Citizen of the World

by John English

  You are definitely a difficult guy to fit into day-to-day life. It seems that you are frightened to death of coming close to the quotidian and, therefore, the banal. Would you not, by chance, be some type of misunderstood romantic? Like Julien Sorel. Yet you haven’t read, o chaste young man, [Stendhal’s] Le Rouge et le Noir. Misunderstood romantic means, according to my worthy pen, unbalanced by choice, in love with tension. Don’t you try to avoid, through energy and resolve, anything that could turn you away from your beautiful spirit? Do you not seek to escape to the higher levels than the barn floor upon which we must keep, at whatever cost, one foot of our being?

  Hertel says he [Trudeau] has both feet in the blue skies: from time to time you come down to where mortals live to attend embryonic riots.80

  Through the summer, the plan continued to spin out, with the hope that there would soon be a decisive event. Trudeau signed his letters to Hertel “Citoyen” and to Boulanger “Anarchiste,” and he used the language of the French Revolution. During those warm months, even his travels testified to his nationalism. In 1941 he had joined his Brébeuf classmate Guy Viau and two others in retracing the path by canoe of the great coureurs du bois, Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Médard Des Groseilliers. They went along the Ottawa River, crossed Lake Timiskaming, and eventually reached Moosonee. The journey through the wilds of the Canadian Shield was described by a journalist as a group of students on a “planned trip.” Trudeau was enraged: he wrote to Hertel, “Imagine then my mood when I learned that this ‘arranged excursion’ about which I had long dreamed, and which was a little my plan … should take on a thoroughly bourgeois allure. Merde!” In his description of his voyage, he emphasized the challenge and his brave response—a pattern he followed throughout his life. He emphasized how he ran the rapids while others portaged. As dangers mounted, rain poured, and harsh winds blew, he became stronger. “In fact, life began to be beautiful.”81

  By the following summer, Trudeau had a Harley-Davidson motorbike—already a symbol of youthful rebellion and recklessness long before the Hell’s Angels and Marlon Brando gave the machine its swagger. Its speed was legendary; its exhaust explosive. For the timid Trudeau, it was the perfect accessory. He even wrote a short tribute, “Pritt Zoum Bing,” for the Université de Montréal student newspaper, Le Quartier Latin, to the freedom motorcycles offered. During the long vacation, he decided to take two trips between sessions for his compulsory COTC training. Gabriel Filion, who accompanied him on the Harley, recalls that, on the first, they travelled “some five thousand kilometres through New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, sleeping in barns at night and sometimes in churches, or in houses that were being built. Most often, however, we slept in the countryside, pitching our tent in the fields or in the forest. We ate in small restaurants, and Pierre always paid the bill.” On the other, they “retraced the route taken by François Paradis, the hero of Maria Chapdelaine.” Here the nationalist motivation seems clear as Trudeau, Filion, and another friend, Carl Dubuc, followed the path of Paradis—in the novel, he left La Tuque and sought to join his love, Maria, on the shore of Lac St-Jean, only to die of exposure. The travellers escaped this tragic fate, but Filion injured his right leg badly on the second day. They decided to carry on and, in Filion’s words, “every day, Pierre tended to my injured leg.”82

  When the trio returned to Montreal, Mackenzie King’s Liberal government decided not to impose conscription immediately. But that did not still the anti-conscriptionist sentiment. In November 1942 a law-school classmate, Jean Drapeau, became an independent candidate in a by-election in Outremont, supported by both the Ligue and the Bloc populaire canadien, a new nationalist party that had supplanted the weak Action libérale nationale. At twenty-six, he was a fiery orator with strong connections to Catholic and other nationalist groups. It was Trudeau’s own constituency, and he fought the battle furiously on streets he knew well. The Liberal candidate was General Léo Laflèche, who was endorsed not only by the English papers but also by L’Action catholique and several major French papers. Le Devoir, however, dissented and supported Drapeau. Trudeau spent most of his time in the fall of 1942 on that campaign, so much so that he told a business colleague that he had little time for other activities.

