by John English
De Grandpré, whom Trudeau himself thought the most polished and articulate among his classmates at Brébeuf, rose to the top of the business world and became wealthy as the head of Bell Canada. There is much resentment in de Grandpré’s comment, but also some truth in his charge that Trudeau, because of his personal wealth and independent circumstances, could search for his identity, experience adventure, try out anarchy, and delay finding himself. It was easier to be anti-bourgeois when your circumstances were thoroughly bourgeois.
Because Trudeau chose Université de Montréal for law and because he became involved in the conscription crisis as a leading opponent, he was immersed in the debate about the future of French-speaking Canadians in a way that he never could or would have been had he won the Rhodes Scholarship or gone to McGill. In a particular sense, he was correct in stating that the politics of wartime passed him by. Those great tides that turned in 1942 and 1943 did not sweep over his life, his classroom, or his friends as the Americans won the Battle of Midway, the Soviets held their ground at Stalingrad, and the Allies—with Canadians among them—set out on a bloody path up the boot of Italy. Trudeau and his associates stood on separate ground, avoiding the battles in Europe while furiously debating what their future as francophone professionals would be in a modern North America. They knew that there could be no return to the past, but in the early 1940s they saw the outline of their future only dimly. Yet the debate that dominated Canadian politics from the 1960s through the 1990s began among Trudeau’s classmates in the university corridors and the Montreal streets in the 1940s. Those times cast the die.
For Trudeau, the times were exhilarating, confusing, and dangerous. He swam in the same stream as others, opposing conscription, favouring Vichy and Pétain, outrageously equating Hitler’s Reich with British policy towards Quebec, and even contemplating and plotting Quebec independence. Yet, in some important personal ways, he remained apart, a self-declared independent who often donned a cloak of mystery. He wrote to his mother in English about how well he worked with his military superiors, and he vacationed at Old Orchard, enjoyed American nightlife, and thought about a future political career. What career, and even what country, remained an open question in 1943 as democracy, so threatened in the 1930s, began its march forward towards its greatest victories. Despite his later denials, he swam with the currents that flowed strongly through his university. Yet, because of his background—his mother, his wealth, and his intense search for free intellectual choice—he sometimes took refuge on the shore, as when he apparently told Gabriel Filion, his travelling companion on the Maria Chapdelaine route, that he dreamed of a united Canada, or when he told his diary that he was proud that his English blood tempered his boiling French blood.
In the 1940s, as conscription loomed, Pierre Trudeau’s French blood boiled; as times changed, so would the man. He would forget much of his youth, as all of us do. Yet in the attic that preserves memory, fragments of the friends, the games, the debates, the Harley, and the wilderness endured—as did, ineffably, Camille’s first kiss.
* The revisions were made at the insistence of Father Brossard, who was the censor for the occasion. After the play, leading Outremont figures such as “le juge Thouin” and Mesdames de Grandpré and Vaillancourt congratulated Pierre. The play was, Pierre wrote, “a great success,” judging by “the congratulations and the laughter.” The only objection was to a section of the play where Jean Couture speaks to his daughter, Camille, and uses the word grosse to describe her. One of the priests thought it might mean “pregnant” and condemned the “double sense.” Pierre wrote in his diary that it was not his intention at all. When the hint of sex brought horror to the hallways of Brébeuf, he noted: “One can’t please everyone.” Journal 1938, May 17, 1938, TP, vol. 39, file 9.
* In an interview with Ron Graham in 1992, Trudeau gave this answer to a question about Groulx’s influence on him. “I used to get some of his books as prizes at the end of the year when I’d get a first or something like that. He was quite revered as a historian. I don’t think any of us at the time understood some of the analysis which has been made later that he was perhaps somewhat inclined to racism or fascism and so on, so I don’t remember him as that, but he used to be talked about and he had quite a few disciples and followers, of which I was not one as I say; he wouldn’t have liked me for applauding the defeat of the French at the Plains of Abraham.” Although Trudeau encountered Groulx only once while he was at Brébeuf, the Abbé’s work formed the basis of Canadian history teaching at the college. Interview between Pierre Trudeau and Ron Graham, April 28, 1992, TP, vol. 23, file 3.
