TWO WORLDS
The Great War was over; the times tasted bitter. Influenza came back with the soldiers and killed more at home than had died in the trenches. Like the war, it preferred the young to the old. Death usually came quickly as the victims suffocated in a blood-tinged froth that sometimes gushed grotesquely from their faces.1. As winter became spring in 1919, theatres stayed empty. Men and women entered public places warily, concealing their faces behind gauze masks. The plague invaded private spaces, compelling isolation and reflection. What, then, did Grace Elliott Trudeau and her husband, Joseph-Charles-Émile, think when she learned she was pregnant in Montreal in mid-winter 1919? Pregnancy was dangerous in normal times, but the influenza surely terrified her as her body began to swell with her second child.
The twentieth century had so far been a great disappointment—especially for francophone Canadians. There was some excitement and hope when it began with Canada’s first French-speaking prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier, in power, and an increasingly prosperous economy. The great transformation of Western society that occurred as electricity, steamships, telephones, railways, and automobiles upset the balance of the Victorian age profoundly affected the world of the young Trudeaus. In Quebec, as elsewhere, people were in motion, leaving the familiar fields of rural life and traditional crafts for the cities that were exploding beyond their pre-industrial core. In Montreal, the population rose from 267,730 in 1901 to 618,506 in 1921. The rich had clustered together, initially in mansions in the “Golden Square Mile” along Sherbrooke Street and north up the southern slope of Mount Royal, while the poor spread out below them and in the east end. It was said in 1900 that the Square Mile contained three-quarters of Canada’s millionaires. Stephen Leacock, who knew them well, commented, “The rich in Montreal enjoyed a prestige in that era that not even the rich deserve.”2
Unfortunately, the rich were nearly entirely English; the poor, overwhelmingly French. When the French lived mainly in the villages, the gap was less obvious. In the city, it sowed the seeds of deep discontent. And, as new immigrants, mainly Jewish, flowed in from continental Europe, new tensions emerged in the more diverse city.3
Even before the war, foreign visitors sensed trouble. In 1911 the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, after a visit to Montreal, said that all reasonable men should advise the French to abandon their resistance to assimilation. They were fast becoming simply an episode in history.4 Among francophones in Quebec, the challenge of the new century brought an increasingly nationalist response, particularly when English-Canadian politicians became entangled in the British imperialism that marked the years before the Great War. By then there was a new prime minister, Robert Borden, and the voice of French Canada in the federal government became faint. And in 1914 the war divided the country as never before between the French and the others.
Once again, it seemed that a bargain had been broken. Now leader of the official Opposition, Wilfrid Laurier supported the war, along with the French Catholic Church. Even Henri Bourassa, who had founded the nationalist newspaper Le Devoir and become the vocal spokesperson for francophone rights throughout Canada, kept his silence. He and the bishops went along because Borden promised there would be no conscription, but, three years later, conscription was proclaimed, accompanied by vitriolic attacks in English Canada on the French in Quebec. In the bitter and violent Canadian election in 1917, francophones voted overwhelmingly for Laurier’s Liberals, who opposed conscription, while anglophones responded by backing a coalition composed of English-speaking Liberals and Conservatives. There were riots in Montreal and deaths in Quebec City. In 1919 Laurier died, then depression struck, while, at Versailles, the victors divided the spoils even as the world began to understand that the war to end all wars had not done so.
In their modest but comfortable row home at 5779 Durocher Avenue in the new suburb of Outremont, the Trudeaus could find some comfort. Outremont was neighbour to Mount Royal and, in population, split between residents of French and British origin, along with a substantial number of Jews. They lived far from the crowded tenements of the city below the hill, where death often came for both mother and child during pregnancy.5 Charles and Grace had married on May 11, 1915, and she had become pregnant soon after with an infant who did not survive.6 In 1918 she gave birth to a daughter, Suzette. Charles already had good reason not to enlist and, after the Military Service Act became law in 1917, to avoid conscription.
When the Trudeaus married, Grace, in common with other Quebec women of the time, acquired the same legal rights as minors and idiots. Her husband owed her protection in return for her submission.7 Yet Grace had her own sources of strength. Her father, a substantial businessman of United Empire Loyalist stock, had sent his daughter to Dunham Ladies’ College in the Eastern Townships, where she had acquired an education in literature, classics, and etiquette that few girls in Quebec possessed. She knew French, her mother’s tongue, as well as English, which she and Charles chose to speak most often at home. Like Charles, she was Roman Catholic and devout.* Though not wealthy in the first years of their marriage, the Trudeaus had the means to hire country girls to help with household tasks.
Assisted by a midwife at home, Grace gave birth to Joseph-Philippe-Pierre-Yves-Elliott Trudeau on a warm fall day, October 18, 1919.8 The parents immediately chose Pierre from his multiple names, though he, later, took a long time to make up his mind which name he favoured. His mother probably reflected the original intention when she wrote in his “Baby Book” Joseph Pierre Yves Philip Elliott Trudeau. Years later, when he was quizzed about it, Trudeau himself could not recall the correct order.9 He weighed eight pounds four ounces and, from the beginning, suffered from colic. The crying finally stopped when he had an operation for adenoids in May 1920. Along with Pierre’s physical health, Grace recorded his spiritual growth in a diary. It began with his baptism, followed by the moment in October 1921 when two-year-old “Pierre made the sign of the cross.” In December he began to say his prayers alone and “blessed Papa, Mama, Suzette etc.”10 Six months later the proud mother recorded that her precociously bilingual child knew “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” “Little Jack Horner,” “Au clair de la lune,” and “Dans sa cabane.” She continued dutifully to collect mementos of Pierre’s life—school essays, marks, news clippings, and letters—until he finally left her home in the 1960s as a middle-aged man.
Grace kept only a few documentary fragments revealing the lives of herself and her husband. We have one intriguing letter from Charles in 1921, when he was working in Montreal and Grace, pregnant with Charles Junior (nicknamed “Tip”), was with Pierre and Suzette at Lac Tremblant, where the family had a cottage. He began with an apology for not being in touch but claimed that his daily tasks were overwhelming. Then his emotions flowed freely as he anxiously asked after the children in a hastily written letter:
How are the “babies”? Always watch them most attentively; and I urge you not to think of me but of them. Watch their steps, their games, their fights, their health. It appears that the little brother [Pierre] is on the right path. This should make you happy, enjoy it; but you must remember that the two of them, the couple, are young and an accident can always happen. If we had to lose one … They are so sweet, so nice—both of them—and you know the proverb: “if you are too nice, you’ll die young.” These words are so true that they make me frightened for those two; a third, and a fourth etc…. would be very welcome if only the good Lord would provide more like those we have. I believe now that I am a “garage man” I can use the expression: more of them would make good “spares.”
After this lame attempt at humour in which he referred to the service stations he had recently purchased, Charles returned to his didactic style, telling Grace to watch their children’s character closely and to correct their faults. Such correction, he urged, was always for the children’s good. After a few more homilies, he closed with kisses and hugs to all: “Salut à Madame, un bon baiser à toi et des caresses aux petits” [Bye Madame, a good kiss for you and hugs for the little ones].11
Affectionate obviously, hierarchical certainly, Charles has remained elusive, even in the descriptions given by his children and friends.12 He moved outside the familiar categories of his time and place, much as his son would later do. In the beginning, however, his path was familiar. Like most nineteenth-century francophones in Quebec, he grew up on a farm. His father, Joseph Trudeau, was a semiliterate but fairly prosperous farmer at St-Michel de Napierville, south of Montreal. He was a descendant of Étienne Truteau, a carpenter from La Rochelle, France, who had arrived in 1659. Three years later, according to a now vanished plaque that was once affixed to a building on the corner of La Gauchetière and St-André in Montreal: “Here Truteau, Roulier, and Langevin-Lacroix resisted 50 Iroquois, May 6, 1662.”13 By the time of Charles’s birth in 1889, the challenge to the French presence came not from the Iroquois or the British soldiers who had conquered Quebec but from the impersonal forces arising from the transformation of a commercial and agrarian society into one that was urban and industrial.
Charles’s parents, especially his mother, Malvina, a mayor’s daughter and a doctor’s sister, knew that their world of the farm, parish, and family would soon be lost. They were determined that the boys among their eight children would have a chance in the new world they faced. They sent Charles to Collège Sainte-Marie, an eminent classical college in Montreal established by the Jesuits in 1848, once the previously banned powerful religious order was allowed to return to Canada. Although situated in the heart of the city, the college was—at least in the later view of some students—a place apart. Its discipline, beginning in the morning with prayers at 5:30, followed by study at 6:00 and Mass at 6:30, took the students “away from the daily realities and the concerns of the day.”14
Paradoxically, by stepping out of the world, these boys became part of a privileged elite that would eventually dominate the fields of law, politics, religion, and medicine in twentieth-century Quebec. Those areas, however, were the traditional ones for francophones in the province, and, in the new industrial age, they increasingly brought fewer material rewards than did the world of finance and industrial capitalism, where the English dominated. Moreover, politics seemed increasingly beholden to wealth, and the francophone politicians of the time catered to the English capitalists. Just as some leading Quebecers, especially in the Roman Catholic Church, developed a critique of modern capitalism, others came to terms with its needs—including Charles Trudeau.
A few notebooks survive from Charles’s years at Collège Sainte-Marie, and they cast a faint light on his education and personality. Warned by his parents that failure meant a return to the farm, he was diligent. In his final year, 1908–9, he wrote and defended his thesis in Latin in a class on philosophy given in that language. He also copied out quotations to memorize and reflected negatively on the issues of the early years of the twentieth century—revolution, alcoholism, and war. “War kills the arts, the sciences, the civilization,” he wrote and then transcribed quotations supporting that cryptic declaration. On the key question of imperialism, he was not yet a stern critic of Britain. One of his quotations suggests it would be dangerous to separate from “Albion”: “We would be incomparably weaker, isolated as we are in a nation of five million facing an immense country of sixty million.” Moreover, Quebec needed foreign investment. But he had some doubts: “The authority of the mother country and the decisions of the Privy Council are not sufficient protection for the rights of Catholics in a province.” The seeds of nationalism had taken root. After Charles left the college, where he won many prizes despite a reputation as a troublemaker, he studied law for three years at the Montreal campus of Laval University (which became the University of Montreal in 1919).15
Charles seems to have been a good student: his notes are impressive in their organization and detail; he wrote in a fine and even elegant hand; and his classical education provided a strong intellectual base. Yet, in the accounts of those who knew him later, he changed radically at this time. He became an extrovert who loved games, gambling, and the high life. At home, though, it was different. In interviews, both Suzette and Pierre recalled him as a strict father who, though often absent, was intense and dynamic when present. He taught Pierre boxing, shooting, and even wrestling tricks. He also made him independent. Trudeau later told how disappointed he was that his friend Gerald O’Connor was put in the second grade and he in the first. He complained to his father, begging him to ask the principal to promote him. “No!” his father said. “It’s your problem. Knock on his door and ask him yourself.” Pierre did—and he happily joined Gerald in the second grade. In the seventies George Radwanski described how, when Trudeau spoke of his father, his eyes lit up and his gestures became more animated. He got “the impression of a child who may have been unknowingly overawed by an exceptionally dynamic father, perhaps in ways that contributed to his childhood sensitivity, insecurity, and later self-testing and rebellious.”16
Trudeau himself wrote more openly about how his father was “very extroverted. He spoke loudly and expressed himself vigorously. His friends were the same.”17 On weekends at Lac Tremblant, he invited guests, sometimes as many as twenty, and expected Grace to cook for them. “They liked to get involved in our games,” Trudeau recalled; “they liked to play cards, and they liked to drink and feast.” Sometimes the parties were organized in the basement of their Montreal home, but normally, he explained, “the only time in the whole day that we got to enjoy his company” was when Charles came home for dinner, took a quick look at the children’s schoolwork, and disappeared into the night to work or play. Although Pierre credited his father with teaching him sports, he claimed, despite visits from the flamboyant Montreal mayor, Camillien Houde, that they did not discuss politics: “I never asked my father any questions on the subject, and he for his part made no attempt to arouse my interest.” But, at the very least, he did so indirectly.
Others have painted a darker picture of Charles as “Charlie” or “Charley,” the bon vivant who played poker with rough-edged friends. Stephen Clarkson, co-author with Christina McCall of a study of Pierre Trudeau, has speculated that Charles was sometimes abusive towards Grace. They quote a family friend who said that Charles was brutal with his own friends and made things difficult when he came home drunk.18 There is no documentary evidence to support these suggestions. The family strongly denies the rumours of abuse towards Grace, though not of loud partying late in the night.
A small, wiry man, Charles’s energy and drive for success soon made him tire of petty legal affairs in his reasonably prosperous three-person law firm, Trudeau & Guérin, on St. James Street. In the fashion of the times, Charles-Émile Guérin was a Liberal, while Charles and his brother Cléophas were identified as bleus, or Conservatives. He took big chances; his son’s papers contain an undated notebook detailing his gambling wins and losses, nightly sums that often exceeded the yearly earnings of a Montreal worker. But in 1921, with two children and another, Charles, on the way, he completely changed course. He had noticed how automobiles were increasingly common on city streets and wondered who fixed and fuelled them. In 1910 there were only 786 automobiles in Quebec; in 1915, 10,112; in 1920, 41,562—and, within five years, there would be almost 100,000. By the 1920s, roads had become the largest item in the Quebec budget.19 Sensing the future, Charles opened a garage near his home, and soon he owned several others offering gasoline as well as the maintenance so often needed by the automobiles of the time—a “garage man,” as he had described himself to Grace—and he called his operation the Automobile Owners’ Association, with offices at 1216 St-Denis. The business quickly succeeded, and he ingeniously expanded the association into a club in which car owners signed on for an annual fee in return for guaranteed service.20
By the early 1930s the association had approximately 15,000 members, and Charles owned thirty garages. Imperial Oil noticed his success and offered him $1.2 million for the business in 1932. He accepted and then invested the funds in mining (mainly Sullivan Mines), Belmont Park (a large amusement park in Montreal), and even the Montreal Royals baseball team, of which he became the vice-president. Mining and entertainment were the best investments for the 1930s, and the stock market moved briskly upward immediately after Charles received his funds. Charles’s fortune was, Pierre Trudeau wrote modestly later, a sum that was “quite respectable for the time.” He became a member of the Cercle Universitaire, the Club Canadien, and several golf clubs. In truth, their affluence brought financial security for Grace and her children for the rest of their lives.21 They became and remained members of the haute bourgeoisie of Quebec.
Perhaps what impressed Pierre about his father was the way in which he so cleverly beat the English at their own games. His father had left law early, although he did tell Pierre that it was a “useful” degree. More interesting and rewarding was business, and his extroverted personality fitted it well. Charles had an excellent Jesuit and French education, but he was determined to learn English, and he insisted that his children write to him in that language. He even signed some of his letters to them “Papa Charley.” He knew they must learn English to succeed in the Quebec of that time, and he sent them to French schools only after he was certain they were fluent in English. Although Pierre later recalled that the workers in his garages were French, the company name on its stationery was in English alone, and probably the majority of customers were anglophones.22
Yet Charles was committed to the French presence in Quebec. He chose to live in Outremont, not Westmount—his wealth would have gained him easy entry. His club was the St-Denis, the “French” club founded in the 1870s; and his office on St-Denis was far from the centre of bourgeois wealth in Montreal. He was generous to many French Catholic charities, particularly the hospitals. His politics were Conservative and nationalist. Very tellingly, his newspaper was the nationalist bible Le Devoir, and he was even a member of its operating board. Unlike many Quebec francophones of the day, Charles relished modern times and its wonders. The family’s increasing prosperity brought a move from the row house on Durocher to a more substantial Outremont home at 84 McCulloch (sometime McCullough) Street, with a large veranda and rooms for the maid and the chauffeur, Elzéar Grenier. It was also near the great park on Mount Royal, away from the city’s slums, and close to the best schools for the children. The brick house, while not pretentious, was impressive in its three storeys, large rooms, stately furnishings, and easy access to the verdant surroundings on the mountain.
When Charles was not at his garage or his club, he travelled sometimes to Europe and often to the United States. In one letter that Pierre sent to his father, Grace added a postscript: “Will write you in Los Angeles—at Biltmore Hotel. I don’t know of any other.”23 Clearly, Charles was always difficult to follow, a trait his son inherited, yet his presence was strong, sentimental, and loving with, or away from, his family. On September 28, 1926, he sent a postcard with a photograph of an airplane to Pierre and wrote over the picture: “There I was for nearly 3 hours.” On the back he informed his young son: “Whatever you do when you grow to be a man, Pierre, don’t be an aviator. Your Papa would be too much afraid. 3000 feet high, a speed of 125 miles an hour for 3 hours. Gee that’s long!” From New York City in May 1930 he sent another postcard, with a cartoon of a young boy who is being rebuked by his mother for spitting on the floor: “Hello there, Pierre! Are you the papa at home just now? Tell them they have to take orders from you. Love & kisses, Pa.” He wrote from San Francisco a few months later, “My own Pierrot,” and told him, “Glad to see that you can do anything when you want.”24
Pierre was equally warm in his letters to his father—which were normally written in English. He wrote in the summer of 1929, when the children and Grace were at their summer home at Old Orchard Beach in Maine:
Dear Papa
How are you? We are having a good time. We are doing our exercises three times a day. Tippy [brother Charles] is learning how to swim pretty good. I can float and I like it. We went on a picnic yesterday afternoon—ten kids. We played around and when it was time to eat we had to open our bottles on a barbwire fence! There were lots of mosquitoes so we came home. I would like to have my bike down here and Tippy would his also. Did mamma tell you about it? Hope you come back soon.
Your loving son, Pierre
(P.S.) don’t forget the bike.
Pierre’s plea was gently rebuked. On July 19 Charles replied to “Mon cher petit Pierre”:
I am very glad to see that you’re having a good time, that you are doing your exercises and you are good “kids” because Mamma told me so in her last letter …
Being the oldest I hope you are showing Tippy how to swim and you yourself are watching him: the biggest brother should always do that.
I like to see that you have learned how to float and I bet you have also improved your swimming. Now, is Suzette doing her exercises good and is she practicing swinging? I wish I had an eye on her too and show her how to get strong and healthy and wise.
Yes, Mamma told me about your “bike,” Pierre and you may be sure Mamma does not forget anything when she thinks it can please her “kids” but my opinion is that out there you don’t need the “bike” because you can play all sorts of games on the beach, have all sorts of exercises etc., which is much better, I think, than promenading on the streets with a “bike.” Never mind, Pierre, if the other guy gets one: he won’t be any better off and then you have things that he does not have and besides there are very few boys that have a bike over there. In fact I don’t think I saw one.
Now tell Suzette that I expect a letter from her by return mail and I don’t see why she has let you write before her.
Tell Tippy too that he can at least write a postal card and sign his name.
Tell Mamma that I’ll write tonight or tomorrow. Keep on having a good time and be good. Don’t forget your exercises and your swing and listening to Mamma and by doing all that you’ll be working as hard as your papa and work is what makes a man out of one.
Kisses to all, Papa Charley
There would be no bikes on Old Orchard Beach that summer.25
Charles’s frequent absences brought a flow of postcards, and ten-year-old Pierre responded with banter and warmth. In an undated letter of the late 1920s he assured his father that he did “not mind staying till half past five every afternoon” at school because, when he got home, he had all his homework done. After saying that he had not missed his 5BX exercises, a military calisthenics drill, and had missed piano practice only once, he concluded: “I have nothing more to say so I will close up my letter giving lots of xxxxxx and love.” In the summers they went to the Laurentians, followed by a long stay at Old Orchard Beach. In their Lac Tremblant cottage, the children “would listen for the faraway sound of tires on the bridge across the outlet of the lake that would mean [Charles] was arriving.” Pierre often became playful in his signoff, once declaring himself J P E Trudeau and another time mimicking the end of radio programs: “We are now signing off. Please stand by for station announcement. Your loving son, Pierre.”
In 1933 Charles decided to take the entire family and Grace’s father to Europe. Sixty years later, Pierre said that he retained “a thousand vivid images of it” in his mind. For the first time, he said, they (presumably the children) “experienced the remarkable feeling of being almost totally out of our element.” He enjoyed that feeling and always would. He developed an abiding wanderlust. One story that Trudeau retold many times was how his father stopped the car in front of a German hotel and said, “Pierre, rent us the rooms.” Faced with the challenge and possessing limited German, the thirteen-year-old lad nevertheless made the deal.
Although Charles gave his older son adult tasks, Pierre retained a childlike tone when dealing with his father in his early teenage years. He wrote to his father from Old Orchard Beach in the summer of 1934. He and Tippy, who seems to have become the subordinate younger brother, had just enjoyed the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, and he reported on the arrival and departure of friends and relatives. The latest group did not “interest me much as there are only girls in both families,” he said, but the complaint was almost certainly a fib. Beach photographs from the period suggest that Pierre’s already penetrating eyes were constantly fixed on the girls, who were often grouped around him. Once again he reported on his exercises and concluded: “I hope you come up and see us sometime soon. Now I must be signing off as everybody is on the beach and I must go too. Kisses (xxx), Pierre.”26 Pierre treasured these summer months and yearned for his father’s presence.
On March 30, 1935, he complained to his parents, who were then vacationing in Florida as the Montreal Royals began their spring training, about the “disagreeable” winter season in Montreal. He eagerly awaited the coming Easter vacation, but even more the summer holiday that was only three months away. At school he had received a “Bene,” but the most interesting event of the month was the visit of “Antoni, the famous Canadian magician,” who had mystified the students with his extraordinary tricks. His mother returned from the South on April 8, and Pierre immediately wrote to his father:
Dear Papa,
As Maman has decided to send you my report card [from Brébeuf] which came today, I’ve decided to add a few words:
When I got home this evening, Maman told me you were ill and I hasten to wish you a speedy recovery. I’m relieved to know it is apparently nothing serious.
He expressed hope that his father would write soon, noted that he had obtained another “Bene,” and suggested that the results of his essays should also please him. Then he concluded:
Don’t stay away too long and try to be with us for Easter at least!
We’re all well here. Goodbye!
Your loving son,
Pierre
But Charles did not come home for Easter.
The pneumonia that had not been “serious” had caused a heart attack. When Grace heard that Charles’s condition was quickly worsening, she and Suzette flew down to Florida, leaving Tip and Pierre with an aunt. Before Pierre could send his letter, the telephone rang. From the landing in the stairwell, he saw his aunt turn towards him. “Your father is dead, Pierre,” she said.27 “In a split second,” he recalled later, “I felt the whole world go empty. His death truly felt like the end of the world.” And forty years later he said: “It was traumatic, very traumatic … I still can’t go to a funeral without crying.”28 Death had come quickly for Charles, who was only forty-six, and it traumatized the whole family.* Grace told Suzette: “I’ll never be able to bring up the boys alone.”29 Pierre himself recalled that, at fifteen years of age, “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.”30 Brébeuf’s rector wrote to him: “Poor little one! But you are a little Christian, Pierre, and you have the consolation of our beautiful Catholic faith.”31 It helped, but the distraught boy tore up the letter he had written to his father.
When Grace came home, she found its pieces in the wastebasket, along with a draft of the earlier letter he had sent to his parents in Florida. She carefully pasted the pages together. They were among the documents she kept until her death, when they passed to Pierre—and into his collection of papers. He preserved another item too. In the celebrated portrait of Trudeau in the Parliament Buildings, just outside the House of Commons, he wears, as a final homage, Charles’s cape, which he had kept for over half a century.32 Clearly there was intense grief, but did he also feel “ambivalence” towards his father, thus complicating the grief, as some have suggested? That is less certain. I will return to the psychological impact of Charles’s life and death on Pierre later. The documentary records of the time support his sister Suzette’s comment that “[Pierre] didn’t shock or disturb us or react in a way that I would think was because my father was gone … Perhaps he took on a certain responsibility.”33 He never ceased to miss him profoundly, however.*
Camillien Houde, the Conservative and nationalist mayor of Montreal; J.-A. Bernier, the president of the nationalist Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste; and Georges Pelletier, the editor of Le Devoir, joined the family as Charles’s remains arrived in Windsor Station early on the following Saturday morning. At the funeral there were thirteen priests, several judges, and seven cars carrying the flowers.34 The funeral became etched forever in Pierre’s memory, but he was away from school only briefly and his marks, which were recorded weekly, remained remarkably high. He wrote rather formally to his mother on April 28 and again on May 2, less than a month after his father’s death, saying in both letters that he knew she was “in good health” and hoped that she remained so. Occasionally he stayed in school as a boarder and, in the first letter, he noted that he missed the charm of home and the caresses of his mother. In the second he reported that his marks were the highest in the class, a total of 292 out of 300. He then wrote out “April’s fool” in Greek, Latin, English, French, and another script. It was a good academic year. He wrote again to his mother on June 10 and told her that he expected to win prizes. Thanks to his excellent teachers, “we have all had a good year.” He ended by thanking his mother for sending him to such a fine school.35
Several of Pierre’s classmates have said that it was a different boy who returned to the school after his father died. He became more nonconformist, more eager to shock teachers and students alike.36 Certainly his father was missed at Brébeuf, where the Jesuit priests later remembered how “Charlie” would “offer to buy them Havana cigars to pass around at a college dinner in honour of a visiting papal delegate or to send them a case of whisky for their own pleasure any time they liked.”37 Small wonder so many of them attended his funeral. The atmosphere at home also changed. Trudeau said later: “When my father was around, there was a great deal of effusiveness and laughter and kissing and hugging. 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 mother and so on.”38 Pierre began to use the hyphenated surname Elliott-Trudeau, suggesting a new orientation towards the English side of the family, though in 1931–32 he had briefly favoured J.P. Elliott Trudeau.39 It seems that he became more rebellious in class, while, in the less playful atmosphere at home, he increasingly strove to please Grace. His letters and notebooks indicate a more complex pattern after his father’s death: he became more like a stone whose colours radiated differently, depending on the angle from which it was viewed. He concealed more, but, paradoxically, what he did reveal briefly illuminated his core.
To be sure, Pierre doted on his mother, expressing constant concern for her health. Although we have no written records of what Grace thought, Charles’s death profoundly affected her. Her life had focused on her husband’s career and, most of all, the children. Years after, Grace Pitfield, who was related by birth or marriage to many of the British elite of Montreal (and was the mother of Trudeau’s friend and later colleague Michael Pitfield), told a journalist how Grace Elliott, who had Loyalist roots and a minor inheritance, had simply disappeared. She had friends who “had been at school with Grace Elliott,” she explained. “They heard later that she had married a Frenchman. But nobody knew who he was, and of course they never saw her afterwards.”40 It was not surprising, given this divide in Montreal society at the time, that Grace—having cut herself off from her background—craved the affection and attention of her children. And they responded. The reserve that had marked her when the exuberant and extroverted Charles was alive disappeared when she was the sole parent, and she became more assertive, more playful. But that was Grace’s private side. “‘Formidable’ is the word Trudeau sometimes uses to describe his father,” quipped the journalist Richard Gwyn. “Everyone else applies it to his mother.” After Charles’s death, Grace Trudeau gained presence.41
Pierre seemed to become both son and companion, an emotional combination that has its charms and its dangers. He took more responsibility for family affairs, according to both Suzette and Pierre himself. His father’s death brought financial independence and security, and Pierre cherished this freedom. Each of the children apparently received $5,000 a year, more than the average annual income for doctors and lawyers in the late 1930s. And there were reserves if needed.42 In his late teenage years, Pierre became directly involved in managing a large inheritance. For her part, Grace divided the long remainder of her life among travel, charitable work, and the Roman Catholic Church, and she paid little attention to the management of the funds. In 1939 she even managed to lose some of the many stock certificates the family possessed.43 She loved music and played the piano very well, to the envy of Pierre, who did so in an amateur way. She seldom missed a classical concert and even brought some of the leading artists of the day to her home, to perform for friends and family. At one time she persuaded the great Artur Rubinstein to come to McCulloch and perform.44 Some thought the Trudeau home darkened after Charles died; it did, her children sometimes joked, because Grace was on the road so much. She travelled frequently to New York, Florida, Europe, and her beloved Maine, occasionally with the children but, increasingly, with female friends. Suzette, an amiable and uncomplicated daughter, became a consolation and companion to her, but she doted on Pierre.
—
When Charles died, Pierre was a day student at the Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf on St. Catherine Street in Montreal. His parents had initially sent him when he was six years old to Académie Querbes, a Catholic school for both English and French Catholics, and he stayed there until 1932. He first enrolled in the English section “for reasons I do not know,” he claimed in his memoir. He had forgotten: his father had once written that, in the world in which “they” lived, the advantages came to those who learned English.45 And so his children did.
Querbes, which boasted both a bowling alley and a swimming pool, was located at 215 Bloomfield Street in Outremont, and Pierre had only seven classmates in his first year. His report gave him perfect marks for conduct, application, politeness, and cleanliness. He stood first in the class nearly every month except for March, when he was sick. The size of the class grew to sixteen by third year, when he stood second. The following year he began in English, but then changed to French. He stood first in his last month in English, and he retained that place in his first month in French. He again graduated at the top, overall, with a percentage of 92.5 in June 1930. Grace had signed the reports when the courses were in English; Charles signed most of them when Pierre switched to French.
In school, Pierre became immersed in the Catholic faith and in the debate about mortal sin, while on the streets, he fought as boys seemed to do in those days. Michel Chartrand, a fellow Querbes student and future labour activist, recalled that Pierre got into brawls on the streets of Outremont, where the poorer kids liked to take on the precious sons of the well-to-do.46 In his final year, when he stood first in a class of twenty-six students with a percentage of 95.4, his best classes were mathematics and religion—and that pattern continued throughout his academic career.47 Several of his essays are preserved in his papers. They reflect both his mind and the times in which he lived. He received “Beau travail” for an essay on the fabled French soldier Dollard des Ormeaux, who, in 1660, held off the Iroquois on the Ottawa River. Pierre concluded that Dollard and his companions were martyrs and saints without whose sacrifices “the colony would have been completely destroyed” by the barbarians. In an essay on guns, he told how he had asked “Papa” if he could go hunting with him. His father replied, “No, Pierre, you are only eleven years old and not old enough.” When Pierre persisted, Charles gave examples of how accidents happen with firearms, and Pierre finally agreed with him. In an essay on the polite child, Pierre emphasized kindness to others, including the servants. In church, no one should speak or shuffle about but simply pray. The overall lesson he derived from the exercise was that a polite child becomes popular in society.48 For this essay, he received his highest mark: 9.5 out of 10.
From Querbes, Pierre moved to the new classical college, Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, which was within walking distance of his home in Outremont. It had been established in 1928 as one of the five Jesuit colleges explicitly devoted to the education of a French elite in Quebec. Discipline was quick, short, and brutal. The priests frequently expelled troublesome students, and the strap and other forms of discipline were always available. Pierre soon established himself as an outstanding student, but he developed a sharp edge during his eight-year stay there. He brought friends with him from Querbes and the streets of Outremont, notably Pierre Vadeboncoeur, who would follow him through Brébeuf, law school, and political activities for three decades. Brébeuf was a decisive experience in Trudeau’s life, endowing him with a remarkable self-discipline, a profound interest in ideas and politics, and a cadre of friends and acquaintances who would play major roles in his life and career. He later claimed that he had little interest in politics while he was at Brébeuf, but, again, his memory failed him.49
Trudeau’s account of his involvement in contemporary politics during his Brébeuf years is contradictory. He also said on occasion that Father Robert Bernier, who was “the most cultivated man I had met … talked politics to me.”50 His notebooks of the time are full of “politics,” both in the sense of political theory, beginning with the classical tradition, and in the narrower sense of the political events of the 1930s. He entered Brébeuf at the height of the Great Depression, “la Grande Crise” in Quebec, just before Roosevelt’s presidency and Hitler’s chancellorship. Students disappeared from his class as their parents fell into abject poverty, and the Catholic Church in Quebec and elsewhere was in turmoil as it tried to understand what the collapse of democracy in Europe, and capitalism everywhere, meant for the faithful. In Quebec a critique of Canadian capitalism and democracy emerged most strongly in the writings of Abbé Lionel Groulx. In 1919, the year of Pierre’s birth, Groulx had given a historic lecture, “If Dollard Were Alive Today.” His argument already had a deep impact on the young Pierre when he wrote his essay on Dollard at Querbes. The Abbé held the first chair in Canadian history at the Montreal branch of Laval University and went on to edit the highly influential journal L’Action française. In short order it became the catalyst for a new nationalism that linked the Catholic faith, the French language, and the family, while calling for autonomous institutions that would protect these key elements from Anglicization, Americanization, secularization, and a corrupt political class.51
The Abbé responded to the conscription crisis and the First World War by turning to the past: the Conquest of New France in 1760 became a decisive event, God’s test of Quebec’s defeated people; the pact of Confederation, a broken promise. Dollard’s first battles with the Iroquois, or, for that matter, Étienne Truteau’s, led to the origins of the parish, where the germ of the nation appeared and where common institutions and memories formed. In his eyes, during the Conquest, the Rebellions of the French against the English in 1837–38, the betrayals of Confederation, and the conscription crisis of 1917, a Quebec nation was forged in a fire of constant struggle and within the enduring bond of Catholicism. According to Groulx, the nation had become a reality through this continual battle with “the others.”52 The aggressiveness of English Canada during wartime; the continuing flow of rural francophones to Montreal, where the symbols of power were English; the drop in the birthrate of francophones in the city and of the French population in Canada (31% in 1867, but only 27% in 1921); and the economic inferiority of the francophone professional class created “the call of the race,” or L’appel de la race, the title of Groulx’s bestselling novel of 1922, about the difficulties of a mixed marriage between a French Catholic lawyer and a converted Protestant English mother. The jacket of the first edition carried a quotation: “All of the descendants of the valiant 65,000 who were conquered must act as one.”53 It was a powerful nationalist argument, one that roiled Quebec society in the interwar years.
In the 1930s, with bourgeois liberal democracy in danger and Communism, socialism, and fascism contesting for dominance in Europe, the winds that blew strongly from Europe reached Quebec. For Quebec Catholics, Communism was simply evil, and liberalism was tainted with its anti-clerical past and enervated present. Within the Quebec church, an angry debate developed between those who believed that the first task was to “rechristianize” the population and others who, with Groulx, thought that “national action” must coincide with “Catholic action” and with what he termed the refrancization of Quebec. On his return from France in 1937, André Laurendeau, later the co-chair of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, attacked the supporters of bilingualism in Quebec. An admirer of Abbé Groulx, he warned: “When all French Canadians have become bilingual, they will all speak English … and French itself will soon be useless.”54 The debate raged within the numerous Catholic youth groups that proliferated in Quebec in the 1930s, especially in response to a report on the subject by the Dominican priest Georges-Henri Lévesque which said the first concern must be the individual in society, not the national question.55 When these debates left the classrooms and church buildings and arrived on the streets, they sometimes took a vulgar form in the creation of a Quebec fascist movement, the National Socialist Christian Party (Parti national social chrétien), whose emblem was a swastika surrounded by maple leaves, with a curious beaver as its crown. Its leader, Adrien Arcand, was a vicious anti-Semite who condoned attacks on Jewish businesses in Montreal and urged the deportation of Jews to Hudson Bay.
The times were clearly important in the formation of Pierre Trudeau, with the breakdown of the European order, the emergence of new nationalist movements in Quebec (especially the Action libérale nationale, or ALN), and the continuing economic crisis. Although there is no direct evidence that Charles Trudeau had urged political beliefs on his son, his own nationalism, as reflected in his association with Le Devoir and his friendship with men such as Camillien Houde, surely left its mark. And Pierre, until he turned twenty-one in 1940, was sheltered within the cocoon of Brébeuf, where the atmosphere was decidedly nationalist. In his first years there, Pierre concentrated on his studies and on sports. He usually began in the morning with prayers at 5:30, followed by early morning Mass. He did not shirk his religious duties, sometimes participating in Mass three times in one day. He attended retreats frequently, although at times he complained about the number of religious observances offered there.
About sports, he never complained. He became the captain of the hockey team, played lacrosse, and went on ski excursions.* And he exercised. In photographs, he is always lean and his body is hard, not in the fashion of modern weightlifters but similar to Clark Gable and other film stars of the time. His love of competition was reflected in his academic work: he carefully followed his own marks along with those of his fellow students. He had to be first—in 1935, despite his father’s death, he won numerous prizes and excelled. He also developed the reputation of being devilish in class: during a presentation on navigation, for example, he took a glass of water out of his inside coat pocket. He later interpreted these tricks as “opposing conventional wisdoms and challenging prevailing opinions,” but they apparently did not greatly offend his teachers—or his mother, whom he regaled with some of the stories. And, it seems, they did not irritate fellow students as much as some of them later recalled. He was elected to several positions, including vice-president of the student assembly, and chosen to be editor of the student newspaper.56 He was disappointed that he was not elected president but counted himself lucky, considering he had no particular group of friends, to finish second in the vote out of a class of fifty.57
Pierre’s pranks and mocking comments were forgiven by his teachers because he became increasingly committed to the school, to the Catholic faith, and to understanding the “national question.” The commitment intensified after the death of his father. Trudeau’s son Alexandre (Sacha) believes that one major consequence of Charles-Émile’s death on Trudeau was a distrust of business and commercial life and a suspicion of law. He came to identify business with late nights, heavy drinking, smoking, and boozy argument. In Alexandre’s words, Pierre thought business killed his father. He never smoked, drank to excess, swore vigorously, or argued long into the night, even though he adored his father, who did.58
Oddly, although several Brébeuf priests influenced Pierre, notably Father Robert Bernier, the one who would have the strongest impact never taught him. Father Rodolphe Dubé, a Jesuit priest and novelist, wrote under the pen name François Hertel—the actual name of a ferocious and brutal opponent of the English and the Aboriginal enemies of New France. Trudeau’s papers suggest that Hertel was probably the major intellectual influence in his life until the mid-1940s—explaining, perhaps, the lavish but oblique praise for him in his memoirs. However, the priest was a remarkably charismatic leader of the young, and his views on politics and the arts deeply influenced Catholic youth in the late thirties and early forties. He first attracted attention when he wrote a study in 1936 entitled Leur inquiétude, in which he talked about the restlessness of youth in Quebec, with their “desire to evade reality, their dissatisfaction with the present, their dolorous focus on the past, and their anxious view of the future.”59 Later scholars have reinforced Hertel’s views and have argued that the anxiety that marked students in the classical colleges in the thirties—in the form of pranks, demonstrations, and misbehaviour—was a response to the colleges’ emphasis on chastity, asceticism, and submission. In these male institutions, such teachings represented a threat to the sexual identity of the students at a time when modern attitudes provided so many distractions and temptations.60
Pierre was never dolorous, like the students Hertel describes, but he was increasingly restless. In February 1935 the fifteen-year-old wrote a spirited but juvenile essay for his English class, “My Interview with King George of England,” in which he went to visit the monarch because there was so much disorder in his class at school. Arriving at the court, he was escorted in:
Then amidst the sounds of trumpets and cries of “The King!
The King!” a dignified old gentleman entered, escorted by many brilliantly colored soldiers.
“How do you do Sir?” I said.
“Fine, thank you, except for a little trouble with my teeth,” he answered. “I am pleased to meet you.”
“The pleasure is all mine,” said I, “but come let us get down to business, and I would like to see you alone.”
“Very well, you may leave, Captain,” and after a brief argument in which the King proved he could take care of himself, the captain left. [An increasingly angry teacher writes, “Nonsense.”]
Seeing the gentleman was beginning to sweat under his uniform, I bade him take off his coat; having done so I began. [Teacher: “Nonsense.”]
Pierre went on to say that Governor General Lord Bessborough had urged him to see the King because the teacher was “English.” He described the total disorder in his classroom at home:
“They are even setting off matches, no doubt to burn the college, and also stink bombs, the odors of which are very disagreeable. Now our professor, M. Gosling, being from England, I thought you might have some sympathy for him (for he finds it trying on his nerves).”
King George replied that he was very sad, for he “thought that all the boys in the British Empire on which the sun never sets were perfect gentlemen. It must be looked after at once.” He promised to come down to speak to the class at Brébeuf. Then Pierre concluded:
“Thanks very much, George, I knew you would do it. Well, so long, I will be seeing you.”
“Good-bye, Pierre.”
“Good-bye. I think I shall go to Rome now and see if I can convince Pope Pius to come up and see us over in Canada too.”
The teacher wrote: “As a writer of nonsense you may achieve fame but try to become a little more serious and do not use slang.” A gentle caution, but more criticism would follow.61
As Pierre Trudeau became increasingly nationalist in his views, along with his classmates and teachers, his growing enthusiasm was reflected both in his academic work and in the books he read. He focused in particular on Abbé Groulx, apparently finding some of his interpretations congenial. On a copy of an article the Abbé published in L’Action nationale, he underlined a passage stating that some men dream for Canada of “total independence; for their province [Quebec] total autonomy; and for their nationality, a noble future.” He also read one of Groulx’s pamphlets and declared it “very interesting,” adding, “It is necessary to make total preparations,” although it is unclear what those preparations might have been.62
At the same time that he became more interested in national questions, his conservative Catholicism also deepened. The two commitments became inextricably intertwined for him, as they did for many other students too. While he had earlier complained to his parents about the frequency of religious observances, he now began to seek out retreats and discussions about the faith. Still, probably because of his independent spirit and Brébeuf’s elitist ways, he did not become involved in the Jeunesse étudiante catholique, the best-known Catholic youth group of the day. When he edited the school newspaper, Brébeuf, he took strong issue with a request that all student newspapers take a common view. Rather, he read widely in Catholic literature and became especially interested in the Catholic revival in France in the twenties. In the fashion of the times, he vigorously condemned Communists: for example, he denounced André Gide as a Communist who, from a moral point of view, was “one of the most pernicious authors who ever existed.” It was “a matter of life,” of how Catholic faith penetrated all thought.63
In his notebooks, the adolescent Pierre reflected his times and his environment as he groped to understand a complex world. He blamed the Treaty of Versailles and, bizarrely, the British insistence on Germany giving up its colonies for the troubles of the 1930s. And his father’s views found a place with his son. He expressed a traditional view of the difference between men and women: “God made the sexes, that of woman for the work in the house and that of man for the things outside.” Men’s robust bodies suited them for war and voyages, but women’s weaker physique meant that “God has destined them to work at home and bear children.”64 In an October 1937 story he described a soapbox orator who talked about the conscription of twenty years before and warned that another war would mean automatic conscription.65 In a Brébeuf debate he argued against intervention in the Sino-Japanese conflict because “China is infested with strangers, so Japan has a noble aim wanting the yellow race to survive.” He also blamed the “Reds” for causing troubles in China.66
He wrote a short story in Father Robert Bernier’s class in 1936 in which he deplored the isolation of the college and dreamed of what he might do as a sailor on some future adventure. In his fantasy, he travelled the world, joined the air force, engaged in “numerous dangerous exploits, blew up some enemy factories,” and won the war. He then returned to Montreal “about 1976, when the time was ripe to declare Quebec independence.” The Maritimes and Manitoba joined with Quebec to confront the enemies, and “at the head of the troops, I lead the army to victory” over the English Protestant infidels. “I live now,” he fantasized, “in a Catholic and Canadian country.”67 He was the modern Dollard of the fabled “Laurentie” of Groulx and other nationalists of the day.
Like many of Pierre’s intellectual meanderings at this time, this fantasy—that he would lead an army that won independence for Quebec in the same year that the Parti Québécois actually came to power—is simply juvenile trivia. In some essays, he favoured anti-Semitic, elitist, and conservative Catholic writers. In others, he merely took positions in a school where debate was strongly encouraged. He even praised the misogynist and elitist L’homme, cet inconnu by Alexis Carrel, as well as other works of a similar conservative Catholic character.68 And, in a speech he gave on the survival of French Canadians in November 1937, he took his approach directly from nationalists like Groulx. “To save our French civilization,” he said, “we must keep our language and flee American civilization.” The “revenge of the cradle,” he predicted, whereby French Catholics had large familes while English Protestants had few children, would soon allow the French population to exceed the English. He attacked immigration, because it tended to increase the English population, but rejoiced that the government had cut off most immigrants during the Great Depression. French Canada, he said, had a precise and even divine role—to propagate “French and Catholic ideas in the New World.”
Yet the young Trudeau was also inconsistent at this time. In his 1936–37 notes, he made favourable references to Jacques Maritain, an eminent Catholic philosopher who opposed fascism and supported liberal democracy. He paraphrased his idea that “if the author is good, he will spontaneously criticize vice and approve good,” and he strongly agreed with this liberal sentiment. He also proudly reported to his mother that he joined with other students in honouring not only the nationalist hero Dollard but also May 24, “la fête de la reine,” the Queen’s birthday, which was “another excellent occasion to display patriotism.”69 Contradictions abound.
Trudeau attended a “semaine sociale” at Brébeuf from November 28 to December 4, 1937, where they discussed a variety of social questions. The diet was strongly nationalist and conservative, and he learned about the “error of economic liberalism,” “the necessity of corporatism,” and “the illusion of communism and socialism.”* To his nationalist teachers and friends there, he could deny strongly that he was “Americanized.” Yet in 1937 he tried to establish a liaison between the student newspaper Brébeuf and its counterpart at the New York Catholic Fordham College. He told the U.S. editors that “you will come more directly in contact with the French and French Canadians, and the object of Mr. Roosevelt in establishing relations of goodwill and friendship between the American people will be greatly helped.”70 And, on the language question generally, unlike André Laurendeau, Trudeau rejected the popular nationalist cause of unilingualism, following, instead, his father’s view that “because of the advantages which knowledge of the English language presents, the majority of ‘Canadiens’ are compelled to learn English. Far from blaming them, I find them to be perfectly reasonable”—except when they introduced anglicisms into French.71
Pierre could never identify with the element of extreme nationalism that attacked the brothels and nightclubs of Montreal and detested American music and movies. He continued to visit New York, go to the theatre, and adore the Marx Brothers and the sirens of Hollywood. He made a pledge to himself in 1937: “I don’t want to go out with girls before I am twenty years old because they would distract me,” especially frivolous American girls.72 But that summer at Old Orchard he met an American student, Camille Corriveau, “whose beauty I had admired for 4 years.”73 She finally spoke to him on August 18, his resolve melted, and within a week he fell in love. In October she told him he should choose any profession except the priesthood. “Even the life of a policeman would be more exciting,” she thought. Then he returned to Brébeuf.
It was a different world. Father Brossard taught him Canadian history. He was, said Pierre, a patriot but not a fanatic. On October 20 the young Trudeau shaved for the first time. The next day he stood for the “autonomists” in the student parliament and heard Henri Bourassa, the nationalist founder of Le Devoir, speak in the evening. On October 22 he and other students demonstrated against “Communists.” Then he joined the family at Christmas, went skiing for a week before New Year’s, and refused an invitation from his sister, Suzette, to attend a New Year’s Eve dance with her and her friends. The profferred date, “Olga Zabler,” was very pretty, but he was still shy. “I am always timid around women,” he mused, though that reserve frequently made him exaggerate his self-assurance in their presence. In short, he was awkward. Reflecting his frustrations, he made a New Year’s resolution to “cultivate the strongest possible sense of honour” and to avoid any act that would cause him embarrassment. Without doubt, the “exalted patriots,” as Pierre called the fervent nationalists, would not have thought much of his ideas and activities during this holiday season.
Tip tagged along with his brother on a trip to New York on January 2, 1938. They went immediately to a Broadway musical, the next day to see the American Jewish comedian Ed Wynn, the following day to Rockefeller Center—“c’est colossal!” Pierre wrote—and, in the evening, to the fabled Cotton Club. There, “the orchestra and the comedians were good,” but there was a touch of Brébeuf in his comment that “the review was rather immoral and vulgar.” Far more satisfying was Radio City Music Hall, where he saw the Rockettes kick their legs high. They were “very good,” and the theatre itself “a marvel.” When he got home, he continued to go to movies and to write to Camille, all the while trying to resist his strong urges to approach attractive young women.74
When Pierre returned to Montreal on January 8, Brébeuf enclosed him within its capacious bosom. He was ambitious academically and athletically, although he remarked that a pretty girl could capture his attention “despite my coldness and independence.”75 His ambitions included standing for the school elections and participating in a drama contest. He worried about his popularity because of his shyness and his tendency to be “contrary.” At times he was troubled. He wrote to his mother: “Temperature uncertain, like adolescence.” And, in his notebooks, there is a draft of what is perhaps a poem: “My adolescent heart is like nature / Everything is upset. The temperature of sadness.”76
Father Bernier had reassured him in the fall of 1937 that he had “a Canadien mentality mixed with English,” a combination, in Pierre’s own view, that was “not bad for broadening one’s outlook.” Brébeuf was French, however, and he resolved to improve his French diction, to read more widely, and to attend Mass often. Still, he had pride in his bicultural background, even if many critics of the time deplored the mixing of French and English. He determined that he would continue to sign “Elliott” as part of his name: it was an indication of “good stock and distinction.”77
Then came a brutal blow to this bicultural calm. Just after the early February 1938 elections for the Academic Council, where his great rival Jean de Grandpré narrowly beat him for the presidency, “Laurin” told Pierre that a fellow student had declared he had no confidence in him—“that I was mediocre, Americanized, and Anglicized, in short, I would betray my race. I made it seem that I wasn’t bothered, but it was a profound shock.” “Perhaps I seem superficial about certain things,” Pierre wrote in his journal. “But the truth is that I work. And I would never betray the French Canadians.” If he was accused directly, he would punch the accuser in his face. Then he paused: “However, 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.” The incident made him more determined than ever to finish first at Brébeuf, the educational jewel of French education in Montreal.78
Four days later, on February 9, the results of yet another election were announced, this time for the Conventum—the class council. Pierre had initially not wanted to run but did so when he discovered that his father had been on the secretariat of the Conventum at his school. He again ran behind Jean de Grandpré, but he won the run-off election and became vice-president. “Oh, inexpressible happiness!” he exclaimed in his diary. He added that he was very pleased that his bilingual name, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, had not hurt him much in the election. In March the issue still bothered him. In English class he pretended to be Irish and, “for a joke,” dared other students to take him on. No battle followed, although Father Landry threatened him with expulsion. However, he wrote in his diary after the class that he was content to have his English blood mixed with his French blood. The blend, he concluded, made him less fearful of going against “the popular spirit.”
Some have claimed that Trudeau was the model for François Hertel’s 1939 novel, Le beau risque—a story about “Pierre Martel,” a young student at a classical college who loses his restlessness as his “soul” becomes thoroughly French. The novel takes the form of a memoir by a priest-professor who is going to Asia. He says that Pierre lacks confidence, despite his intelligence and a successful surgeon father he admires. The narrator, Father Berthier, soon discovers that the father is empty and lacks depth, concerned as he is only with appearance. Like Pierre Trudeau, Pierre Martel has acne, lives in a large house in Outremont, has a wealthy father, takes trips to New York, gratuitously irritates his teachers, prefers individual sports to team sports, loves poetry, and, most tellingly perhaps, spends his summers at Old Orchard Beach. The novel traces how Pierre turns away from the materialist and Americanized world of his father and finds strength in Boucherville, in the traditional world of his grandparents. He confronts his father for his scepticism, his Anglicisms, and his materialism, while, at the same time, he comes to admire his grandfather’s respect for the past and, in particular, the way he has retained the spirit of the 1837 Rebellions. Pierre senses the call of the blood and angrily refuses to go to Old Orchard or to visit a Quebec “inn,” which, he tells his father, must be called an “auberge.” He takes up the continuing struggles of his people, becomes devoted to a renewed Catholicism, and expresses commitment to a world where “we will be more ourselves.”79 Trudeau read the book when it appeared, as did many young Quebecers, but his short review in his journal does not indicate that he identified himself with Martel. Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that Pierre Trudeau, like Martel, was a divided soul in those troubled times.
