by John English
What we do know is that he was most willing to marry Thérèse in the fall of 1946 and the spring of 1947 and that their relationship soured because of his jealousy, their professional ambitions, his suspicion of her psychiatric analysis—and his demand that she prematurely end it. We also know that, for a long time, they loved each other intensely in the peculiar fashion of their different time and place. Theirs was not a physical relationship but it was intensely emotional. For that reason, we know that when Thérèse ended their love affair, the disappointment shattered Trudeau more than any other event since the loss of his father. He wrote to her brother Lomer on July 10: “It is exactly 24 hours ago that your sister removed all reason for me to live.” Men, he said, cannot survive such deep wounds. And because he sensed there was a certain empathy between Lomer and himself, he asked him to discover whether Thérèse could even “bear my presence.” Could they meet just once more? He ended with the signature, “Your lamentable, etc. Pierre.”12
Brothers, of course, are seldom useful in such cases, but Pierre did try to meet “Tess” once more at the Gouins’ summer home in Malbaie on the St. Lawrence, but Thérèse, to her mother’s distress, would not see him. Trudeau stayed the night but left the morning of July 27, without talking to her. The next year she fell in love with Trudeau’s friend Vianney Décarie, a young philosopher. In the late spring of 1948, as Vianney and Thérèse were dining at the apartment of Jean-Luc Pepin in Paris, there was a knock at the door. It was Pierre, Jean-Luc’s former classmate, but he had come to see Thérèse. This time they did speak, but when Thérèse told him she was now engaged, he simply shrugged. In that case, he said, he would tour the world alone.13
Their paths crossed often in the future, Trudeau saved press clippings about the increasingly eminent psychologist Thérèse Décarie,14 and Vianney published in Cité libre—the journal Trudeau edited for several years. In 1968 the Décaries, both then professors at the Université de Montréal, circulated a petition soliciting support for the candidacy of Pierre Trudeau for the leadership of the Liberal Party.15 There’s also a story, repeated by Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall, that, after Trudeau became prime minister, Thérèse went to Ottawa and asked a staff member in the Prime Minister’s Office if she could see him and offer her congratulations. Trudeau was not there, but she asked for a sheet of paper, wrote Thérèse on it, kissed it, and left the lipstick-stained note on the desk.16
Madame Gouin Décarie laughs when asked about the story. There was neither the visit nor the lipstick on the paper: it was a prank by their mutual friend and congenital prankster, Roger Rolland, who was then a speechwriter for Trudeau. There is only one note from Thérèse in Trudeau’s papers after their love affair ended. It is undated, but was surely written in 1969 when his political fortunes began to fall after the triumphant election of 1968. “Pierre, our Pierre, what has happened to you? You always seem angry. Your eyes are spiteful, and you appear mean.” She cautioned him that those around him and those he must rely on would not understand. She ended gracefully: “We think so often of you. Thérèse.”17 The note lacks lipstick but not affection and dignity.
Thoroughly romantic, Trudeau deeply mourned the end of their relationship. It was, admittedly, an affair that seemed to flourish best when they were apart and one that faced many constraints. Still, its end was a decisive moment in the career of Pierre Trudeau. That summer in Montreal he seemed adrift. He saw a few old friends, including some women. In his quest for solitude, he journeyed by foot the hundred miles from Montreal to Lac St-Jean, experiencing the rough charms of La Mauricie, its surging rapids, deep forests, and high waterfalls.18 In early August he took his first flying lesson, and continued the classes every day for two weeks in a Curtiss-Reid plane. He managed to fly solo on September 3, but he does not appear to have earned a permanent flying licence, although in the early fifties he did take up gliding.