* Camille introduced Pierre to Proust in a serious way. He told her: I will “always remain indebted to you for having set me under Proust’s influence.” He had “heard much about him” but much “was naught in comparison with what I found in reality. What power of expression, what penetration in his observations, what suppleness of a style that can follow a concept into its most subtle relations, explore the secrets of its development and verily track it down to its birth in the proudest depths of the soul as surely as a hound will track a bleeding prey.” As this sentence indicates, Proust had affected his prose style, and not for the better. The fact that Trudeau had not encountered the giant Proust until he was almost twenty-one reflects upon the deficiencies in his education—it had extensive French literary content, but only selectively so. Trudeau to Corriveau, Oct. 29, 1940, TP, vol. 45, file 5.
* Corporatist thought, the standard text on modern Quebec rightly declares, “is not easy to summarize.” Essentially, “its vision was of all social groups, organized in ‘corporations’ or ‘[intermediate] bodies’ dedicated to the pursuit of the common good, working together in harmony to ensure order and social peace. In this way, class ‘collaboration would replace class struggle: employers and workers in the same economic sector would belong to the same corporation and work together for the advancement both of their sector and of the nation as a whole … Parliamentary democracy was a source of dissension, and corporatism would replace it with a unanimous society in which each person, imbued with the national mystique, would work towards—and at the same time benefit from—the general harmony and prosperity.’” Paul-André Linteau, René Durocher, Jean-Claude Robert, and François Ricard, Quebec since 1930, trans. Robert Chodos and Ellen Garmaise (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1991), 79.
* A camp for war protestors in Canada.
* In July 1942 Hertel was told that his writings under his pseudonym did not bring credit to the Jesuit Order. While his influence on the young and his knowledge of theological doctrine were admitted to be great, his teaching was dangerous: “It is not by light talks on love or jokes or similar ways that one gives the young a taste for the serious, the profound, and the solid nor do they become aware of the gravity of the problems they face in their individual, family and social life.” He threatened to quit the order but remained until 1946, when Trudeau encountered him once more in Paris. E. Papillon, sj, to Rodolphe Dubé, sj, July 18, 1942, Fonds Hertel, Archives Nationales du Québec-Montréal.
* French intellectual debates had a great influence during these years on the rhetoric of revolution in Quebec. In his history of postwar Europe, the historian Tony Judt has emphasized how the “bipolar” politics of France, along with the myth of revolution and the acceptance of “violence,” was at the centre of public policy. He cites the postwar example of the radical politician Edouard Herriot, who announced in 1944 that normal politics could not be re-established until France passed through a “bloodbath.” His language, Judt adds, “did not sound out of the ordinary to French ears, even coming as it did from a pot-bellied provincial parliamentarian of the political center.” Within French intellectual and political circles, there was general if vague acceptance of the idea that “historical change and purgative bloodshed go hand in hand.” Hertel clearly was part of this heritage in both his language and his concept of historical change. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 19
45 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 211.
* In his memoir, Trudeau’s friend and political colleague Gérard Pelletier describes their future colleague Jean Marchand’s disillusionment with violent political nationalism in the forties in terms that could also apply to Trudeau: “[Marchand] had been recruited into one of the innumerable leagues that existed at the time (each one with twelve or fifteen members), all of which wanted to overthrow the government and put an end to democracy. That was the spirit of the age. Of course, the half-baked leaders of these little groups had no precise notion of what political action meant. They dreamed, they grew intoxicated with words, and in the basements of middle-class houses they cooked up heady plots which no one ever dreamt of acting on.” Trudeau was far from alone in “trying out” these “heady” plots, but he later treated them with the disdain that Marchand and Pelletier did. Pelletier, Years of Impatience, 1950–1960, trans. Alan Brown (Toronto: Methuen, 1984), 9.
CHAPTER 3
IDENTITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Twenty-one can be the cruellest year. Pierre Trudeau had drifted away from infatuation with Camille Corriveau by the spring of 1941, but, as with other significant women in his life, he clung to the intimacy they once had shared. With her and several women who followed, he peeled away the layers of hardened bark that enclosed the core where emotions flow. With men, he consistently refused to show weakness, whether in the classroom, the canoe, or the political forum. Among men, he sought uniqueness or, as he put it in his Brébeuf diary, to stand apart. This impulse created its greatest tension for him as he passed from adolescence to adulthood, that period when friendship is deeply craved and when, in twentieth-century North American society, identity becomes a pre-eminent concern. For Trudeau, the times were particularly difficult because he was determined to shape his own identity and to make choices freely, away from the direction of others.
