by John English
When Grace came home, she found its pieces in the wastebasket, along with a draft of the earlier letter he had sent to his parents in Florida. She carefully pasted the pages together. They were among the documents she kept until her death, when they passed to Pierre—and into his collection of papers. He preserved another item too. In the celebrated portrait of Trudeau in the Parliament Buildings, just outside the House of Commons, he wears, as a final homage, Charles’s cape, which he had kept for over half a century.32 Clearly there was intense grief, but did he also feel “ambivalence” towards his father, thus complicating the grief, as some have suggested? That is less certain. I will return to the psychological impact of Charles’s life and death on Pierre later. The documentary records of the time support his sister Suzette’s comment that “[Pierre] didn’t shock or disturb us or react in a way that I would think was because my father was gone … Perhaps he took on a certain responsibility.”33 He never ceased to miss him profoundly, however.*
Camillien Houde, the Conservative and nationalist mayor of Montreal; J.-A. Bernier, the president of the nationalist Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste; and Georges Pelletier, the editor of Le Devoir, joined the family as Charles’s remains arrived in Windsor Station early on the following Saturday morning. At the funeral there were thirteen priests, several judges, and seven cars carrying the flowers.34 The funeral became etched forever in Pierre’s memory, but he was away from school only briefly and his marks, which were recorded weekly, remained remarkably high. He wrote rather formally to his mother on April 28 and again on May 2, less than a month after his father’s death, saying in both letters that he knew she was “in good health” and hoped that she remained so. Occasionally he stayed in school as a boarder and, in the first letter, he noted that he missed the charm of home and the caresses of his mother. In the second he reported that his marks were the highest in the class, a total of 292 out of 300. He then wrote out “April’s fool” in Greek, Latin, English, French, and another script. It was a good academic year. He wrote again to his mother on June 10 and told her that he expected to win prizes. Thanks to his excellent teachers, “we have all had a good year.” He ended by thanking his mother for sending him to such a fine school.35
Several of Pierre’s classmates have said that it was a different boy who returned to the school after his father died. He became more nonconformist, more eager to shock teachers and students alike.36 Certainly his father was missed at Brébeuf, where the Jesuit priests later remembered how “Charlie” would “offer to buy them Havana cigars to pass around at a college dinner in honour of a visiting papal delegate or to send them a case of whisky for their own pleasure any time they liked.”37 Small wonder so many of them attended his funeral. The atmosphere at home also changed. Trudeau said later: “When my father was around, there was a great deal of effusiveness and laughter and kissing and hugging. 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 mother and so on.”38 Pierre began to use the hyphenated surname Elliott-Trudeau, suggesting a new orientation towards the English side of the family, though in 1931–32 he had briefly favoured J.P. Elliott Trudeau.39 It seems that he became more rebellious in class, while, in the less playful atmosphere at home, he increasingly strove to please Grace. His letters and notebooks indicate a more complex pattern after his father’s death: he became more like a stone whose colours radiated differently, depending on the angle from which it was viewed. He concealed more, but, paradoxically, what he did reveal briefly illuminated his core.