  At a major rally during the campaign’s last week, Trudeau gave such a spirited speech for Drapeau that Le Devoir published almost all of it. He began by denouncing the Liberals for running a military officer as their candidate; in a democracy, the military had no place in politics. He minimized the German threat, ridiculed the King government, and, according to Le Devoir, said that “he feared the peaceful invasion of immigrants more than the armed invasion by the enemy.” The French of North America would fight when threatened, just as they had against the Iroquois; “today,” he scorned, “it is against other savages.” Then Trudeau stated dramatically: the government had irresponsibly declared war even though North America faced no direct threat of an invasion, “at the moment when Hitler had not yet had his lightning victories.” The newspaper quoted his dramatic conclusion in full: “Citizens of Quebec, don’t be content to whine. Long live the flag [drapeau] of liberty. Enough of Band-Aids; bring on the revolution.”83

  Two days after this demagogic speech, which seemed to equate the King government with savages, minimized the Nazi threat, and attacked immigrants (who, in Montreal, were mainly Jewish), Le Devoir ran another story about a polite heckler at a Laflèche rally who had been beaten by a thug. Trudeau kept the clipping and identified the heckler as his friend Pierre Vaillancourt.84 After the election, which Drapeau lost, Trudeau explained the reasons for the Liberal victory to a friend. There was no need for “lamentations,” he said: “We know that in a constituency two-thirds Jewish and English, a nationalist and anti-bourgeois candidate would not have great appeal. Drapeau did not lose his deposit. And especially if Mr. King gives consideration to the polling statistics, he will understand that the votes for Laflèche are owed [?] almost uniquely to the Jewish and English areas and … to a powerful Liberal machine.” He concluded by arguing that they had not really lost the election; rather, he blamed the “dishonesty” of what would later be called the “ethnic vote.” The Bloc could well take the riding the next time.85

  Trudeau’s dramatic contribution to the Drapeau campaign contrasts with his relative silence at the university, where he published only one article in Le Quartier Latin that dealt directly with the war. This article, “Nothing Matters Save the Victory,” mocked war propaganda and dripped with sarcasm about the rights the British were fighting to preserve. Although no fan of Hitler, Trudeau ridiculed the British regard for the rights of minorities. The Nazi hordes, he declared, would take away language rights, deny the rights of minorities in other provinces, capture the economic heights, and make the French population hewers of wood and drawers of water. Not even the dullest reader could miss Trudeau’s comparison with the English treatment of the French after 1763. The editors indicated that its publication in the fateful month of November 1942 barely escaped the censors.86

  One incident that has continually stirred controversy occurred in the summer of 1943 and involved Roger Rolland. In The Secret Mulroney Tapes, journalist Peter Newman complains that “journalists … seldom [mentioned] the fact that during the Second World War he [Trudeau] had cruised around Montreal on a motorcycle wearing a German helmet.” The cruising was not in Montreal, and the helmet was probably French, not German. In his memoirs, Trudeau explained how he and Roger had found some old German uniforms from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 in the Rolland attic. Rolland’s wealthy father had collected military souvenirs, including memorabilia from both the French and the Prussian side in this conflict. According to Rolland, Trudeau chose a French helmet when they decided to don the ancient military gear and surprise their friends, Jean-Louis Roux and Jean Gascon, who were members of the comedy troupe Les Compagnons de Saint-Laurent. The troupe was spending the summer season at a chalet at Saint-Adolphe-de-Howard in the Laurentians
, quite some distance from Montreal.

  As the pranksters headed north on their Harleys, Trudeau caught up to Rolland near Sainte-Agathe and told him that a villager had hailed him down to inform him that “a German soldier had just gone by heading north.” That dramatic reaction spurred them on to even more tricks. They stopped at an imposing house and knocked on the back door. When a servant answered, Pierre demanded water, and the terrified woman brought a large glass out to him. But he signalled his suspicion of the contents, handed the glass to Roger, and demanded that he drink his share of it first. Once Roger had taken a few sips, he suddenly collapsed, screaming with pain. The servant quickly bolted the door, and the “soldiers” fled. When they reached their friends, they found only one of the actors there. He was “petrified” as he encountered the bizarre invaders and thought he was hallucinating. It took him a few minutes and a strong shot of cognac “to recover his senses.” Trudeau later dismissed the whole incident as simply a prank, but, when interviewer Jean Lépine told him in the early 1990s that Rolland had admitted that they scared some people, Trudeau agreed.87

