The enduring image of Trudeau during his life, one he often encouraged, was that of someone who from a young age always chafed at conformity. His classmates took the side of the French, so he took the side the English; they spoke street Québécois, joual, so he made a point of speaking the French of Paris. In this way, Trudeau forged himself into the firebrand the country came to see him as when he was prime minister.
We now know that this image of Trudeau as someone who had sprung out of the womb a rebel and an original was largely a construction. Trudeau himself more or less admitted as much late in life in the introduction to a 1996 collection of his writings, Against the Current, where he remembered that in his early years he was “more inclined to do and say the conventional thing” than to question what he was taught. Though he’d grown more rebellious by his teens, “the real sea change came” when he returned to Quebec after graduate studies abroad and found that his province “had become a citadel of orthodoxy with a state-of-siege mentality. To remain a free man in Quebec, one had to go against the current of ideas and institutions.”
This admission by Trudeau really goes to the heart of his political formation, even if it can’t quite be taken at face value: he was the one who had changed much more than his province had, alive now to unpleasant aspects of his home culture to which he had been blind before his experience of the wider world. In many ways this more mature Trudeau, for all the sense people would later have of him as someone who had never wavered from certain core beliefs, came to hold views that were the polar opposites of those he had held as a youth. It would be hard to understand Trudeau’s later political trajectory without understanding this crucial transitional period in his life and the demons he had had to wrestle with before he had got through it.
“MY CHILDHOOD having been a happy one,” Trudeau wrote, “I felt no need for ‘le doute méthodique.’” Happy, on the whole, his childhood may have been, but perhaps not quite in the generic way of Tolstoy’s happy families. Trudeau’s family stood out: a francophone father and anglophone mother, in an era when a kind of apartheid still reigned in Quebec between English and French; an increasing level of wealth that came not from some seigneurial past or from any of the traditional routes to respectability available to French Canadians—through the professions, mainly, particularly law—but through an entrepreneurial cunning that was entirely anomalous in French-Canadian society of the time.
If there was a true original in the Trudeau family, it was not Pierre but his father, Charles. Charles had indeed trained in the law but quickly grew bored with it and turned his mind to other pursuits. Correctly predicting the great future that lay ahead for the motor car, he started the Automobile Owners’ Association, a sort of loyalty program that for a small membership fee offered discounted gas and repairs at Charlie’s growing string of service stations. In 1932, by which time he had thirty stations and fifteen thousand members, he sold the business to Imperial Oil for $1.2 million. Then he took the money and made such clever investments—in mining, mostly, but also in an amusement park and the Montreal Royals baseball team—that in the very heart of the Depression he quickly managed to turn a small fortune into a much larger one.
Whatever hardships, then, Pierre may have endured while his father was establishing himself, by the time he was thirteen the family finances were such that money would not be a concern for him for the rest of his life. By then Charlie Trudeau, a hard-living bon vivant who dominated any room he was in and was forever holding late-night gatherings and jetting off to parts unknown, had apparently taken on a godlike status for the young Pierre, having managed by sheer force of will to pull the family up from the common lot into the upper crusts of Quebec society. Trudeau’s take on his father in later life was usually as this exalted figure, slightly distant and unknowable, but all the more godlike for that. Yet the sheer energy of the man must have put a fright in him. It was Charlie’s irritation at his son’s frail, sensitive nature as a young boy that had started Trudeau on the path of the athleticism he was constantly parading in later life. In home movies of the time, Pierre was always mugging for the camera or engaging in antics that foreshadowed the ways his own sons would one day behave around him in an effort to get his attention. In any event, Charlie, in between his late nights and his business trips, set high standards for Pierre, and Pierre, whether in worship or terror, always did whatever it took to live up to them. Though by nature almost his father’s opposite—retiring where his father was the consummate extrovert and tending toward the refined where his father tended toward the crude—much of what he became could be seen as a kind of offering to him, a re-channelling of his father’s irrepressible energy and will through his own, very different character.
“My father was gregarious, outgoing, expansive,” he told Gale Zoë Garnett years later. “I am not. Never have been. I am a solitaire, really. When I do something big and playful, like that pirouette behind the Queen, I am, I believe, pretending to be my father.”
Just a few short years after he made the family rich, Charlie, never one to slow his pace for the sake of his health, fell dead from a heart attack. He was in Florida for the Royals’ spring training when he came down with pneumonia. Pierre’s mother and sister went to tend to him, though the next news Pierre and his brother Tip had in Montreal was of their father’s death. Fifteen at the time, Trudeau said afterwards, “His death truly felt like the end of the world.” His other reaction, however, was to think that “all of a sudden, I was more or less the head of a family; with him gone, it seemed to me that I had to take over.” It might be simplistic to read an Oedipal wish-fulfillment in this thought, though over the next years—when he wasn’t off at Harvard or the Sorbonne or chasing revolutions—Trudeau would come to fulfill this role as the family’s head mainly with regard to his relationship with his mother, Grace. When Charlie died, Grace came out of the shadows to become a dominating presence not only in the family but on the Montreal social scene, and the man who was invariably on her arm when she was out and about was her son Pierre, who kept rooms in the family home into his forties and didn’t marry until his mother had passed into senility.
