Citizen of the World

by John English

  Trudeau left Montreal in September and arrived in France on the 29th, Thérèse’s birthday. She wrote to him the previous day, asking where he was: “Today, I am 22 years old and I love you; tomorrow I will be 23 and I will love you still.”80 He did not respond until October 9, his excuse being that he had no paper and had lost some of his considerable baggage. Among the items he took to France were a beret, a Grenfell parka, a tuxedo, five suits, five sports jackets, eleven “chemises de ville,” eight sport shirts, four sweaters, eleven jockey shorts, skis, his Harley (a treasured machine on Paris boulevards after the war), chocolate, jam, sugar, coffee—and cigarettes for his uncle, Gordon Elliott, who had returned to France after the Liberation.81 Mocking himself and Thérèse’s psychology studies, he said he had already lost his analism in Paris. In truth, he admitted he had lost himself in the quartiers, the courtyards, the grand boulevards, and the bistros of Paris.82 In those times, so did many others.

  Perhaps there was, in fact, no paper on which Pierre could have written. There was still rationing in Paris in the early fall of 1946, and the streets had few taxis, many military vehicles, and an emptiness that allowed a rich young Canadian student to race his Harley “across Paris at speeds that under other circumstances would have cost me my life—or at least my freedom.”83 Pétain, whom Trudeau had defended at Harvard, was in jail, his death sentence for treason having been commuted to life imprisonment. Charles de Gaulle, France’s president after the Liberation, had resigned dramatically in January 1946, leaving an uneasy provisional government, including Communists, Socialists, and the right-wing group, over which the socialist Félix Gouin briefly presided. Soon after Trudeau’s arrival, the French narrowly approved a draft constitution that gave women the vote. In the elections that followed on November 10, the Communists came first, but the third party, the Socialists, again provided the premier because the right quarrelled with the Communists. In the grand hotels, diplomats and journalists gossiped long into the nights as the Allies tried to agree on the shape of the postwar world, while prostitutes outside the peace conference offered delegates “an atomic bomb” experience.

  Paris came alive after the Liberation. The clash of ideas between East and West, left and right, the modern and the traditional played out on a front along the Left Bank of the Seine, around the dining tables of the Café de Flore, or in cramped apartments crammed with books and Picassos. Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others who came to dominate the footnotes of postwar Western academic journals created one of the great moments of the intellectual life of the twentieth century in Paris in these years. For Trudeau, the atmosphere was familiar in its uniquely French blend of the literary with the philosophical. As a Catholic, he became intellectually engaged in the attempt to reconcile Catholicism, modernism, and Communism, and this endeavour left a lasting intellectual imprint upon him. He was present, as one critic later said, in Paris during its “heyday.”84

  After staying at the Maison des étudiants canadiens, a student residence built in 1926 at the initiative of Canadians, Trudeau and Roger Rolland moved in the spring into L’Hôtel Square, a small but charming Left Bank hotel on St-Julien-le-Pauvre. There François Hertel, Pierre’s former mentor and confidant, soon joined them. They had, as the hotel correctly advertises, “the finest view” of the magnificent Notre Dame Cathedral, and they all enjoyed their proximity to the intellectual and social turmoil of St-Germain-des-Près. The church on their street had become a Greek Orthodox Church late in the nineteenth century when secularism thrived in Paris.85 Unlike Harvard, where Trudeau had no friends from Montreal, Paris had attracted seven other students from his years at Brébeuf, including Guy Viau, with whom he had canoed the Canadian Shield. Most of them, like Rolland, were studying literature and the arts, but Trudeau alone among former Brébeuf students opted for political science at the École libre des sciences politiques.86 Other Montrealers, notably Jean Gascon and Jean-Louis Roux, guided their compatriots through the experimental theatre of Paris, while a future Trudeau minister, Jean-Luc Pepin, also studied politics.87