  Curiously, the Quartier Latin article (although not the motorbike incident) escaped the attention of Canadian journalists, politicians, and writers when Trudeau was prime minister, even though it contained political dynamite. In 1972 a clever opposition party could have used Trudeau’s angry anti-British rhetoric to win a few Ontario seats where “Queen and country” still mattered. Rumours constantly swirled around Trudeau, but surprisingly little effort was made to clear away the mists when, in some cases, they could have been easily dispersed. Jean-Louis Roux was not so lucky. After a brilliant career as one of Quebec’s finest actors, he was appointed lieutenant-governor of Quebec. When the press revealed that he had worn a swastika on his lab coat five decades earlier at the Université de Montréal, he responded that, like other students fiercely opposed to conscription, he had simply wanted to be noticed. He apologized for his youthful deeds and explained that the context of the time had skewed his understanding of evil.88 The appointment, however, was aborted.89

  Trudeau, too, was a clever actor. In the summer of 1942, for example, he took part alongside Roux and Gascon in a play, Le Jeu de Dollard, in front of the statue of Cartier at the base of Mount Royal. And throughout this period, he changed roles quickly. The bland young essayist of Brébeuf became a biting polemicist at the Université de Montréal, as the caution that had marked his adolescent escapades disappeared. He was daring. In a debate on gallantry that took place the following January 8 in the presence of the federal minister of fisheries, Ernest Bertrand, Trudeau was outrageous, just as everyone expected him to be. The program romantically described him as “chevalier des nobles causes.” Pierre, it declared, “cuts the figure of a revolutionary in our time.” He told George Radwanski that, in his defence of gallantry, he pulled a gun, pointed it at one of the judges, and fired it. A puff of smoke appeared, but it was a blank. The judge ducked; the crowd was stunned. Not surprisingly, Trudeau and his partner lost the debate, in which they argued that gallantry belonged to the past, not the present, where gallantry was a fake.90 That winter night Trudeau received poor marks for gallantry—and common sense—from many in the crowd.

  What are we to make of Trudeau in these exuberant, troubled times? His correspondence with François Hertel leaves no doubt that he was deeply involved with François-Joseph Lessard’s revolutionary activity and that his politics were not only anti-war and anti-Liberal but also clandestine, highly nationalist, and, at least momentarily, separatist and even violent. Hertel was, as Lessard himself said, the major recruiter for the secret cell, and Trudeau was involved with Lessard well before the summer of 1942. His letter after the Drapeau defeat in which he blamed the Jews and the English, and the speech in favour of Drapeau where he announced his fear of immigrants, are both appalling. So too are some of the comments he made in his notebooks on works that were anti-Semitic or racist. After he read Charles Maurras’s pro-Pétain and anti-Semitic volume La seule France, for instance, he told Hertel it pleased him very much, just as the “political jobbery” of Canada in 1942 disgusted him.

  Trudeau’s education, his friendships, and even more his participation in the summer military training exercises took him briefly to the barricades in 1941 and 1942. He deeply resented the military training, and his colleagues shared that resentment. Their attitude is clear in the remarkable photograph of the commandos “without zeal,” and it’s easy to imagine the pranks they contemplated as they “trained” together—pranks such as stealing their military kit and weapons.

  Trudeau’s opposition to conscription is understandable, and his political activities in the referendum campaign and in campaigning for Drapeau are expressions of his democratic rights. Under Hertel’s spell, however, when he was bored with law school, entranced with the mystique of revolution, and freed by fortune to make his own choices, Trudeau did and said some foolish things. Yet perspective is needed.* He regarded Les Frères Chausseurs, or LX, as hopelessly disorganized and François-Joseph Lessard as a great bother. He did read Charles Maurras, Alexis Carrel, and others, but Hertel also introduced him to Alfred Pellan and Paul-Émile Borduas, and he spent far more time in salons listening to symphonies than in the streets calling for revolution. He, Lessard, and Jean-Baptiste Boulanger, who later became a prominent psychiatrist and disapproved strongly of Trudeau’s dismissal of their separatist activities in his memoirs, seem strikingly immature. But then, many are in wartime.

  Throughout this period, Trudeau lived at the family home, with its chauffeur and servants, while denouncing the bourgeois life. He invited his fellow students there for evenings of classical music, where his mother graciously entertained them. It seems that he told her nothing about his nights on the streets or his notorious motorbike jaunt. These secrets he kept from her, and it surely would have jarred and distressed her had she known. And that, most assuredly, he was loath to do. It was a troubled time, and, as Camille Corriveau and even Hertel recognized, Pierre Trudeau, who had dreamed of being Canadian prime minister as he travelled across the country in the summer of 1940, had become a troubled young man.

  Despite the daring of his political involvement (which was mentioned in the Université de Montréal debate program) and the boredom of his legal studies, Trudeau once again excelled in the classroom. He stood first at university even more often than he had at Brébeuf. Sure, he complained about the drill of law classes, but his remarkable discipline prevailed. His marks in civil law, for example, were 40 out of 40 in January 1941; 38 out of 40 in June 1941; and 38.5 out of 40 in June 1942, when he received 28 out of 30 in criminal law, 20 out of 20 for constitutional law, 17.5 out of 20 for international law, and 24.8 out of 25 for notarial procedure. Evidently, the plebiscite and politics made little difference to his grades.

  The following year, in June 1943, Trudeau graduated first in law “with great distinction.” He won the Governor General’s Medal for overall excellence as well as the Lieutenant-Governor’s Medal for standing first in the licensing examination. He personally wrote a letter of thanks to Their Excellencies for the medals. The response from the office of the Governor General thanked him for the information that he had won the medal—a gesture that surely confirmed Trudeau’s contempt for the British nobles who then occupied the office.91 When his sister, Suzette, read the results in La Presse, she wrote from Old Orchard Beach and congratulated him on “his latest achievements.” She hoped he could use the publicity “in obtaining what you would like for next year.”92

  Trudeau, however, was still unsure what he liked. The five years between 1938 and 1943 were, nonetheless, decisive for him and, most historians argue, for Canada and Quebec too. He had to make a choice: Would he be a French or an English Canadian?93 When he lost the Rhodes Scholarship and chose the Université de Montréal, Trudeau became Québécois. The term itself had no meaning in 1940, apart from being a resident of Quebec City. But Trudeau decided during those years that he was “French,�
� a choice that was almost inevitable given the intensity of his education and the great events of the time. In making that choice, he became entangled in those events. And there was another factor: as Brébeuf’s top student in a period when French-Canadian excellence was prized, he became a magnet for those who sought a leader for difficult times.

  The debates, the battles fought by the young, and the relationships that were forged in the early 1940s echoed loudly in Quebec and Canadian political life for the next half century. The bodies aged and nuances emerged, but the names endured: Daniel Johnson, Jean-Jacques Bertrand, Jean Drapeau, Jean-Louis Roux, Paul Gérin-Lajoie, Charles Lussier, and so many more. When Trudeau spoke in the Outremont by-election, the other speakers for future mayor Drapeau’s candidacy were Michel Chartrand, later a prominent labour leader and separatist in Quebec, and D’Iberville Fortier, one of the most eminent federal public servants forty years later. André Laurendeau, who worked closely with Trudeau in these battles, became the most respected Quebec journalist of his age. His best friend in the 1930s, Pierre Vadeboncoeur, became a major literary figure in Quebec; and Jean-Louis Roux and Jean Gascon were among the key personalities in the French and English theatre in the last half of the twentieth century. Most of these principal actors in the “revolutionary” moments of the early 1940s kept their silence about themselves—and about Pierre Trudeau.

  At Brébeuf, Trudeau had stood a resented second to Jean de Grandpré until his final year. In another fateful decision, his rival chose to attend McGill University. As he explained:

  [Trudeau] could afford to search for his identity. People like me … were forced by economic necessity to get on with our careers, to go to McGill to improve our English because English was the language of business, to get a law degree and enter a practice immediately. Most of us married fairly early and started to raise a family and you had to earn money for that. As a rich bachelor, Pierre was able to spend years “finding himself.”94