Citizen of the World

by John English

  Trudeau went on to make scathing attacks on the principal exponents of nationalism and Catholic social doctrine in Quebec. He condemned the Jesuit scholar Father Richard Arès and the Montreal economist Esdras Minville as ignorant of both modern social science and the contemporary world itself. He linked Abbé Groulx with authoritarianism and xenophobia. He accused André Laurendeau of fearing any social reform initiated by the federal government because of the threat it represented to “Catholic morality” and the dreams of corporatism, in which individualism would disappear and elites would be organized to manage society. He criticized the conservative and nationalist economist François-Albert Angers for his support of corporatism, his opposition to state action, and his condemnation of socialism. He attacked various church leaders for their opposition to socialism and the CCF, including Father Georges-Henri Lévesque, even though he admitted that Lévesque had recently demonstrated more liberal ways as the dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Laval. And he even condemned his earlier friend and mentor François Hertel for a 1945 essay that spoke wistfully of the need for corporatism.10

  Although Maurice Duplessis remained the main target, few escaped Trudeau’s relentless attack. Paul Gouin, Thérèse’s uncle, merited praise for creating the Action libérale nationale in the 1930s, but he was also criticized for his alliance with Duplessis. The exile of Bishop Charbonneau to Victoria became a symbol of the oppressiveness of the church and its antipathy to free speech. Grudgingly, Trudeau gave credit to the church for its efforts in charitable associations, welfare organizations, and adoption agencies, but, in truth, he concluded, the church’s “heart and mind were certainly not in it, but longed for the golden age when an obscure rural people was accustomed to hide behind the skirts of the clergy.”11 Not surprisingly, Jean-Charles Falardeau and Frank Scott worried about the impact Trudeau’s comments on these individuals would have.*

  The essay is an incisive, often bitter, social and political analysis that defines Trudeau’s beliefs more sharply than ever before. It sets out the outline for what he would later term the “just society,” one in which legal protections assure democratic participation in the development of public policy. He was firmly anti-nationalist—not simply an opponent of conservative Quebec nationalism but wary of a doctrine that closed borders to ideas, people, and goods. Because of the church’s link with conservative nationalism in Quebec and its opposition to “progress,” he believed it should retreat from the socioeconomic realm and occupy only the spiritual heights, where its presence was fully justified.

  Here Trudeau was very much a “modernizer,” one who believed that material needs were important in a democratic society and that contemporary social science and Keynesian economics were essential to the creation of the “good life.” He was also a socialist cast in a British-Canadian mould. The essay treated the CCF as a great opportunity lost. Despite later claims that Trudeau was never a party person, this piece made it clear that the CCF closely reflected his views, just as the receipts for CCF dues for 1955 in his papers prove his participation in CCF campaigns.* Indeed, at a conference sponsored by Le Devoir in February 1955, Trudeau—in elegant suit and tie, with pocket handkerchief perfectly placed—scandalized his listeners by strongly urging socialism for Quebec. “M. Elliot-Trudeau,” as the newspaper wrongly named him, “reproached Le Devoir for having no philosophy of economics. A kind of schizophrenia,” he declared, “exists among the editors of Le Devoir on these questions.”12

  Like many of its leaders, Trudeau thought that the best hope for the future of the CCF lay in the trade-union movement, whose earlier gains in the forties had not been built on during the Cold War fifties. He rejected the “proletarian messianism” of the Communist left, but he saw alternatives in the democratic socialism of Western Europe. He ended his epilogue to the book: “The only powerful medium of renewal is industrialization; we are also aware that this medium will not provide us with liberty and justice unless it is subject to the forces of an enlightened and powerful trade-union movement.” Finally, Trudeau looked beyond the Quebec border with a generous description of North America and English Canada. Quebec, he argued, could not stop the world and seal itself off, just as “nationalistic countries like Spain, Mexico, Argentina, etc. have learned that bloody revolution eventually topples archaic structures.” Fortunately, “we,” the French Catholic people of Quebec, “have a safety-valve in a continental economy and in a federal constitution, where pragmatism, secularism, and an awareness of change are the predominant attitudes.”13 For the first time, Trudeau had clearly defined the value of Canada for himself and for his province.

  Beneath the clarity of the vision, beyond the rhetoric of debate and the flow of statistical evidence, Trudeau’s essays expressed a deep-seated anger. Not surprisingly, they generated anger in return, and they continue to do so as modern historians reassess the dramatic events of the fifties and sixties in Quebec. At the time, François-Albert Angers devoted six essays in L’Action nationale to Trudeau’s attacks on nationalism and his promotion of socialism, fearing it would lead to homogeneity with English Canada. More troubling to Trudeau was the response of Father Jacques Cousineau, a highly respected Jesuit who had mediated the strike in 1949 and was considered a supporter of the rights of unions and workers. The priest pointed to the role of the Catholic-affiliated unions in the strike and the activity of some important elements of the church in its mediation and resolution—all of which Trudeau had ignored. It was a just criticism, but Cousineau went too far in claiming that Trudeau simply reflected the views of the CCF and its Quebec branch, the Parti social démocratique (PSD). Father Richard Arès, the editor of the Jesuits’ Relations, refused to publish Trudeau’s reply to Father Cousineau or even a letter to the editor from him. If Trudeau was disappointed, he was not surprised by his former Jesuit mentors’ disavowal of their prize student.

  Trudeau expected the neo-nationalist André Laurendeau—whom he had met in the thirties, fought with in the forties against conscription and Canadian war policy, and debated in journals and on television in the fifties—to attack him in Le Devoir for his views. Laurendeau did, but indulgently. While agreeing that the conservative nationalism of the Duplessis government and the social thought of the church created a barrier to social reform and essential change, he argued that Trudeau oversimplified and ignored the genuine challenges to the survival of a French-speaking people in a modern North America. Nevertheless, he deemed the essay a brilliant and evocative ode to liberty: in its argument, ideas, and prose, it presented “a remarkable personality” to Quebec public life.14 Still, Laurendeau rebuked his colleague for his anger and for his personal attacks on those who had fought the same battles and endured similar blows. At the very least, he said, Trudeau was rude, especially to many of his early mentors and teachers.

  If Trudeau’s essays on the Asbestos Strike are significant for the intellectual history of Quebec, they are fundamentally important in his own intellectual biography. In them we sense that Trudeau, the student who fiercely cherished his individuality, the adolescent who chafed against authority, and the young lover who dreamed of a haven from the deadened hand of Catholic morality, believes he has finally broken free. His own past has become another country, one he has largely abandoned and whose monuments he no longer honours. Those long nights and days at Brébeuf College where he pored over the texts of Abbé Groulx, French religious philosophers, and assorted papal encyclicals now seemed like wasted time. His interpretation of historical change focused in quasi-Marxist terms on economic forces, rejecting the role of social thought that, in Quebec, did not reflect reality.15 Like many of his colleagues on Cité libre, he dismissed his early studies as useless, unrelated to the real life of workers or the contemporary needs of Quebec.*

  The passionately idealistic yet traditional anti-Communist Catholic youth who had demonstrated against André Malraux, supported Marshal Pétain, and possibly thrown stones through Jewish shop windows had, by his early thirties, become a s
ocialist who used Marxist dialectics to understand economic change and now notoriously claimed that priests had no more divine right than prime ministers or anyone else. Just over a decade earlier, Trudeau had vigorously supported the nationalist Bloc populaire canadien, had funded the conservative nationalist Notre Temps, and had even had nationalists muse about him leading an independence movement. In the mid-forties, François Hertel was his close companion, Catholic and nationalist thought a preoccupation, and Abbé Groulx an admired counsel. Now, in the mid-fifties, he had begun to form his own independent opinions and to break from his roots: he chided his mentor Hertel, attacked his friend Father Richard Arès, and derided François-Albert Angers, who had supported him against Father Braun after his trip to the Soviet Union.

  Trudeau’s time in Ottawa had bred a strong resentment against the second-class status of French-speaking Canadians within the Canadian public service. The fifties in Montreal now provided him with a practical education that made him a bitter opponent of the conservative and nationalist government of Duplessis and a resentful critic of the church that tried to silence him and his colleagues. And, through Frank Scott, the CCF, the Canadian labour movement, and his participation in the Canadian Institute of International Affairs (through which he attended two international conferences in Africa and in Asia), Trudeau would increasingly develop relationships with English Canadians who had considerable respect for his credentials from Harvard and the London School of Economics.16 With his effortless and often eloquent English and his liking for foreign travel, he was sought out for conferences and media appearances in English Canada. His striking appearance, whimsical yet elegant taste in clothes, and unpredictability of views made him a well-known figure in Montreal cultural and intellectual circles, and television carried his name and views to a broader audience. While some of his previous characteristics changed significantly in this decade, others remained constant. He was still elusive, a mystery to those around him. And he continued to pursue his ambition for public life, even if its object was not yet clear.

  The Asbestos Strike [La Grève de 1’amiante] appeared in the fateful fall of 1956, when Britain, France, and Israel conspired to attack Egypt and brought the world to the brink of war. Soviet troops, meanwhile, crushed the Hungarian uprising, exposing the brutal disregard of democratic and individual rights within the Communist bloc. In France and elsewhere, Communist intellectuals were abandoning the Communist Party, but they remained disillusioned with the West because of the conspiracy among the French, British, and Israeli governments to smash Arab nationalism. By 1957 the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom, which was clinging desperately to great-power status, had tested hydrogen bombs that had the capacity to destroy humanity in minutes. The Soviets tested an intercontinental ballistic missile that could not be intercepted, and President Nikita Khrushchev admitted the crimes of the Soviet past.

  In Canada the Liberal government felt the changing winds of international politics, and Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent condemned the British-French collusion, declaring that the age of “supermen” had passed. Although his remarks offended many English Canadians, they recognized an important truth: the old colonial empires were quickly collapsing. At Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and other leaders of new or emerging states declared a position of neutrality in the Cold War. “Sisters and Brothers,” Indonesian president Achmad Sukarno intoned at the opening, “how terrifically dynamic is our time! … Nations and States have awoken from a sleep of centuries … We, the people of Asia and Africa, far more than half the human population of the world, we can mobilize what I have called the ‘Moral Violence of Nations’ in favour of peace.”17

  Trudeau quickly accepted the justice of this cause. His travels had made him suspect frontiers—the dangers they created and the damage they did to people who lived around them. He worried about nationalism in the developing countries as much as in Canada. In 1957 he joined a Commonwealth group under the auspices of the World University Service that travelled to Ghana, the first decolonized African member of the Commonwealth. While he welcomed the liberation, he worried about what the future held for Ghanaians. In discussions, he presented the case that “culture can exist only if people are able to provide themselves with [the] instruments of government.”18 He was already worried that those instruments in the developing world were weak. And he was right.

  This onrush of world events stirred Trudeau and others like him in Quebec. Increasingly, the conservative nationalism of Duplessis and the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church was on the defensive, as Trudeau and his colleagues championed the concept and principles embodied in the United Nations 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These principles in turn influenced a series of important judicial decisions in Canada in the fifties. Trudeau, drawing on his legal training, began to work closely with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and, especially, with F.R. Scott in asserting the importance of individual rights. In 1957 the Supreme Court of Canada finally struck down Duplessis’s notorious 1937 Padlock Law, which permitted the state to “lock” down any facilities where it believed “Communist or Bolshevik” activity had occurred. Scott was the principal lawyer in that case as well as in the Roncarelli case. In 1946 Duplessis had denied Roncarelli’s tavern a liquor licence because he had paid bail for some Jehovah’s Witnesses who insisted on their right to free speech. Roncarelli sued Duplessis, and the case made its way through the courts and through the elections of 1952 and 1956, where Duplessis made effective use of it:

  The Liberals were not going to take the side of the Witnesses any more than they were ready to declare any partisanship for the Communists, so Duplessis was free to disport himself as the indispensable rampart of democracy and established Christianity … against enemies that had no audible spokesmen. It was like hunting; it was good sport. Duplessis was a great nimrod, hunting subversive rodents, and the federal game warden kept interfering with him.19

  The Liberals remained silent when Duplessis passed a preposterous law in 1953 that authorized the provincial government to ban any religious movement that published “abusive or insulting attacks” on the established religions. Such legislation horrified and embarrassed Trudeau. In 1959 the “federal game warden”—the Supreme Court of Canada—finally decided in favour of Scott and Roncarelli and against Duplessis, who was ordered to pay damages of $46,132. That he did—not from his own pocket but from funds advanced by the Union nationale.

  Although historians first treated the fifties as a “return to normalcy,” much as the twenties had been, closer scrutiny has revealed the strong dynamic for change that emerged from unlikely places—from suburbs and urban slums, coffee houses and country music. Just as Jean Marchand had sung Monique Leyrac’s “Les lumières de ma ville” during the 1949 Asbestos Strike, in the 1950s Félix Leclerc gained international celebrity as he spun his musical folk tales of Quebec life. As a popular Québécois musical culture developed, it faced powerful competition from the blues and the rock rhythms of Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, and the first Motown beats that bellowed from the Impala hardtops that “cruised” St. Catherine Street. Trudeau treasured Leclerc, Leyrac, and the other chansonniers, but he found rock an alien dialect, even though his lithe body followed its beat in the late fifties on the dance floor. And, when his mother sorted out some of the Trudeau real-estate holdings, she asked Pierre if he wanted to take over some space at 518 Sherbrooke West, in the heart of the new nightlife district. While he retained his Outremont home address with her, the downtown “pad” brought him close to the new excitement on Montreal streets as the sixties approached. It also gave him independence, just as his appeal to and interest in women was strong.

  Madeleine Perron, for example, wrote a note praising Cité libre, but especially its editor. She asked if he had time between “two conquests” to send her a copy of the latest issue and concluded, “My admiration to the author, my hommage and respect to the prince, and my biggest peck to P
ierre.” Doris Lussier, who was gaining fame as an actor in the new television hit La famille Plouffe/The Plouffe Family, in both English and French Canada, supported his attack on clericalism in Cité libre, ending her message with the words “Long live your liberty! Sacred Pierre. You are peerless, like a Greek god.” Lionel Tiger, a McGill professor who also enjoyed Montreal’s nightlife, sent “regards to the exquisite woman with whom I occasionally see you living the good life with.”

  Carroll Guérin, an artist and occasional model to whom he likely referred, certainly was exquisitely beautiful, and she became one of Trudeau’s most frequent companions in the late fifties. In her elegance, dress, and appearance, she strikingly resembled Grace Kelly, the American movie star who married Prince Rainier of Monaco and dominated the tabloids of the day. And indeed, Trudeau did pursue women very much as the Greek gods did—or, for that matter, Prince Rainier. When a student in England did not return his calls during one of his visits, he wrote: