by John English
Even his social life became buoyantly nationalist: Pierre kept a dance card from December 1940 on which he wrote, on the front, “Praise to liberty,” and, on the back, “Long live liberty and the debutants.”60 To Camille, he wrote in French for the first time, thanking her for calling him “my dearest friend” and saying, “It is impossible to know fully the value of a friend, of someone who penetrates our inescapable solitude.” But their romance was chilling, perhaps because of his new attitudes. He objected strongly when she ridiculed the decision of his friend “Roland” to become a monk, especially as she had always thought he was a “Don Juan.” “The idea of getting up in the middle of the night to sing is perfectly ridiculous,” Camille declared. An angry Trudeau found her remark “shocking.”61
By the spring of 1941 he was complaining to her not only about law school—“A genuine lawyer is only supposed to study six times longer than what I have; no wonder most of them are idiots”—but also about the Officers Training Corps, which he had earlier told her he was eager to join. Now it would be “more thrilling to go to the Concentration Camp* or to the Front.”62 But he joined the Corps and, with resentment, did his service with many of his Brébeuf friends. Charles Lussier, a fellow nationalist then and a distinguished Canadian public servant later, remembered a revealing incident from that time: “One day our cadet captain marched us over to a depot where we were to move some shells. The officer in charge was English and gave instructions entirely in that language.” The eight trainees were all French Canadians and all obeyed except one—Pierre Trudeau—who refused to move because, he said in French, he did not understand the command. After an officer repeated the order in very bad French, Trudeau replied in unaccented English, “Good, now I understand you.”63
Liberty meant resistance, and resist Trudeau did, whether it was a unilingual officer or a bureaucratic directive. Yet his rebellion had limits. When, for example, he wanted to read Marx’s Das Kapital and other works on “the Index” (the Catholic restricted list), including Rousseau’s Social Contract, he dutifully asked the archbishop of Montreal for permission. After an initial refusal, he received the approval, although “His Excellency” urged him to treat the books with great care and guard them closely.64 No doubt he did, but in other respects neither he nor some of his friends heeded the archbishop’s counsel in 1941 and 1942 that French Catholics in Quebec should show restraint in opposing conscription and the war effort.
François Hertel was now openly separatist, and his 1942 study of personalism called for “men of action” who would make a free choice “to live.” Trudeau took the advice. He became ever more drawn to the widening circle around the priest and wrote him several admiring letters. Hertel, who was an enthusiastic patron of modernism in the arts, introduced the Trudeau family to the surrealist and cubist artist Alfred Pellan, who had returned to Montreal from Paris after the Nazi invasion. Highly cultured, Hertel impressed Grace and her children, and they frequently invited him to their home and wisely took his advice on purchasing art. Hertel paid Grace the highest compliment in August 1941 when he wrote to Pierre that she was “the least bourgeois woman he had encountered in his life.”65 He encouraged Tip’s growing interest in architecture and music, as well as Pierre’s in literature. In this complex man, religion, literature, and politics mingled with romantic notions of revolution. Although he admired the French liberal philosopher Jacques Maritain, he did not follow his politics. Like many European personalists, including Emmanuel Mounier himself initially, Hertel saw much in Vichy to commend—particularly its “Catholic” sense of order, anti-capitalism, and corporatist rhetoric.
In 1941, when the Jesuit hierarchy exiled him to Sudbury for having a negative influence on the young, Hertel became Trudeau’s confidant.* He encouraged Trudeau to work with a fellow student, Roger Rolland, to produce a literary review, while also expressing his firm opinions against conscription and the Catholic hierarchy and in favour of Pétain. Roger, the son of a major French-Canadian entrepreneur, had first captured Trudeau’s attention when he lit a cigarette with a two-dollar bill, reminding him of the flamboyant ways of his father. He soon became Pierre’s close friend (and, later, his speech writer when Trudeau was prime minister).66 Hertel approved thoroughly of François-Joseph Lessard’s “revolutionary” activities through his secret society, though he considered him a bit intense—as when Lessard suggested that Winston Churchill himself had intervened to send Hertel to Sudbury.67
The correspondence between Hertel and Trudeau began rather formally, with Hertel signing his name Rodolphe Dubé, SJ, but soon he developed a remarkable candour. Hertel was clearly Lessard’s patron, and he asked Trudeau to be patient with his excitable colleague. Both men believed that Trudeau’s major contribution to the revolutionary movement would be intellectual, and in October 1941 Trudeau mocked Lessard’s political espionage in a letter to Hertel which clearly indicates that he was already a part of Lessard’s secret society: “Meanwhile Lessard constantly has some missions of extreme delicacy to be undertaken, some deeply serious events to announce. I have some regret that he has taken me to be a confidant. I feel a certain embarrassment in displaying gushing enthusiasm when he reveals the exact number of fire hydrants in Ste-Hyacinthe.” The revolutionary was well-meaning, the activities intriguing—but Lessard was too earnest.68
As their relationship developed, Trudeau flattered Hertel, calling him “un grand homme,” a great man, while Hertel, in turn, told Pierre he now had the opportunity to be the man of action that Hertel himself had always wanted to be. In this sense, Lessard, however irritating, offered opportunity. In response to a letter from Pierre asking Hertel to explain who he really was, the priest wrote an extraordinary reply—distancing himself by using the third person:
His friends are largely young men. And yet he’s in no way homosexual. He differs in this respect from a certain number of the Amérique française [review established by Rolland and others] collaborators. Have no fear, it’s not about the two Trudeaus and Père Bernier and [the unidentified] Jacqueline.
And so this strange character is a softy deep down. He possesses a sensitivity that was once touchiness. He now knows how to forgive and forget everything, and even fails to notice [insults] when it comes to his friends. The others he can forgive also. As often as possible he simply forgets. Above all, he has resolved to ignore petty reprisals.
Loving his friends is his life. Yet this love—and that’s as far as it goes—however platonic and platonist, is demanding as Hell. To his friends, this “pilgrim of the Absolute” … desires the highest good more than anything. He would be much sorrier—I’m sincere here—to learn of Pierre Trudeau’s death than to learn he was living common-law. And this is why, however broad-minded and tolerant of the tolerable he may be, the said Hertel’s ears perk up when he foresees any potential danger that could be lethal to his friends’ souls. That is why he doesn’t like Gide [whose tolerance of homosexuality was controversial in Catholic circles], and dreads this elegant and naively perverse man because he may remove the fresh blossoms of those of his friends who are still blossoming. As far as a certain Pierre Trudeau is concerned, he believes his cynicism and maturity are sufficiently developed to keep him from being adversely affected by Gide. However, he would not like the said Trudeau to think that all his friends have reached the necessary degree of shamelessness to assimilate Gide without allowing themselves to be spoiled.
Hertel, in fact, doesn’t like revolution the way Trudeau does. The latter loves it as one does a mistress. Hertel married revolution out of duty, because he had first given her children, and he does not wish to abandon them …
All in all, the moral portrait of the said Hertel—which we are currently sketching—is quite handsome. However, the hero is aware he is more handsome in his dreams than in reality. While on this subject, today this strange individual has chosen to add to this moral portrait his physical portrait. There are two. One for Pierre—which shows the tense, hardened Hertel, so fond
of the “coups d’état” (although he has never himself seen or executed one); and [the other photo], Hertel, par excellence, the great Hertel.
Egads! I almost forgot the third: one for Madame Trudeau, in which she will easily recognize Hertel “à 1’américaine,” the one who offered to take her to a baseball game last year, while her two sons studied (the studious one) and tinkled away at the piano (the artistic one). A strong mother whose sons have been made effeminate by legal and literary hairsplitting was worthy to accompany the strong man from the Mauricie to these virile games.69
This letter makes several points clear. Whatever his faults, Lessard and his fellow revolutionaries were “Hertel’s children,” a fact the hierarchy recognized in moving him to Sudbury. The other references to homosexuality are obscure, but Hertel, though clearly regarding homosexuality as sinful, banters here and later about the physical appearance of young men. When he received a photograph of Trudeau in December, for instance, one he called a “physical photograph,” he said it was “great. It could be Tahiti! Ah! If only Gauguin had known you.” In the same letter his definition of his “revolutionary creed” had echoes of French Catholic thinkers of the thirties:
God is strong and pure and lucid. We are weak, carnal, and blind as bats. But do we blindly throw ourselves to God in order that he might give us all that we radically lack? The only great originality of my peculiar thinking is to have understood this: the close alliance between Christianity and Revolution. The all-embracing Christian revolutionary, practising and devout, this is the product I am striving to create and protect. This, because I have understood that he who may give his life is he, he alone, who knows how to give it without losing [its essence]; that he who is completely sincere, he alone can free himself of anti-revolutionary and bourgeois prejudices … The church is, at the present moment, the only possible source of revolution.
“Revolution” was a term used very casually at the time not only by the political left and right and but also by the Protestant and Catholic churches.* The Quebec Catholic hierarchy certainly did not share Hertel’s views on “revolution,” but the priest had allies. Father Marie d’Anjou—one of Trudeau’s four favourite teachers at Brébeuf—was even more supportive of the “revolution.” The Catholic hierarchy had removed him too from Montreal, and his resentment was profound. Hertel believed that his fellow priest was his closest ally in confronting these church leaders. In his correspondence, d’Anjou always called Montreal “Ville-Marie,” and he cherished the dream of Laurentie, the independent French Catholic state.70 During his absence from Montreal, he wrote often to Lessard, and he recommended young Trudeau as the one most able to undertake various tasks for his “group.”71
In his papers for the 1941–42 period, Pierre Trudeau has copies of a “plan” that describes a secret society which had been created some years before by three “guys” who were tired of half measures while “the people” slid downwards into the crevasse. They had read “Groulx, Péguy, Blois, Hertel, Istrati, Savard,” and they believed in the immortal lessons of both history and Catholicism. The glories of New France must live beyond the granite of the monuments, they said, and the fearful, the down and out, the prostitutes, the blasphemers, and the drunkards who besmirch that tradition must be destroyed. Revolution is the daughter of “the Fatherland,” the plan writers noted:
Political and military revolution is but a stage, an accident of Revolution, as wars are but cataclysms of history. This is what the revolutionaries are, philosophers and doctrinaires. Of the philosophers of the Laurentian Revolution, one preached to the people the dogma of homeland, the other promulgated the dogma of hope to the desperate. Revolution, in this common view, of which we are the proof, is mankind who, in spite of everything, his selfishness, his cowardice, his passions, his flaws, the number and power of his adversaries, his failures, his mistakes, advances relentlessly. He, in the midst of all, sword in hand, despite obstacles, strikes again and again, until they fall.72
The plan identifies three “types” who had met together and organized this revolutionary cell. They were Lessard, Trudeau, and Jean-Baptiste Boulanger, the Brébeuf friend Trudeau had met on his cross-Canada tour in Edmonton. In his memoirs, Trudeau says that Boulanger and he “decided together to read over one summer the great works of political writing—Aristotle, Plato, Rousseau’s Social Contract, Montesquieu, and others … Boulanger knew more than me in this field, and that was why I hung around with him.” In fact, Boulanger’s course of studies included Georges Sorel, Leon Trotsky, and other theorists of revolution. Both also read the French authoritarian Charles Maurras, whose works became the pillars of Vichy.73
The barricades beckoned—and Trudeau rushed to the defence of the cause. The first battle came with the referendum on conscription. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, the Canadian government moved quickly to full mobilization. Ernest Lapointe, who had promised no conscription, had died, and the English newspapers demanded that Canada now respond as America and Britain already had. The wily Prime Minister Mackenzie King decided he should call for a referendum that would ask Canadians not a direct question on conscription itself but whether they would release the government from the pledge that there would be no conscription for overseas service. The date was set for April 27, 1942.
