Citizen of the World

by John English

  Trudeau was deeply wounded, especially when she refused to meet him in Europe in the spring of 1952. He begged to see her, accused her of being cruel, and promised to silently withdraw from her life forever if she so desired. Later, he begged forgiveness for his conduct: “I cannot take leave of you without adding that my present grief has permitted me to fully understand the anguish beyond endurance that in the past year I have inflicted upon one who loved me more deeply than seems humanly possible, and one whose pardon I can at last most humbly seek … Fare thee well, sweet, sweet Hélène.”50 The old pattern was repeating itself.*

  Once Trudeau had decided to leave Ottawa by October 1951, he openly chafed against the restrictions of the Canadian public service, just as he had earlier reacted against the transatlantic alliance of Britain, the United States, and Canada in which Lester Pearson’s foreign policy fitted so well. Against the conventional views followed in Ottawa, he presented those proclaimed by the French Catholic left in Esprit and Le Monde—ideas that argued for conciliation rather than confrontation in the Cold War and that supported decolonization in countries such as Indochina, where smouldering embers had become raging flames.

  In keeping with this contentious mood, he had an interesting exchange with Norman Robertson when he returned the magazine in which Lionel Trilling had argued the liberal case against Soviet Communism. He told Robertson that the article did not impress him, although he did agree that it was an anachronism to look at “labour as an oppressed cause.” He objected strongly to Trilling’s description of the idealist as “someone who finds virtue only where he is not.” Far more convincing to Trudeau would be the definition “someone who finds not only virtue where he is.” To the rather intellectually pretentious Robertson, Trudeau responded in kind: “Both these brands of idealists are poor material for totalitarianism of either extreme. The true totalitarian is an idealist who finds only virtue where he is, or a realist or an agnostic* who pretends to do so in order to avoid the fate of Buridan’s ass.” This medieval ass faced starvation when he could not choose between two equally attractive piles of hay. Trudeau continued: “Incidentally the ass might not have starved had there been more than two hay stacks to sway between. Which makes me feel that if free men ever let the world be divided in two, they will have to die like asses to avoid living like slaves. Another argument for the third force!”51 The “third force” was a popular concept in Esprit and Le Monde in which Europe, under French leadership, stood aside from the Soviet-American confrontation and established an alternative social democratic society. Robertson, a former socialist himself, had little patience with such views, but he and Trudeau parted on good terms.

  Trudeau invited Norman Robertson and his wife, Jetty, to drop in on Saturday night, and then he drafted his letter of resignation, which he sent on September 28. His first draft began with “Dear Great Man,” which eventually became, in mock revolutionary fashion, “Dear Citizen.” His secretary told him he had to send a written resignation, and he did so in a letter that mixed polite sarcasm with a modest degree of gratefulness for an experience where he had been able to put his ample learning into practice:

  My work with the Privy Council has been to me a constant source of satisfaction, and not infrequently of delight. As for fellow workers, I cannot imagine a more sympathetic lot. I have never ceased to be aware of the precedence in your mind of human beings over institutions, and this in itself has been a valuable lesson …

  I dare to hope that the structure of the central government will not be too badly shattered by my departure. But however that may be, any sense of despair should be tempered by the knowledge that I will probably return to the Bar from which I once so impetuously resigned.

  He departed from Ottawa on October 6, 1951, took five days of statutory leave, and formally left the civil service on October 14, 1951.52

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  While Trudeau was still in Ottawa working as a civil servant, he had become intrigued by discussions with his friend Gérard Pelletier, who had now left journalism to work for the Catholic trade-union movement. During these talks, the idea came up of a Canadian journal, to be called Cité libre, similar to the review Esprit published by the French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier. It would link progressive Catholic faith with analysis of contemporary political and social issues, just as Esprit had done in France.