  Aware of his presence in the city at a remarkable moment in the arts, Trudeau retained a pile of ticket stubs that indicate he saw, among other performances, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis-Clos, Paul Claudel’s L’échange, a private “Hommage à Jean Cocteau,” as well as events with Walter Damrosrch, Artur Rubinstein, Jascha Heifetz, Leopold Stokowski, and Harry James. He also attended the opening of the celebrated Automatism exhibit at the Galerie du Luxembourg which featured Paul-Émile Borduas, Jean-Paul Riopelle, and other Quebec artists.88

  With relatively light academic requirements, given his limited goal of gaining background information for his proposed Harvard dissertation on the vaguely defined but important theme of Communism and Christianity, Trudeau had freedom to indulge once again his love of the arts and, simply, to enjoy Paris. Now that Trudeau was united with François Hertel and Roger Rolland, the three quickly recalled an old trick they had learned together in Montreal. “Les Agonisants,” or “The Dying,” as Hertel, Rolland, and Trudeau dubbed themselves, performed their remarkable feat of suddenly going rigid, falling forward, and catching themselves with their hands only at the last second. In the salons and cafés of Paris they would appear to drop dead, one after another, before astonished Parisian innocents.89 Trudeau comes alive in the photos from France, most tellingly in the images sent back to Canada by the French information service. Trudeau’s brilliant eyes begin to dominate photos, and his physicality is obvious in the lithe contortions evident even in the still photography.

  After his immersion in contemporary liberal democratic theory at Harvard, France took him back to familiar subjects in his personal history—most notably, religion. The postwar period proved to be a turning point in French Catholicism, and most of the contemporary French theologians Trudeau had encountered earlier at Brébeuf were themselves coming to terms with the war and its aftermath. In the lecture halls and churches of Paris during those years, the historic path to Vatican II was being paved as the Catholic Church modernized its liturgy, broke down barriers to dialogue with other faiths, and created a greater role for the laity. In early 1947 Trudeau attended lectures with Étienne Gilson, the great neo-Thomist philosopher, and, within a period of five weeks, he met the personalist Emmanuel Mounier, the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel, and the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, whose visionary linkage of evolution with Christianity deeply influenced modern Catholic thought.90 He reported to Thérèse that he had met Teilhard, whom he found “formidable,” but added that “Hertel was also formidable in his own way.”91 However, it was Mounier who left the deepest mark on Trudeau as the student linked his religious beliefs with his own sense of individual identity.

  “It was [in Paris],” Trudeau later wrote, “that I became a follower of personalism, a philosophy that reconciles the individual and society. The person … is the individual enriched with a social conscience, integrated into the life of the communities around him and the economic context of his time.” Although he had encountered personalism through Hertel and Maritain in the late thirties and forties, the war had fundamentally affected the concept of what personalism meant. In the courses he chose and the lectures and conferences he attended in Paris in 1946–47, Trudeau began to shape his personalist approach to religion.92 He was, as always, a diligent student and, as before, he received permission from the church to read some proscribed books on the Index, so long as he kept them to himself. Among his courses, he studied with the renowned historian Pierre Renouvin and the sociologist André Siegfried, who had written two major works on Canada. He went on a student pilgrimage to Chartres in May 1947 and attended many other lectures on religious thought, especially with Hertel.93

  These interests and activities captured the attention of his earlier acquaintance Gérard Pelletier, who was travelling through Europe for a Catholic fund for student victims of war. He had asked Trudeau in March to head a seminar on American civil
ization at Salzburg, Austria, that summer and to take an active part in the international Catholic youth movement.94 Though Trudeau refused, he, Pelletier, and the other young Quebec students in France had begun to contrast the intellectual atmosphere in Canada with the passionate and open debates among Catholics, socialists, existentialists, and Communists that occurred in France and Europe more generally. Together, a group of these students wrote a bitter letter of protest home objecting to Premier Duplessis’s banning of the celebrated French film Les enfants du paradis,95 whose frank treatment of sexuality offended the church, but only one newspaper published it. Marcel Rioux, one of the Canadian students in Paris, recalls that “a negative unanimity” developed among these young intellectuals in this period against both the political regime and the hardened and ritualistic Catholicism in Quebec.96 It was a negativity that created the passion of positive commitment.