To be sure, Pierre doted on his mother, expressing constant concern for her health. Although we have no written records of what Grace thought, Charles’s death profoundly affected her. Her life had focused on her husband’s career and, most of all, the children. Years after, Grace Pitfield, who was related by birth or marriage to many of the British elite of Montreal (and was the mother of Trudeau’s friend and later colleague Michael Pitfield), told a journalist how Grace Elliott, who had Loyalist roots and a minor inheritance, had simply disappeared. She had friends who “had been at school with Grace Elliott,” she explained. “They heard later that she had married a Frenchman. But nobody knew who he was, and of course they never saw her afterwards.”40 It was not surprising, given this divide in Montreal society at the time, that Grace—having cut herself off from her background—craved the affection and attention of her children. And they responded. The reserve that had marked her when the exuberant and extroverted Charles was alive disappeared when she was the sole parent, and she became more assertive, more playful. But that was Grace’s private side. “‘Formidable’ is the word Trudeau sometimes uses to describe his father,” quipped the journalist Richard Gwyn. “Everyone else applies it to his mother.” After Charles’s death, Grace Trudeau gained presence.41
Pierre seemed to become both son and companion, an emotional combination that has its charms and its dangers. He took more responsibility for family affairs, according to both Suzette and Pierre himself. His father’s death brought financial independence and security, and Pierre cherished this freedom. Each of the children apparently received $5,000 a year, more than the average annual income for doctors and lawyers in the late 1930s. And there were reserves if needed.42 In his late teenage years, Pierre became directly involved in managing a large inheritance. For her part, Grace divided the long remainder of her life among travel, charitable work, and the Roman Catholic Church, and she paid little attention to the management of the funds. In 1939 she even managed to lose some of the many stock certificates the family possessed.43 She loved music and played the piano very well, to the envy of Pierre, who did so in an amateur way. She seldom missed a classical concert and even brought some of the leading artists of the day to her home, to perform for friends and family. At one time she persuaded the great Artur Rubinstein to come to McCulloch and perform.44 Some thought the Trudeau home darkened after Charles died; it did, her children sometimes joked, because Grace was on the road so much. She travelled frequently to New York, Florida, Europe, and her beloved Maine, occasionally with the children but, increasingly, with female friends. Suzette, an amiable and uncomplicated daughter, became a consolation and companion to her, but she doted on Pierre.
—
When Charles died, Pierre was a day student at the Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf on St. Catherine Street in Montreal. His parents had initially sent him when he was six years old to Académie Querbes, a Catholic school for both English and French Catholics, and he stayed there until 1932. He first enrolled in the English section “for reasons I do not know,” he claimed in his memoir. He had forgotten: his father had once written that, in the world in which “they” lived, the advantages came to those who learned English.45 And so his children did.
Querbes, which boasted both a bowling alley and a swimming pool, was located at 215 Bloomfield Street in Outremont, and Pierre had only seven classmates in his first year. His report gave him perfect marks for conduct, application, politeness, and cleanliness. He stood first in the class nearly every month except for March, when he was sick. The size of the class grew to sixteen by third year, when he stood second. The following year he began in English, but then changed to French. He stood first in his last month in English, and he retained that place in his first month in French. He again graduated at the top, overall, with a percentage of 92.5 in June 1930. Grace had signed the reports when the courses were in English; Charles signed most of them when Pierre switched to French.
In school, Pierre became immersed in the Catholic faith and in the debate about mortal sin, while on the streets, he fought as boys seemed to do in those days. Michel Chartrand, a fellow Querbes student and future labour activist, recalled that Pierre got into brawls on the streets of Outremont, where the poorer kids liked to take on the precious sons of the well-to-do.46 In his final year, when he stood firs
t in a class of twenty-six students with a percentage of 95.4, his best classes were mathematics and religion—and that pattern continued throughout his academic career.47 Several of his essays are preserved in his papers. They reflect both his mind and the times in which he lived. He received “Beau travail” for an essay on the fabled French soldier Dollard des Ormeaux, who, in 1660, held off the Iroquois on the Ottawa River. Pierre concluded that Dollard and his companions were martyrs and saints without whose sacrifices “the colony would have been completely destroyed” by the barbarians. In an essay on guns, he told how he had asked “Papa” if he could go hunting with him. His father replied, “No, Pierre, you are only eleven years old and not old enough.” When Pierre persisted, Charles gave examples of how accidents happen with firearms, and Pierre finally agreed with him. In an essay on the polite child, Pierre emphasized kindness to others, including the servants. In church, no one should speak or shuffle about but simply pray. The overall lesson he derived from the exercise was that a polite child becomes popular in society.48 For this essay, he received his highest mark: 9.5 out of 10.
