CHAPTER 2

LA GUERRE, NO SIR!

In the late spring of 1938, after the success of Dupés with the students and their parents at Brébeuf and his decision not to enter the priesthood, Pierre Trudeau began to wonder, as older adolescents often do, what his fate might be. He disliked business, and his father’s career and death had left him ambivalent towards law. He wrote in his diary as the school year came to an end in June 1938: “I wonder whether I will be able to do something for my God and my country. I would like so much to be a great politician and to guide my nation.”¹ This dream never died, though his conception of both his nation and its politics certainly changed.

When Pierre began the quest for his destiny at Brébeuf in the 1930s, the stream of world events quickly turned into rapids. The Great Depression altered its direction, Hitler’s Germany disrupted its flow, and the confluence of war in China and in Spain created a torrent that crested in September 1939 when the world burst apart once more. Like others, Canadians became immersed in the flood of current events. Some were swept away by the martial spirit. Farley Mowat, the son of a soldier who gloried in memories of the First World War, saw his gleeful father come down the country lane bearing news of war, and the dutiful son set out to fight through six cruel years of war.² In the poor parts of Montreal, recruiting centres were clogged as the unemployed and the young with few prospects (including the future hockey star Maurice Richard) viewed the dangers of war as more alluring than the pain of their present plight. Among Pierre’s classmates at Brébeuf, however, few answered the call, and most of this young elite probably opposed the war as a British imperial conflict that would spill Canadian blood and bitterly divide the country. Charles Trudeau’s close friend Mayor Camillien Houde did not hide his agreement with that view.

Pierre was nineteen years old when the Germans stormed across the German-Polish border that September. His own attitude towards the war was not predictable, and he understood its bloodiness. In the debate at school on the Sino-Japanese conflict in which he took the Japanese side, he admitted they were ruthless: “But in war can such things be avoided?” he asked. “Did not Germany use gas in 1914 and bomb the Red Cross of the Allies? Did not Italy use very crude means in Ethiopia, did not China massacre Europeans in the Boxer rebellion, did not Franco render thousands of Spanish children orphans, did not France execute unscrupulously certain of her enemies in the last war, did not Great Britain herself use the inhuman explosive bullets against the Boer?”³ Trudeau obviously knew much about war, but he displayed none of the generous views towards Mussolini’s Italy and Franco’s Spain that were common among the clergy and the commentators in Quebec at the time.

Camille Corriveau, his American girlfriend, wrote to him at the outbreak of war, begging him not to enlist. He did not answer directly but described the immediate signs of war in Montreal: “Soldiers guard the Jacques Cartier bridge; airplanes often survey the city. The regiments hunt for recruits. Parliament is now sitting to decide if there will be conscription. There are some anti-conscription gatherings across the city. One hears some threats.” He admitted he had not read any newspapers and was not well informed, but he confided that he personally believed Hitler was near the end.⁴ Many who had read the newspapers shared this view when Hitler’s war machine halted during the “phony war” of that first winter. But they were wrong.

Pierre could have enlisted, but he did not. There was no military tradition in his family, despite Étienne Truteau’s celebrated seventeenth-century triumph over the Iroquois, and he later recalled that only one of his cousins enlisted.⁵ In general, francophones were poorly represented within the Canadian military. French was spoken only in the famed Royal 22e Régiment, and military administration in Quebec was conducted in English despite the controversies of the First World War. Among the higher ranks, francophones were scarce, and not one of the brigade commanders of the First Canadian Division was francophone.⁶ In Pierre’s last year at Brébeuf, 1939—40, he concentrated on his studies for his bachelor’s degree, on editing the school newspaper, and on his future plans. Meanwhile, he carefully guarded his opinions about the war.

“I’m not open enough,” he had decided when pondering a religious life in his future. Certainly, Pierre had become less open as his teenage years progressed and as his own sense of identity reacted to his understanding of external events. He told his mother in the fall of 1935 that the priests at Brébeuf might be worried about the election results, but he expanded no further and passed quickly on to another subject.⁷ He also grumbled that there were three Masses each day and no fewer than fifty-six religious exercises of various kinds in the Brébeuf regimen. But despite his complaints, his Catholic piety was increasingly and devoutly expressed: with exhilaration he told her how the lights were turned out at a retreat so they could better see the magnificent cross that loomed above them on Mount Royal. At another retreat house, in modest rooms near a quiet river, he told her he enjoyed the sermons but valued most the silence during meals—and, after the experience of those few days, he began his lifelong practice of meditation.

Pierre wrote this letter to his mother on November 26, one day after Quebec politics changed completely with the near defeat of the corrupt and capitalist Liberal government of Louis-Alexandre Taschereau; six weeks after the victory of Mackenzie King’s Liberals in Ottawa; three months after Mussolini’s dive bombers, in attacking Abyssinia, demolished the fragile hopes of collective security through the League of Nations; and nine months after Germany denounced the disarmament clauses of the Treaty of Versailles and introduced conscription. It was also only eight months after the death of Charles Trudeau. Quebec turned inward as it confronted the new realities; so, for a while, did Pierre.⁸

Although he turned inward, Pierre, contrary to his frequent later statements, remained deeply immersed in politics in two important ways: in the sense, set out by Aristotle, that the end of the science of politics must be human good; and in the specific Quebec context where the rights of francophone and Catholic citizens must be upheld. The cross on Mount Royal, after all, symbolically linked Roman Catholicism with the national mission of the descendants of New France in North America. Pierre’s Jesuit education mediated his understanding of contemporary politics in the 1930s, and his youthful play Dupés illustrates how closely he followed political events despite his later claims of ignorance. His views, as expressed publicly, were conventionally nationalist—what one would expect of an adolescent Brébeuf student in 1938. He supported the “Buy from our own” movement that arose as Jewish shopkeepers proliferated in the francophone districts of Montreal. He deplored the tendency to create constituency boundaries so that Jews could have electoral representation, although he wrongly blamed Maurice Duplessis rather than the federal Liberals for that chicanery. In common with most Quebec nationalists of the time, he portrayed active politicians as corrupt and craven, a view that he expressed bluntly in a Brébeuf essay that year where he said that anyone who entered politics risked acquiring “the reputation of an imbecile.” Yet he and many others dreamed of a new kind of politics, not so corrupt, and he fancied a future political career for himself.⁹

Much later, in minimizing his nationalist views, Trudeau recalled that he had joined students at a demonstration against the French writer André Malraux, who was touring Canada to advocate the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.¹⁰ Similarly, his views on international affairs, as expressed in his schoolbooks—which the priests read—followed the line taken by Quebec Catholic nationalists. For an English rhetoric class, he wrote in October 1937: “Do we want to go to war? We do not. Ask those who have been if they enjoyed the horrors, if they enjoyed the terrors, the misery and the uncertainty of war.”¹¹ The memories of the last war and the bitter divisions it caused were still strong in the province.

The anti-Semitism of Dupés was as conventional in its time as it seems deplorable today. It lacks the ferocity of Quebec fascist leader Adrien Arcand or, for that matter, the Canadian-born Catholic priest Father Charles Coughlin, who spread hatred and fear of Jews in Roosevelt’s America—a fear that grew rapidly as he denounced American Jews for drawing the United States into a European war. It was less extreme than the exaggerated view of Jewish economic power expressed in 1933 by Les Jeunes-Canada, a Quebec Catholic youth group that in a famous April rally, “Politicians and Jews,” heard speakers denounce the “Jewish plutocracy” and argue that Canadian politicians were quicker to condemn discrimination against Jews in distant Germany than against French Canadians in Ontario or the West.¹²

Pierre’s anti-war sentiments echoed the strong isolationist sentiment not only in Quebec but also among English-Canadian intellectuals in the 1930s. His rhetoric pales beside that of University of Toronto history professor and war veteran Frank Underhill, who called on the Canadian government to make clear to the world, “and especially to Great Britain, that poppies blooming in Flanders fields have no further interest for us … European troubles are not worth the bones of a Toronto grenadier”—or, Pierre would have added, a Brébeuf student.¹³ The conventional, history reminds us, is frequently badly wrong. The moral quandaries of the time lay elsewhere, and Pierre’s manuscript for Dupés was revised several times not for its anti-Semitism but for its suspected sexual nuance.^*

After 1935, Pierre began that period of adolescence when, in psychologist Erik Erikson’s well-known phrase, individuals ask, “Who am I?” The voices he most often heard after the death of his father were those within Brébeuf—his teachers and his classmates. He immersed himself in books, especially in the Catholic religion, French literature, and Catholic philosophy. In a more general sense, he followed the outline, or ratio, established by the Jesuit founder Ignatius of Loyola in the sixteenth century. It laid out the first international system of education, one whose method and content were similar in Peru, Poland, or Quebec. For its time, it was utilitarian, a method to provide the human resources for good government and to create a Catholic elite. Its design was “intended to ensure an immersion into classical culture, mastery of material, quickness of mind, sensitivity to individual ability, and personal discipline.”¹⁴

In this sense, Pierre Trudeau was an exceptional student. His discipline, a quality that Jesuit education inculcated, was extraordinary, and it remained so throughout his life. His notebooks are remarkable in their detail and conscientiousness; even when he was writing the compulsory letter to his mother, he made numerous corrections to individual phrases so as to find exactly the right word. He wrote reviews of every book he read while at Brébeuf, and the commentaries were perceptive beyond his adolescent years. He maintained his enthusiasm as he studied the differences between Aristotle and Plato, Rome and Athens, Jerusalem and Rome. He mastered his academic material in every class, whether classical Greek or, in 1939, political economy. His record was outstanding: in competition with an elite student body, he stood first in most of his classes, won more prizes than anyone else (to his delight, they were often in cash), and, in his final year, he bested his strongest competition, Jean de Grandpré, and stood first overall. He was extremely ambitious, a quality Ignatius of Loyola also valued: he carefully recorded de Grandpré’s marks and cheered those occasions when his rival finished second.

In the world of the later 1930s, as Pierre contemplated the question of his identity, Brébeuf created the context where he found most of the answers. It differed from some of the other classical colleges, which concentrated on producing priests, and self-consciously viewed itself as the vanguard of intellectual Catholicism in Quebec. It already stood at the apex of a structure of classical colleges that Maurice Duplessis regarded as “our fortresses, indispensable bastions that are essential to preserve our patriotic and religious traditions.”¹⁵ As he remarked in one of his school essays, the “fortress” of Brébeuf was a closed world where daily rituals and duties defined his days.¹⁶ Among his teachers, Father Robert Bernier, a Franco-Manitoban, was important in inspiring Pierre’s literary interest, and they certainly had great respect for each other. At one Easter retreat, the priest advised him to develop a broader cultural interest, which, he said, most Canadians lacked. Above all, he added, “you must avoid all contact with the vulgar, even if it is under the pretext of a distraction.” Pierre apologized for raising the subject but told Bernier he had no intimate friend who could give such advice.¹⁷

Bernier continued to counsel Pierre so long as he was at Brébeuf, but he was traditional in his views and self-effacing in manner. Gradually, Father Rodolphe Dubé, better known as the author François Hertel, became the greater influence. Hertel, Trudeau wrote later, “naturally gravitated towards everything that was new or contrary to the tastes of the day” and carried his students far beyond the thick stone walls of the fortress and the classroom.¹⁸ In the words of one of Pierre’s closest Brébeuf friends, Hertel was “a truly revolutionary force” among the sons of the bourgeoisie who predominated at the college, and he saved them from “the mediocrity and congenital folly of our condition.”¹⁹ Hertel’s biographer has argued convincingly that the success of this charismatic and humorous priest derived in large part from the solemn atmosphere and rigorous discipline of Brébeuf in those times. A brilliant teacher and a clever comedian, he would begin his classes with a joke that often shocked the students and dramatically pierced the greyness in the classrooms.²⁰

Deeply anti-capitalist, profoundly distrustful of the influence of Britain and the United States, but also a critic of racism in Germany and of “British imperialism,” François Hertel admired the nationalist interpretation of history put forward by Abbé Groulx. In a 1939 article in L’Action nationale, the Abbé, in turn, responded with enthusiasm to Hertel’s novel, Le beau risque. He said it provided a penetrating exposé of the empty soul of bourgeois French Canadians, who had cut themselves off from their nationalist roots, and he focused on one short passage which noted that the francophone bourgeoisie always raised the “national question” hesitantly with their children. In his view, the new generation had to break away from the compromises of earlier generations if the national question was to be seriously addressed.²¹ Then a true democracy could exist, one based on a national faith that resided in the hearts and minds of the people.²²

Pierre made no mention of this article in his journal, but his school writings contain similar anti-bourgeois and nationalist sentiments. Although there are several references in his papers to works by the Abbé, he seems to have had only one personal encounter with him during his Brébeuf years. On February 18, 1938, he went to a lecture Groulx gave on the intendant Jean Talon, who, in the latter seventeenth century, had tried to consolidate the prosperity of New France, and he reported: “The subject is interesting and was treated well, but the poor Abbé does not have a good voice or oratorical talent.” Moreover, whether or not Trudeau was the model for the character Pierre Martel in Hertel’s Le beau risque, the message of the novel—the dangers of Americanization and Anglicization, the obligations to the past, the limitations of bourgeois capitalism, the importance of national sentiment among youth—resonated loudly for him, despite his later denials in interviews that they did.^*

Like Hertel and the other Brébeuf teachers, Pierre Trudeau shared the excitement that came from the reinvigoration of French Catholicism in the twentieth century, especially after the First World War. France, so secular and revolutionary in the nineteenth century, had become the centre of a remarkable revival of Catholic faith in the twentieth century. Leading Catholic thinkers and theologians such as the liberal Jacques Maritain, the “personalist” Emmanuel Mounier, and the conservative, elitist Charles Maurras came to dominate French intellectual life in the interwar years and began a process of seeking to “bare the human condition utterly.”²³ Among the subjects they bared was the relationship between the citizen and the state. “Personalism”—a philosophical approach to the Catholic faith that emphasized the individual while linking individual action with broader purposes within society—would have a profound impact on Trudeau and on Quebec intellectual life.

Son of a bourgeois father and an English-speaking mother, rich, charmed by the New York theatre, at ease with American wealth, intrigued by American women, and infatuated with the movies, Trudeau’s words and convictions as a Brébeuf student seem to belie his own past, present, and future actions and beliefs. And it is precisely these contradictions that shape the emotional and intellectual growth of Pierre Trudeau. He had internalized deeply the death of his father, but the source of his inquietude seems to have been the tension between the Catholic nationalism of Brébeuf and his own personal experience and developing convictions. Brébeuf was immersed in nationalism from the mid-thirties on. The college priests detested the Liberal government of Premier Louis-Alexandre Taschereau, who had compromised with the Americans and the capitalists, and they welcomed the rise of the Action libérale nationale—a rebel group that expressed the nationalism and social action which they and the Catholic youth groups found attractive as a response to the Depression and the discontents of the time. However, after the ALN formed a coalition with the Conservatives to form a new party, the Union nationale, the ALN’s leader, Paul Gouin, lost the leadership to Maurice Duplessis, a conservative nationalist tied to rural Quebec. And, in 1936, the Union nationale won the election. In Dupés, Pierre had revealed his politics and those of the play’s audience when he mocked Duplessis as Maurice Lesoufflé. Nationalism in itself was not enough.

In 1938 Pierre Trudeau began a journal, which he continued through his last two years in school. It is detailed, frank, and extraordinarily revealing. It is the only diary in his papers, apart from less personal travel diaries and an agenda for 1937 that contains some commentary, and it expresses his own need to chronicle the moments of late adolescence as he tried to find his identity. It begins on New Year’s Day 1938 with the intriguing advice: “If you want to know my thoughts, read between the lines!”

The lines themselves tell a great deal about this tumultuous time in his life. He recounts how he lamented his father’s absence on the third anniversary of his death; at other times, he says that things would be different and, presumably, better if his father were still with him. He does not mean that the Trudeaus would be wealthier. Here the pages abound with evidence of the Trudeau family’s considerable wealth—a Buick for Suzette, who enjoyed bourgeois pleasures; a grand Packard that bears Pierre, Tip, and some priests to a retreat; the chauffeur, Grenier; the tickets for friends and teachers for Royals’ games and the Belmont amusement park; and the good hotels and restaurants the family frequented when they visited New York City. Above all, the entries reveal two aspects of his character: first, his goals, as his ambition for a public life at the highest level becomes a constant refrain; and, second, his extraordinary intellectual curiosity and commitment to hard work. On February 17, 1938, the eighteen-year-old student even thanks God for the good health that allows him to work to midnight almost every night on his studies. Rarely does God receive such thanks from schoolboys.

His mother encouraged but did not direct. Grace Trudeau continued to spend summers at Lac Tremblant and Old Orchard Beach in Maine, while travelling frequently to New York in the fall and spring and to Florida in the winter. Grace, though a strong personality, gave her children surprising freedom. In his journal, it is the “eyes” of Brébeuf that watch the young Trudeau throughout these pages. He complained about this constant attention not only in the diary pages but even in an article he wrote in May 1939 for Brébeuf, the student newspaper, where he suggested that the departing class will rejoice at the end of the constant “surveillance” and the need to ask, “Father, may I …?²⁴ There were endless permissions, perpetual denials, and eclectic censorship. In March 1938 the censor forbade the presentation of a play after Trudeau and others had rehearsed it many times. And a few of the priests used the threat of expulsion for even trivial misdemeanours. Pierre was always diligent and fundamentally shy, but he sought popularity and gained attention by clever, rebellious distractions that infuriated some of his teachers. After a snowball fight and a couple of other incidents, Father Landry warned him in a menacing fashion that he was a millimetre from being kicked out of the college: the rector would no longer tolerate the “insolence of Pierre Elliott Trudeau,” he said, and the next offence would mean a trip to the rector’s office. Throughout the reprimand, Pierre smiled, to the certain annoyance of Landry. The next day the clever student found “an excuse” to call upon the rector, and there he discovered that everything was fine so far as the top man was concerned. Pierre already possessed political wiles.

Landry continued to pester him, but Pierre found allies in other teachers, notably Fathers Bernier, Sauvé, d’Anjou, and Toupin. Despite their counsel to avoid jazz, movies, and American popular culture, he travelled to New York in the spring of 1939 in his sister’s Buick, which his mother agreed he could drive after an excellent academic year. Suzette had spent four months in France and, very much the young sophisticate, was returning on June 16 on the art deco gem the Normandie. Grace and the boys stayed on Central Park South at the elegant Barbizon Plaza, attended the New York World’s Fair, and, with a friend of Suzette’s, Pierre danced the night away at the Rainbow Grill on the roof of Rockefeller Center. The fair initially disappointed Pierre: “The first good effect is spoiled by all the common people, the crowd, and especially because nearly all the buildings are made of beaver board and the columns are of cardboard. And inside you see only a bunch of merchandise.” It was, he concluded in best Brébeuf fashion, too vulgar. He found the Soviet pavilion an impressive exception with its marble, but he deplored the “marvellous Communist propaganda” it represented. He approved of the monumental Italian pavilion, however, though he made no political comments about it or Mussolini. On another evening he was deeply moved when he saw Raymond Massey star in Abraham-Lincoln in Illinois. The aspiring politician was no doubt assured to discover that young Lincoln had been “troubled, timid, overwhelmed, and a misanthrope.”²⁵

The world beckoned, yet Brébeuf’s pull persisted. There, Pierre increasingly wrestled with questions of faith, nationality, and vocation. Outside the college walls, he enjoyed experiences that his school notebooks often condemn. The tensions between experience and education, belief and practice, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, ambition and timidity created the dynamic that drove his personal growth in these critical years. As the international situation worsened and nationalist currents flowed more strongly, he built up his own internal protections against the pressures that suddenly confronted him. The eminent psychologist Jerome Kagan has explained that adolescents tend to categorize people and endow them with certain characteristics. If an adolescent who believes he belongs to a particular category suddenly behaves in ways that violate those expectations, he experiences considerable uncertainty.²⁶ Discontinuities compel resolution. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Pierre Trudeau sensed such discontinuities, and he, too, sought their resolution.

One huge discontinuity occurred when Grace Trudeau registered both her sons at Camp Ahmek, the Taylor Statten summer camp on the shore of Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park, which was a favourite of the Ontario English elite. When he arrived on July 2, 1938, Pierre discovered that he had four English-Canadian roommates. Since he had left Querbes, his companions had been almost exclusively French. Sensing the foreign environment, he promised his diary that he would seize every occasion to declare that he was a “French Canadian and a Catholic.” He quickly made his mark, not least in boxing, where his skills and well-developed body resulted in bloody noses for several of the other campers. He also excelled in acting, receiving the highest marks for performances that were, of course, entirely in English. In the sole English entry in his diary that summer he wrote: “It’s good to hear ‘He is Pierre Trudeau, the best actor in camp!’”²⁷

The Brébeuf priests would also have been upset to learn that their prize eighteen-year-old student had fallen in love. Camille Corriveau, one year older than Trudeau, was a student at Smith College, and photographs indicate she was very pretty, with a full figure. Certainly Trudeau found her as attractive as Vivien Leigh and Jean Harlow, the actresses he admired in the movies. He was annoyed when the photograph she sent did not catch her stunning beauty. As he opened the envelope, he wrote in reply, the radio began to play the song “You must have been a beautiful baby.” He wanted more than this unsatisfactory photo, he complained, “so I keep thinking of the beautiful soft hair that was left out of the picture, the delicate ear [he stroked out ‘I am kissing’], a feminine shoulder, a graceful arm, a few charming curves, here and there [stroked out ‘a lovely leg’], and so many other things I am missing. Truly, you have been holding out on me, you little iconoclast you!” We cannot be sure Camille received exactly the words in this draft letter, but it does convey the allure she held for him.²⁸

A Franco-American, Camille vacationed in Orchard Beach every year with the many other francophones who gathered on the Maine beaches. Although a good dancer, Pierre was still shy with women, and he often turned down invitations thrust at him by his sister. When Suzette was presented as a debutante at Rideau Hall in Ottawa on January 28, 1938, he described himself, as he reflected on the occasion, as a bit of a misogynist. Still, he admitted that, for “esthetic” reasons, he could admire a beautiful woman. That would suffice for now, he concluded. It didn’t.²⁹

A few days after they met, Camille sent him a warm letter that stirred him despite his “coldness and … independence.” At least, he opined, Camille was more serious than the majority of women he encountered in Montreal. The memory of her lingered and he was soon looking forward with anticipation to their coming summer meeting. There was a moment of doubt in April when he went to a religious retreat. Father Tobin, the American priest for whom he had procured Montreal Royals tickets, took him aside to talk about universities in the United States. Pierre had been considering American schools for graduate work himself, but Father Tobin was firm in rejecting this option. The universities, he declared, were mostly co-educational and had become veritable dens of immorality. The male-only universities were equally bad because students would sneak women into their rooms. Worst of all were women’s colleges such as Vassar and Smith, which were “schools of immorality.” Indeed, the mother of a Smith student had confessed to Tobin that contraceptives were to be found everywhere at the school. The reason—the immoral cinema. But even more influential were the professors who openly professed free love.