  According to Pelletier, Cité libre emerged from the Catholic youth movement and his own admiration for Mounier. In 1950 he took the lead, because of Trudeau’s absence in Ottawa, and worked with others, notably the teacher Guy Cormier and the trade-unionist Jean-Paul Geoffroy, to create a journal that would be Catholic yet dissident. Another Cité libre founder, the literary critic and notary Maurice Blain, has perceptively noted the impact that the Great Depression and the Second World War made on the generation that founded the journal: “This generation without masters is seeking a humanism,” he said, “and is anxiously asking on what kind of spiritual foundation this humanism should be based.”53 Those were the central questions that Trudeau, too, had asked himself in the forties, although he, as a Brébeuf student, had not done so within the Catholic youth movement.

  After riding his motorbike to Montreal, Trudeau would join in the long night debates about the shape the journal should take. Pelletier cemented Trudeau’s participation with the suggestion that Cité libre would fundamentally challenge the status quo in Quebec. But, he recalled, he had to convince others to accept Trudeau:

  On the one hand, he really was a novice among us, still grudgingly accepted by our team, several of whom barely knew him. On the other hand, he was vitally interested in our undertaking, which was to allow him, after several years’ absence, to find his place in his generation, and in a circle that was broader than the one to which he belonged.

  Neither his personality nor his wealth * (or his continuing references to Cardinal Newman as a source of inspiration) made Trudeau popular among some of Pelletier’s colleagues, and they told Pelletier their complaints:

  Four or five of us were standing in the middle of the large kitchen, glasses in hand. It was well past midnight, closer, in fact, to dawn. We were having a quiet post-mortem on the evening’s discussion when, suddenly, the thing that had been incubating for months gave the conversation an unexpected turn. It was not Trudeau’s ideas that were questioned by my friends, but his origins, his circle, his society connections.

  Although fascinated by his intelligence and strength, many found him, in Pelletier’s words, “a disturbing influence.” And, as Pelletier added wryly in the 1980s, “he has continued to be throughout his life.”54

  Guy Cormier, reporting the same conversation, said that when the first issue of Cité libre was passed around on the evening of July 14, 1950, at a cottage on Île Perrot, the editors had a “courteous but very lively discussion” about Trudeau’s participation. The former Young Catholics were especially critical, with one of them saying: “I don’t want to see Trudeau on the team. He’s not with our people; he never will be with our people.” On that and so many other occasions, Pelletier strongly defended his friend.55

  This account is unconvincing, not because of the details of the discussion but because the first issue was ready well before Bastille Day, 1950, and because Trudeau was essential to its production. While it is undoubtedly true that his wealth caused hesitations, Trudeau is probably wrong to think it was the major source of the opposition to him. His financial support was, in fact, a large ingredient in the journal’s success. Pelletier’s Young Catholics predominated and Pelletier’s wife, Alec, not Trudeau, signed the bank note to guarantee funding, but Trudeau and his friends brought resources and relationships that were crucial for its early success. The journal depended on money from nine people: Réginald Boisvert, Maurice Blain, Guy Cormier, Jean-Paul Geoffroy, Pierre Juneau, Charles Lussier, Pelletier, Roger Rolland, and Trudeau. Pelletier and Trudeau gave the largest contributions, $250.32, while the others gave much less. Cormier contributed only $31.09, and Geoffro
y, $47.09. Trudeau covered debts when necessary, and he regularly paid the costs for the impecunious Pierre Vadeboncoeur and for Geoffroy.56 He was, admirably, always silent about his private charity.

  Moreover, Trudeau’s meticulous address book provided buyers for the journal, which had only 225 subscriptions on its second issue. Among the names on Trudeau’s list are female friends (including Jacqueline Côté, later the wife of Professor Blair Neatby, Mackenzie King’s biographer, and his sister, Suzette), the great Catholic philosopher Étienne Gilson, and Marcel Cadieux, Jean-Louis Delisle, Mario Lavoie, Georges Charpentier, and Jean Langlois of the Department of External Affairs. Trudeau’s reach, both financial and personal, considerably exceeded his colleagues’ grasp. He also bought up thirty-three copies to send to François Hertel to distribute in France, in the hope of increasing their readers abroad.57 The initial price asked of subscribers was a lofty $2, at a time when the popular weekly Le Petit Journal sold for 10 cents.