From Querbes, Pierre moved to the new classical college, Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, which was within walking distance of his home in Outremont. It had been established in 1928 as one of the five Jesuit colleges explicitly devoted to the education of a French elite in Quebec. Discipline was quick, short, and brutal. The priests frequently expelled troublesome students, and the strap and other forms of discipline were always available. Pierre soon established himself as an outstanding student, but he developed a sharp edge during his eight-year stay there. He brought friends with him from Querbes and the streets of Outremont, notably Pierre Vadeboncoeur, who would follow him through Brébeuf, law school, and political activities for three decades. Brébeuf was a decisive experience in Trudeau’s life, endowing him with a remarkable self-discipline, a profound interest in ideas and politics, and a cadre of friends and acquaintances who would play major roles in his life and career. He later claimed that he had little interest in politics while he was at Brébeuf, but, again, his memory failed him.49
Trudeau’s account of his involvement in contemporary politics during his Brébeuf years is contradictory. He also said on occasion that Father Robert Bernier, who was “the most cultivated man I had met … talked politics to me.”50 His notebooks of the time are full of “politics,” both in the sense of political theory, beginning with the classical tradition, and in the narrower sense of the political events of the 1930s. He entered Brébeuf at the height of the Great Depression, “la Grande Crise” in Quebec, just before Roosevelt’s presidency and Hitler’s chancellorship. Students disappeared from his class as their parents fell into abject poverty, and the Catholic Church in Quebec and elsewhere was in turmoil as it tried to understand what the collapse of democracy in Europe, and capitalism everywhere, meant for the faithful. In Quebec a critique of Canadian capitalism and democracy emerged most strongly in the writings of Abbé Lionel Groulx. In 1919, the year of Pierre’s birth, Groulx had given a historic lecture, “If Dollard Were Alive Today.” His argument already had a deep impact on the young Pierre when he wrote his essay on Dollard at Querbes. The Abbé held the first chair in Canadian history at the Montreal branch of Laval University and went on to edit the highly influential journal L’Action française. In short order it became the catalyst for a new nationalism that linked the Catholic faith, the French language, and the family, while calling for autonomous institutions that would protect these key elements from Anglicization, Americanization, secularization, and a corrupt political class.51
The Abbé responded to the conscription crisis and the First World War by turning to the past: the Conquest of New France in 1760 became a decisive event, God’s test of Quebec’s defeated people; the pact of Confederation, a broken promise. Dollard’s first battles with the Iroquois, or, for that matter, Étienne Truteau’s, led to the origins of the parish, where the germ of the nation appeared and where common institutions and memories formed. In his eyes, during the Conquest, the Rebellions of the French against the English in 1837–38, the betrayals of Confederation, and the conscription crisis of 1917, a Quebec nation was forged in a fire of constant struggle and within the enduring bond of Catholicism. According to Groulx, the nation had become a reality through this continual battle with “the others.”52 The aggressiveness of English Canada during wartime; the continuing flow of rural francophones to Montreal, where the symbols of power were English; the drop in the birthrate of francophones in the city and of the French population in Canada (31% in 1867, but only 27% in 1921); and the economic inferiority of the francophone professional class created “the call of the race,” or L’appel de la race, the title of Groulx’s bestselling novel of 1922, about the difficulties of a mixed marriage between a French Catholic lawyer and a converted Protestant English mother. The jacket of the first edition carried a quotation: “All of the descendants of the valiant 65,000 who were conquered must act as one.”53 It was a powerful nationalist argument, one that roiled Quebec society in the interwar years.
In the 1930s, with bourgeois liberal democracy in danger and Communism, socialism, and fascism contesting for dominance in Europe, the winds that blew strongly from Europe reached Quebec. For Quebec Catholics, Communism was simply evil, and liberalism was tainted with its anti-clerical past and enervated present. Within the Quebec church, an angry debate developed between those who believed that the first task was to “rechristianize” the population and others who, with Groulx, thought that “national action” must coincide with “Catholic action” and with what he termed the refrancization of Quebec. On his return from France in 1937, André Laurendeau, later the co-chair of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, attacked the supporters of bilingualism in Quebec. An admirer of Abbé Groulx, he warned: “When all French Canadians have become bilingual, they will all speak English … and French itself will soon be useless.”54 The debate raged within the numerous Catholic youth groups that proliferated in Quebec in the 1930s, especially in response to a report on the subject by the Dominican priest Georges-Henri Lévesque which said the first concern must be the individual in society, not the national question.55 When these debates left the classrooms and church buildings and arrived on the streets, they sometimes took a vulgar form in the creation of a Quebec fascist movement, the National Socialist Christian Party (Parti national social chrétien), whose emblem was a swastika surrounded by maple leaves, with a curious beaver as its crown. Its leader, Adrien Arcand, was a vicious anti-Semite who condoned attacks on Jewish businesses in Montreal and urged the deportation of Jews to Hudson Bay.
