Pierre Elliott Trudeau

by Nino Ricci

  Clarkson and McCall, in their own speculation about the impact of Charlie’s death on Pierre, extensively mined exactly this Freudian vein, seeing the sudden disappearance of “the most powerful presence” in Trudeau’s life as the source of a “psychic imbalance” Trudeau could never get beyond. “The day would never come … when paternal dominance would be replaced by the father’s acknowledgement of the son’s achievements as a grown man.” Later biographers have been skeptical of this analysis, taking Trudeau’s reaction to his father’s death somewhat more at face value, as the normal grieving of an adolescent at the loss of a beloved parent. But whatever twist one gives it, the death would surely have marked Trudeau profoundly, and likely in ways which neither his own comments on it nor the comments of those around him would have plumbed the depths of. Clearly it was something that hung over Trudeau all his life—forty years later the memory of it could still bring tears to his eyes—not least for the fact that the tremendous freedom he enjoyed throughout his life to do as he wished rested largely on the fortune that Charlie had almost literally killed himself to amass.

  In the short term, at least, the death may have brought some feeling of liberation along with the trauma. Suddenly Trudeau was free of this larger-than-life figure he had been trying to please all his childhood. This was the period in which a so-called anti-authoritarian streak began to come out in Trudeau at school, the elite Jesuit lycée Jean-de-Brébeuf, which had opened its doors in Montreal just a few years earlier. The streak manifested itself, however, mainly in a prankishness that seemed more calculated to call attention to Trudeau than to overthrow the established order. Even in the year of his father’s death, Trudeau managed to win awards and keep up his high academic standing. The evidence, in fact, suggests that far from becoming a maverick in these years, Trudeau, like most adolescents, was instead doing everything he could to be accepted and to fit in, tailoring himself to his differing environments in a way that went very much with the current rather than against it.

  At home, where the reign of Grace had now replaced the reign of Charles, the atmosphere had grown increasingly English and refined. Gone were the late nights, the physicality, the coarse language and jokes. “When my father was around, there was a great deal of effusiveness and laughter and kissing and hugging,” he told biographer George Radwanski. “But after he died, it was a little bit more the English mores which took over, and we used to even joke about, or laugh at, some of our cousins or neighbours or friends—French Canadians—who’d always be very effusive within the family and towards their mothers and so on.”

  But while he was becoming increasingly English at home, at school, in an almost Zelig-like compartmentalization, he was becoming increasingly French. There, his father’s death seemed to have had the effect of leading him to seek out father figures among his Jesuit teachers, men whose difference from his father prompts the question whether Trudeau was trying to fill a lack or rather explore a new freedom. Some of these teachers were to exercise an enormous influence over him, in ways that were not generally known until Trudeau biographer John English and former Cité libre editors Max and Monique Nemni were granted access to Trudeau’s archive after his death. What these researchers found was a portrait of Trudeau’s formation substantially at odds with the standard, accepted version during his life.

  In their groundbreaking book Young Trudeau: 1919–1944, Max and Monique Nemni use materials from the Trudeau archive to show how, far from learning at Brébeuf, as one of his teachers was to claim, the values of “federalism, democracy, and pluralism” that would become the bedrock of Trudeau’s beliefs in later years, he was instead initiated into a brand of reactionary nationalism very much at odds with these values but quite common in Quebec in the years preceding the Second World War. Trudeau was in the habit of keeping thorough records, even going so far as to save drafts of his letters, and his archive contains a treasure trove of notebooks and journals and papers of every sort. Using these, the Nemnis have shown that the Trudeau who emerged from Brébeuf was one who subscribed not only to the widespread anti-Semitism of the day but to the church’s disdain for democracy.

  In Quebec, the church’s preferred model of governance in that period was a so-called corporatist one, in which the state acted as a sort of benevolent parent, governing citizens who couldn’t be trusted to govern themselves. This was the very model that lay behind the fascist dictatorships then gaining ascendancy in Europe. The church’s ultimate goal in Quebec was an independent state that functioned as a kind of theocracy, Catholic and ethnically pure. In an essay Trudeau wrote at Brébeuf about his hopes for the future, he imagined just such a prospect. After establishing himself as an international war hero, he would return home “around the year 1976” just in time to lead the charge in the establishment of an independent Quebec that was “Catholic and canadien.”

  Canadien, in Quebec, was always a term that referred not to Canadians as a whole but only to the “real” Canadians, the descendants of the pre-Conquest French habitants. Putting aside the unintentional irony of Trudeau’s reference to 1976—the year René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois would come to power—the swashbuckling tone of the essay was decidedly tongue-in-cheek. But this was not satire: however much Trudeau might have been indulging in a flight of fancy, he was doing so within terms that would not only have been accepted at Brébeuf but encouraged. The point comes through more starkly in a play the Nemnis quote that Trudeau wrote for the college’s tenth-anniversary celebrations. Originally titled On est Canadiens français ou on ne l’est pas, a popular nationalist saying of the day, but then changed to Dupés, “duped,” the play’s apparent message was that Jewish merchants were stealing the livelihoods of French Canadians. The idea echoed a buy-from-our-own campaign being championed at the time by the outspoken cleric and nationalist leader Abbé Lionel Groulx.

  If Trudeau was rebelling against anything at this age, it certainly wasn’t the narrow-minded nationalism that later made Quebec seem “a citadel of orthodoxy” to him. Yet his writings of the time were full of the language of rebellion. In Dupés, a character named Ditreau, who claims a diploma in “commercial psychology,” advises the French-Canadian tailor Couture to pretend to be a Jew to improve his business. French Canadians, Ditreau says, 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.” Couture goes along at first, then rebels. “Now it’s my turn to teach a lesson: the Canadien people is a sleeping lion. It will soon awaken.” Perhaps this was exactly the appeal of nationalism to someone of Trudeau’s disposition, that it allowed all the rhetoric of rebellion without costing him the approval of his superiors. One almost senses even in Dupés, which had the same tongue-in-cheek tone as his essay on his hopes for the future, that the actual content was just an excuse for indulging a certain irreverence. Ditreau—his name was an obvious play on “Trudeau,” who in fact played him in the production—can’t help but strike us now as offensive, but there is also a mischievousness to him that cuts in both directions.

  Trudeau noted on his copy of the script that the play was presented “before parents and students with great success.” Success seems to have been the point for him. A few days earlier he had taken it very hard when he had lost a student election to his friend and great rival at Brébeuf, Jean de Grandpré, the same man who would later come to advise him not to run for the Liberal leadership. By now, as if to reconcile the double life he had begun to lead, Pierre had taken to including his matronymic, Elliott, as part of his name, but he had cause to wonder if it had cost him the election. In Citizen of the World, John English describes how Trudeau learned of an accusation made behind his back that he was “mediocre, Americanized, and Anglicized, in short, I would betray my race.” For Trudeau the accusation was “a profound shock.” “I would never betray the French Canadians,” he wrote in his journal. But he was also determined to retain his own Englishness, which he thought—not entirely correct
ly, it seems—helped give him the strength to resist simply following “the popular spirit.” “I am proud of my English blood, which comes from my mother. At least it tempers my boiling French blood. It leaves me calmer and more insightful and perspicacious.”

  This kind of reflection on a dual heritage is very familiar to the children of immigrants, who grow up fighting dual claims in almost every arena. What is surprising with Trudeau is how seldom the issue seems to have come up for open discussion, not only in his youth but also in his later political life. Even though his doubleness formed an important part of his public image, there always seemed a taboo around any actual allusion to it. One infamous breaking of this taboo was René Lévesque’s snide and ill-considered reference to Trudeau’s “Elliott” side just days before the 1980 referendum, in much the same terms as the anonymous accusation levelled at Trudeau back at Brébeuf. This time, Trudeau was able to give as good he got, in a rousing speech at Paul Sauvé Arena that cost Lévesque the high ground and may have cost him the referendum. Back at Brébeuf, however, Trudeau, for all his self-reflection, showed little understanding of the essentially irreconcilable conflict between his own Englishness and his growing allegiance to an anti-English ethnic nationalism.

  As a young man, in an apparent compromise, Trudeau came to refer to his mother not as English but as Scottish. At Brébeuf, however, what may have helped him to abide his contradictions was that his mother had inherited French blood from her own mother, along with an ardent Catholicism that was always to remain a strong point of contact between her and her son. When Trudeau was at home, he never missed a Mass with his mother, and their shared faith may have served as a sort of bridge for him, a point of reconciliation between the English world of home and French one of Brébeuf, where he attended Mass as often as three times a day. Trudeau, for all his aura of rationalism and secularism, was to remain a staunch Catholic the rest of his life, faltering briefly in his faith, according to friends, only at the time of the death of his son Michel. One reason, perhaps, that his Catholicism remained so central to him was because of this unifying role it had had for him as an adolescent, holding together his disparate selves.

  TRUDEAU EMERGED from Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf steeped in views that were fairly typical for his time and place and social class. Trudeau himself, however, was hardly typical. At Brébeuf he had been, as he would later be, a star. That quality would perhaps remain the real constant in his life, his ability to excel, to shine in the right ways and at the right moment. The skill seemed less the result of some natural flair than of an iron discipline, one that went back to the pains he had taken to please his father but that had been honed to a razor edge by the Jesuits at Brébeuf. He had mastered every subject there, and in his final year beat even his rival Jean de Grandpré to stand first in the school; he had read extensively, always beyond the required texts, and had written commentaries on everything he had read. He had been the captain of the hockey team; he had skied, played lacrosse, swum, boxed, and sailed. He had had his debates and his plays, his student politics and his student paper, had played piano and gone to the symphony. Among a group of already exceptional students, he had been more exceptional, for which he had been rewarded with prizes—often, to his pleasure, in cash—and with praise.

  When he emerged from this cocoon of adulation and familiarity, however, schooled in an ideology designed to prepare him to take his place in the French-Canadian elite, he promptly attempted to flee his French self and indulge his English one, applying for a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford. Until then he had expressed his hopes for the future mainly in the vague, lofty terms adolescents are given to. “I would like so much to be a great politician and to guide my nation,” he had written in his journal in 1938, though he had also flirted with the idea of joining the priesthood. In his Rhodes application, however, he stated quite unequivocally that he planned to pursue a career in politics. “For some years now,” he wrote, “I have sought out activities that prepare one most immediately for public life,” among which he included his diction lessons, his acting, and his singing lessons. Whether Trudeau, in the time-honoured manner of application-fillers, was merely trying to suggest some pattern to what might otherwise seem a hopeless hodgepodge, the idea of politics had at least crossed his mind by now, even if in his play, Dupés; Trudeau’s character Ditreau had been rejected by his beloved for being that vilest of things, a politician.

  For once, Trudeau failed to get the prize. The Rhodes, despite his impressive credentials and glowing references, went to another candidate. Unexpectedly, Trudeau found himself at loose ends, and as a fallback began to study law at the Université de Montréal. In the meantime, the Second World War had broken out. In his memoirs, Trudeau gave the impression that he paid as little attention to the war as he could get away with. “[T]he instinct that made me go against prevailing opinion caused me to affect a certain air of indifference. So there was a war? Tough. It wouldn’t stop me from concentrating on my studies so long as that was possible.”

  Again, Trudeau may have overplayed in hindsight his resistance to “prevailing opinion,” not to mention his interest in his studies. His studies, in fact, bored him. Though he performed with his usual brilliance, graduating, in 1943, once more at the top of his class, he often spoke dismissively of law school at the time, and never with any of the excitement with which he spoke of his days at Brébeuf. The one lasting legacy of his years there, perhaps, was that it was where he first came across a man who would later prove a great influence on him, the law professor, constitutional expert and civil libertarian, F.R. Scott, who spoke at the university in 1943 on the question of conscription. At the time, though, Trudeau was apparently just as taken with an extracurricular lecture by Abbé Lionel Groulx, who, despite being a man of the cloth, spoke on the conditions under which armed insurrection could be justified, using the Lower Canada Rebellion of 1837–38 as his example.

  Most of Trudeau’s time at law school, however, was taken up not with his studies but with exactly the sorts of issues which he later claimed to have had little involvement in. If in his desire to go to England—though only as a scholar; he’d shown no interest in going as a soldier—he had at some level been expressing a wish to escape the narrowness of Quebec nationalist culture, now that he was stuck in it he very much continued to play his part. In his memoirs, he shrugged off a speech he gave at an anti-conscription rally as a momentary effort that had less to do with the war than with the affront to democracy shown by the federal government’s reversal on conscription. In reality, however, Trudeau’s speech was the culmination of many weeks of involvement in a federal by-election on behalf of the anticonscription candidate Jean Drapeau. The speech itself, given at a rally in the campaign’s final days, made such an impression that Le Devoir quoted great portions of it. Speaking of the hysteria he claimed the government was stirring up of an imminent German invasion, Trudeau said he “feared the peaceful invasion of immigrants”—often a code word for Jews—“more than the armed invasion of the enemy.” While in the past, he went on, the French Canadians had had to fight against the Iroquois, “today it is against other savages” they had to fight, namely the Mackenzie King Liberals in Ottawa.

  All of this went far beyond the innocent defence of democratic principles into the truly hateful. It was demagoguery; it was, in this man who would later be known by the motto “Reason over passion,” an appeal to the basest impulses. At twenty-three, Trudeau was still clearly of his times rather than above them. As at Brébeuf, he was still attracted to the rhetoric of revolution, but as then, he took care to apply it in a way more likely to earn him accolades than billy clubs.

  The other holdover from Brébeuf, however, was Trudeau’s telltale playfulness. The speech was full of inside jokes and puns, playing throughout on the name Drapeau, or flag, and that of Drapeau’s rival, La Flèche, or arrow. It ended with the line “Enough of cataplasmes [bandages], bring on the cataclysms,” exactly the sort of clever formulation the yo
ung Trudeau revelled in, at once rousing and comic. As odious as the speech was, then, it bore the trace of the same doubleness as his play, Dupés, a tone of mockery whose target remained unclear. Self-mockery, perhaps, but also a kind of subconscious escape clause, as if, in a pinch, one could claim to others, or to oneself, not to have been speaking seriously. The stakes were higher now than at Brébeuf—this was the real world, with real consequences—but Trudeau still seemed to be hiding behind the same mask, half-denying even as he affirmed. Perhaps that was what lay behind his later claim that he hadn’t involved himself much in politics during the war: the sense that he hadn’t, really, not in some essential part of himself, had merely been playing a role. In one of his pranks during the war years, he and a friend dressed up in old Prussian uniforms and toured the countryside on their Harleys calling on friends and frightening passersby, who perhaps thought that the Huns had truly arrived at their shores.

  If he was playing a role, however, he seemed prepared to take it to extremes. At Brébeuf, Trudeau had come under the influence of one of the more politicized teachers, Father Rodolphe Dubé, better known by his pen name, François Hertel. In 1939 Hertel had published Le beau risque, a nationalist coming-of-age tale in which the young Pierre Martel turns away from the Anglicized and Americanized values of his father toward a renewed Catholicism and devotion to his patrie. Martel’s life so clearly paralleled Trudeau’s that Hertel had surely used him as a model, though Trudeau, who reviewed the book in his journal, gave no indication of recognizing the resemblances.