In 1940 Pierre sent Camille a list of nine authors he felt he should master: it included René Descartes and Adam Smith, as well as Aristotle, Pascal, Montesquieu, Kant, Marx, and Bergson.1 Many years later, in 1962, Germain Lesage, a Quebec journalist, asked ninety-seven Quebec clergy, writers, academics, and dramatic and visual artists to identify those who had influenced them most. Overwhelmingly, they chose French writers or philosophers, with Blaise Pascal and Paul Claudel—the French diplomat-writer—receiving the most mentions (thirteen times). Out of step with the others, Pierre Trudeau chose only one French author, Descartes, who appeared on no other list. His other choices were Adam Smith, Cardinal Newman, Sigmund Freud, and Harold Laski. Three were British, two were Jewish, and only Freud was mentioned by more than two of the others questioned.2 Was Trudeau being playful in challenging the contemporary ethos or was he reflecting the unusual diversity of his intellectual mentors—particularly with his selection of Descartes and Smith? Still, it’s worth remembering that 1962 was the year when the Quebec Liberal government stoked nationalist fires by nationalizing Quebec’s private electricity companies. Descartes, of course, represented reason, and Smith the case for minimalist government intervention. At that moment Descartes and Smith made more sense to Trudeau than the passionate arguments for nationalization put forward by his friend the Quebec Cabinet minister René Lévesque. His choice of British thinkers was also provocative, a deliberate attempt to “shock the intellectuals” in Quebec. They also represented Trudeau’s cosmopolitanism, a value and a term he had actively embraced as he matured intellectually in the mid-forties.
Because of his restricted education up to that point, Freud and Laski were virtually unknown to Trudeau when he graduated in law from the Université de Montréal in 1943. Like his peers, he had had his mind crammed with Jacques Maritain, Abbé Groulx, Paul Claudel, and the other names on the lists. Freud had already begun to interest him, and that prepared him for the intense personal encounter he had with Freudianism later in the decade. Harold Laski, a professor at the London School of Economics and a socialist thinker of renown and influence in those times, would also profoundly influence Trudeau’s conception of the state and public life.3 In the details of his playfulness with the poll lay some truths, however, the major one being the fundamental importance of the period 1943 to 1948 in the intellectual, personal, and public life of Pierre Trudeau. Let us begin, as Trudeau would have preferred, with his mind.
When Trudeau was denied the Rhodes Scholarship and forced to remain at the Université de Montréal in 1940, he gained an enduring voice in the long debate among French Canadians about their place in Canada. When he left Canada to study abroad, first at Harvard in 1944–46, then in Paris in 1946–47, and finally in London in 1947–48, Trudeau, to use one of his best-known metaphors, opened the windows to fresh currents of thought and action. Like many others, he unloaded some baggage that had become offensive or superfluous: the former included the casual anti-Semitism of his youth; the latter his close study of religious thought. As Father Bernier had counselled, he continued to read theological works, but religious references quickly disappeared from his prose. Unlike many other Quebecers, such as the eminent journalist and sometime politician André Laurendeau, Trudeau would remain a believer, deeply interested in debates about the character of faith and observant of Roman Catholic sacraments. In this respect, his mention of Cardinal Newman rather than Jacques Maritain, Teilhard de Chardin, or Emmanuel Mounier is fascinating.
At Harvard and later at the London School of Economics, Trudeau participated in the Newman societies that were the centre of Catholic life in the Protestant milieus of those universities and, typically, immersed himself in Newman’s life and thought. What attracted him to Newman, the great Anglican intellectual of the early nineteenth century? In part it was surely Newman’s intellectual passage that he had detailed so brilliantly in Apologia pro vita sua. When the English theologian sought to dispute the legitimacy of the Roman Catholic Church, he concluded that, contrary to his task and his own beliefs, the church “had preserved unbroken her continuity with the Primitive Church, the Church set up by Christ, and founded on the Twelve.”4 At a moment in British history when anti-Catholicism was intense, Newman followed his conscience and converted to the Roman Catholic Church. He was no social reformer, but his intellect guided his actions, and his faith emerged from reason. An individualist, Newman chafed at the emerging doctrine of papal infallibility. Always, though, he found truth through reason, and Trudeau searched for the same grail. Trudeau’s growing focus on individual choice within the structure of the Catholic faith stems directly from Newman, as does his willingness to challenge orthodoxies.
In commenting on the choices of the Quebec intellectuals he interviewed, Germain Lesage made two significant points: first, the fact that Paul Claudel and Georges Bernanos trumped Aquinas (named by only six of the ninety-seven interviewed) indicated that the intellectuals chose those who had influenced them most “beyond their formal academic training”; and, second, the choices reflected “loyalty to France” and “devotion to Christianity.”5 In this respect, Trudeau’s political activism and his attacks on clericalism were not a rejection of Catholicism or religion itself; rather, like Quebec’s Quiet Revolution in the sixties more generally, they were deeply rooted in “the grand ideas of European Christian renewal” among Catholics such as Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier.6 Revolutions once begun find their own paths, and Trudeau eventually found the taste bitter. In the 1940s, however, he frequently savoured its flavour.
Trudeau consciously fashioned his identity in this decade, creating a recognizable shape from the elements provided by his past, his family, and his education. In his study of the “sources of the self” in modern times, Trudeau’s friend and, later, political opponent, the philosopher Charles Taylor, emphasized how the modern Western quest for self differs from earlier Christian and other traditions in which “what I want and where I stand” is defined by others and by a set of beliefs and practices. In contrast, he said, the modern search for identity requires “leaving home”; it stresses self-reliance and, abov
e all else, individualism. As we strive to orient ourselves to the good, however, we must try to “understand our lives in narrative form, as a ‘quest.’”7 In these words, Taylor, who was also a Catholic Montrealer, captures the sense of “quest” that pervades Trudeau’s own understanding of his identity.
Trudeau was indelibly shaped by his childhood and adolescence, but he also exhibited a profound sense of individualism. “Ah! Liberty, independence,” he wrote in his diary in February 1940. “Don’t bend [your] knees before anyone; keep [your] head high before the powerful.”8 We see this spirit in his choice of intellectual influences, especially Newman and Freud. We understand its romantic origins in the tears that flowed from his eyes when he read how Cyrano de Bergerac strove to break free of the restraints of time and place. Yet, like the great nineteenth-century romantics, Trudeau had to bring his individualist instinct in line with his well-defined ambitions, which could be realized only within a mannered and ordered society. For Trudeau, writing that life narrative was an enduring struggle, one that brought periodic silences and curious forays, but never malingering.
There were delays: Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall turn to psychology when they discuss Trudeau in the forties and conclude that he was a puer, a condition marked by delayed adulthood and prolonged adolescence. It’s true that Trudeau did prolong the ease of adolescence and delay the trappings of adulthood, but he did so not only because he could, in material terms, but because he struggled continually with his past, his beliefs, and his quest.
In a very real sense, Trudeau mirrored Quebec itself in the forties as it wrestled with modern technology and politics and its relationship to its past and its traditions. The parallels are striking. Women in Quebec obtained the vote in April 1940, the same spring that Trudeau was wrestling with his strong sexual urges and his traditional Catholic conception of female chastity. Trudeau chose law over philosophy or the priesthood because he wanted to have an active part in public life, just as his province similarly came to terms with modern industrial capitalism despite the enormous impact it would have on traditional ways. When Trudeau talked in the forties about becoming a leader in his country, there was an ambiguity that is familiar to students of Quebec history in the twentieth century. He deeply resented British domination and was unsure what “la patrie,” the fatherland, meant, but he did not commit fully to the concept of a separate Quebec state even while musing of revolution. It’s a curious but common tradition at the time in Quebec, one that’s reflected in the name of the nationalist groups Ligue pour la défense du Canada and the Bloc populaire canadien. Finally, he sought validation through external recognition—study at Harvard, Paris, and London—much as Quebec itself did, first by engaging in the “renewal” of Catholicism in the thirties and forties and in the lively European debates, and then by injecting modernism into culture and government in the fifties and the sixties. Trudeau was very much “a Québécois” Catholic; but, as with Cardinal Newman, his quest took unexpected turns.