The times were clearly important in the formation of Pierre Trudeau, with the breakdown of the European order, the emergence of new nationalist movements in Quebec (especially the Action libérale nationale, or ALN), and the continuing economic crisis. Although there is no direct evidence that Charles Trudeau had urged political beliefs on his son, his own nationalism, as reflected in his association with Le Devoir and his friendship with men such as Camillien Houde, surely left its mark. And Pierre, until he turned twenty-one in 1940, was sheltered within the cocoon of Brébeuf, where the atmosphere was decidedly nationalist. In his first years there, Pierre concentrated on his studies and on sports. He usually began in the morning with prayers at 5:30, followed by early morning Mass. He did not shirk his religious duties, sometimes participating in Mass three times in one day. He attended retreats frequently, although at times he complained about the number of religious observances offered there.
About sports, he never complained. He became the captain of the hockey team, played lacrosse, and went on ski excursions.* And he exercised. In photographs, he is always lean and his body is hard, not in the fashion of modern weightlifters but similar to Clark Gable and other film stars of the time. His love of competition was reflected in his academic work: he carefully followed his own marks along with those of his fellow students. He had to be first—in 1935, despite his
father’s death, he won numerous prizes and excelled. He also developed the reputation of being devilish in class: during a presentation on navigation, for example, he took a glass of water out of his inside coat pocket. He later interpreted these tricks as “opposing conventional wisdoms and challenging prevailing opinions,” but they apparently did not greatly offend his teachers—or his mother, whom he regaled with some of the stories. And, it seems, they did not irritate fellow students as much as some of them later recalled. He was elected to several positions, including vice-president of the student assembly, and chosen to be editor of the student newspaper.56 He was disappointed that he was not elected president but counted himself lucky, considering he had no particular group of friends, to finish second in the vote out of a class of fifty.57
Pierre’s pranks and mocking comments were forgiven by his teachers because he became increasingly committed to the school, to the Catholic faith, and to understanding the “national question.” The commitment intensified after the death of his father. Trudeau’s son Alexandre (Sacha) believes that one major consequence of Charles-Émile’s death on Trudeau was a distrust of business and commercial life and a suspicion of law. He came to identify business with late nights, heavy drinking, smoking, and boozy argument. In Alexandre’s words, Pierre thought business killed his father. He never smoked, drank to excess, swore vigorously, or argued long into the night, even though he adored his father, who did.58
Oddly, although several Brébeuf priests influenced Pierre, notably Father Robert Bernier, the one who would have the strongest impact never taught him. Father Rodolphe Dubé, a Jesuit priest and novelist, wrote under the pen name François Hertel—the actual name of a ferocious and brutal opponent of the English and the Aboriginal enemies of New France. Trudeau’s papers suggest that Hertel was probably the major intellectual influence in his life until the mid-1940s—explaining, perhaps, the lavish but oblique praise for him in his memoirs. However, the priest was a remarkably charismatic leader of the young, and his views on politics and the arts deeply influenced Catholic youth in the late thirties and early forties. He first attracted attention when he wrote a study in 1936 entitled Leur inquiétude, in which he talked about the restlessness of youth in Quebec, with their “desire to evade reality, their dissatisfaction with the present, their dolorous focus on the past, and their anxious view of the future.”59 Later scholars have reinforced Hertel’s views and have argued that the anxiety that marked students in the classical colleges in the thirties—in the form of pranks, demonstrations, and misbehaviour—was a response to the colleges’ emphasis on chastity, asceticism, and submission. In these male institutions, such teachings represented a threat to the sexual identity of the students at a time when modern attitudes provided so many distractions and temptations.60