  While Trudeau was wrestling successfully with his problems of religious and intellectual identity, his absence was creating difficulties in his relationship with Thérèse, problems that made him seek help to understand why he acted as he did. Paradoxically, Montreal seemed far away from Paris, despite the presence of many, like Guy Viau and Roger Rolland, who were part of the circle of friends they had shared in Montreal. Paris, where the left and especially the Communists occupied the postwar intellectual mainstream, radicalized Trudeau, who, like Emmanuel Mounier, sought to discover the intersection between Catholic thought and the egalitarianism of Communism. In these circumstances, Trudeau made little apparent use of the letters of introduction written by Senator Gouin to important Paris friends in which he described Trudeau as “a little like an adopted son.”97 Thérèse began to sense quickly that Paris was changing Pierre and that the rush of emotion that had overflowed in his letters from his lonely Harvard room did not flow quite so freely in Paris. Still, he began a letter on October 21, 1946: “This morning just before I woke up, I dreamt that you came into my bedroom and, to make me wake up, kissed me warmly on the mouth … it was so real, so beautiful, so good.”98

  But it was only a dream. He wrote less frequently than she expected; he asked how she found the time to write so often. He worried that she did too much, for “you are weak, a woman, delicate, precious and so petite. How are you able to prepare your course, your thesis, and the conference presentation and the evening course and [simultaneously] go through psychoanalysis, go to Mass, and do your exercises?”99 But the bonds between them remained very strong: although he loved Paris, he said he loved her more. He wrote her on November 6 after looking at her latest photos: “Your last photo is stunning; with your hair swept back and your open mouth, you have a fire around you with the style of an Irish lass—and I love you always with all my heart.”100

  Thérèse expressed some doubt when she replied, indicating that their friend “D.D.” (Andrée Desautels) thought Pierre should have a woman who was tall, thin, and fair, not one with the dark complexion and full figure that Thérèse possessed. She missed his presence profoundly, but with the reserve that marked young Quebec Catholics of their station, she added: “No, what I have to say has no sense and maybe cannot be said. I just feel like loving you. I think that if you were near me tonight, my darling, I would be ‘coy,’ resist you, play with you, evade you and then kiss you so hard and so well that you would feel faint. Therefore it is much better, my darling, that you are not near me.”101 How, after only two months apart, could they endure ten months? But for conservative young Roman Catholics of the time, the sexual revolution was far in the future. Courtship was prolonged, restricted, and titillating simply because sexual intercourse itself was inconceivable.

  Despite their yearnings, they continued to disagree about her work and about the psychoanalysis she was undergoing as part of her academic course. He went to hear the psychologist Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud’s daughter, speak at UNESCO and attended a seminar on love and marriage as a mark of his good will.102 She told him—helpfully, she hoped—that her psychoanalysis made her realize that she was guilty because she had concealed some things from him. She did so, she added perhaps unhelpfully, because she felt in him “an insatiable curiosity” to know everything about her. She had no desire to live with Pierre “under a system of rules with exchanges and obligations,” an attitude that obviously ruled out marriage soon. They should rather maintain an “essential” friendship.103 Pierre responded to her in early December, saying he was not really bothered by the suggestion that she should keep some of what occurred in her psychoanalytic sessions private. However, he did not like her letter: “It’s the tone in which you speak to me, a tone that is cold, strange, and even defiant.” He admitted to being possessive, but added that being together meant sharing thoughts, hopes, and events.104

  Then, on December 10, Trudeau was rushed to the American hospital in Paris for an emergency appendectomy. The cost of the stay was meagre, about the price of a stay in a modest Paris hotel at the time, but the anaesthetic was in short supply. The operation was painful and the food scarce. On December 13 he had to eat meat on a Friday, probably for the first time in his life.105

  From his hospital bed he wrote to Thérèse. He had thought about their love and had come to realize that jealousy was a deadly emotion. He apologized. Moreover, she should now become his fiancée. On his back in the hospital, he had realized that life without her would be impossible. He signed off, “Poor Pierre.”106 She sent a message of love at Christmas, but he had already left for Mégève, in the Alps, to recuperate. There, his mood changed. He wrote her a letter a few days later in which he returned to her earlier letter that had irritated him. He again questioned her course of psychoanalysis. Once more he was jealous, apparently because their mutual friend Pierre Vadeboncoeur had passed on some news that displeased him about the company she was keeping. He hinted that “André Lussier” is more than “a friend”—but only the draft of this letter remains; he never sent the final copy. However, in a letter he did send on December 29 he admitted what he had intended to write: “At this morning’s Mass, I prayed for you. And I was ashamed of myself, profoundly ashamed because yesterday I wrote you a harsh letter that I knew would deeply hurt my ‘Katsi,’” a pet name for her. He apologized, but he remained anxious about her associates and asked specifically about a friend with whom she went to a concert.107 These fits of jealousy occurred even though Pierre and Thérèse had agreed that both could go to social events with others during their separation.108

  The worm had entered the bud. Their letters alternated between abundant expressions of love and querulous doubts. On February 15 she was exasperated, not least because he had hinted he was enjoying the presence of a blonde. Indeed, he was. He had met Sylvia Priestley, and his agenda reveals that he saw her often that month. Thérèse called Pierre “cette étrange construction,” this strange construction, and recommended that he consider psychoanalysis himself. In fact, he had already begun to visit a Paris psychoanalyst. He told her it was “cette dernière concession,” his last concession.109

  What survives of the consultations are the bills, which are high; the hours of consultation, which modern psychoanalysts tell me are unusually long; and Trudeau’s transcript of his dream diary and his own notes of the sessions where he associated freely.* Psychoanalysis in the postwar period was thoroughly grounded in Freudian theory, and Trudeau’s psychoanalyst, Georges Parcheminey, used Freudian categories to describe the process of identity formation. Though a poor empiricist himself, Freud believed that psychoanalysis required a series of sustained sessions, and Trudeau’s psychoanalysis reflected that belief. He went three or more times each week for appointments that sometimes lasted several hours. Fortunately, he found a psychoanalyst who mixed solid common sense with the heavy doses of Freudianism. He often told Trudeau not to take himself, his problems, or psychoanalysis as a science too seriously. Trudeau grew fond of the fifty-nine-year-old psychiatrist, whose commitment to Freud was so strong that he had courageously paid tribute to the Viennese Jew duri
ng the German occupation of Paris, and before German officers.110

  The notes on the psychiatric sessions provide a snapshot of Trudeau at a particular and emotional time, February to June 1947.111 They reflect those circumstances, particularly in their many references to his closest friend at that moment, Roger Rolland, and to Hertel, who lived in the same hotel room. They confirm Rolland’s penchant for pranks and excursions but suggest little else about him. They substantiate Trudeau’s close relationship with Hertel, but also his doubts about Hertel’s fights with the church. He mentions Pierre Vadeboncoeur (nicknamed “the Pott”) frequently, though in the context of his fondness for a friend whom he regarded as wonderfully eccentric. Unfortunately, some of the document is illegible, especially the part where Trudeau was scribbling down his psychiatrist’s interpretation of his dreams or free associations.

  The first dream, the night of February 11–12, sees him at the gold mine where he had worked the previous summer. A worker speaks to him about a nationalist book, which has been reissued in a deluxe edition. The worker explains that such writings displease the company management. Trudeau says he will buy the book, but not in the deluxe edition. The doctor gave this sensible interpretation to the dream: Trudeau’s nationalism conflicts with his professional ambitions. In another dream that describes a speech by Henri Bourassa, Trudeau becomes troubled when someone he did not invite shows up. Similarly, when someone tells him that a Co-operative Commonwealth Federation candidate lost an election, he says, “Too bad,” but then, when told that this candidate “got beaten in King’s constituency,” he approves, even though, earlier, he seems to have the contrary view. Ambition, nationalism, and socialism clearly clashed. There was, however, surprisingly little politics in his dreams.