During the remaining few weeks of the summer and early fall, Trudeau did not sulk as jilted lovers sometimes do. His calendar was full and interesting. On July 7 he had lunch with his friend Gérard Pelletier, and he spent the evening with his erstwhile revolutionary companion François Lessard and his wife. In mid-August he went to Toronto with Catholic youth leader Claude Ryan, who would later become a rival and a Quebec Liberal leader—they were hoping to found a coordinating committee of Canadian Catholic associations. Pelletier, a key organizer, was unable to accompany them because he lost his train ticket. In Toronto, Trudeau met Ted McNichols, whom he described as a Protestant and a Communist. The meeting featured “lively discussions on democracy and the possibility of reconciling [democratic] life with Communism.” On his return, he went north on his motorbike, where he met an acquaintance whose girlfriend reminded him poignantly of Thérèse. He spent an evening with François Hertel, who was also back in Montreal, and visited Abbé Groulx. He spoke to Claude Ryan on Hertel’s behalf, probably to explore whether his old mentor, who had by now left the Jesuits but not the church, could find work with the groups Ryan was organizing.
In September, Trudeau left Montreal once more for study abroad, this time at the London School of Economics (LSE). Within a month he would celebrate his twenty-eighth birthday. He travelled in a first-class berth on the Empress of Canada, and among his fellow passengers were Allan Blakeney, the future Saskatchewan premier, and Marcel Lambert, later Speaker of the House of Commons, both in tourist class.19 Significantly, before he departed, he made certain that his Quebec links were strong. On September 8 he had lunch with Lomer Gouin; met at 3:30 with Gérard Filion, who became editor of Le Devoir in 1947; and followed with a call on the conservative nationalist Léopold Richer, with whom he spoke about possible articles for the journal Notre Temps. The following day he saw Claude Ryan again and had dinner with Hertel in the evening. Hertel was, in that month, his closest companion. He also had lunch with his classmate Charles Lussier, now a promising lawyer, at the home of Paul Gouin, Thérèse’s uncle, the former radical Liberal politician. And just before his departure, he met with the eminent civil libertarian, law professor, and poet F.R. Scott at the McGill Faculty Club.20 Altogether, Trudeau’s agenda for the summer of 1947 confirms his strong political interests and his continuing links with Catholic youth groups (Pelletier and Ryan), with Liberals (Gouin), with socialists (Scott), and with older and more traditional Quebec nationalists (Groulx, Hertel, Lessard, and Richer). Already he was preparing for his future. He was keeping many options open.
What did he discuss at these meetings? Career most likely, his education probably, politics certainly. Some hint of Trudeau’s mood in these times is given in a letter to him from Lomer Gouin in the fall. Lomer, who had begun practising law, told Trudeau that he reminded him of “a bit of champagne that had turned into vinegar: you are full of effervescence, of young courage, but the taste is bitter.” He would never make a good saint, but he was “ripe” for politics, a profession where saints, apparently, did not thrive. Gouin encouraged him to halt his travelling and his studies and return home. There would be elections in the spring, and Pierre should run, presumably as a Liberal candidate.21
Confusion and contradiction more than emptiness seemed to mark Trudeau’s life in late 1947. He entered a doctoral program in political science at LSE in October, even though his Harvard doctoral thesis remained undone. And London, he soon found, was not Paris. The cluster of intense, madcap Brébeuf and Montreal friends was missing, and Trudeau stayed aloof, just as he had at Harvard. Paul Fox, a classmate and later an eminent Canadian political scientist, recalled that Trudeau seemed like a “young nobleman on a Grand Tour, very intelligent but quite disengaged.”22 As at Brébeuf, Trudeau deliberately concealed parts of himself, revealing only what seemed appropriate to the circumstances. His past, however, had made him, and the traces were clear: some he followed fitfully; others he began systematically to efface.