A shocked Pierre apparently did not argue with Tobin, who was his “guardian angel” for the retreat, but in his diary he wrote: “I am convinced that my Camille is an exception. However, the atmosphere can have an influence.” Fortunately, “she is Catholic,” a commitment that was, in his still innocent mind, an impregnable shield against the forces of lust and the availability of condoms.³⁰

The conversation lingered in the recesses of Pierre’s conscience as the summer of 1938 and Camille’s presence approached. Unfortunately, Pierre and Camille had not connived to make their stays coincident, and he went off to Camp Ahmek again in July. After lamenting to his diary that Camille was in Old Orchard while he was in the wilds of Ontario, he broke down in tears when he finished reading Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac. Cyrano spoke to his sense of romance and became his model. The greatest compliment, he wrote to Camille, would be to hear someone say, “You have won because you are Cyrano!”³¹ Throughout his life Trudeau identified with Cyrano, who appealed to his romantic spirit. The daring seventeenth-century swordsman believed that, because of his ugly nose, the beautiful Roxane would never accept him—and, in the end, his handsome but dull friend Christian won her heart.³² Pierre, who constantly worried about his acne and thought women did not find him appealing, clearly identified with the brilliant poet but tragic lover Cyrano. Four decades later, Trudeau also recalled the importance for him of Cyrano’s famous “tirade” about walking alone to the heights: “I found there an expression of who I was and what I wanted to be: I don’t care if I don’t make it, providing I don’t need anyone else’s help, providing what I do make I make alone.”³³

Pierre enjoyed Camp Ahmek, but when the month was up on July 29, he was impatient to get to Old Orchard Beach.³⁴ The family chauffeur immediately drove him and Tip to Maine to join Grace and Suzette. Camille had agreed to stay a few more days. Alas, when he arrived, he discovered that she had not been able to find a room and might have to leave. Grace and Suzette quickly responded to the crisis with an invitation for Camille to stay with them. For Pierre, “utopia had arrived!”³⁵ They had five glorious days in which, like Cyrano with Roxane, he read poetry to Camille, they watched the stars at night on the pier, and they went to confession together. Then they parted sadly on August 6, vowing to stay in touch.

They met again the next year in August at Old Orchard Beach, and the external world that was falling apart was far distant from the young lovers. Camille had spent part of the academic year in France, and Pierre found her aloof at first, but soon enchantment returned. They went to Hollywood films almost every night, then walked on the pier and talked—he about law school, which he had begun to consider, and she about becoming a schoolteacher. On the 17th they had their first fight, when he wanted to pass the evening reading and she wanted him to spend it with her. He finally agreed, and, the following night, they went dancing with Suzette and her boyfriend to celebrate the second anniversary of their meeting. Afterwards, the moon over the water was especially bewitching and, for the first time, they kissed.

At month’s end, however, they fought again. She sent him a note telling him to meet her on the pier if he was not tired; her tone was cold. Pierre noted in his journal: “I found the proposal comic and I would have responded to her in the same tone, but I wasn’t able to do so because I was in the bath.” Resentfully, he met her and reproached her for her bad mood. They went to Camille’s summer place, where he told her that she was beautiful and enchanting but he would not be pulled along by “the end of the nose.” He confessed to himself that his behaviour might have been impolite, but, he reasoned, “it seems to me that the woman should not push the man around.”³⁶ The next evening, as the Second World War began, she begged him not to do anything dangerous. Rather, she asked him to visit her at Smith in the autumn and to attend her graduation the following June. As she wept, he kissed her tears and whispered poetry in her ear before they finally parted at 2:45 a.m.³⁷

The summer of 1939 was the best, he told his diary: “I read little, but I kissed a woman.”³⁸ In September, school resumed: Pierre became the editor of the college newspaper, Brébeuf, and prepared to wrest class leadership away from Jean de Grandpré. He thought constantly of Camille, but among his peers the news of war incited considerable debate in the college corridors. He avoided the discussions and deliberately cloaked himself with ambiguity. On October 9 he wrote in his diary: “It’s true that there is a certain charm to surrounding oneself with mystery.” He preferred to have people say “Trudeau? No one knows him. Friend of all; intimate of none.”

Pierre remained publicly aloof from the controversies about conscription. His journal provides convincing repudiation to anyone who argues that his nationalism made him an immediate opponent of the “British war.” He found the declarations of many students—that they would resist conscription and flee into the bush—simply foolish. “Everyone is talking for and against conscription,” he noted in one entry. “It is a sad thing but I would not do what many others are promising to do: hide themselves in the bush. I would sign up and go and come back for the sake of adventure.” Then he hesitated: his own preference was to avoid the war and go to England—not as a soldier but as a Rhodes Scholar—or maybe to the States.³⁹

Within the next months, war, as it so often does, changed everything, notably Canadian politics. Trudeau attended two election rallies in the fall as Duplessis challenged the federal government’s war authority under the War Measures Act. On October 20 he went with his mother to the Montreal Forum for a Liberal rally. A family friend had given them tickets, but Pierre, whose father had been a Conservative, was offended by the Liberal crowd, which “cried like babies with each invective against the bleus.”⁴⁰ Still, he found Mackenzie King’s French lieutenant, Ernest Lapointe, very impressive. The federal Liberals had warned francophone Quebec that the re-election of Duplessis would mean the resignation of the Quebec Liberal ministers and, inevitably, the emergence of a conscription coalition, as in the First World War.

Six days later he attended yet another Liberal rally with his mother, where he heard the brilliant orator Athanase David speak. Pierre could not yet vote, but in his first Brébeuf article dealing with the war he cast a plague on all the older parties and expressed his belief that Quebec needed a new movement that was neither bleu nor rouge, conservative nor liberal. About the war, he was remarkably taciturn. He made no comments on the defeat of Poland or on the alliance of Communism and Nazism in its destruction. He attacked the tyranny of public opinion, where “soldiers dare not say they would like to halt war … and generals dare not call for peace.”⁴¹ Camille and plans for his future career preoccupied him more than politics, and he said nothing publicly when the provincial Liberals defeated Duplessis.

Camille had asked him to visit her at Smith. He hesitated, writing in his diary: “2,000 women. Ouf!” He admitted that he understood neither her nor women generally. He was jealous; he was suspicious. Perhaps recalling Father Tobin’s warnings, he wondered about the summer day when Camille had revealed a “naughty” character. He finally decided that he would go to Smith, and he borrowed Suzette’s impressive Buick for the occasion. Once again they went to the movies, where they saw All Quiet on the Western Front, the film based on Erich Maria Remarque’s novel. Its anti-war message impressed Pierre, but this time Camille did not. She was too materialistic and too independent. She was, to be sure, charming and pretty, but “My God,” he exclaimed, “I am too much an idealist and an intellectual for her.” Although Catholic and French, she was, regrettably, too American.⁴² He returned home, worried about the war, and with one goal in mind: to win the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship and go to Oxford.

If the Rhodes had been granted, Pierre Trudeau would have embarked on a path that took him away from his companions and the whirlwind of Quebec political life. His teachers at Brébeuf recommended him strongly for the award and, in January 1940, his chances seemed excellent. Indeed, the letter from Father Boulin, the head, or prefect, of the college, listed the astonishing number of prizes that Pierre had won (a hundred prizes and honourable mentions in seven years) and stated that he had performed with great distinction in all fields. Pierre was, he added, diligent and intelligent, though a bit timid and his own most severe critic. He was “a manly character, a desired companion, and a perfect gentleman.” His determination was exceptional: in the past year, when he broke his leg in a skiing accident, Boulin continued, Pierre chose not to take a comfortable break at home; “instead, he became a boarder at the college, prepared for classes in the sick room and went to each course in a wheelchair. The decision was entirely his,” he explained, “because his mother and his sister had not yet returned from a trip to Europe.” He had demonstrated the manliness that Cecil Rhodes so prized, and he was developing a strong personality and character little by little. Boulin sent the letter to Grace, requesting that she not reveal its contents to Pierre. One suspects she did.

The family’s Liberal friend Alex Gourd was asked to supply a letter of support for Trudeau’s nomination for the scholarship. In it he listed the many awards Pierre had won and drew particular notice to Dupés, the work by the young playwright. After mentioning the numerous sports in which Pierre participated, he noted that he was fluently bilingual, his mother being “Scottish”—a description increasingly used by Pierre himself. Like Boulin, Gourd also suggested that the young man was “timid,” but, in his view, the reserve derived from a lack of life experience. A final letter came from a Montreal city official, who emphasized the “affection mixed with respect” that Pierre showed towards his family, particularly his mother.

Pierre had to compose an essay for the Rhodes Committee. He offered to write it in English, but “being a French-Canadian student of a French-Canadian college,” he thought the committee would prefer that he present it in French. He began by admitting the difficulty of writing about his interests and hopes, and then he continued with a defence of his education. First in his life came religion, which had universal application; then came study at Brébeuf, which had prepared him well for future public life. He pointed to the diversity of his studies and to his own tendency to grasp new experiences. He was, he noted in English, a “Jack of all trades.” After listing an exhausting number of extracurricular activities, he said that this thirst for diversity had affected his career choice. Very simply, he stated, “I have chosen a political career.” He defined politics broadly and indicated that both his own capacity and his particular circumstances would determine whether such a career was in politics itself, in the diplomatic service, or even in journalism. In any case, Pierre said that he was choosing his educational path so he might prepare quickly for public life.

To this end, he continued, he had studied public speaking and had published many articles in Brébeuf. He rejected demagoguery and political jobbery, arguing that the politician must have “a perfect understanding of men and a knowledge of their rights and duties.” That was a tall order and good reason to study “Philosophy-Politics-Economics” at Oxford and, if it was not too much, modern history as well. His ultimate goal was a law degree. Finally, after raising the issue of what Oxford would mean for his “French self,” he provided his own answer that the intimate contact with English culture would serve to broaden him. Rhodes himself had famously said, “So much to do, so little time in which to do it.” Like Rhodes, Pierre Trudeau stated that he, too, possessed “an inextinguishable passion for action.”⁴³

But it was not to be. In January 1940 the Rhodes officials awarded the scholarship to another applicant. If Trudeau had won the Rhodes and gone to England, he would have become much less French and more a part of the Anglo-American world. He seemed to anticipate that fate. As editor of Brébeuf, he wrote that the journal had decided not to express any defined opinion on the subject of the war during the fall of 1939.⁴⁴ That public position echoed the private thoughts expressed in his diary. He did not initially oppose the war, reflecting the attitude of his church and probably that of most of his teachers. The archbishop of Quebec, Cardinal Villeneuve, took a clear stand for the Allies by asking God “to hear our supplications and that the forces of evil may be overthrown and peace restored to a distracted world.”⁴⁵ Trudeau’s presence at Liberal rallies with his mother and Liberal family friends suggests that he probably would have voted Liberal against Maurice Duplessis—as his mother surely did. But because he was not yet twenty-one, the voting age, he did not have to make that choice.

Everything changed in 1940. Jerome Kagan has noted how “adolescents, who are beginning to synthesize the assumptions they will rely on for the rest of their lives, are unusually receptive to historical events that challenge existing beliefs.” Whether in Ireland at Easter 1916, Prague or Paris in spring 1968, or Montreal in 1940, adolescents are keen witnesses as history “tears a hole in the fabric of consensual assumptions.” Young minds fly through that hole, Kagan wrote, “into a space free of hoary myth to invent a new conception of self, ethics, and society.” With Pierre, some myths lingered, but in 1940 the conception changed.⁴⁶

His contemporary and friend of the 1950s, the sociologist Marcel Rioux, later wrote that, for him and his generation, the war completely changed the direction of their lives. Their understanding of society and, especially, of the relationship between the economically dominant anglophone minority and the poorer francophone majority altered dramatically. Rebellion took many forms, whether at classical colleges or in the working-class areas of Montreal. For Pierre Trudeau, son of a French businessman and an English (now always termed Scottish) mother, this transformation was very turbulent.

The war made Trudeau into a Quebec nationalist. The ambiguities that had marked his writings and thought in the 1930s began slowly to disappear. He was well prepared: he knew the nationalist arguments and had repeated them to the nationalist priests at Brébeuf and to a broader audience in Dupés. Although he had serious reservations about the stronger nationalist arguments made by “our exalted patriots,” he increasingly regarded his heritage as primarily French, and his education constantly strengthened that belief. When the Canadian government imposed the Defence of Canada Regulations that limited free speech and invoked conscription for Home Defence in 1940, Pierre suddenly saw history differently. He became, in his own phrase, deeply concerned about the fate of his “French self.”

But the change came gradually, as he worked diligently to stand first at Brébeuf and as he edited, rather eccentrically, the student newspaper. As editor, he took a “hands-off” approach and put much energy into a “Tribune libre” edition where free expression was permitted. He was too busy to write to Camille very often, but at last on March 30, 1940, he sent her a long letter to fill her in on his activities. He wrote in English, even though Camille’s French had improved after her time in Paris, but he took her to task for her earlier comment that his meanings were often obscure and his prose too complex. He admitted, however, that others at Brébeuf had made the same complaint. The letter gives the flavour of his life at the time and contrasts with the impression presented in his notebooks, where he concentrates on philosophical works and ignores the movies and concerts he attended and the popular books he read. After a long apology for the delay in writing, he began:

And to make a long story less long, you find me with a pen in my hand, a happy Easter on my lips, and very little in the back of my head. But shall we get down to facts?

During the past month I have done a great deal of most anything. Naturally we were overworked in school. As we finish a month ahead of the other classes, our teachers want to cram everything in at once.

Then I have been reading quite a bit of “Dominique” by Eugène Fromentin [a French author and painter]. In the line of plays, I was at [Canadian director and actor] Maurice Evans’ staging of Hamlet. It was a masterpiece of producing. I found his playing very comprehensive yet too declaratory. I saw Rostand’s “Aiglon” which had some very high spots.

He went on to say that he had read Charles Péguy’s Notre jeunesse and Frivolimus ’40, a good example of Montreal low humour. He also saw French director Sacha Guitry’s movie Le roman d’un tricheur, which he declared “insipid.” He went to two concerts, one a Red Cross benefit which combined “the two Montreal Symphonic Orchestras,” but “it was remarkable by its lack of anything remarkable.” To all that, he told Camille, “you can add a few conferences [lectures] by the French philosopher [Jacques] Maritain,” who strongly supported the Allied war effort. Given Trudeau’s increasing nationalism and opposition to war, it’s interesting that he listened carefully to the liberal and pro-Allied Maritain at this time.⁴⁷

Pierre told Camille that his hockey team was in the playoffs and that he was simply “crazy” about skiing. He boasted that he had bought “jumping skis” (which, unhappily, were soon to break his leg). He said that the whole family had skied during the Christmas holiday and he and Tip had spent time together on the “superb” hills at Mont Tremblant. He went on to describe the controversies he had proudly stirred at Brébeuf:

And now to end this one topic (myself conversation), I will please you by admitting that you are not alone to find my style obscure and incoherent: the last edition of “Brébeuf” had a “Tribune libre” in which several fellows took a few cracks at my essays. Evidently I could not let them have the last word, so I answered right back with good style …

By the way I also published an article on Rut-thinking and standardized education that we have discussed together. It caused a scandal in the cloister, and I was called up to explain my views. It was even funnier because Tippy at the same time wrote an article on individualism. But I leave this to some other time for I am anxious to talk about you, my dear Camille.

After inquiring about her college, how she looked, and what she planned to do, he made a characteristically lame joke: “I think I’ll have my graduation diploma pickled; that’s because I can’t get stewed.” In France, Camille had developed an interest in philosophy and in Freud and Proust.^* Suddenly, Pierre, in a pattern that he followed later in his relationships with women, became earnest with her:

Such deep thinking brings me to the subject of Philosophy and to your concept of philosophical ethics. Honestly, I think we could have a peach of an argument on the subject. Firstly, I would tell you to read [Alexis Carrel’s] “L’homme, cet inconnu” to find out how bad it is to always do what pleases you. Secondly I should ask you to demonstrate, either by examples of metaphysics, your theory on how “one thing that might be wrong for the whole world to do, might be perfectly alright in one particular case.” In other words, if all men are participants of the human nature, why shouldn’t all men obey one universal natural law? Thirdly, I should inquire why you say it took over 2000 years for society to catch on to itself. Do you mean that the birth of Christ marked the beginning of the period when society misunderstood itself, or of the period when it understood itself? But don’t bother answering; true to your sex, you have probably changed your mind about everything in the past month, exchanging Freud’s theories for Aristotle’s.

Camille must have read Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, a study that had its faults but was infinitely superior to Carrel’s book. L’homme, cet inconnu is highly elitist and racist and, because of Carrel’s repute as a Nobel Prize winner in medicine, his argument gave intellectual weight to Hitler’s extermination policies. The book’s “woman is weaker” strain is also reflected in Pierre’s comments to Camille. He indicated no understanding of how Carrel conflicted with Jacques Maritain or, for that matter, Tip’s article on individualism.

In an addendum to his letter, he signalled his confusion about himself and his beliefs. Apologizing for failing to write to an apparent mutual friend, Pierre wrote: “I should like to call it laziness; yet it truthfully is nothing but lack of genius. I, who always believed myself simple and ‘like unto a little child,’ have realized that I am, unfortunately, a complicated adult unable to speak a simple thought, without forethought and afterthought.” He was, very slowly, becoming an adult, but a complicated one.⁴⁸ Given that Trudeau would turn twenty-one that year, he appears astonishingly adolescent in this letter. He wants to be a contrarian, to escape the “ruts,” but his education seems to have left him adrift as powerful new waves swept over his world. He was well read but not yet well educated.

After he lost the Rhodes competition, Pierre Trudeau decided to stay in Quebec and to study law at the Université de Montréal—with the intention of entering politics. He had consulted widely, asking even Henri Bourassa for direction. Edmond Montpetit, the most prominent Quebec economist, advised him to study law, followed by economics and the social sciences. Father Bernier was involved in the final decision, in mid-June 1940. Trudeau told him that he had considered a career in chemistry or in medicine, with a psychiatric speciality, or, alternatively, in “politics,” which he believed required a legal degree. When Pierre decided to rule out chemistry, on the grounds that it was “as good to govern men as atoms,” Bernier accepted his final decision in favour of politics, but insisted that his former student should always maintain his interest in the arts. He explained, as Pierre noted in his journal: “So many worthy men, like Papa, had been compelled to work to earn their living” that they were unable to enjoy the fruits of their earlier studies. They both agreed that a man of principle should “have a mystique,” and Pierre resolved to give fifteen to twenty minutes every day to “meditate on the goals of man, the Creator, the tasks to do, morality etc. and then conclude with a true prayer, a conversation with God.” They also concurred on the need to maintain an ascetic life. Pierre recorded but did not comment on Bernier’s advice that, in relationships with young women, one should not make “the least sensual concession.” However, he agreed that “it was bad to work too much,” no doubt recalling his father’s early death. He concluded his entry on their discussion with a pledge to read literature more widely and to continue to study theology.⁴⁹

A few weeks earlier, Pierre had expressed the same sentiments to a Camp Ahmek friend, Hugh Kenner, who, later, became an eminent literary critic. As he prepared to leave Brébeuf, Trudeau told Kenner that it had been “such fun probing into the mysteries uncovered by the study of metaphysics and ethics … Personally,” he added, “it was with great awe that I came to the conclusion that space was only limited by God himself; that somewhere beyond our universe and all the universes, millions of light years away, out where matter ceased to be possible, there exists space conceivable, that is to say the Conceiver.” Cosmology, Trudeau declared, would become his second focus; the first, of course, remained literature. And, as for so many others, literature would play a major role in making Trudeau a revolutionary nationalist at this time.⁵⁰

In June, the same month Trudeau graduated, France fell. Immediately, the call for conscription echoed throughout English Canada as the British, the Free French, and a few Canadians fled Dunkirk in the famous defeat that became “their finest hour.” In France itself many attributed the defeat to the secularism and socialism of the Republic and saw the creation of Vichy, the German puppet government under First World War hero Marshal Pétain, as a base from which to build a new France—one more Catholic and less corrupt than the previous regime. These views found strong support in conservative circles in Quebec, to the annoyance of many in Ottawa who were concentrating on the threat of invasion to Britain. Paul Gérin-Lajoie, the scion of one of Quebec’s leading families, Trudeau’s predecessor as editor of Brébeuf, and later an eminent public servant, wrote in the college newspaper in February 1941 that French democracy had been hopeless and that it must be replaced by a corporatist state based on the family—a system that recognized the French people’s obvious need for authority. Drawing on the papal encyclical Quadragesimo Anno and, in Quebec, on traditional nationalist distrust of the impact of modernization, corporatism was a rejection of capitalism, socialism, and liberalism in favour of a more Catholic, authoritarian, and self-sufficient state. Mussolini’s Italy, Salazar’s Portugal, and, after 1940, Pétain’s Vichy were sometimes cited as models of a corporatist state.^* Trudeau came to share most of these views, and he kept Gérin-Lajoie’s article among his papers.

The historian Esther Delisle has argued that, as early as 1937, Trudeau was secretly an ardent nationalist dedicated to Quebec independence, and that, while still at Brébeuf, he became a member of Les Frères Chausseurs, or LX, a secret revolutionary cell plotting the overthrow of the existing government. Although evidence of his early nationalism and even his sympathies for independence began to emerge before Trudeau wrote his own memoirs, he never responded to this charge. In the memoirs, he portrays himself as an anti-nationalist throughout the earlier period and depicts the war as a mild deviation from that path, one caused by the wrongs of wartime. “The war,” he wrote, “was an undeniably important reality, but a very distant one. Moreover, it was part of current events, and, as I have explained, they did not interest me very much.”

That account is disingenuous at best. The information about Trudeau’s involvement in a secret revolutionary cell came initially from two sources: from his contemporary François-Joseph Lessard, an important member of Les Frères Chausseurs, who claimed in a book published in 1979 that Hertel had introduced Trudeau to the group in 1937 as the Simón Bolívar of French Canada; and from François Hertel himself, who said in 1977 that Trudeau was a founder of the group and, at that time, an angry nationalist who had battled with the police in 1937–38 during the centennial celebrations of the earlier Rebellions.⁵¹ Trudeau did admit to interviewers that he was present at student protests against André Malraux and the representatives of the Spanish Republic, but he claimed it was the noise of the crowd that had attracted him to the event.⁵² His journal clearly refutes that explanation.

Without doubt, Trudeau would later deceive interviewers who asked him where he was and what he believed when the Second World War was fought. Surprisingly, much of the evidence was already in the public domain, though Delisle was the first to put it all together: the testimony of Hertel and Lessard; press clippings about a speech and a trial following an anti-Semitic riot; and articles in the Université de Montréal student newspaper, Le Quartier Latin, where Trudeau’s virulent opposition to the war was publicly expressed. There was even a question in the House of Commons from a Social Credit MP on April 5, 1977, when Trudeau seemed to admit that he had been a member of a “separatist” secret society. Yet before Delisle and, more recently, Max and Monique Nemni drew attention to this evidence, there was no public discussion about it, and, astonishingly, no journalist “followed up” on the question asked in the House.⁵³

Based on Trudeau’s complete personal papers, the evidence is overwhelming that Trudeau did become a strong Quebec nationalist and that, during the war, he associated with supporters of “Laurentie,” who espoused an independent French Catholic state. How did the fan of American movies, the participant in Liberal rallies in the 1939 Quebec election, the student who was suspicious of “exalted patriots” and proud of both his “English” blood and his “Elliott” name so quickly become a revolutionary separatist? The path, as always with Trudeau, has unexpected turns.

Trudeau’s papers suggest that, in the pre-war years, because of his education and experience, Pierre was capable at certain moments of being strongly nationalist. Conversely, he reacted against that same nationalism when it touched on those of mixed English/French blood. He correctly told biographers that, at Brébeuf, he had shocked the priests and his classmates when he applauded Wolfe’s victory over Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham. At other times, he was a strong defender of nationalist positions—on one occasion burning the Union Jack with a bunch of Brébeuf boys. In his own mind, he had established a sense of balance that occasionally tilted when, on the one hand, he attended an English-Canadian camp or, on the other, when a student accused him of betraying the French “race.” Still, his heritage was primarily French and Catholic.