Clarkson and McCall, in their own speculation about the impact of Charlie’s death on Pierre, extensively mined exactly this Freudian vein, seeing the sudden disappearance of “the most powerful presence” in Trudeau’s life as the source of a “psychic imbalance” Trudeau could never get beyond. “The day would never come … when paternal dominance would be replaced by the father’s acknowledgement of the son’s achievements as a grown man.” Later biographers have been skeptical of this analysis, taking Trudeau’s reaction to his father’s death somewhat more at face value, as the normal grieving of an adolescent at the loss of a beloved parent. But whatever twist one gives it, the death would surely have marked Trudeau profoundly, and likely in ways which neither his own comments on it nor the comments of those around him would have plumbed the depths of. Clearly it was something that hung over Trudeau all his life—forty years later the memory of it could still bring tears to his eyes—not least for the fact that the tremendous freedom he enjoyed throughout his life to do as he wished rested largely on the fortune that Charlie had almost literally killed himself to amass.
In the short term, at least, the death may have brought some feeling of liberation along with the trauma. Suddenly Trudeau was free of this larger-than-life figure he had been trying to please all his childhood. This was the period in which a so-called anti-authoritarian streak began to come out in Trudeau at school, the elite Jesuit lycée Jean-de-Brébeuf, which had opened its doors in Montreal just a few years earlier. The streak manifested itself, however, mainly in a prankishness that seemed more calculated to call attention to Trudeau than to overthrow the established order. Even in the year of his father’s death, Trudeau managed to win awards and keep up his high academic standing. The evidence, in fact, suggests that far from becoming a maverick in these years, Trudeau, like most adolescents, was instead doing everything he could to be accepted and to fit in, tailoring himself to his differing environments in a way that went very much with the current rather than against it.
At home, where the reign of Grace had now replaced the reign of Charles, the atmosphere had grown increasingly English and refined. Gone were the late nights, the physicality, the coarse language and jokes. “When my father was around, there was a great deal of effusiveness and laughter and kissing and hugging,” he told biographer George Radwanski. “But after he died, it was a little bit more the English mores which took over, and we used to even joke about, or laugh at, some of our cousins or neighbours or friends—French Canadians—who’d always be very effusive within the family and towards their mothers and so on.”
But while he was becoming increasingly English at home, at school, in an almost Zelig-like compartmentalization, he was becoming increasingly French. There, his father’s death seemed to have had the effect of leading him to seek out father figures among his Jesuit teachers, men whose difference from his father prompts the question whether Trudeau was trying to fill a lack or rather explore a new freedom. Some of these teachers were to exercise an enormous influence over him, in ways that were not generally known until Trudeau biographer John English and former Cité libre editors Max and Monique Nemni were granted access to Trudeau’s archive after his death. What these researchers found was a portrait of Trudeau’s formation substantially at odds with the standard, accepted version during his life.
In their groundbreaking book Young Trudeau: 1919–1944, Max and Monique Nemni use materials from the Trudeau archive to show how, far from learning at Brébeuf, as one of his teachers was to claim, the values of “federalism, democracy, and pluralism” that would become the bedrock of Trudeau’s beliefs in later years, he was instead initiated into a brand of reactionary nationalism very much at odds with these values but quite common in Quebec in the years preceding the Second World War. Trudeau was in the habit of keeping thorough records, even going so far as to save drafts of his letters, and his archive contains a treasure trove of notebooks and journals and papers of every sort. Using these, the Nemnis have shown that the Trudeau who emerged from Brébeuf was one who subscribed not only to the widespread anti-Semitism of the day but to the church’s disdain for democracy.
In Quebec, the church’s preferred model of governance in that period was a so-called corporatist one, in which the state acted as a sort of benevolent parent, governing citizens who couldn’t be trusted to govern themselves. This was the very model that lay behind the fascist dictatorships then gaining ascendancy in Europe. The church’s ultimate goal in Quebec was an independent state that functioned as a kind of theocracy, Catholic and ethnically pure. In an essay Trudeau wrote at Brébeuf about his hopes for the future, he imagined just such a prospect. After establishing himself as an international war hero, he would return home “around the year 1976” just in time to lead the charge in the establishment of an independent Quebec that was “Catholic and canadien.”
Canadien, in Quebec, was always a term that referred not to Canadians as a whole but only to the “real” Canadians, the descendants of the pre-Conquest French habitants. Putting aside the unintentional irony of Trudeau’s reference to 1976—the year René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois would come to power—the swashbuckling tone of the essay was decidedly tongue-in-cheek. But this was not satire: however much Trudeau might have been indulging in a flight of fancy, he was doing so within terms that would not only have been accepted at Brébeuf but encouraged. The point comes through more starkly in a play the Nemnis quote that Trudeau wrote for the college’s tenth-anniversary celebrations. Originally titled On est Canadiens français ou on ne l’est pas, a popular nationalist saying of the day, but then changed to Dupés, “duped,” the play’s apparent message was that Jewish merchants were stealing the livelihoods of French Canadians. The idea echoed a buy-from-our-own campaign being championed at the time by the outspoken cleric and nationalist leader Abbé Lionel Groulx.
If Trudeau was rebelling against anything at this age, it certainly wasn’t the narrow-minded nationalism that later made Quebec seem “a citadel of orthodoxy” to him. Yet his writings of the time were full of the language of rebellion. In Dupés, a character named Ditreau, who claims a diploma in “commercial psychology,” advises the French-Canadian tailor Couture to pretend to be a Jew to improve his business. French Canadians, Ditreau says, prefer to buy from Jews, “firstly because they don’t want to enrich one of their own and then because they believe they will get a better price.” Couture goes along at first, then rebels. “Now it’s my turn to teach a lesson: the Canadien people is a sleeping lion. It will soon awaken.” Perhaps this was exactly the appeal of nationalism to someone of Trudeau’s disposition, that it allowed all the rhetoric of rebellion without costing him the approval of his superiors. One almost senses even in Dupés, which had the same tongue-in-cheek tone as his essay on his hopes for the future, that the actual content was just an excuse for indulging a certain irreverence. Ditreau—his name was an obvious play on “Trudeau,” who in fact played him in the production—can’t help but strike us now as offensive, but there is also a mischievousness to him that cuts in both directions.
Trudeau noted on his copy of the script that the play was presented “before parents and students with great success.” Success seems to have been the point for him. A few days earlier he had taken it very hard when he had lost a student election to his friend and great rival at Brébeuf, Jean de Grandpré, the same man who would later come to advise him not to run for the Liberal leadership. By now, as if to reconcile the double life he had begun to lead, Pierre had taken to including his matronymic, Elliott, as part of his name, but he had cause to wonder if it had cost him the election. In Citizen of the World, John English describes how Trudeau learned of an accusation made behind his back that he was “mediocre, Americanized, and Anglicized, in short, I would betray my race.” For Trudeau the accusation was “a profound shock.” “I would never betray the French Canadians,” he wrote in his journal. But he was also determined to retain his own Englishness, which he thought—not entirely correctly, it seems—helped give him the strength to resist simply following “the popular spirit.” “I am proud of my English blood, which comes from my mother. At least it tempers my boiling French blood. It leaves me calmer and more insightful and perspicacious.”
This kind of reflection on a dual heritage is very familiar to the children of immigrants, who grow up fighting dual claims in almost every arena. What is surprising with Trudeau is how seldom the issue seems to have come up for open discussion, not only in his youth but also in his later political life. Even though his doubleness formed an important part of his public image, there always seemed a taboo around any actual allusion to it. One infamous breaking of this taboo was René Lévesque’s snide and ill-considered reference to Trudeau’s “Elliott” side just days before the 1980 referendum, in much the same terms as the anonymous accusation levelled at Trudeau back at Brébeuf. This time, Trudeau was able to give as good he got, in a rousing speech at Paul Sauvé Arena that cost Lévesque the high ground and may have cost him the referendum. Back at Brébeuf, however, Trudeau, for all his self-reflection, showed little understanding of the essentially irreconcilable conflict between his own Englishness and his growing allegiance to an anti-English ethnic nationalism.
As a young man, in an apparent compromise, Trudeau came to refer to his mother not as English but as Scottish. At Brébeuf, however, what may have helped him to abide his contradictions was that his mother had inherited French blood from her own mother, along with an ardent Catholicism that was always to remain a strong point of contact between her and her son. When Trudeau was at home, he never missed a Mass with his mother, and their shared faith may have served as a sort of bridge for him, a point of reconciliation between the English world of home and French one of Brébeuf, where he attended Mass as often as three times a day. Trudeau, for all his aura of rationalism and secularism, was to remain a staunch Catholic the rest of his life, faltering briefly in his faith, according to friends, only at the time of the death of his son Michel. One reason, perhaps, that his Catholicism remained so central to him was because of this unifying role it had had for him as an adolescent, holding together his disparate selves.
TRUDEAU EMERGED from Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf steeped in views that were fairly typical for his time and place and social class. Trudeau himself, however, was hardly typical. At Brébeuf he had been, as he would later be, a star. That quality would perhaps remain the real constant in his life, his ability to excel, to shine in the right ways and at the right moment. The skill seemed less the result of some natural flair than of an iron discipline, one that went back to the pains he had taken to please his father but that had been honed to a razor edge by the Jesuits at Brébeuf. He had mastered every subject there, and in his final year beat even his rival Jean de Grandpré to stand first in the school; he had read extensively, always beyond the required texts, and had written commentaries on everything he had read. He had been the captain of the hockey team; he had skied, played lacrosse, swum, boxed, and sailed. He had had his debates and his plays, his student politics and his student paper, had played piano and gone to the symphony. Among a group of already exceptional students, he had been more exceptional, for which he had been rewarded with prizes—often, to his pleasure, in cash—and with praise.
When he emerged from this cocoon of adulation and familiarity, however, schooled in an ideology designed to prepare him to take his place in the French-Canadian elite, he promptly attempted to flee his French self and indulge his English one, applying for a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford. Until then he had expressed his hopes for the future mainly in the vague, lofty terms adolescents are given to. “I would like so much to be a great politician and to guide my nation,” he had written in his journal in 1938, though he had also flirted with the idea of joining the priesthood. In his Rhodes application, however, he stated quite unequivocally that he planned to pursue a career in politics. “For some years now,” he wrote, “I have sought out activities that prepare one most immediately for public life,” among which he included his diction lessons, his acting, and his singing lessons. Whether Trudeau, in the time-honoured manner of application-fillers, was merely trying to suggest some pattern to what might otherwise seem a hopeless hodgepodge, the idea of politics had at least crossed his mind by now, even if in his play, Dupés; Trudeau’s character Ditreau had been rejected by his beloved for being that vilest of things, a politician.
For once, Trudeau failed to get the prize. The Rhodes, despite his impressive credentials and glowing references, went to another candidate. Unexpectedly, Trudeau found himself at loose ends, and as a fallback began to study law at the Université de Montréal. In the meantime, the Second World War had broken out. In his memoirs, Trudeau gave the impression that he paid as little attention to the war as he could get away with. “[T]he instinct that made me go against prevailing opinion caused me to affect a certain air of indifference. So there was a war? Tough. It wouldn’t stop me from concentrating on my studies so long as that was possible.”
Again, Trudeau may have overplayed in hindsight his resistance to “prevailing opinion,” not to mention his interest in his studies. His studies, in fact, bored him. Though he performed with his usual brilliance, graduating, in 1943, once more at the top of his class, he often spoke dismissively of law school at the time, and never with any of the excitement with which he spoke of his days at Brébeuf. The one lasting legacy of his years there, perhaps, was that it was where he first came across a man who would later prove a great influence on him, the law professor, constitutional expert and civil libertarian, F.R. Scott, who spoke at the university in 1943 on the question of conscription. At the time, though, Trudeau was apparently just as taken with an extracurricular lecture by Abbé Lionel Groulx, who, despite being a man of the cloth, spoke on the conditions under which armed insurrection could be justified, using the Lower Canada Rebellion of 1837–38 as his example.
Most of Trudeau’s time at law school, however, was taken up not with his studies but with exactly the sorts of issues which he later claimed to have had little involvement in. If in his desire to go to England—though only as a scholar; he’d shown no interest in going as a soldier—he had at some level been expressing a wish to escape the narrowness of Quebec nationalist culture, now that he was stuck in it he very much continued to play his part. In his memoirs, he shrugged off a speech he gave at an anti-conscription rally as a momentary effort that had less to do with the war than with the affront to democracy shown by the federal government’s reversal on conscription. In reality, however, Trudeau’s speech was the culmination of many weeks of involvement in a federal by-election on behalf of the anticonscription candidate Jean Drapeau. The speech itself, given at a rally in the campaign’s final days, made such an impression that Le Devoir quoted great portions of it. Speaking of the hysteria he claimed the government was stirring up of an imminent German invasion, Trudeau said he “feared the peaceful invasion of immigrants”—often a code word for Jews—“more than the armed invasion of the enemy.” While in the past, he went on, the French Canadians had had to fight against the Iroquois, “today it is against other savages” they had to fight, namely the Mackenzie King Liberals in Ottawa.
All of this went far beyond the innocent defence of democratic principles into the truly hateful. It was demagoguery; it was, in this man who would later be known by the motto “Reason over passion,” an appeal to the basest impulses. At twenty-three, Trudeau was still clearly of his times rather than above them. As at Brébeuf, he was still attracted to the rhetoric of revolution, but as then, he took care to apply it in a way more likely to earn him accolades than billy clubs.
The other holdover from Brébeuf, however, was Trudeau’s telltale playfulness. The speech was full of inside jokes and puns, playing throughout on the name Drapeau, or flag, and that of Drapeau’s rival, La Flèche, or arrow. It ended with the line “Enough of cataplasmes [bandages], bring on the cataclysms,” exactly the sort of clever formulation the young Trudeau revelled in, at once rousing and comic. As odious as the speech was, then, it bore the trace of the same doubleness as his play, Dupés, a tone of mockery whose target remained unclear. Self-mockery, perhaps, but also a kind of subconscious escape clause, as if, in a pinch, one could claim to others, or to oneself, not to have been speaking seriously. The stakes were higher now than at Brébeuf—this was the real world, with real consequences—but Trudeau still seemed to be hiding behind the same mask, half-denying even as he affirmed. Perhaps that was what lay behind his later claim that he hadn’t involved himself much in politics during the war: the sense that he hadn’t, really, not in some essential part of himself, had merely been playing a role. In one of his pranks during the war years, he and a friend dressed up in old Prussian uniforms and toured the countryside on their Harleys calling on friends and frightening passersby, who perhaps thought that the Huns had truly arrived at their shores.
If he was playing a role, however, he seemed prepared to take it to extremes. At Brébeuf, Trudeau had come under the influence of one of the more politicized teachers, Father Rodolphe Dubé, better known by his pen name, François Hertel. In 1939 Hertel had published Le beau risque, a nationalist coming-of-age tale in which the young Pierre Martel turns away from the Anglicized and Americanized values of his father toward a renewed Catholicism and devotion to his patrie. Martel’s life so clearly paralleled Trudeau’s that Hertel had surely used him as a model, though Trudeau, who reviewed the book in his journal, gave no indication of recognizing the resemblances.
After leaving Brébeuf, Trudeau kept up contact with Hertel, who was a frequent guest at the Trudeau home. In Young Trudeau, the Nemnis have made a convincing case that Trudeau was involved with Hertel and several of his old Brébeuf schoolmates in a secret society called “les X ” or “L.X.,” also referred to as les Frères chasseurs. The society’s mission was the establishment of an independent Quebec organized on Catholic and corporatist—in other words, fascist—principles. Through the summer of 1942, Trudeau and his friend Jean-Baptiste Boulanger worked on what they called the “Plan,” using writers like Trudeau’s beloved Plato to direct them, but also the anti-Semitic and anti-democratic Charles Maurras, a strong supporter of Marshall Pétain’s Vichy government. After several drafts they came up with a manifesto that summarized their aim as a “national revolution,” which they saw as “a permanent struggle aimed at the human excellence of the community.” The country to emerge from this revolution, the manifesto concluded, would be “Catholic, French and Laurentian” and would express itself “in a State that is at the same time authoritarian and the guardian of freedoms.”
The Nemnis were able to track later references to the society by some of its former members. Hertel, for instance, admitted Trudeau’s involvement in it to La Presse in 1977, even ascribing its formation to Trudeau. The playwright and actor Jean-Louis Roux, meanwhile, wrote about the society in his memoirs, recalling a document that was passed around explaining how the city’s police and fire stations would be captured and its radio stations occupied when the day of action came. Roux later paid heavily for his own antics during the war, losing an appointment as Quebec’s lieutenant-governor when it became known he had worn a swastika as a part of anti-conscription protest. But Trudeau, for some reason, was spared, even though many of the details about his wartime activities would have been readily available to journalists during his lifetime.
On the eventual fate of les X, the Nemnis have been unable to offer much direction. The paper trail ends in 1943; the society may have gone on working for years in deepest secrecy or may simply have collapsed from its own irrelevance. “Parfaitement loufoque,” Roux said of the enterprise, perfectly nutty, and it had enough of the same suspicious tone of highhanded irreverence of many of Trudeau’s earlier projects for one to wonder how seriously its own members took it. At the end of the manifesto for the group that Trudeau and Boulanger had written up, they had tacked the line “God approves.” Another document that outlined methods for dealing with traitors included “temporary kidnapping” among its suggestions. Roux, who announced he was quitting the group when it gave him the ludicrous task of recruiting to it the secretary general of the Université de Montréal, Édouard Montpetit, was made to believe that severe repercussions awaited those who tried to drop out. “The days, the weeks, the months went by,” Roux recalled later. “Nothing occurred. I’m still waiting.”
We may never really know if the young man whose rebelliousness at Brébeuf had seldom risen above the level of throwing snowballs was truly plotting a fascist coup—with what would have had to have been a nearly psychotic level of delusion—or if the whole project was merely an intellectual exercise to relieve the boredom of law school or confound his future biographers. This last possibility is a real one. In a commentary he wrote at Brébeuf on Pascal’s Pensées that is reproduced by the Nemnis, the young Trudeau reflected at length, with eerie foresight, on his future biographers. After admitting that pride—the fear he might later look ridiculous—often prevented him from putting down his true thoughts, he then admitted to the greater pride beyond this fear, namely the assumption “that some day biographers will delve into all that we have written down to follow therein the development of our thinking.” He went on in that vein, trying to find the way around a selfconsciousness that only became more tortuous and inescapable the more he explored it. “Pascal, writing down his thoughts,” he concluded, “was more assured of surviving than I am (more assured because of his previous success, but not more convinced! Such is my assurance.) (I have this assurance because I’m role playing, and not so much because it’s definitely within me.)”
By the end of the passage we feel as if we are in a house of mirrors, with no basis anymore for ascertaining which image is the true one. Trudeau, in a tone at once whimsical and troubled, gave us a window here onto a complexity of character that was both a sort of freedom and a sort of prison, that multiplied his possible selves but left him caught up in a selfconsciousness that then gave the lie to each of them. “If you want to know my thoughts,” Trudeau started his journal of 1938, “read between the lines!” The self-consciousness, the presumed audience, was always there, making every statement somehow doubly suspect. It would be a risk to take at face value the writings of a young man in whom selfrevelation and self-concealment were so interwoven.
John English notes in Citizen of the World that radical groups like les X were quite common in Quebec during the war. Gérard Pelletier recalled in his memoirs that Jean Marchand, too, “had been recruited into one of the innumerable leagues that existed at the time (each one with twelve or fifteen members), all of which wanted to overthrow the government and put an end to democracy. That was the spirit of the age.” That same spirit would return some years later in the FLQ, only this time with real bombs and with real kidnappings. Trudeau by then would find himself on a very different side of the question, though some of the parallels between the two periods may provide insight into the younger Trudeau. There was something reminiscent of the young Pierre Trudeau in Hubert Aquin, for instance, the author, intellectual, and would-be felquiste who served time in a psychiatric hospital after announcing he was going underground to become a terrorist. In Aquin’s semi-autobiographical novel Prochain épisode, a narrator imprisoned for an unnamed revolutionary crime recounts a sort of spy story set around Lake Geneva that is a complex allegory of Quebec’s oppression and of the narrator’s, and Aquin’s, own experience. In its self-consciousness and reflexivity, where reality and fantasy become difficult to separate, the book recalls the writings of the young Trudeau, refusing ever to settle squarely on a clear self-characterization or on a single plan of action or point of view. Aquin was arrested after he declared his terrorist intentions but was never convicted of any crime, and his life reads much less like that of a revolutionary than that of a tortured intellectual who was unable to escape the straitjacket of his cultural identity or the frustration of his own inaction. After discussing suicide with the people around him for many years, in a running dialogue that almost became a kind of farce, he finally shot himself outside a Catholic girls’ school in Montreal.
Aquin was perhaps the extreme end of the kind of circular self-consciousness the young Trudeau manifested, one that intellectuals in the hothouse culture of Quebec would have been particularly prone to whenever the calls of nationalism and collective loyalty made it difficult to indulge the usual ambiguities and doubts of an intelligent mind. The portrait of Trudeau that emerges from the war years is of someone living a divided identity, throwing himself full force into a lunatic revolutionary movement as if to prove he would never be the one to betray his race, as his anonymous accuser at Brébeuf had suggested, yet still winning his accolades at school, and still living out his Englishness at home.
Over the years there would be many casualties among Quebec nationalists of men who, like Aquin, were never able to reconcile the contradictions between collective and self. It may have been the church, again, that helped save Trudeau. His extracurricular readings of the time included not only reactionaries like Charles Maurras and André Tardieu—and his commentaries on these were disturbingly uncritical—but also Catholic writers like Pascal and François Mauriac and Henri Bergson, who were somewhat more in the mainstream of Western thought. From them he would draw the ideas that became the basis both for his later “personalist” approach to his faith and for the values that would come to define his view of the individual and of human rights. The faith that had bound him to a regressive nationalism would also be his way free of it. In the 1950s, his personalism would make him one of the leading critics in Quebec of a church hierarchy whose paternalism and authoritarianism he had sought to glorify during the war.
At Brébeuf, where Trudeau valued his religion classes above all others, he jotted down these notes inspired by a teacher, Father Lamarche, for whom he had had a tremendous respect. “See the truth wherever it is to be found. If one is not strong enough to act accordingly, that is too bad. But one should at least be loyal enough to recognize that what is true is true.” These words sound like the Trudeau we would all eventually come to know. But if something in him during his war years in Quebec saw through to the truth, he was not “strong enough to act accordingly.” He went with the current. When the atrocities in Europe began to be widely known he dismissed them as propaganda, as many Quebecers did, writing a vicious parody of Mackenzie King’s renewed call to arms for the university paper. Meanwhile he attended rallies that turned into anti-Semitic riots. He also staged a play in which Adam Dollard des Ormeaux, killed by the Iroquois in the 1600s, stood for the embattled French Canadians and the Iroquois, as in his anti-conscription speech, stood for the savage English (although Trudeau, always layering in his ambiguities, played an Iroquois in the actual production). In one of his more bizarre escapades, related by the Nemnis in Young Trudeau, he turned a debate on gallantry into an elaborate anti-British protest, lacing his comments with double meanings and planting his fellow Frères chasseurs in the audience to help further the spectacle. In the final moments, one of Trudeau’s plants pretended to heckle him and Trudeau pulled out a gun loaded with blanks and fired it at him. He then turned his back to the audience and made a gesture of being hanged, ending by pointing to his backside and suggesting a Union Jack be planted there.
We may recognize the later Trudeau in the style of these antics but not so much in their intent. In 2004 the CBC released a peculiar drama called Maverick in the Making, in which the young Trudeau was depicted as many of us would have imagined him in these years: attending anti-Franco meetings, getting beaten up by the Montreal fascists, fighting the church establishment at every turn. Many of these scenes have so much the ring of truth that one has to keep reminding oneself that they are pure fabrication. At one point Pierre goes to confession, and just before launching into a diatribe against church authority he asks the priest if it is possible that the war against the Nazis is a just one. But there is little evidence that this question ever occurred to the real Trudeau at the time.
Trudeau’s flurry of public actions ended abruptly when he graduated from law school in 1943, as did his subversive activities with les X and a period of intense reading and writing and publication. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, he had also grown suddenly bitter and disillusioned. In a jotting that was never published he wrote, “If the ordinary people truly realized what sort it was they were relying on to ensure salvation … they would not wait another day before giving up altogether.” He had been disappointed by his own co-conspirators, or perhaps by the whole future elite of Quebec with whom he had just spent three years at law school, and whom he accused of being utterly “two-faced” and lacking in character.
Obviously “two-faced,” in Trudeau’s lexicon, was much more heinous than many-faced, as he was. Yet his bitterness seemed genuine: he had seen past some scrim, had seen the divide between talk and action. He himself, despite a legitimate claim to divided loyalties, had been willing to give over the whole of his energies to the call of the collectivity. He may have found that others, for all their talk, were not quite so ready to rise to the challenge.
A YEAR OF ARTICLING was enough for Trudeau to grow bored, as his father had, with the practice of law. “[T]hat’s the problem when you have an office,” he told George Radwanski. “People come to you with their problems.” Then, in 1944, he finally received permission from Canadian authorities, denied the previous year on account of the war, to leave the country to study in the United States. The next years would prove crucial. As John English shows in Citizen of the World, through Trudeau’s correspondence and other writings of this period, the man who left Quebec feeling intellectually bankrupt and hollowed out would return to it five years later with an outlook that was much changed from that of his youth, and that would come to define him for the rest of his life.
Trudeau had chosen to go to Harvard, to study “Political Economy and Government.” In his memoirs, he said he had been torn “between law, psychology, sociology, and political science.” After consulting many people, including the great Quebec intellectual and political leader Henri Bourassa, by then in his seventies, Trudeau finally took the advice of André Laurendeau, at the time a Quebec MNA, who pointed out to him that Quebec was sadly lacking in economists. In his Harvard application, however, Trudeau stayed true to the hope he had expressed when he had applied for a Rhodes Scholarship to follow a career in politics. “I need not hide my conviction that Canada is decidedly lacking in statesmen. We French-Canadians in particular have too few political thinkers to lead us, and the sight of such splendid people going to ruin appalls me.”
It did not take Trudeau long to realize how blinkered his life in Quebec had been over the previous few years. In his memoirs, he recalled that in the “super-informed environment” of Harvard, he began to grasp, for the first time, the “true dimensions” of the war. Harvard had on faculty several professors who had fled the Nazis, including Hitler’s predecessor as chancellor, Heinrich Brüning. “I realized then that I had, as it were, missed one of the major events of the century in which I was living.”
A great deal seemed to go unstated in this recollection. He ended it thus: “Did I feel any regret? No. I have always regarded regret as a useless emotion.” But as the war was ending in 1945, he wrote to the girlfriend he had left behind in Montreal expressing exactly that, regret, seeming mortified at the mindset that had allowed him to remain caught up his own partisan pursuits while unimaginable horrors were occurring across the sea. His laments had the quality of a cri di cœur—understandably so, given that the “true dimensions” of the war had been well enough known for some time by then, and he had chosen to discount them. As much as he later downplayed this moment of revelation, it was likely determinative for him in setting the future course of his thinking.
Trudeau’s notes from the time show he had been reading up on Fascism and National Socialism and understanding how narrow and unreflective his own political thinking had been. Commenting on one of his readings he noted that “democracy is not synonymous with capitalistic exploitation,” with the tone of someone who had just emerged from a pampered dictatorship to discover that the wider world was not the den of iniquity he had been led to believe.
Trudeau mentioned that Heinrich Brüning, a Catholic, had fled the Nazis for Harvard, but he didn’t mention any Jews who had found refuge from the Nazis there, probably because none had. Despite the massive influx of Jewish intellectuals into the United States before and during the war, Harvard, in addition to a tacit quota on Jewish students, maintained a virtual moratorium on the hiring of Jewish faculty well into the 1940s. This “super-informed environment” was not exactly super-enlightened. Trudeau, however, an outsider now, keeping to his room in the graduate residence much of the time despite the “Citizen of the World” tag pinned to his door, and making few friends, might have grown more sensitive to other outsiders. A friend he did make, in fact, was fellow graduate student Louis Hartz, who became a sort of mentor. He was one of the few Jews who had managed to slip in under the quota and would later go on to become a full professor at Harvard and one of its most influential political scientists.
Though Trudeau later spoke enthusiastically about his time at Harvard, his letters of the time, quoted at length by John English, show he was not very happy there. From having been the centre of attention he was suddenly a provincial; and everything he had learned and thought, his entire formation, must suddenly have seemed a bill of goods. Outside the conformist atmosphere of Quebec, where it had been possible to indulge his rebelliousness simply by subscribing to the views of his superiors, he was discovering ways of making sense of the world that he had never considered. Much of his later intransigence toward Quebec nationalists likely went back to this time, when the scales fell from his eyes and he realized how blinded he had been by his own nationalism.
Even so, he allowed himself to ease toward a new understanding only by a kind of “étapisme,” not so much renouncing old views as reasoning toward new ones, as if to save himself the shock of complete reversal. One part of his past education he was happy to leave behind, however, was his time at law school: he now had confirmed for him what he had suspected all along, that much of what he had been taught there was beside the point. It was at Harvard that he came to understand the law not as a dull collection of jots and tittles but, as he would later tell Peter Newman when he became justice minister, as a structure for “planning for the society of tomorrow,” the very warp and woof of what held a society together. He also received a solid grounding in economics at Harvard, one of the reasons, after all, he had chosen to go there. He later tended to downplay his understanding of economics, always stressing his cultured side over his political one, but at Harvard he studied with people like the pre-eminent post-Keynesian economist John Kenneth Galbraith and the eventual Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief. It was at Harvard that he was first exposed to the Keynesian theories of interventionism that would guide his own years in office. But there were also many opponents of Keynes at Harvard who left their mark. In Citizen of the World, John English makes the argument that what many people later took as a lack of rigour in Trudeau’s economic thinking was really the understanding he took from the divergent views he was exposed to at Harvard that “economic judgements were not the product of a science but more often the result of special interests.” What in Trudeau the politician came across as indifference to economics, then, may more properly have been distrust of it.
In later years Trudeau would give the impression that Harvard had merely confirmed him on a path he had already been on. The evidence, however, suggests that it was exactly at Harvard that the ideas that later defined him first took root. His writings of the time show that what he took from Harvard was not simple theory but a growing understanding of the complex ways in which societies function and of how their various aspects—their laws, their economies, their political systems—interconnect. From someone who had had a suspicion of liberalism and democracy and capitalism bred into him from a young age, he was becoming a grudging convert. He was also starting to understand how pie-in-the-sky some of his youthful ideas had been. Back in Montreal, writing his manifestos for les X, he hadn’t given much thought to how his Laurentian state would put food on the table.
In 1946 he earned his master’s from Harvard and went on to Paris to do courses at the École libre des sciences politiques and the Sorbonne. His plan was to begin research for a doctorate on the relationship between Christianity and Communism, a topic that showed how far he had come in his thinking in his two years at Harvard. In Paris he ended up spending little time in class, however, and much more touring the cafés with old acquaintances from Quebec he had met up with there. These included Gérard Pelletier, whose close, lifelong friendship with Trudeau really dated to this time; Roger Rolland, who had been part of Trudeau’s Prussian soldier prank; Jean-Louis Roux, who presumably was still awaiting his reprisals from les X; and his former Brébeuf mentor, François Hertel. In 1947 Hertel would be expelled from the Jesuits for his controversial views, and eventually his trenchant nationalism would result in a bitter split between him and Trudeau. But for now his presence brought Trudeau away from his Harvard liberalism and back to the question of religion.
It was during his time in Paris that Trudeau came to embrace personalism, a philosophy that was to provide him another bridge between the values he had grown up with and the ones he was evolving toward. Founded by the French thinker Emmanuel Mounier, personalism was a sort of spiritualized existentialism, asserting the primacy of the individual and of free will but balancing these with the demands of social conscience and social responsibility. For Trudeau, the philosophy became—perhaps a bit conveniently—a means both of holding on to his past and of remaking it, transforming a Catholicism that in Quebec had consisted of a close-minded authoritarianism into one consonant with the principles of liberal democracy and individualism. Implicit in the philosophy was an almost Protestant notion of personal conscience that would later serve as a bulwark for Trudeau in his battles with the priestbased Catholicism of Quebec.
Another great influence on Trudeau at the time was the French philosopher and political thinker Jacques Maritain, a Catholic convert who advocated a philosophy he called integral humanism. Like personalism, it sought a way to reintroduce the spiritual element that had been lost in secular humanism. As one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1947, Maritain was a key figure in establishing the notion of inalienable rights that would one day motivate Trudeau’s own Charter. The Nemnis point out, however, that when Trudeau had read Maritain in 1944 while still in Quebec, he had not been especially impressed, accusing him of hanging on “to a backward-looking democracy” and of being “right out of it” where practical issues were concerned.
From Paris, without having accomplished much in terms of his studies, Trudeau moved on after a year to the London School of Economics, abandoning his dissertation on Communism and Christianity to start a new doctoral program in political science. Friendless again, Trudeau found London a repeat of his experience at Harvard. For a “citizen of the world,” he was not yet very adept at negotiating unfamiliar environments, and he found postwar London a tremendous letdown after Paris. At the LSE, however, he studied under the world-renowned leftist Harold Laski, who ended up having a tremendous influence on him. Trudeau had been drawn to the left during his time in Paris, where Communism had been very much in vogue and even the personalists leaned toward a kind of Christian socialism. Now Laski, a mythic presence at the LSE, drew him further. Laski had a towering intellect but was also a brilliant and beloved teacher—and someone who, like Trudeau, relished a good fight.
Laski was also a Jew. In his memoirs, Trudeau made frequent references to the wide range of humanity he encountered in his studies abroad, a situation that was “a complete change from the rather parochial climate” he had known growing up in Montreal. In all likelihood, the notion of multiculturalism Trudeau later came to espouse in Canada actually had its roots in these first real experiences outside the country. The Montreal of his childhood was hardly monocultural, yet he had lived it as such, where everyone who was other—the English, the immigrants, the Jews—was the enemy. Now the boundaries between “us” and “them” were dissolving; it was in this sense that he truly became a “citizen of the world.” Now his friends were Jews; now his professor and mentor was. Canada didn’t make him a pluralist; the world did, in these very personal bonds he developed—first in his studies and later in his travels—with people who had previously been entirely outside the realm of his experience.
According to John English, Laski, as one of the major thinkers in the British socialist movement, became a model for Trudeau of the “engaged intellectual.” In Laski, Trudeau saw what he himself could be. Trudeau later said that it was in London that “everything I had learned until then of law, economics, political science, and political philosophy came together for me.” Indeed, the titles of his courses with Laski read like a checklist for every tool Trudeau would later need in his political toolkit: “Democracy and the British Constitution,” “Liberalism,” and “Revolution.” Even Trudeau’s understanding of federalism went back to Laski: the sharing of power in federal systems was one of Laski’s major areas of interest.
Trudeau completed a year of studies at the LSE but, as at the Sorbonne, he obtained no degree, having by now abandoned the idea of a doctorate. Before returning home, however, he set himself one more “challenge,” as he put it: he had decided to travel the world. Rather than sticking to the wellworn routes, however, he intended “to range more widely.” To that end he would eschew the more comfortable means of travel he could well have afforded in favour of those “of Everyman,” going on foot, by bus, by cargo boat, the better “to mix with local populations” and “learn their habits, their troubles, and their reactions.”
Despite the slightly anthropological tone of his description of it, the trip proved to be as crucial, in its way, to Trudeau’s later political career as his international studies would be. For one thing, much of the mystique that surrounded him, and in particular the sense of his having been a hippie avant la lettre that so appealed to young people, derived from this trip. But just as importantly, the trip humbled him. The stories that were told afterwards were the dramatic ones, the arrests and near-arrests, the wars and the revolutions. But in later years what always struck people who travelled with Trudeau was his tremendous humility as a traveller, his ability to immerse himself in a foreign culture without presuming to know better than his hosts. It was a humility, according to Trudeau’s son Alexandre, that went back to this first trip.
Alexandre’s foreword to a 2007 reissue of Two Innocents in Red China—an account by his father and Jacques Hébert of a trip they took together in 1960—talked about the importance of his father’s earlier round-the-world trip, when for first time Trudeau stepped beyond the borders of the “well-established social values” he had been able to depend on until then.
In the Canadian wilds, he had deliberately deprived himself of physical and even psychological shelter, but he had never had to deal with the near total absence of all moral shelter. In his great journey of 1949 he found himself on many occasions without the protection of the rule of law, in situations where he had to rely for survival not on his own wits or strength of limb, but on a force completely beyond his control: the kindness of strangers.
It was a very different Trudeau who would return to Quebec at the end of 1949 than the one who had left it in 1944. It was still not quite the Trudeau we would come to know of, or the Trudeau we would think we knew, but by now all the scaffolding was in place.