  Trudeau’s presence was dominant from the first issue on. And, significantly, Trudeau began to find his place among his generation in Quebec through Cité libre. In the June 1950 premier issue, Trudeau wrote tributes to three giants who had recently died: the French socialist leader Léon Blum and his own intellectual mentors Emmanuel Mounier and Harold Laski. “Emmanuel Mounier has gone,” he began his tribute to the founder of Esprit, whose influence touched every page of Cité libre’s first issue. So great was his impact that the journal’s founders had hoped to give him the first copy of the new review. The other obituaries have more substance, and they also indicate why Trudeau did not share the opinions of Lester Pearson and the Ottawa mandarins in the summer of 1950 as Canada joined the United States and the United Nations in responding to the invasion of South Korea by the Communist North.

  There were, Trudeau wrote, two systems that divided humanity in a dangerous way, with each one able to annihilate the other. There were, however, some who had “refused to be signed up in one or the other of the totalitarianisms. They have instead devoted their lives to interpreting and acting upon a belief which holds that liberty, justice and peace must be pre-eminent. As is inevitable, they are hysterically denounced and hatefully censured by both orthodox Marxists and official Christianity.” Among the “circle of the just” (to use Dante’s phrase linking eternal and temporal justice) who maintain the principles of Christianity and human dignity, Trudeau found it “astonishing” that “two Jewish Marxists have without pause distinguished themselves by their intelligence, their courage, and their unending generosity”: Harold Laski and Léon Blum. Laski, he wrote, received heads of states and poor students with equal simplicity, and his work would endure as humans built the “free city” where they were able to live in tolerance and eventually in love. That, he continued, was why both capitalists and Stalinists were sworn enemies of the principled Laski and of the admirable Blum.58 And that was why Trudeau was increasingly uncomfortable in Ottawa.

  Trudeau did not sign his name to those tributes, understandably, given his civil service position. In the same issue, he wrote a major article whose title became an emblem of his approach to politics, one which, before that summer, had lacked coherence. “Politique fonctionnelle” (functional politics) became a term that he bore with him as he navigated the rapids of political change in Quebec in the fifties and sixties. Right from the first issue of Cité libre, Trudeau demonstrated that his experience with the practical side of politics in Ottawa had left a mark, while, simultaneously, he recognized the uniqueness of the Quebec Catholic experience of his past. A church, he wrote, “would be an impostor if it stayed forever in the catacombs. Similarly, in politics, you cannot stay below ground too long.” French Canada, it seemed, might be heading for a dead end where its leaders exaggerated the dangers of religious and linguistic assimilation while brandishing threats from supposed enemies—“the English, Jews, imperialists, centralizers, demons, free-thinkers, and I don’t know what else.” While slaying imaginary enemies, he cautioned, “our language has become so impoverished that we no longer notice how badly we speak,” and clerics discouraged students from going abroad lest their faith be challenged.

  Another passage in the article became celebrated as Trudeau’s political credo:

  We want to bear witness to the Christian and French fact in America. Fine; so be it. But let’s get rid of all the rest. We should subject to methodical doubt all the political categories relegated to us by the previous generation; the strategy of resistance is no longer conducive to the fulfillment of our society. The time has come to borrow the “functional” discipline from architecture, to throw to the winds those many prejudices with which the past has encumbered the present, and to build for the new man. Let’s batter down the totems, let’s break the taboos. Better yet, let’s consider them null and void. Let us be coolly intelligent.

  It is, in retrospect, a remarkable paragraph. It gave no offence to his Ottawa superiors, yet it initiated the definition of a new program. * Indeed, although there were no senior public servants on Cité libre’s subscription list, Trudeau’s criticism of the high-handed way the Duplessis government acted at the federal-provincial conference of January 1950 would have pleased them immensely. When presented with concrete offers, Quebec remained stupidly silent. In concluding, Trudeau argued that the nationalism of the past and its intimate link with the clergy no longer served the interests of a Catholic and French people who must confront a new world where old barnacles had to be scraped away.59

  The importance of Cité libre for Trudeau was enormous. When he left Ottawa, he asked Jean Marchand whether there was a position for him in the trade-union movement, but he took no permanent job.60 Through Cité libre he developed close contacts with the emerging media, especially television, where several of his friends, including Alec Pelletier and Roger Rolland, were finding positions. Although the journal’s subscription list remained small, its influence among the intellectual and political elite of Quebec was considerable. The conservative historian Robert Rumilly warned Maurice Duplessis that “the people at Cité libre are extremely dangerous; they have international affiliations with the review Esprit in France; they are subversives and you must be wary of them. In the long term, it is very dangerous for your government.”61 Duplessis accepted the advice, which had merit, and cast an increasingly suspicious eye on the “Cité libre crowd.”

  Historians more recently have criticized the oversimplification that Cité libre was the overwhelming centre of opposition to Duplessis. It was not, but, in the words of the leading text on modern Quebec history, “Cité libre, despite its small circulation, represented a major gathering place and channel of expression for reform liberals.”62 It stood out because it championed two predominant themes that resonated widely at the time: traditionalist nationalism was outmoded, and the socioeconomic reality of Quebec required new approaches that emphasized democracy and individual freedom. In defining and refining those themes, Pierre Trudeau was to play a principal role in Quebec after the mid-century.

  * On his return in 1949, Trudeau spoke to two lawyers who were fast-rising francophones in External Affairs—Marcel Cadieux and Michel Gauvin. Both men were conservative Roman Catholics who had served with distinction in the war—the former as a public servant; the latter as a Canadian officer on the battlefields of Western Europe. Both were blunt. Cadieux said he would do everything to prevent the iconoclastic and capricious Trudeau from entering the department. Trudeau himself recalled that Cadieux was upset with his beard, which was not considered proper for young men in “External in those days.” Interestingly, in 1968, when Trudeau became prime minister, Cadieux was undersecretary of state for external affairs; the less guilty Gauvin was ambassador to Ethiopia. But Trudeau bore no grudges: he made Cadieux the first francophone ambassador to the United States, Canada’s most important diplomatic position, and he gave Gauvin several choice assignments, including ambassador to China. Interview with Michel Gauvin, May 1995. Cadieux’s strong personal views on C
anadian politicians can be glimpsed in John Bosher, The Gaullist Attack on Canada, 1967–1977 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999), in which Bosher quotes extensively from Cadieux’s very opinionated diary. Interview with Michel Gauvin, April 1994; interview of Pierre Trudeau by Jean Lépine, April 27, 1992, TP, vol. 23, file 2.

  * Recruitment of francophones after the war brought the francophone percentage of the public service to the lowest level in Canadian history, even though the prime minister was francophone. The Interdepartmental Committee on External Trade, of which Trudeau was a member, had only two francophones among twenty-two members. Frequently, as the sole bilingual member, he became the secretary to various committees—in case some committee member momentarily lapsed into French. TP, vol. 9, file 13.

  * On matters relating to the Catholic Church, however, he was less open-minded and still observant of certain restrictions. On January 20, 1950, he wrote to Archbishop Vachon of Ottawa indicating that, because of his professional responsibilities, it was necessary for him to read Marxist works that were on the Index. The archbishop gave him the permission he sought eight days later. TP, vol. 14, file 12.

  * John Watkins was later accused of being compromised by his close personal friendship with a Soviet agent, but he died of a heart attack during the long and secret RCMP interrogation in Montreal.

  * Trudeau did not often attend dinner parties, mainly because he spent many weekends in Montreal. However, the family of the eminent journalist Blair Fraser was linked with the Trudeau family through a mutual acquaintance, and they entertained him several times while he was in Ottawa. He responded gracefully after one such dinner. “That was an extremely pleasant evening I spent at your house on Thursday. Not only was the dinner excellent, the sherry stimulating, and the conversation informative, but I was able to confirm by scientific experience a principle which had long been laid down, ‘the Frasers are very nice.’” He claimed that he was fortunate to meet all the family and felt “privileged that even little Graham [later another eminent Canadian journalist] should have condescended to see us after the ominous interest of the tam-tam.” Trudeau to Mrs. Fraser, nd [1950], TP, vol. 9, file 12.