One trace was indelible: his commitment to Roman Catholic Christianity. But the nature of that commitment was changing. He could still
write a letter that would have satisfied the most traditional of his Brébeuf teachers. At Easter 1947, for example, he had written to Thérèse about “the Christ of the Passion,” who had come to represent for him the fundamental humanity of Christ. Christ’s last days, he continued, were filled with uncertainty, betrayal, and defeat. He was no more than a poor fisher, and that humility bore His essential message to us. To the ever devout François Lessard, he sent a postcard that same Easter that ended with the words “Christ is King!”23 In Paris he had paid scant attention to the atheist existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir, but Paris had nevertheless jolted him loose from the restraints on behaviour that Catholic devotion had previously entailed. In particular, his extended encounter with Freudian psychology at the dawn of the age of Kinsey began to loosen the religious bindings on his sexual behaviour.* Trudeau’s faith was becoming more personal and less responsive to ecclesiastical authority and tradition, and in this respect he reflected his more fully defined personalist approach to religion and Catholic belief. While remaining a believer, he was becoming a sceptic towards the Quebec Catholic Church, which, in his opinion, lacked the breath of contemporary life.
Some critics have pointed to contradictions in Trudeau’s beliefs at this time. They certainly exist, as is to be expected in a man of his age, though his papers make it clear that they derived less from uncertainty on his part than from the influence of old friendships and relationships. He maintained close ties with the increasingly conservative and nationalist Quebec journal Notre Temps, in which he had invested the considerable sum of $1,000 in 1945. It had emerged from the rubble of the Bloc populaire canadien, where conservative and leftist nationalists had briefly embraced during the war. Subsequently, it had become increasingly supportive of the conservative provincial government of Maurice Duplessis and his Union nationale party.24
In the spring of 1947, Trudeau had told Thérèse that he felt angry with Canada and that he intended to write a critical essay about his country. And, soon after he arrived in London, he produced a long article, “Citadelles d’orthodoxie,” which Notre Temps published in its October issue. As the title implies, Trudeau attacked the “orthodoxies” of contemporary Quebec society. While acknowledging that the conservatism of Quebec society had been essential in the resistance to assimilation, he deplored the way religion and nationalism had become stale “orthodoxies” that suffocated citizens who sought to be free, “without a system.” The article is curiously vague and refers to only two individuals, the nationalists Henri Bourassa and Paul Gouin. Trudeau linked both of them with the “courageous” initiatives of the Bloc populaire. On the whole, the article lacks clarity, detail, and force; it reflects a mind in motion, but one whose direction is still unclear.25
Another major change came in Trudeau’s political understanding and outlook. Both the classrooms and the streets of Paris had taken him on paths that led towards the political left. At Harvard he had attended a couple of “socialist” gatherings, mainly out of curiosity. In Paris the Communists carried the cachet of wartime resistance and the promise of a revolutionary future. Trudeau was intrigued, particularly by the attempts of French Catholics to come to terms with the challenge of Communism. The eminent philosopher Emmanuel Mounier cast away the remnants of corporatist thought, which Vichy and wartime Belgium had discredited, and took up the cause of Christian socialism and opposition to the role of American capitalism in the postwar world. In his journal, Esprit, he linked personalism and Marxism, pointing out that both were concerned with alienation in modern industrial society. He saw the Communist revolution that was stirring in postwar France as a means of rejuvenating Christianity itself.26
These thoughts intrigued Trudeau. When the excitement of the Parisian streets drew him into the mass movements of the left, he had related to Thérèse how a demonstration had carried over from the revolutionary cafés of the Left Bank to the government institutions on the Right Bank; how he had been surrounded by police but managed to escape, then waved “bye-bye” in the depths of a Métro station.27 More seriously, he listened attentively as Mounier and other French Catholics turned to socialism to reinvigorate Christianity.
While still in Paris, Trudeau had begun to tell friends that the thesis he would finally write would not focus on a narrow academic subject but would make a major contribution to the grand debate about the reconciliation of Catholicism and Communism. Long into the nights that year he debated with Gérard Pelletier whether anyone could reconcile Communism and the Catholic faith. Later, before the Iron Curtain crumbled, Pelletier candidly admitted the attraction Communism offered in those years. His French friend at the time, Jean Chesneaux, said that the logic of Christianity compelled a Christian to be a Communist in the postwar years. Trudeau, Pelletier continued, was more informed, more rational, yet in those times, in “the pile of rubble Europe had become … with neighbourhoods … flattened by bombs, and where Auschwitz and Dachau were horrible testimony to the bankruptcy not only of fascism but also of pre-war conservatism, Communism was a temptation or, at the very least, intriguing to a young practising Catholic.”28
The London School of Economics was poorly suited for the study of Catholicism but ideal for academic work on Communism. Although it already had some eminent conservative thinkers, notably Friedrich Hayek, whose 1944 classic, The Road to Serfdom, was a brilliant attack on state planning, the school was rightly identified with the British Labour Party and with socialism. Sidney Webb, whose admiring work on the Soviet Union Trudeau had scorned at Harvard, had founded the LSE in 1896 to advance “socialist” education. Britain’s postwar Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, had taught there, but its most noted faculty member when Trudeau arrived was Harold Laski, a political scientist and Labour Party adviser. Laski had taught at McGill during the First World War, knew the United States well, and was a highly controversial public figure because of his continued praise for the Soviet Union as the Cold War began. He was, moreover, a brilliant lecturer—Trudeau described him as having an “absolutely outstanding mind”—who encouraged debate among his adoring students. Ralph Miliband, a British Marxist political scientist, recalled how Laski came up by train during the war to lecture in Cambridge:
The winter was bitter and train carriages unheated. He would appear in his blue overcoat and grotesquely shaped black hat, his cheeks blue with cold, teeth chattering, and queue up with the rest of us for a cup of foul but hot coffee, go up to the seminar room, crack a joke at the gathering of students who were waiting for him, sit down, light a cigarette and plunge into controversy and argument; and a dreary stuffy room would come to life and there would only be a group of people bent on the elucidation of ideas. We did not feel overwhelmed by his knowledge and learning, and we did not feel so because he did not know the meaning of condescension. We never felt compelled to agree with him, because it was so obvious that he loved a good fight and did not hide behind his years and experience.29
Trudeau cared little for London but very much for Laski. He became a major intellectual and, to a lesser degree, personal influence on the young Canadian. A decade after Trudeau had written the anti-Semitic Dupés, only five years after he had questioned Jewish immigration and participated in a riot where Jewish windows were smashed, his mentor was a Jew and a socialist.
In the formal ways of even the socialist English, Laski required students to send him a letter requesting their first appointment. Trudeau saw him at 3:15 on October 8, and he asked Laski to be his thesis supervisor and told him he would like to research the relationship between Communism and Christianity. Trudeau, it seems, impressed Laski immediately: he agreed to supervise his thesis and allowed him to attend several of his seminars. Trudeau’s schedule indicates that he had classes with Laski on “Democracy and the British Constitution” for over three hours every Monday afternoon, another seminar on “Liberalism” every Tuesday, and a final one on “Revolution” every Thursday.30 Trudeau claimed later that, when he left London, �
��everything I had learned until then of law, economics, political science, and political philosophy came together for me.”31 Certainly it was not “together” when he arrived, as the prolix and opaque “Citadelles” article demonstrates. Harold Laski became, for Trudeau, a model: an engaged intellectual whose philosophical and political thought had influenced one of the major movements of the twentieth century—the British socialist movement as embodied in the Labour Party. Laski and the experience of the postwar Labour government was, he wrote to a friend, “excellent training” that made him anxious to return to Canada and to play his own part in politics.32
Laski may have influenced Trudeau in another way. He wrote superb accessible prose that Labour backbenchers, trade unionists, and Oxford dons could all appreciate. He began his work on the state with this gem: “We argue, as with Aristotle, that the state exists to promote the good life. We insist, as with Hobbes, that there can be no civilization without the security it provides by its power over life and death. We agree, as with Locke, that only a common rulemaking organ, to the operations of which men consent, can give us those rights to life and liberty and property without the peaceful enjoyment of which we are condemned to a miserable existence.”33 In London, Trudeau’s mind became clearer, his prose sharper, and his political ambitions more strongly defined.