly realized that “their former idols had become old so quickly.” Vallières and several others resigned immediately after this issue appeared. He founded a new review, Révolution québécoise, that embraced socialism, separatism, and violence. Two years later, he was in jail charged with terrorism.11
Trudeau might quarrel with the young, but he himself remained youthful in his taste and demeanour. He wore turtlenecks at the university, raced his Mercedes through the streets, and sought out younger friends. He was an active member of the anti-nuclear movement and an early opponent of the Vietnam War. On campus, he wore the dove peace symbol as early as 1962, long before it became ubiquitous. Yet he did not share the eccentric François Hertel’s fascination with, and approval of, those “who play with dangerous and different ideas” because he believed that the ideas of Vallières and his colleagues were irresponsible and destructive. Perhaps he had once had such notions, as Hertel insinuated in his reply to Trudeau’s 1964 attack on him in Cité libre after the priest seemed to call for the assassination of André Laurendeau. But the mingling of separatism with nationalism and, more recently, with violence represented to Trudeau a horrid return to an earlier world of extreme nationalism that had thankfully disappeared. Where Vallières saw echoes of the streets of Algiers or Hanoi, Trudeau saw the Munich beer halls of the twenties and the Nuremberg rallies of the thirties. The gulf between them widened quickly in 1964. His long-time companion Madeleine Gobeil, now living in Paris but still fully engaged in Quebec debates and making a name as a writer, told Trudeau that she would publish in Cité libre because it would identify her as anti-separatist. To publish in Parti pris, which was much more strongly literary in character, would lead everyone to believe she was a separatist.
Both journals had drawn the line. Trudeau, along with Pelletier and others, once again reorganized Cité libre with the intention of making it a journal of opinion that was leftist, secularist, but most decidedly not separatist. The journalist Jean Pellerin remained as editor after Vallières left, and the McGill philosopher Charles Taylor, for whom Trudeau had worked in the 1963 federal election when Taylor was an NDP candidate, became very active in the journal. Yet serious divisions remained: Charles Taylor, Jean Pellerin, and others were sympathetic to nationalist arguments and to the NDP’s support for the concept of “two nations.” Pelletier and Trudeau were increasingly not.
These passionate debates and differences shaped later understandings of what
happened in Quebec in the sixties. Was there a profound rupture from the past at the time? What happened to the French Canadian and when did the Québécois appear? What was the meaning of the Catholic past and the socio-political culture of the thirties and forties for the new society that emerged in the sixties? And, above all, what was Quebec’s place in Canada?
On the last question, Trudeau had become increasingly clear: Quebec’s place lay within a Canadian federal state where individual rights were well defined and the cultural rights of French-speaking Canadians were guaranteed. He differed from André Laurendeau and from his New Democrat friends in his vehement opposition to the concept of “two nations”; he, in contrast, emphasized constitutionally guaranteed individual rights. While accepting the existence and importance of the French language and culture in North America, he rejected a political definition of “nation” based on “ethnicity.” Toronto historian Ramsay Cook, who knew him well in the early sixties, recalled that Trudeau came to believe that democracy in Quebec—a goal he had long cherished—faced one huge danger after the Lesage victory: nationalism. “For Trudeau,” Cook wrote, “nationalism was conformist force founded upon conservatism and insecurity. At worst it was totalitarian. Moreover, in the Quebec context, nationalism acted as an emotional substitute for reasoned solutions to real problems.” It was, therefore, the young who would lose the future as they sought out some “imaginary Jerusalem” rather than more immediate and useful goals.12