In the spring of 1938, while Pierre contemplated the comments about his “Americanization and Anglicization,” he wrote a play entitled Dupés, about a Montreal tailor. In itself a disappointing, slight confection, it won a competition at Brébeuf and was performed there, with Pierre as one of the actors. Jean de Grandpré, Trudeau’s greatest academic rival and a future prominent business executive, played the lead. At the time it was written, nationalists in Quebec were urging a “Buy from our own” campaign, which the Jewish community in Montreal condemned as anti-Semitic. Trudeau’s “comedy of manners” is laced with sarcasm and some bitterness. The main character is a tailor, Jean-Baptiste Couture, who, in the first draft, is described as a good father of a French-Canadian family, honest but sometimes violent. Another character, Jean Ditreau, is interested in Couture’s daughter, Camille, a name Trudeau devilishly chose in honour of his American girlfriend. Others in the play include a few customers, notably the dubious Paul Shick.
Ditreau has a diploma in “commercial psychology” from McKill University, and he offers to help Couture assess his clients. “Your business,” he explains, is in a French-Canadian area, but francophones “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.” His solution: Put up the sign “Goldenburg, tailor” in place of “Chez Couture.” He also advises Couture to sell “American magazines” and to install a “soda-fountain”; people will then come after Mass to drink “Coke.” While he is speaking, Ditreau tears down a sign that reads “Help our own” and replaces it with a new English sign that says: “We sell for less—Goldenburg, fine goods. Open for business.”
Once all the signs have been changed, Couture tells his first customer, in the “manner of a Jew,” that he has the latest fashions from Paris, New York, and London and then whispers, “in spite of our repugnance [for Hitler] we even follow the fashions of Berlin.”80 The deals continue—and the confusion mounts. Ditreau is finally rejected as a suitor by Camille because he is a politician, the lowest of all professions. The evil ways of politicians are also demonstrated by another customer, Maurice Lesoufflé, clearly modelled on Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis, who proposes having six “heroic” Canadians split the vote so a “Hebrew” candidate can win an election.
Dupés was a great triumph for Pierre Trudeau at Brébeuf, and the priests, parents, and students who attended the performance vigorously applauded its young author—youthful but complicated. It reflected not only the mood of Outremont but also a time when the Canadian prime minister could compare Hitler to Joan of Arc; when his major adviser, O.D. Skelton, an eminent liberal, could fret about the “Jewish” influence that was pushing Britain towards war; and when Vincent Massey, the high commissioner to Britain and future governor general, could declare that Canada needed no Jewish immigrants.
Like most students, Pierre Trudeau responded to what his teachers, his peers, and his family wanted of him—most of the time. But certain unresolved contradictions appear in his personal journal, where his private activities and views are expressed. On the surface, he seemed to conform to the nationalist, anti-Semitic, and anti-English environment of the time. Yet, just a few days before Dupés was performed, after careful supervision by the Brébeuf staff, Trudeau had his “encounter” with Laurin about his mixed blood and his American and English ways. Without doubt, this incident made the final text of Dupés more reflective of the general mood at Brébeuf. Pierre had written to his mother on January 24, 1938: “One of the qualities of the letter is tact. That is to say that when one writes, one should take account of the circumstances and adapt the letter to the one who will read it.”81 It was meant to apply to a specific letter, but the comment describes well how Trudeau believed he must adapt to particular circumstances. Yet, as he told his mother, he found it a “complex” task. He conformed, yes, but in his heart he often rebelled, and in his acts he sometimes contradicted.82
Three days before Pierre wrote Dupés, he made some notes about the “pros and cons” of the religious life. Here doubt and belief abound. The pro side emphasized how the priesthood would always lead him towards perfection and closer to Christ. It would grant him a better place in heaven and, more generally, make him a better man. But the cons won. He was not much attracted to the vocation. He was not humble enough; he was too proud and too independent. He liked an active life, and he would not be good at confessions because he lacked the necessary spirit. Moreover, he would not be a good teacher: “I’m not open enough,” he concluded. It was a shrewd assessment.83 Pierre Trudeau was a good Catholic, but he would have made a poor priest.
* Grace’s mother was a Catholic and, in the practice of the day, she took her mother’s religion. She also spoke fluent French, even though her mother died when she was ten years old. Trudeau later explained, “Obviously she always spoke French too because otherwise she wouldn’t have met the gang that my father was hanging around with in the time of his studies in Montreal.” Trudeau also said that they met at a church attached to Collège Sainte-Marie, adding, “It’s a good place to meet, I suppose, at least in the stories you tell your kids.” Interview between Pierre Trudeau and Ron Graham, April 28, 1992, TP, vol. 23, file 3.
* Charles Trudeau’s death attracted considerable attention in the Montreal press, with similar responses. The Montreal Star, April 12, 1935, mourned the death of a major sports figure, the owner of Belmont Park and the major investor in the Montreal Royals, while La Patrie, April 11, lamented, in a key editorial, the loss of a French-Canadian businessman who had attained “the prestige and influence of the rich,” yet did not lose his friends even when he reached the highest steps on the ladder of success. Trudeau, Le Devoir claimed, had served superbly on its board as a financial consultant. The April 11–12 issue even speculated that although Charles Trudeau had become disillusioned with politics, he might some day have entered politics as a reformer.
* On April 10, 1938, the third anniversary of Charles’s death, Pierre went to Mass and took communion for the sake of his father’s soul. He wrote in his diary: “Time heals all. Maybe it’s true that you are able to become accustomed to an absence, but the more time passes, the more I miss his firm but kind goodness, his advice so full of wisdom. Without doubt, he guides me from Heaven still but it would be so good to be able to talk with him and discuss things with him once again.” He lamented that he had been given only fifteen years to profit from his father’s wisdom. He accepted that it was God’s will that Charles was with Him. The loss is expressed constantly in the diaries he kept from 1938 to 1940. Journal 1938, April 10, 1938, TP, vol. 39, file 9.
* Trudeau also liked to go to Montreal Royals’ baseball games, and he tracked the scores. He won some popularity among the priests at Brébeuf by using the family interest in the Royals to get opening-day tickets. He was rewarded with a day off school when he accompanied Father Toupin to the game. Personal Journal, 1937–40, TP, vol. 39, file 9.
* While the fare was highly nationalist and, in economics, corporatist in the fashion of Catholic economic thought at the time, there was some diversity and balance. André Laurendeau, for example, condemned Communism strongly, but said that all collective property—“propriété collective”—was not bad, giving the examples of electricity and railways. Father Omer Jenest, SJ, said that the church’s support for corporatism distinguished it from fascism. He argued that the imposition by force of corporatism in Italy must be condemned. Gérard Filion, the future editor of Le Devoir, spoke on cooperatives and said they were most advanced in the Nordic countries. He added that Italy, because of fascism, was better off than France. Trudeau’s notes are in TP, vol. 4, file 6.