As France fell and the Canadian government introduced conscription for home defence, the Trudeau family was on its way to Old Orchard Beach. There they received a telegram from Grace’s brother, Gordon, who lived in France and now asked for money to help him flee from the Nazis. Pierre recorded this “bad news” but, by the next morning, paid little attention to the crisis in Europe and the anti-conscription marches in Montreal as he slept in, did some oil painting, and remarked on the “perfect tranquility” with so few people on the beach. A few days later the full force of what was happening in Europe struck Pierre—perhaps because Camille was fiercely anti-Nazi and pro-Allies, even though she was an American. He wrote in his journal that the Germans were now in Paris. “Ah! the pigs,” he exclaimed. He saw a newsreel on the fall of Paris that infuriated him; it was, he wrote, the work of “the dirty Boche.” He decided he would join the Canadian Army to fight. In the meantime, he had to return for graduation.⁵⁴

This evidence decisively disproves the claims made later by Hertel and some later historians that Trudeau had early antiwar or even pro-fascist sympathies. However, it is true that his attitude in June 1940 is surprising, given some of his notebook jottings on works by Alexis Carrel and others. Very simply, he is contradictory and conflicted.

Meanwhile, the Trudeau family had decided to take a train and car trip across Canada and down the west coast of the United States. It began on June 26, and Pierre’s admiration for what he saw is clear in his notes. North of Superior, he wrote, “Quel pays admirable!” as he watched a splendid sunset. On arrival in Winnipeg, he described the city as “a drop of oil on the plains.” As he surveyed the vastness of the land, he again pondered whether law and politics was the right career choice: “Would I be capable of leading the people of Canada,” he asked, “or even the people of my own family?” In any event, he would follow where God led him, though, he added accurately, he would not be surprised if “the road has many forks, ditches and detours.”

He had vowed to keep a psychological journal during the trip, but the demands of daily travel were too much. Still, he thought about what fate had in store for him. He worried about his timidity with women, in particular, and humanity, in general, and resolved to look people directly in the eye—something he apparently had found difficult earlier. But he did not lack self-confidence:

I must become a great man. It’s amusing to say that! I’m often surprised to think, as I walk alone, do others not see the signs, don’t they sense that I bear within me, the makings of a future head of state or a well-known diplomat or an eminent lawyer? I am frankly astonished that those things do not shine through. And I have compassion for those who will not be able to boast in ten or twenty years of having seen me a single time.

He believed he had made the right career choice but recognized that he might change course. For a man, he noted, career is essential. “In a young woman you admire what she is; in the case of a young man, you admire what he will become.” He fretted about his strong attraction to women, although he admitted that the list of those he knew was “perplexingly short.” Camille came first, followed by “Micheline, Myrna, and Alice Ann.” Obviously, in his choice of women, Trudeau was—and remained—thoroughly multicultural. The danger, he warned himself, was that he would fall in love and marry before he completed his education. He concluded his self-assessment: “The moral of all this is that I must continually work for perfection and become likable, obliging, and gallant (what a word!).”

The trip continued, and, as he realized, it was as difficult to rule his family as Canada itself. In Edmonton they stayed at the grand Macdonald Hotel, where they met up with his Brébeuf friend Jean-Baptiste Boulanger and his family. The encounter was important because Jean-Baptiste, a Franco-Albertan, later became part of the secret society advocating a separatist state for Quebec. Together, they toured the cathedral at St. Albert, realizing, first hand, how far the French presence had extended. There was no talk of independence at that time, of course, and Trudeau passed on through the mountains at Jasper: “The first impression was profoundly moving,” he wrote. He remained deeply impressed after they unloaded Suzette’s Buick and drove through the Columbia Ice Fields to Lake Louise—where, on July 1, they celebrated Dominion Day.

There Suzette became sick, so Pierre had to drive through the mountains. It terrified him, not least because the car had faulty shock absorbers. Finally they reached Vancouver, where the natural setting impressed him but the university did not. Then, on July 9, they set off to drive down the Pacific Coast and have the car repaired. Pierre reflected upon the trip one day and pronounced it very worthwhile, especially from the point of view of the family. “We discussed a range of things,” he noted in his journal, “assayed our faults, and recalled old times.” He was more candid with Camille, telling her: “We are still having a riotous time, what with the scenery and the family arguments (some of them are honeys).” In his own case, he used the trip to develop “conversational arts,” which he believed he lacked. He deliberately tried to draw strangers into conversation with him and looked them in the eye as he had planned. It was, of course, all good training for politics.

Finally, on July 22, they reached Los Angeles. The family went to the Hollywood Bowl, where they saw Paul Robeson in an “unforgettable” performance. But that was the best of Los Angeles for Pierre, who betrayed his Brébeuf training in his assessment of the entertainment capital: “I can’t wait to escape this city,” he complained. “I’m sweltering.” There was no “ozone” in the air and too much carbon dioxide. “The people have the appearance of a dead fish,” while the women did not look natural—all of them seemed to be waiting for a director to pass by. At this point in the trip he was tired of writing, so he brought his account to an end. At least, he noted, he had served “the needs of my biographers.” Indeed, he had.

America was still neutral in the war, and the conflict seemed distant in Pierre’s account as June turned into July. Still, he remained strongly opposed to the fascists, writing on July 19 that Gordon Elliott had finally reached England as the war continued “its hideous advance.” Despite some later claims that Trudeau admired Hitler, he expressed loathing for him in his private journal. Hitler, he wrote, threatened to “exterminate the English,” who were nevertheless putting up a brave fight. He had heard little of what had happened in France. “What an affair! But good night: that’s my solution.” He learned that there would be a “mobilization” on August 23 and wondered whether it would “spoil our trip.”⁵⁵

It did not spoil the trip, but Montreal was a changed city on his return. After the fall of France in June 1940 and the imposition of conscription for home defence, Camillien Houde, the Montreal mayor and his father’s old friend, was interned for the duration of the war under the Defence of Canada Regulations because he had called for resistance to conscription. Before Charles Trudeau’s death, when Houde, then the Quebec Conservative leader, had come to the Lac Tremblant cottage, Pierre would hear their loud voices complaining about the “Liberal machine.” According to an accountant who had worked for Charles, Houde would drive into one of the Trudeau gas stations and say he needed “oxygen.” The accountant would go to the safe and hand over one hundred dollars in cash.⁵⁶ The arrest of Houde and others shocked Pierre and his friends, and the war that had been so distant while he was on the Pacific shores became much closer.

It was not a war they wanted to fight. Of his 1939–40 class at Brébeuf, only one out of forty entered the Canadian military, in comparison with three who entered the priesthood, six who studied law, and nine who went into medicine.⁵⁷ At the Université de Montréal in March 1940, a poll showed that 900 opposed any form of conscription and only 35 approved; in the law school Trudeau entered that fall, the vote was 53 to 3. Daniel Johnson, a student leader (and future Quebec premier), had already declared in the student newspaper his strong opposition to a future war where Canada’s interests were not involved. Now, with the “phony war” ending and conscription for home defence near, a young law student, Jean Drapeau, the future mayor of Montreal, also wrote an article in which he warned that another fight against conscription must begin, and he issued a call for vigilance.⁵⁸

Once the National Resources Mobilization Act was passed, Trudeau and his friends were compelled to enrol in the Canadian Officers Training Corps and to engage in regular drill and summer training. He had been eager to join up as German tanks entered Paris, but things changed after he began law school. In the fall of 1940, when he entered the Université de Montréal, Trudeau immediately attended Abbé Groulx’s history lectures. Of course, he had read Groulx’s numerous books and articles, but his earlier comments did not suggest that the Abbé impressed him greatly. His decision to take this class reflected both his revived nationalism and the influence of Hertel, who was increasingly a guest at the family home. Trudeau never told interviewers later that he had studied with the Abbé, yet his detailed notes for the lectures exist among his papers. And, although his early encounter with Groulx had left him with the impression that the esteemed historian lacked oratorical skills, the content of the course intrigued him now. His notes indicate that Groulx was characteristically silent on questions such as separation and, seemingly, the war. Like any good historian, he provoked students to think about consequences—in his case, the consequences of the Conquest of New France. It was the will of God for the heirs of the defeated in 1760 to maintain French Catholic culture in North America.⁵⁹

The Abbé left another clear mark on Trudeau: in his lectures, he emphasized the importance of the Statute of Westminster, giving it an exceptional constitutional significance in granting Canada freedom from the British Empire—an interpretation that went far beyond what the government of the day accepted. For many years afterwards, on December 11, Trudeau wrote “Statute of Westminster Day” on letters instead of the actual date. And, as he attended Groulx’s lectures, his life at school became associated with nationalist causes. For example, in the fall of 1940 he took part in a satirical farce at the university that ridiculed politicians and denounced conscription. Among the players were Jean Drapeau and Jean-Jacques Bertrand, who later became premier of Quebec while Trudeau was prime minister.

Even his social life became buoyantly nationalist: Pierre kept a dance card from December 1940 on which he wrote, on the front, “Praise to liberty,” and, on the back, “Long live liberty and the debutants.”⁶⁰ To Camille, he wrote in French for the first time, thanking her for calling him “my dearest friend” and saying, “It is impossible to know fully the value of a friend, of someone who penetrates our inescapable solitude.” But their romance was chilling, perhaps because of his new attitudes. He objected strongly when she ridiculed the decision of his friend “Roland” to become a monk, especially as she had always thought he was a “Don Juan.” “The idea of getting up in the middle of the night to sing is perfectly ridiculous,” Camille declared. An angry Trudeau found her remark “shocking.”⁶¹

By the spring of 1941 he was complaining to her not only about law school—“A genuine lawyer is only supposed to study six times longer than what I have; no wonder most of them are idiots”—but also about the Officers Training Corps, which he had earlier told her he was eager to join. Now it would be “more thrilling to go to the Concentration Camp^* or to the Front.”⁶² But he joined the Corps and, with resentment, did his service with many of his Brébeuf friends. Charles Lussier, a fellow nationalist then and a distinguished Canadian public servant later, remembered a revealing incident from that time: “One day our cadet captain marched us over to a depot where we were to move some shells. The officer in charge was English and gave instructions entirely in that language.” The eight trainees were all French Canadians and all obeyed except one—Pierre Trudeau—who refused to move because, he said in French, he did not understand the command. After an officer repeated the order in very bad French, Trudeau replied in unaccented English, “Good, now I understand you.”⁶³

Liberty meant resistance, and resist Trudeau did, whether it was a unilingual officer or a bureaucratic directive. Yet his rebellion had limits. When, for example, he wanted to read Marx’s Das Kapital and other works on “the Index” (the Catholic restricted list), including Rousseau’s Social Contract, he dutifully asked the archbishop of Montreal for permission. After an initial refusal, he received the approval, although “His Excellency” urged him to treat the books with great care and guard them closely.⁶⁴ No doubt he did, but in other respects neither he nor some of his friends heeded the archbishop’s counsel in 1941 and 1942 that French Catholics in Quebec should show restraint in opposing conscription and the war effort.

François Hertel was now openly separatist, and his 1942 study of personalism called for “men of action” who would make a free choice “to live.” Trudeau took the advice. He became ever more drawn to the widening circle around the priest and wrote him several admiring letters. Hertel, who was an enthusiastic patron of modernism in the arts, introduced the Trudeau family to the surrealist and cubist artist Alfred Pellan, who had returned to Montreal from Paris after the Nazi invasion. Highly cultured, Hertel impressed Grace and her children, and they frequently invited him to their home and wisely took his advice on purchasing art. Hertel paid Grace the highest compliment in August 1941 when he wrote to Pierre that she was “the least bourgeois woman he had encountered in his life.”⁶⁵ He encouraged Tip’s growing interest in architecture and music, as well as Pierre’s in literature. In this complex man, religion, literature, and politics mingled with romantic notions of revolution. Although he admired the French liberal philosopher Jacques Maritain, he did not follow his politics. Like many European personalists, including Emmanuel Mounier himself initially, Hertel saw much in Vichy to commend—particularly its “Catholic” sense of order, anti-capitalism, and corporatist rhetoric.

In 1941, when the Jesuit hierarchy exiled him to Sudbury for having a negative influence on the young, Hertel became Trudeau’s confidant.^* He encouraged Trudeau to work with a fellow student, Roger Rolland, to produce a literary review, while also expressing his firm opinions against conscription and the Catholic hierarchy and in favour of Pétain. Roger, the son of a major French-Canadian entrepreneur, had first captured Trudeau’s attention when he lit a cigarette with a two-dollar bill, reminding him of the flamboyant ways of his father. He soon became Pierre’s close friend (and, later, his speech writer when Trudeau was prime minister).⁶⁶ Hertel approved thoroughly of François-Joseph Lessard’s “revolutionary” activities through his secret society, though he considered him a bit intense—as when Lessard suggested that Winston Churchill himself had intervened to send Hertel to Sudbury.⁶⁷

The correspondence between Hertel and Trudeau began rather formally, with Hertel signing his name Rodolphe Dubé, SJ, but soon he developed a remarkable candour. Hertel was clearly Lessard’s patron, and he asked Trudeau to be patient with his excitable colleague. Both men believed that Trudeau’s major contribution to the revolutionary movement would be intellectual, and in October 1941 Trudeau mocked Lessard’s political espionage in a letter to Hertel which clearly indicates that he was already a part of Lessard’s secret society: “Meanwhile Lessard constantly has some missions of extreme delicacy to be undertaken, some deeply serious events to announce. I have some regret that he has taken me to be a confidant. I feel a certain embarrassment in displaying gushing enthusiasm when he reveals the exact number of fire hydrants in Ste-Hyacinthe.” The revolutionary was well-meaning, the activities intriguing—but Lessard was too earnest.⁶⁸

As their relationship developed, Trudeau flattered Hertel, calling him “un grand homme,” a great man, while Hertel, in turn, told Pierre he now had the opportunity to be the man of action that Hertel himself had always wanted to be. In this sense, Lessard, however irritating, offered opportunity. In response to a letter from Pierre asking Hertel to explain who he really was, the priest wrote an extraordinary reply—distancing himself by using the third person:

His friends are largely young men. And yet he’s in no way homosexual. He differs in this respect from a certain number of the Amérique française [review established by Rolland and others] collaborators. Have no fear, it’s not about the two Trudeaus and Père Bernier and [the unidentified] Jacqueline.

And so this strange character is a softy deep down. He possesses a sensitivity that was once touchiness. He now knows how to forgive and forget everything, and even fails to notice [insults] when it comes to his friends. The others he can forgive also. As often as possible he simply forgets. Above all, he has resolved to ignore petty reprisals.

Loving his friends is his life. Yet this love—and that’s as far as it goes—however platonic and platonist, is demanding as Hell. To his friends, this “pilgrim of the Absolute” … desires the highest good more than anything. He would be much sorrier—I’m sincere here—to learn of Pierre Trudeau’s death than to learn he was living common-law. And this is why, however broad-minded and tolerant of the tolerable he may be, the said Hertel’s ears perk up when he foresees any potential danger that could be lethal to his friends’ souls. That is why he doesn’t like Gide [whose tolerance of homosexuality was controversial in Catholic circles], and dreads this elegant and naively perverse man because he may remove the fresh blossoms of those of his friends who are still blossoming. As far as a certain Pierre Trudeau is concerned, he believes his cynicism and maturity are sufficiently developed to keep him from being adversely affected by Gide. However, he would not like the said Trudeau to think that all his friends have reached the necessary degree of shamelessness to assimilate Gide without allowing themselves to be spoiled.

Hertel, in fact, doesn’t like revolution the way Trudeau does. The latter loves it as one does a mistress. Hertel married revolution out of duty, because he had first given her children, and he does not wish to abandon them …

All in all, the moral portrait of the said Hertel—which we are currently sketching—is quite handsome. However, the hero is aware he is more handsome in his dreams than in reality. While on this subject, today this strange individual has chosen to add to this moral portrait his physical portrait. There are two. One for Pierre—which shows the tense, hardened Hertel, so fond of the “coups d’état” (although he has never himself seen or executed one); and [the other photo], Hertel, par excellence, the great Hertel.

Egads! I almost forgot the third: one for Madame Trudeau, in which she will easily recognize Hertel “à 1’américaine,” the one who offered to take her to a baseball game last year, while her two sons studied (the studious one) and tinkled away at the piano (the artistic one). A strong mother whose sons have been made effeminate by legal and literary hairsplitting was worthy to accompany the strong man from the Mauricie to these virile games.⁶⁹

This letter makes several points clear. Whatever his faults, Lessard and his fellow revolutionaries were “Hertel’s children,” a fact the hierarchy recognized in moving him to Sudbury. The other references to homosexuality are obscure, but Hertel, though clearly regarding homosexuality as sinful, banters here and later about the physical appearance of young men. When he received a photograph of Trudeau in December, for instance, one he called a “physical photograph,” he said it was “great. It could be Tahiti! Ah! If only Gauguin had known you.” In the same letter his definition of his “revolutionary creed” had echoes of French Catholic thinkers of the thirties:

God is strong and pure and lucid. We are weak, carnal, and blind as bats. But do we blindly throw ourselves to God in order that he might give us all that we radically lack? The only great originality of my peculiar thinking is to have understood this: the close alliance between Christianity and Revolution. The all-embracing Christian revolutionary, practising and devout, this is the product I am striving to create and protect. This, because I have understood that he who may give his life is he, he alone, who knows how to give it without losing [its essence]; that he who is completely sincere, he alone can free himself of anti-revolutionary and bourgeois prejudices … The church is, at the present moment, the only possible source of revolution.

“Revolution” was a term used very casually at the time not only by the political left and right and but also by the Protestant and Catholic churches.^* The Quebec Catholic hierarchy certainly did not share Hertel’s views on “revolution,” but the priest had allies. Father Marie d’Anjou—one of Trudeau’s four favourite teachers at Brébeuf—was even more supportive of the “revolution.” The Catholic hierarchy had removed him too from Montreal, and his resentment was profound. Hertel believed that his fellow priest was his closest ally in confronting these church leaders. In his correspondence, d’Anjou always called Montreal “Ville-Marie,” and he cherished the dream of Laurentie, the independent French Catholic state.⁷⁰ During his absence from Montreal, he wrote often to Lessard, and he recommended young Trudeau as the one most able to undertake various tasks for his “group.”⁷¹

In his papers for the 1941–42 period, Pierre Trudeau has copies of a “plan” that describes a secret society which had been created some years before by three “guys” who were tired of half measures while “the people” slid downwards into the crevasse. They had read “Groulx, Péguy, Blois, Hertel, Istrati, Savard,” and they believed in the immortal lessons of both history and Catholicism. The glories of New France must live beyond the granite of the monuments, they said, and the fearful, the down and out, the prostitutes, the blasphemers, and the drunkards who besmirch that tradition must be destroyed. Revolution is the daughter of “the Fatherland,” the plan writers noted:

Political and military revolution is but a stage, an accident of Revolution, as wars are but cataclysms of history. This is what the revolutionaries are, philosophers and doctrinaires. Of the philosophers of the Laurentian Revolution, one preached to the people the dogma of homeland, the other promulgated the dogma of hope to the desperate. Revolution, in this common view, of which we are the proof, is mankind who, in spite of everything, his selfishness, his cowardice, his passions, his flaws, the number and power of his adversaries, his failures, his mistakes, advances relentlessly. He, in the midst of all, sword in hand, despite obstacles, strikes again and again, until they fall.⁷²

The plan identifies three “types” who had met together and organized this revolutionary cell. They were Lessard, Trudeau, and Jean-Baptiste Boulanger, the Brébeuf friend Trudeau had met on his cross-Canada tour in Edmonton. In his memoirs, Trudeau says that Boulanger and he “decided together to read over one summer the great works of political writing—Aristotle, Plato, Rousseau’s Social Contract, Montesquieu, and others … Boulanger knew more than me in this field, and that was why I hung around with him.” In fact, Boulanger’s course of studies included Georges Sorel, Leon Trotsky, and other theorists of revolution. Both also read the French authoritarian Charles Maurras, whose works became the pillars of Vichy.⁷³

The barricades beckoned—and Trudeau rushed to the defence of the cause. The first battle came with the referendum on conscription. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, the Canadian government moved quickly to full mobilization. Ernest Lapointe, who had promised no conscription, had died, and the English newspapers demanded that Canada now respond as America and Britain already had. The wily Prime Minister Mackenzie King decided he should call for a referendum that would ask Canadians not a direct question on conscription itself but whether they would release the government from the pledge that there would be no conscription for overseas service. The date was set for April 27, 1942.

In Quebec, André Laurendeau organized the No side quickly under the banner of the significantly named Ligue pour la défense du Canada. Trudeau’s anger was deep. He had written some rough notes twelve days after Pearl Harbor. “Is it necessary to be pro-British or anti-?” The answer was clear. He boasted to Camille about a “revolution” he was planning and, in 1942, asked her to obtain for him a copy of Malaparte’s Coup d’Etat: The Technique of Revolution. Fearing censorship at the border, he cautioned: “I am anxious to read it as soon as possible; but I doubt it would be wise to mail it to me. I seriously wonder if the officials of this pharisaic puritan government would let the thing be delivered.” He concluded with the words “Thanks for your trouble, and long live liberty.”⁷⁴ Out of Trotsky and other revolutionary theorists, Trudeau, Boulanger, and Lessard took the lesson that a small cell could carry out revolution effectively if it was cohesive and its plans were clear. It was, Trudeau suggested, the wave of the future. The old were the imperialists; the young, the separatists. The old did not belong to the future; they sought a solution that would maintain the status quo and allow them to play out their hand. It was already too late for that.⁷⁵

Trudeau wrote to Hertel in January 1942 to say that the plan was moving forward, although not so effectively as he would have liked. As he had indicated earlier, he thought he could serve best intellectually—a position Hertel strongly supported. The anti-conscription movement continued to unite behind André Laurendeau, who, Hertel wrote in December 1941, was “a good man. Lots of sangfroid and vision.” However, being too cerebral, he was “not a leader.” Trudeau perhaps took the advice and told Hertel that “we” are trying to organize a study circle, which, under Laurendeau’s direction, will examine social questions. Then he continued in a passage that, while illustrating his participation in a secret cell, revealed his doubts:

I’ve told Arsenault, who is very understanding. He agrees that my work should be almost exclusively one of study … (with a touch of the spectacular anarchy I find indispensable). Lessard doesn’t understand quite so well and is more inclined to have me play the role of mailman.

I think the whole business is going badly in all respects. Too few are believers. Too weak an organization to fortify the tottering. Missed demonstrations. Too many clergy from the meek bourgeoisie … If it is impossible to make them see good sense and understand what’s important, there must be some other way to force their hand. We’ll have to see about that.

And so the “revolution” tottered forward, with Trudeau reading furiously, demonstrating regularly, and somehow crowding in his legal studies.⁷⁶

Montreal seethed with discontent. Mayor Houde wore his prison garb; the Italians, whose main church honoured Mussolini, were adrift; the sailors fought furious battles over women in the bars near the port; and restaurants could serve only one cup of coffee or tea to each patron. On March 24, 1942, anti-conscriptionists gathered for a rally where the dissident Liberal Jean-François Pouliot was to speak with the support of the Université de Montréal student association at Jean-Talon market.⁷⁷ After the rally, a group of forty students got together at the corner of Saint-Laurent and Napoléon, in the centre of the city. Suddenly, windows shattered as young demonstrators threw stones, shouting, “Down with the Jews! Down with conscription!” The police quickly appeared and the demonstrators fled, but one fell and could not escape. In April this arrested demonstrator, Maurice Riel, a law student at the Université de Montréal, appeared in court charged with vagrancy—a favourite of Canadian police in those times. Trudeau spoke as a witness for the defence, and Riel—a Trudeau appointment to the Senate of Canada in 1973—was acquitted.⁷⁸ Meanwhile, the plan for an uprising went forward.

There were protests, even riots, and overwhelming francophone opposition to conscription. To Trudeau’s despair on referendum day, Outremont stood out among the francophone population, with 15,746 voting Yes and only 9,957, No. There is no record whether Grace voted No with her son.

In his reading at this time, Trudeau focused on biographies of mystics and individuals who had confronted danger in support of Christ.⁷⁹ And many of his friends noted this sudden abstraction and mysticism in him. Already in the spring of 1941, Camille had told him that he was avoiding reality. A year later, ten days before the plebiscite, “your friend, the Great Hertel” wrote to him warning that he was becoming too abstract:

You are definitely a difficult guy to fit into day-to-day life. It seems that you are frightened to death of coming close to the quotidian and, therefore, the banal. Would you not, by chance, be some type of misunderstood romantic? Like Julien Sorel. Yet you haven’t read, o chaste young man, [Stendhal’s] Le Rouge et le Noir. Misunderstood romantic means, according to my worthy pen, unbalanced by choice, in love with tension. Don’t you try to avoid, through energy and resolve, anything that could turn you away from your beautiful spirit? Do you not seek to escape to the higher levels than the barn floor upon which we must keep, at whatever cost, one foot of our being?

Hertel says he [Trudeau] has both feet in the blue skies: from time to time you come down to where mortals live to attend embryonic riots.⁸⁰

Through the summer, the plan continued to spin out, with the hope that there would soon be a decisive event. Trudeau signed his letters to Hertel “Citoyen” and to Boulanger “Anarchiste,” and he used the language of the French Revolution. During those warm months, even his travels testified to his nationalism. In 1941 he had joined his Brébeuf classmate Guy Viau and two others in retracing the path by canoe of the great coureurs du bois, Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Médard Des Groseilliers. They went along the Ottawa River, crossed Lake Timiskaming, and eventually reached Moosonee. The journey through the wilds of the Canadian Shield was described by a journalist as a group of students on a “planned trip.” Trudeau was enraged: he wrote to Hertel, “Imagine then my mood when I learned that this ‘arranged excursion’ about which I had long dreamed, and which was a little my plan … should take on a thoroughly bourgeois allure. Merde!” In his description of his voyage, he emphasized the challenge and his brave response—a pattern he followed throughout his life. He emphasized how he ran the rapids while others portaged. As dangers mounted, rain poured, and harsh winds blew, he became stronger. “In fact, life began to be beautiful.”⁸¹

By the following summer, Trudeau had a Harley-Davidson motorbike—already a symbol of youthful rebellion and recklessness long before the Hell’s Angels and Marlon Brando gave the machine its swagger. Its speed was legendary; its exhaust explosive. For the timid Trudeau, it was the perfect accessory. He even wrote a short tribute, “Pritt Zoum Bing,” for the Université de Montréal student newspaper, Le Quartier Latin, to the freedom motorcycles offered. During the long vacation, he decided to take two trips between sessions for his compulsory COTC training. Gabriel Filion, who accompanied him on the Harley, recalls that, on the first, they travelled “some five thousand kilometres through New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, sleeping in barns at night and sometimes in churches, or in houses that were being built. Most often, however, we slept in the countryside, pitching our tent in the fields or in the forest. We ate in small restaurants, and Pierre always paid the bill.” On the other, they “retraced the route taken by François Paradis, the hero of Maria Chapdelaine.” Here the nationalist motivation seems clear as Trudeau, Filion, and another friend, Carl Dubuc, followed the path of Paradis—in the novel, he left La Tuque and sought to join his love, Maria, on the shore of Lac St-Jean, only to die of exposure. The travellers escaped this tragic fate, but Filion injured his right leg badly on the second day. They decided to carry on and, in Filion’s words, “every day, Pierre tended to my injured leg.”⁸²

When the trio returned to Montreal, Mackenzie King’s Liberal government decided not to impose conscription immediately. But that did not still the anti-conscriptionist sentiment. In November 1942 a law-school classmate, Jean Drapeau, became an independent candidate in a by-election in Outremont, supported by both the Ligue and the Bloc populaire canadien, a new nationalist party that had supplanted the weak Action libérale nationale. At twenty-six, he was a fiery orator with strong connections to Catholic and other nationalist groups. It was Trudeau’s own constituency, and he fought the battle furiously on streets he knew well. The Liberal candidate was General Léo Laflèche, who was endorsed not only by the English papers but also by L’Action catholique and several major French papers. Le Devoir, however, dissented and supported Drapeau. Trudeau spent most of his time in the fall of 1942 on that campaign, so much so that he told a business colleague that he had little time for other activities.

At a major rally during the campaign’s last week, Trudeau gave such a spirited speech for Drapeau that Le Devoir published almost all of it. He began by denouncing the Liberals for running a military officer as their candidate; in a democracy, the military had no place in politics. He minimized the German threat, ridiculed the King government, and, according to Le Devoir, said that “he feared the peaceful invasion of immigrants more than the armed invasion by the enemy.” The French of North America would fight when threatened, just as they had against the Iroquois; “today,” he scorned, “it is against other savages.” Then Trudeau stated dramatically: the government had irresponsibly declared war even though North America faced no direct threat of an invasion, “at the moment when Hitler had not yet had his lightning victories.” The newspaper quoted his dramatic conclusion in full: “Citizens of Quebec, don’t be content to whine. Long live the flag [drapeau] of liberty. Enough of Band-Aids; bring on the revolution.”⁸³

Two days after this demagogic speech, which seemed to equate the King government with savages, minimized the Nazi threat, and attacked immigrants (who, in Montreal, were mainly Jewish), Le Devoir ran another story about a polite heckler at a Laflèche rally who had been beaten by a thug. Trudeau kept the clipping and identified the heckler as his friend Pierre Vaillancourt.⁸⁴ After the election, which Drapeau lost, Trudeau explained the reasons for the Liberal victory to a friend. There was no need for “lamentations,” he said: “We know that in a constituency two-thirds Jewish and English, a nationalist and anti-bourgeois candidate would not have great appeal. Drapeau did not lose his deposit. And especially if Mr. King gives consideration to the polling statistics, he will understand that the votes for Laflèche are owed [?] almost uniquely to the Jewish and English areas and … to a powerful Liberal machine.” He concluded by arguing that they had not really lost the election; rather, he blamed the “dishonesty” of what would later be called the “ethnic vote.” The Bloc could well take the riding the next time.⁸⁵

Trudeau’s dramatic contribution to the Drapeau campaign contrasts with his relative silence at the university, where he published only one article in Le Quartier Latin that dealt directly with the war. This article, “Nothing Matters Save the Victory,” mocked war propaganda and dripped with sarcasm about the rights the British were fighting to preserve. Although no fan of Hitler, Trudeau ridiculed the British regard for the rights of minorities. The Nazi hordes, he declared, would take away language rights, deny the rights of minorities in other provinces, capture the economic heights, and make the French population hewers of wood and drawers of water. Not even the dullest reader could miss Trudeau’s comparison with the English treatment of the French after 1763. The editors indicated that its publication in the fateful month of November 1942 barely escaped the censors.⁸⁶

One incident that has continually stirred controversy occurred in the summer of 1943 and involved Roger Rolland. In The Secret Mulroney Tapes, journalist Peter Newman complains that “journalists … seldom [mentioned] the fact that during the Second World War he [Trudeau] had cruised around Montreal on a motorcycle wearing a German helmet.” The cruising was not in Montreal, and the helmet was probably French, not German. In his memoirs, Trudeau explained how he and Roger had found some old German uniforms from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 in the Rolland attic. Rolland’s wealthy father had collected military souvenirs, including memorabilia from both the French and the Prussian side in this conflict. According to Rolland, Trudeau chose a French helmet when they decided to don the ancient military gear and surprise their friends, Jean-Louis Roux and Jean Gascon, who were members of the comedy troupe Les Compagnons de Saint-Laurent. The troupe was spending the summer season at a chalet at Saint-Adolphe-de-Howard in the Laurentians, quite some distance from Montreal.

As the pranksters headed north on their Harleys, Trudeau caught up to Rolland near Sainte-Agathe and told him that a villager had hailed him down to inform him that “a German soldier had just gone by heading north.” That dramatic reaction spurred them on to even more tricks. They stopped at an imposing house and knocked on the back door. When a servant answered, Pierre demanded water, and the terrified woman brought a large glass out to him. But he signalled his suspicion of the contents, handed the glass to Roger, and demanded that he drink his share of it first. Once Roger had taken a few sips, he suddenly collapsed, screaming with pain. The servant quickly bolted the door, and the “soldiers” fled. When they reached their friends, they found only one of the actors there. He was “petrified” as he encountered the bizarre invaders and thought he was hallucinating. It took him a few minutes and a strong shot of cognac “to recover his senses.” Trudeau later dismissed the whole incident as simply a prank, but, when interviewer Jean Lépine told him in the early 1990s that Rolland had admitted that they scared some people, Trudeau agreed.⁸⁷

Curiously, the Quartier Latin article (although not the motorbike incident) escaped the attention of Canadian journalists, politicians, and writers when Trudeau was prime minister, even though it contained political dynamite. In 1972 a clever opposition party could have used Trudeau’s angry anti-British rhetoric to win a few Ontario seats where “Queen and country” still mattered. Rumours constantly swirled around Trudeau, but surprisingly little effort was made to clear away the mists when, in some cases, they could have been easily dispersed. Jean-Louis Roux was not so lucky. After a brilliant career as one of Quebec’s finest actors, he was appointed lieutenant-governor of Quebec. When the press revealed that he had worn a swastika on his lab coat five decades earlier at the Université de Montréal, he responded that, like other students fiercely opposed to conscription, he had simply wanted to be noticed. He apologized for his youthful deeds and explained that the context of the time had skewed his understanding of evil.⁸⁸ The appointment, however, was aborted.⁸⁹

Trudeau, too, was a clever actor. In the summer of 1942, for example, he took part alongside Roux and Gascon in a play, Le Jeu de Dollard, in front of the statue of Cartier at the base of Mount Royal. And throughout this period, he changed roles quickly. The bland young essayist of Brébeuf became a biting polemicist at the Université de Montréal, as the caution that had marked his adolescent escapades disappeared. He was daring. In a debate on gallantry that took place the following January 8 in the presence of the federal minister of fisheries, Ernest Bertrand, Trudeau was outrageous, just as everyone expected him to be. The program romantically described him as “chevalier des nobles causes.” Pierre, it declared, “cuts the figure of a revolutionary in our time.” He told George Radwanski that, in his defence of gallantry, he pulled a gun, pointed it at one of the judges, and fired it. A puff of smoke appeared, but it was a blank. The judge ducked; the crowd was stunned. Not surprisingly, Trudeau and his partner lost the debate, in which they argued that gallantry belonged to the past, not the present, where gallantry was a fake.⁹⁰ That winter night Trudeau received poor marks for gallantry—and common sense—from many in the crowd.

What are we to make of Trudeau in these exuberant, troubled times? His correspondence with François Hertel leaves no doubt that he was deeply involved with François-Joseph Lessard’s revolutionary activity and that his politics were not only anti-war and anti-Liberal but also clandestine, highly nationalist, and, at least momentarily, separatist and even violent. Hertel was, as Lessard himself said, the major recruiter for the secret cell, and Trudeau was involved with Lessard well before the summer of 1942. His letter after the Drapeau defeat in which he blamed the Jews and the English, and the speech in favour of Drapeau where he announced his fear of immigrants, are both appalling. So too are some of the comments he made in his notebooks on works that were anti-Semitic or racist. After he read Charles Maurras’s pro-Pétain and anti-Semitic volume La seule France, for instance, he told Hertel it pleased him very much, just as the “political jobbery” of Canada in 1942 disgusted him.

Trudeau’s education, his friendships, and even more his participation in the summer military training exercises took him briefly to the barricades in 1941 and 1942. He deeply resented the military training, and his colleagues shared that resentment. Their attitude is clear in the remarkable photograph of the commandos “without zeal,” and it’s easy to imagine the pranks they contemplated as they “trained” together—pranks such as stealing their military kit and weapons.

Trudeau’s opposition to conscription is understandable, and his political activities in the referendum campaign and in campaigning for Drapeau are expressions of his democratic rights. Under Hertel’s spell, however, when he was bored with law school, entranced with the mystique of revolution, and freed by fortune to make his own choices, Trudeau did and said some foolish things. Yet perspective is needed.^* He regarded Les Frères Chausseurs, or LX, as hopelessly disorganized and François-Joseph Lessard as a great bother. He did read Charles Maurras, Alexis Carrel, and others, but Hertel also introduced him to Alfred Pellan and Paul-Émile Borduas, and he spent far more time in salons listening to symphonies than in the streets calling for revolution. He, Lessard, and Jean-Baptiste Boulanger, who later became a prominent psychiatrist and disapproved strongly of Trudeau’s dismissal of their separatist activities in his memoirs, seem strikingly immature. But then, many are in wartime.

Throughout this period, Trudeau lived at the family home, with its chauffeur and servants, while denouncing the bourgeois life. He invited his fellow students there for evenings of classical music, where his mother graciously entertained them. It seems that he told her nothing about his nights on the streets or his notorious motorbike jaunt. These secrets he kept from her, and it surely would have jarred and distressed her had she known. And that, most assuredly, he was loath to do. It was a troubled time, and, as Camille Corriveau and even Hertel recognized, Pierre Trudeau, who had dreamed of being Canadian prime minister as he travelled across the country in the summer of 1940, had become a troubled young man.

Despite the daring of his political involvement (which was mentioned in the Université de Montréal debate program) and the boredom of his legal studies, Trudeau once again excelled in the classroom. He stood first at university even more often than he had at Brébeuf. Sure, he complained about the drill of law classes, but his remarkable discipline prevailed. His marks in civil law, for example, were 40 out of 40 in January 1941; 38 out of 40 in June 1941; and 38.5 out of 40 in June 1942, when he received 28 out of 30 in criminal law, 20 out of 20 for constitutional law, 17.5 out of 20 for international law, and 24.8 out of 25 for notarial procedure. Evidently, the plebiscite and politics made little difference to his grades.

The following year, in June 1943, Trudeau graduated first in law “with great distinction.” He won the Governor General’s Medal for overall excellence as well as the Lieutenant-Governor’s Medal for standing first in the licensing examination. He personally wrote a letter of thanks to Their Excellencies for the medals. The response from the office of the Governor General thanked him for the information that he had won the medal—a gesture that surely confirmed Trudeau’s contempt for the British nobles who then occupied the office.⁹¹ When his sister, Suzette, read the results in La Presse, she wrote from Old Orchard Beach and congratulated him on “his latest achievements.” She hoped he could use the publicity “in obtaining what you would like for next year.”⁹²

Trudeau, however, was still unsure what he liked. The five years between 1938 and 1943 were, nonetheless, decisive for him and, most historians argue, for Canada and Quebec too. He had to make a choice: Would he be a French or an English Canadian?⁹³ When he lost the Rhodes Scholarship and chose the Université de Montréal, Trudeau became Québécois. The term itself had no meaning in 1940, apart from being a resident of Quebec City. But Trudeau decided during those years that he was “French,” a choice that was almost inevitable given the intensity of his education and the great events of the time. In making that choice, he became entangled in those events. And there was another factor: as Brébeuf’s top student in a period when French-Canadian excellence was prized, he became a magnet for those who sought a leader for difficult times.

The debates, the battles fought by the young, and the relationships that were forged in the early 1940s echoed loudly in Quebec and Canadian political life for the next half century. The bodies aged and nuances emerged, but the names endured: Daniel Johnson, Jean-Jacques Bertrand, Jean Drapeau, Jean-Louis Roux, Paul Gérin-Lajoie, Charles Lussier, and so many more. When Trudeau spoke in the Outremont by-election, the other speakers for future mayor Drapeau’s candidacy were Michel Chartrand, later a prominent labour leader and separatist in Quebec, and D’Iberville Fortier, one of the most eminent federal public servants forty years later. André Laurendeau, who worked closely with Trudeau in these battles, became the most respected Quebec journalist of his age. His best friend in the 1930s, Pierre Vadeboncoeur, became a major literary figure in Quebec; and Jean-Louis Roux and Jean Gascon were among the key personalities in the French and English theatre in the last half of the twentieth century. Most of these principal actors in the “revolutionary” moments of the early 1940s kept their silence about themselves—and about Pierre Trudeau.

At Brébeuf, Trudeau had stood a resented second to Jean de Grandpré until his final year. In another fateful decision, his rival chose to attend McGill University. As he explained:

[Trudeau] could afford to search for his identity. People like me … were forced by economic necessity to get on with our careers, to go to McGill to improve our English because English was the language of business, to get a law degree and enter a practice immediately. Most of us married fairly early and started to raise a family and you had to earn money for that. As a rich bachelor, Pierre was able to spend years “finding himself.”⁹⁴

De Grandpré, whom Trudeau himself thought the most polished and articulate among his classmates at Brébeuf, rose to the top of the business world and became wealthy as the head of Bell Canada. There is much resentment in de Grandpré’s comment, but also some truth in his charge that Trudeau, because of his personal wealth and independent circumstances, could search for his identity, experience adventure, try out anarchy, and delay finding himself. It was easier to be anti-bourgeois when your circumstances were thoroughly bourgeois.

Because Trudeau chose Université de Montréal for law and because he became involved in the conscription crisis as a leading opponent, he was immersed in the debate about the future of French-speaking Canadians in a way that he never could or would have been had he won the Rhodes Scholarship or gone to McGill. In a particular sense, he was correct in stating that the politics of wartime passed him by. Those great tides that turned in 1942 and 1943 did not sweep over his life, his classroom, or his friends as the Americans won the Battle of Midway, the Soviets held their ground at Stalingrad, and the Allies—with Canadians among them—set out on a bloody path up the boot of Italy. Trudeau and his associates stood on separate ground, avoiding the battles in Europe while furiously debating what their future as francophone professionals would be in a modern North America. They knew that there could be no return to the past, but in the early 1940s they saw the outline of their future only dimly. Yet the debate that dominated Canadian politics from the 1960s through the 1990s began among Trudeau’s classmates in the university corridors and the Montreal streets in the 1940s. Those times cast the die.

For Trudeau, the times were exhilarating, confusing, and dangerous. He swam in the same stream as others, opposing conscription, favouring Vichy and Pétain, outrageously equating Hitler’s Reich with British policy towards Quebec, and even contemplating and plotting Quebec independence. Yet, in some important personal ways, he remained apart, a self-declared independent who often donned a cloak of mystery. He wrote to his mother in English about how well he worked with his military superiors, and he vacationed at Old Orchard, enjoyed American nightlife, and thought about a future political career. What career, and even what country, remained an open question in 1943 as democracy, so threatened in the 1930s, began its march forward towards its greatest victories. Despite his later denials, he swam with the currents that flowed strongly through his university. Yet, because of his background—his mother, his wealth, and his intense search for free intellectual choice—he sometimes took refuge on the shore, as when he apparently told Gabriel Filion, his travelling companion on the Maria Chapdelaine route, that he dreamed of a united Canada, or when he told his diary that he was proud that his English blood tempered his boiling French blood.

In the 1940s, as conscription loomed, Pierre Trudeau’s French blood boiled; as times changed, so would the man. He would forget much of his youth, as all of us do. Yet in the attic that preserves memory, fragments of the friends, the games, the debates, the Harley, and the wilderness endured—as did, ineffably, Camille’s first kiss.

* The revisions were made at the insistence of Father Brossard, who was the censor for the occasion. After the play, leading Outremont figures such as “le juge Thouin” and Mesdames de Grandpré and Vaillancourt congratulated Pierre. The play was, Pierre wrote, “a great success,” judging by “the congratulations and the laughter.” The only objection was to a section of the play where Jean Couture speaks to his daughter, Camille, and uses the word grosse to describe her. One of the priests thought it might mean “pregnant” and condemned the “double sense.” Pierre wrote in his diary that it was not his intention at all. When the hint of sex brought horror to the hallways of Brébeuf, he noted: “One can’t please everyone.” Journal 1938, May 17, 1938, TP, vol. 39, file 9.

* In an interview with Ron Graham in 1992, Trudeau gave this answer to a question about Groulx’s influence on him. “I used to get some of his books as prizes at the end of the year when I’d get a first or something like that. He was quite revered as a historian. I don’t think any of us at the time understood some of the analysis which has been made later that he was perhaps somewhat inclined to racism or fascism and so on, so I don’t remember him as that, but he used to be talked about and he had quite a few disciples and followers, of which I was not one as I say; he wouldn’t have liked me for applauding the defeat of the French at the Plains of Abraham.” Although Trudeau encountered Groulx only once while he was at Brébeuf, the Abbé’s work formed the basis of Canadian history teaching at the college. Interview between Pierre Trudeau and Ron Graham, April 28, 1992, TP, vol. 23, file 3.

* Camille introduced Pierre to Proust in a serious way. He told her: I will “always remain indebted to you for having set me under Proust’s influence.” He had “heard much about him” but much “was naught in comparison with what I found in reality. What power of expression, what penetration in his observations, what suppleness of a style that can follow a concept into its most subtle relations, explore the secrets of its development and verily track it down to its birth in the proudest depths of the soul as surely as a hound will track a bleeding prey.” As this sentence indicates, Proust had affected his prose style, and not for the better. The fact that Trudeau had not encountered the giant Proust until he was almost twenty-one reflects upon the deficiencies in his education—it had extensive French literary content, but only selectively so. Trudeau to Corriveau, Oct. 29, 1940, TP, vol. 45, file 5.

* Corporatist thought, the standard text on modern Quebec rightly declares, “is not easy to summarize.” Essentially, “its vision was of all social groups, organized in ‘corporations’ or ‘[intermediate] bodies’ dedicated to the pursuit of the common good, working together in harmony to ensure order and social peace. In this way, class ‘collaboration would replace class struggle: employers and workers in the same economic sector would belong to the same corporation and work together for the advancement both of their sector and of the nation as a whole … Parliamentary democracy was a source of dissension, and corporatism would replace it with a unanimous society in which each person, imbued with the national mystique, would work towards—and at the same time benefit from—the general harmony and prosperity.’” Paul-André Linteau, René Durocher, Jean-Claude Robert, and François Ricard, Quebec since 1930, trans. Robert Chodos and Ellen Garmaise (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1991), 79.

* A camp for war protestors in Canada.

* In July 1942 Hertel was told that his writings under his pseudonym did not bring credit to the Jesuit Order. While his influence on the young and his knowledge of theological doctrine were admitted to be great, his teaching was dangerous: “It is not by light talks on love or jokes or similar ways that one gives the young a taste for the serious, the profound, and the solid nor do they become aware of the gravity of the problems they face in their individual, family and social life.” He threatened to quit the order but remained until 1946, when Trudeau encountered him once more in Paris. E. Papillon, sj, to Rodolphe Dubé, sj, July 18, 1942, Fonds Hertel, Archives Nationales du Québec-Montréal.

* French intellectual debates had a great influence during these years on the rhetoric of revolution in Quebec. In his history of postwar Europe, the historian Tony Judt has emphasized how the “bipolar” politics of France, along with the myth of revolution and the acceptance of “violence,” was at the centre of public policy. He cites the postwar example of the radical politician Edouard Herriot, who announced in 1944 that normal politics could not be re-established until France passed through a “bloodbath.” His language, Judt adds, “did not sound out of the ordinary to French ears, even coming as it did from a pot-bellied provincial parliamentarian of the political center.” Within French intellectual and political circles, there was general if vague acceptance of the idea that “historical change and purgative bloodshed go hand in hand.” Hertel clearly was part of this heritage in both his language and his concept of historical change. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 211.

* In his memoir, Trudeau’s friend and political colleague Gérard Pelletier describes their future colleague Jean Marchand’s disillusionment with violent political nationalism in the forties in terms that could also apply to Trudeau: “[Marchand] 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. Of course, the half-baked leaders of these little groups had no precise notion of what political action meant. They dreamed, they grew intoxicated with words, and in the basements of middle-class houses they cooked up heady plots which no one ever dreamt of acting on.” Trudeau was far from alone in “trying out” these “heady” plots, but he later treated them with the disdain that Marchand and Pelletier did. Pelletier, Years of Impatience, 1950–1960, trans. Alan Brown (Toronto: Methuen, 1984), 9.