In Quebec, André Laurendeau organized the No side quickly under the banner of the significantly named Ligue pour la défense du Canada. Trudeau’s anger was deep. He had written some rough notes twelve days after Pearl Harbor. “Is it necessary to be pro-British or anti-?” The answer was clear. He boasted to Camille about a “revolution” he was planning and, in 1942, asked her to obtain for him a copy of Malaparte’s Coup d’Etat: The Technique of Revolution. Fearing censorship at the border, he cautioned: “I am anxious to read it as soon as possible; but I doubt it would be wise to mail it to me. I seriously wonder if the officials of this pharisaic puritan government would let the thing be delivered.” He concluded with the words “Thanks for your trouble, and long live liberty.”74 Out of Trotsky and other revolutionary theorists, Trudeau, Boulanger, and Lessard took the lesson that a small cell could carry out revolution effectively if it was cohesive and its plans were clear. It was, Trudeau suggested, the wave of the future. The old were the imperialists; the young, the separatists. The old did not belong to the future; they sought a solution that would maintain the status quo and allow them to play out their hand. It was already too late for that.75
Trudeau wrote to Hertel in January 1942 to say that the plan was moving forward, although not so effectively as he would have liked. As he had indicated earlier, he thought he could serve best intellectually—a position Hertel strongly supported. The anti-conscription movement continued to unite behind André Laurendeau, who, Hertel wrote in December 1941, was “a good man. Lots of sangfroid and vision.” However, being too cerebral, he was “not a leader.” Trudeau perhaps took the advice and told Hertel that “we” are trying to organize a study circle, which, under Laurendeau’s direction, will examine social questions. Then he continued in a passage that, while illustrating his participation in a secret cell, revealed his doubts:
I’ve told Arsenault, who is very understanding. He agrees that my work should be almost exclusively one of study … (with a touch of the spectacular anarchy I find indispensable). Lessard doesn’t understand quite so well and is more inclined to have me play the role of mailman.
I think the whole business is going badly in all respects. Too few are believers. Too weak an organization to fortify the tottering. Missed demonstrations. Too many clergy from the meek bourgeoisie … If it is impossible to make them see good sense and understand what’s important, there must be some other way to force their hand. We’ll have to see about that.
And so the “revolution” tottered forward, with Trudeau reading furiously, demonstrating regularly, and somehow crowding in his legal studies.76
Montreal seethed with discontent. Mayor Houde wore his prison garb; the Italians
, whose main church honoured Mussolini, were adrift; the sailors fought furious battles over women in the bars near the port; and restaurants could serve only one cup of coffee or tea to each patron. On March 24, 1942, anti-conscriptionists gathered for a rally where the dissident Liberal Jean-François Pouliot was to speak with the support of the Université de Montréal student association at Jean-Talon market.77 After the rally, a group of forty students got together at the corner of Saint-Laurent and Napoléon, in the centre of the city. Suddenly, windows shattered as young demonstrators threw stones, shouting, “Down with the Jews! Down with conscription!” The police quickly appeared and the demonstrators fled, but one fell and could not escape. In April this arrested demonstrator, Maurice Riel, a law student at the Université de Montréal, appeared in court charged with vagrancy—a favourite of Canadian police in those times. Trudeau spoke as a witness for the defence, and Riel—a Trudeau appointment to the Senate of Canada in 1973—was acquitted.78 Meanwhile, the plan for an uprising went forward.
There were protests, even riots, and overwhelming francophone opposition to conscription. To Trudeau’s despair on referendum day, Outremont stood out among the francophone population, with 15,746 voting Yes and only 9,957, No. There is no record whether Grace voted No with her son.
In his reading at this time, Trudeau focused on biographies of mystics and individuals who had confronted danger in support of Christ.79 And many of his friends noted this sudden abstraction and mysticism in him. Already in the spring of 1941, Camille had told him that he was avoiding reality. A year later, ten days before the plebiscite, “your friend, the Great Hertel” wrote to him warning that he was becoming too abstract: