by John English
* Modern students can only envy Trudeau, because it is unusual for students to meet the great names of academic life. In London, Trudeau met with the famed Fabian socialist G.D.H. Cole (an “anti-papist”) and Harold Laski on October 8, soon after his arrival. The next morning he met with Ritchie Calder, a celebrated journalist and politician. Within two months, he had attended lectures by the Labour intellectual Richard Crossman, the historian Arnold Toynbee, and the philosopher Bertrand Russell.
* Roger Rolland denies Suzette’s tale, pointing out that his mother knew of his many girlfriends (including Thérèse Gouin). She was upset that she had not met Roger’s fiancée. Letter from M. Rolland, June 7, 2006.
* Tipping was a practice Trudeau despised. Some of his later dinner companions sometimes discreetly left additional cash on the table as Trudeau walked out of the restaurant.
* Likely Herbert Norman, who was later accused by the Americans of being a Communist agent of influence and driven to suicide.
* John Crosbie, who possessed both a Newfoundlander’s gift of gab and a fine education, had a grudging respect for Trudeau which transcended their profound political differences. He wrote in his memoirs that Trudeau “was a worthy adversary. Duelling with him was always risky, but it was very tempting.” On one occasion, Trudeau was challenged about corruption in government and responded: “Quad semper, quad ubique, quad ab omnibus.” Crosbie heckled, “That’s the Jesuit coming out in you,” to which Trudeau replied that Crosbie clearly did not understand what he had said. Crosbie replied with the lawyer’s standard “Res ipsa loquitur,” to which Trudeau replied in Greek. A frustrated Crosbie could only mouth the Greek motto of St. Andrew’s College, the private school he had attended in Ontario. John Crosbie with Geoffrey Stevens, No Holds Barred: My Life in Politics (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997), 236–37.
* In his Memoirs, written in the early 1990s, Trudeau makes this claim and adds that “Quebec had stayed provincial in every sense of the word, that is to say marginal, isolated, out of step with the evolution of the world.” He quotes the chansonnier Jacques Norman, who predicted that “when the Soviets invade, they’ll rename Montreal; they’ll call it Retrograd” (61). Scholars now tend to emphasize the forces of change that were strongly felt in Quebec in the 1940s. Social and economic historians stress the impact of war on even relatively isolated areas of Quebec. In Quelques arpents d’Amérique: Population, économíc, famille au Saguenay, 1838–1971 (Montreal: Les Éditions du Boréal, 1996), Gérard Bouchard indicates that the period after 1941 saw decisive shifts in major indicators such as the use of contraception, age of marriage, and, most important, literacy, where the rise was dramatic (455). In the area of intellectual history, Michael Behiels published a study of Quebec liberalism and nationalism which stressed how much change had occurred before 1949. Writing of the impact of war and depression in Prelude to Quebec’s Quiet Revolution: Liberalism versus Neo-nationalism, 1945–1960 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985), he argued: “Shattered beyond repair was the belief that Quebec was a society where nothing changed or would change.” Despite the book’s extensive and largely favourable treatment of him, Trudeau did not acknowledge its arguments in his memoirs. He did admit, however, that there was “a bubbling of ideas that already, in a very timid way, presaged the changes to come” (62).
CHAPTER 5
HEARTH, HOME, AND NATION
Pierre Trudeau’s decision to go to Ottawa perplexed some of his friends, who sought a rational explanation for this sudden change in direction. Gérard Pelletier, for example, later claimed that he never understood why Trudeau became a federal public servant when the challenges in Quebec were so great.1 But when people make a choice, the rational and the emotional, the private and the public normally mingle together, and there were profound reasons why Trudeau found working in Montreal difficult in 1949. Several are obvious.
First, he had not liked his student experience at the Université de Montréal and probably had little desire to teach there, even if clerical and political conservatives had permitted him to do so. After his involvement with the Asbestos Strike, they would not. Second, many friends had married, including his closest male companion of the time, Roger Rolland, and Thérèse had married another friend, Vianney Décarie. Third, his brother and sister were married, and Suzette now lived close by her mother and could keep an eye on her, so he could leave secure in the knowledge that she would be cared for. Then again, the swarm of family and old friends must have seemed overwhelming after his solitary wanderings of the previous year.
Moreover, in the five years Trudeau had essentially been abroad, the world had changed. Liberal democracy, so troubled in the 1930s, had risen to the challenge of fascism during the Second World War, and Canadians now eagerly entered what Time magazine publisher Henry Luce had named the American century. In the stones and the forests of Quebec, American enterprise extended its claims, and church, state, and citizens responded to both its energy and its consequences. Some of Trudeau’s former classmates, including his greatest Brébeuf rival, Jean de Grandpré, began to find their place within the Canadian corporate world, which was moving rapidly from its traditional link with the British-Canadian imperial tradition to welcome the flow of precious American dollars available to Canadians in the postwar years. Other classmates, such as Pierre Vadeboncoeur, were deeply suspicious of the impact of American economic and cultural influence on Quebec society, even though they recognized that the future world imagined in the Catholic classrooms of their childhood was undeniably lost.2
Outside Canada, a Cold War was emerging in the confrontation between the Soviet Union and the West or, as it was more often expressed, between Communism and democracy. In 1949 a new chill appeared in international affairs as the Soviet Union exploded an atomic bomb, thus ending the American monopoly, and Mao Tse-tung’s armies passed through Peking’s Gate of Heavenly Peace in triumph, not long after Trudeau left Shanghai. In the 1949 Canadian election, Conservative leader George Drew campaigned in Quebec on a strong anti-Communist platform, but he convinced few that Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent was “soft” on Communists. Both St. Laurent and his popular foreign minister, Lester Pearson, joined in stern jeremiads against the Communists. Indeed, even at the height of the Second World War, many Catholic leaders in Quebec had attacked the alliance with the Soviet Union. When Cardinal Villeneuve and Premier Joseph-Adélard Godbout had called for assistance to Russia after Hitler’s attack, the great nationalist Henri Bourassa had bitterly complained: “How can they not see that, some years from now, Russia will be the nightmare of the world?”3 In 1949, for most people in Canada and Quebec, it was.
Pierre Trudeau, in many ways, was a bad fit for Quebec in the spring of 1949. During his long educational absence and world travels, he had carefully maintained links through correspondence with friends, family, and other individuals who kept him informed about events at home. The articles he published in Notre Temps clearly reflected this aim, as did an article in Le Devoir which appeared just as he returned: “Five minutes with Pierre Trudeau—Around the world in 580 days.”4 He immediately re-established old links and made pronouncements on a range of issues both in private and in public. His exchange on republicanism in Le Devoir attracted attention among the intellectual elite, for whom the nationalist newspaper was essential daily reading.
After the Asbestos Strike, Trudeau and Pelletier began to discuss the creation of an intellectual journal, which would be modelled on Emmanuel Mounier’s Esprit. At the invitation of Claude Ryan, now the general secretary of Action catholique canadienne, Trudeau also spoke to a group of students on June 20. The West, he lamented, lacked economic liberty and was too materialistic. Marxism failed because it restricted liberty, but a better alternative lay in the blend of socialism and Christianity. He echoed the French diplomat-writer Paul Claudel in calling on students “to be sensitive to the world which surrounds us, the international community.”5 At a time when both the Canadian
press and politicians were issuing clarion calls to confront global Communism, Trudeau’s comments reflected his profound doubts about such a crusade.
The state of Quebec nationalism similarly made him uneasy. His own public and private writings in the late 1940s possessed ambiguities that confused readers about what he actually believed. His old friend Pierre Vadeboncoeur, with whom he had re-established a close relationship, even wrote to Le Devoir on July 14, 1949, in an effort to clarify what Trudeau had meant in a letter he had written attacking Gérard Filion’s call for a new nationalist political party. With considerable presumption, Vadeboncoeur stated that any party that he “and Pierre Trudeau” founded would not emerge in a nationalist cradle. “The nationalist should not integrate the social but the social should integrate nationalism, which currently has a traditional character.”6
Trudeau knew that Quebec nationalism had a traditional, or conservative, character; reflecting that character, the Duplessis government rejected the social needs of society. Yet the Liberal Party in both Quebec and Ottawa represented neither the national nor the social needs of French-speaking Canadians. The federal CCF had no provincial counterpart, and its attentiveness to the demands of workers and economic inequality was not accompanied by a sensitivity to Quebec’s heritage and postwar cultural challenges. Later, Trudeau told an interviewer that he had not looked for an active political career on his return because, very simply, “I did not agree with any of the major parties.” He probably would have fitted well into a British Labour Party or a French Socialist Party, where the temptations of power balanced a commitment to social programs based on economic equality and progressive social action. In Canada, however, he found no defined political channel through which he could express the ideas he held and the facts he had learned in his five years of absence from Quebec.7
He was not alone. Many other Canadians, including the sociologist John Porter, the novelist Norman Levine, and the painter Paul-Émile Borduas, found Canada unresponsive to the dynamics of postwar progressive currents, whether in the arts or in politics. In 1949 Canada remained distant from the ideal society that postwar social thought offered and economic prosperity seemed to secure.8 What had begun with thunderous election declarations in 1944 and 1945 promising national health care and new social programs had ended with the conservative nationalism of Maurice Duplessis in Quebec and the business-oriented liberalism of Louis St. Laurent’s Liberals in Ottawa. Despite some changes, Trudeau believed that the Old Regime still prevailed in Canada and Quebec, just as it did in the Roman Catholic Church.
A political career, then, was not an option in 1949, and Trudeau found his old friends adrift in a world where the mists of past debates too often clouded the form of the future. Other young intellectuals shared his alienation and uncertainty. When the sociologist Marcel Rioux returned to Quebec from Paris, he discovered no professional opportunities and took employment with the National Museum of Canada in Ottawa, a city which became, in his own words, “a refuge for the opponents to the [Duplessis] regime” in Quebec.9 Trudeau, similarly, had no political outlet in Montreal, detested the regime in Quebec City, had limited professional opportunities as an academic in Quebec, and did not want to practise law.
No sooner was he back, it seemed, than others prepared to leave. For Trudeau and many of his friends, the most upsetting departure was that of François Hertel. In the spring of 1949, Hertel began, in his own words, his “exile” in France. He believed that his readers in the new world could no longer respond to what he taught and wrote, and, for that reason, “it became essential, almost a duty … to disown or leave that milieu.”10 Grace had warned Pierre that his friend was disconsolate. After a dinner with Hertel as he prepared to leave the priesthood and Canada, she reported that he said: “I’m returning to the new world because I’m weary of the old one, and contrary to geological and geographical opinion, I claim that America is the old world.” The cultural renewal in France in particular, but in Europe more generally, he told Grace Trudeau, “makes America look old and decayed.”11 For the Quebec intellectuals of the postwar period, “troubled by the future of their own land, the ideological landscape of Paris was seductive.”12 For Trudeau, however, a return to Paris would have been exile from family, friends, and, not least, his own ambition. Ottawa, then, offered a convenient detour.*
Grace Trudeau was another factor in her son’s decision to go to Ottawa. If Trudeau was to consolidate his new-found independence, he no doubt sensed that he should not return to live in the family home. He and his mother had always had an exceptionally close relationship. In the spring of 1947 she had clung to him like a youthful date while his Harley-Davidson careered at high speed through the corniche roads above Monte Carlo. In other photographs, the middle-aged matron and her adult son cavort on the beach just as they had done as young mother and child. When they were apart, they both wrote or phoned often. Her home was always his. Sometimes they misunderstood each other, but they shared their thoughts, their impressions, and, occasionally, their decisions. In 1949, when Trudeau returned, Grace was understandably relieved and welcoming, but she knew her son was more fraught than he would admit. More than anyone else, she was aware of the difficulties Pierre faced in Montreal that spring.
“Every time the postman comes I make a rush for the letters, hoping to hear from you,” she had written to Pierre in January 1947 during his Paris sojourn. Pierre had been ill but had sought recuperation in the French Alps. How much better his boldness, she told him, than the complaints of Suzette’s husband, Pierre Rouleau, who stayed in bed after a minor hemorrhoid operation. He is not, she declared, “of the Elliott stock! As Aunt Annie used to say.” Although Grace adored her charming son-in-law, she sometimes could be a critical mother-in-law. Constantly she worried whether Pierre had enough “cash” and regularly enclosed British pounds or treasured American dollars to “help out.” As mothers do, she worried about his health and appearance, writing to him on January 17: “Be good to yourself—take the pills. How is your hair behaving, losing any? Beware of hard soap on it.” The hair became a lasting concern, and photographs of Pierre as he aged provide genuine grounds for her worries. She regularly sent news of his friends, past and present. While visiting Tip at Harvard, she called on Pierre’s past love, Camille Corriveau, and reported that she was “kept busy all day with two young ones.” Even worse, she has “no help from outside—does all her own work”—as most American mothers did.
In response to Pierre’s letters about Paris, she wrote: “You are in a social whirl, as much, if not more than your mom.” She always shared his enthusiasm for French ways, although both were thoroughly North American in most of their tastes. A friend of hers had a guest from France who behaved badly and burnt a hole in a treasured Persian rug. “I can’t but think,” Grace wrote, “there is something French in this way of acting, giving one the impression they are our lords and masters.” If her faith in the French was lacking, she had much confidence in her son. On February 20, 1947, she asked what Pierre thought of the world “upside down,” with the British leaving India and the “Jews in Jerusalem [wanting] to get out and return to Germany.” Concerned, she wrote: “It will take some intelligent people and strong minds to unravel the future. Will you be amongst them?”13 Perhaps even more than Pierre, she was determined he would be.
In late February 1947, as Trudeau was in the midst of psychoanalysis, Grace was preparing for her trip to France. “Dear big boy,” she wrote from the “Land of Snow”: “Hurray! You are coming to meet me I heard today—what fun—provided I don’t look all washed up when I step off the ship.” To her son, if no one else, she did not. When she met up with Pierre again in April, she brought copious amounts of food to a France where heavy rationing still prevailed.14 She had first visited her brother in Normandy and then rejoined Pierre, to sweep through the south of France on the Harley-Davidson as spring warmed the Côte d’Azur. There is no suggestion that he told her of his psychiatric sessions in Paris, and she appea
rs not to have been aware of the intense correspondence between him and Thérèse in those weeks. Yet, as a mother, she surely knew something had gone badly wrong.
On her—and Pierre’s—return to Montreal, Grace learned that Thérèse, great-granddaughter and granddaughter of premiers, niece of a political giant, daughter of a senator, and, in the view of many of the leaders of Montreal society, the ideal life partner for her brilliant son, had decided not to marry him. On July 16 she reacted with distress and concern to the news as Pierre began his trek by foot to the remote parts of Quebec. “My dear coureur des bois,” she wrote:
It was a good opportunity to get away and clear the sombre thoughts that have haunted you for the past few days. If I could only have consoled my poor boy in those moments—you know a mother’s heart is much upset when she sees the unhappy situations that often arise in the course of her children’s lives. It was something of a shock to me as well as to you. When I realized how serious was the rift, especially as I had begun to take the girl to heart—which requires time for such an adjustment! Blood is thicker than water you know I often say.
However, I still believe that perhaps within a short time all may be well again between you two. I’m sure the girl must be unhappy—it is impossible to think otherwise. Since she had led you to believe—or I can imagine so—that you were the only man in her life—just be patient—she will have time to think things over and no doubt one of these days you may receive a note asking to meet her half way—I can speak from experience my dear—and when both parties concerned are proud and unwilling to make the first step—it means unhappiness for two people who are really in love. Are you quite sure that you are not to blame in showing any lack of affection? Or in being brusque? I know that when a man makes up his mind to marry the woman of his choice he can’t stand or comprehend why there should be any delay or seeming hesitation on the girl’s side—of course I’m surmising incidents which may have no bearing on the whole situation. I feel so sorry for you my dear boy that I can only pray the dear Lord may console and be your guide and always mom will be there by your side to give what comfort she can. All my love to you, Mom.15