CHAPTER 4

COMING HOME

During the winter months, Pierre and Thérèse had begun to consider spending their lives together. Senator Léon-Mercier Gouin, Thérèse’s father, had even raised the question of a possible journalistic career for Trudeau in discussion with some publishers; and, in early March, Thérèse overcame her timidity in the presence of Grace Trudeau and attended a concert with her.¹ It appeared that, in Parcheminey’s parting words, all would work out. And, sometimes, it seemed it would.

Thérèse finished her thesis, graduating summa cum laude and winning the major prize. Pierre rejected Gérard Pelletier’s tempting invitation to lead a Harvard summer school in Salzburg and instead made plans for the summer with Thérèse in Quebec.² Yet jealousies stirred in Pierre, and doubts arose with Thérèse. Pierre went to dances in Paris; Thérèse, to concerts in Montreal. He yearned for her presence, but there were lapses in the letters and too many abject apologies. Although he complained about Thérèse’s many friends and what he termed her silences, his own life was filled with parties, dances, and some other women in the spring of 1947. “If I wanted to make you jealous,” he wrote to her in March, “I would tell you of a certain American or of Sylvia,^* the daughter of the English writer [J.B.] Priestley.”³

Grace Trudeau met up with Pierre in Paris in April, and mother and son toured the French Riviera together, sometimes on his Harley-Davidson, with the grande dame of Outremont riding behind her daredevil son. They saw the Ballets russes at the Casino de Monaco during the Easter break. She remained in France until June 6, only a few days before Pierre himself embarked for Canada.⁴

In Montreal’s dreary spring, Thérèse dreamed that she, too, was in Paris, walking with Pierre along the Champs Élysées in the night, guided by the light of the fountains and the monuments while the fragrance of spring blossoms lingered in the air. As their hands softly embraced, she turned towards him, “his clear profile lost in the stars.” She told him that she loved him and, she whispered, “I believe that you, too, are stepping towards love.” In this letter, written shortly after Easter, she thanked Pierre for the chocolate rabbit he had sent but even more for his “love letter” and, above all, for his “great love.”⁵ On May 21 he told her of the romantic hotel where he dwelt and added: “If you would be my mistress, we would share the room together beneath the garret, between the dusty walls. The bed is low and rough, but your arms would be soft and your mouth welcoming … Every morning we would find a lost corner of Notre Dame and ask for pardon.”⁶ His desires were clear.

Yet tensions abounded. In his sessions with Parcheminey, Trudeau spoke surprisingly seldom about Thérèse but did have visions of other women, including Thérèse’s friend Andrée Desautels, or D.D., who herself came to Paris in the spring. The correspondence became intense yet less frequent, especially from Thérèse. He wrote to her on April 16, begging her to write more often, but before he sent the letter, he received one from her in which she yearned for his return, while promising to meet him wearing a hat of flowers when he arrived in July on the Empress of Canada. Soon they quarrelled again about psychoanalysis, and he protested strongly that she had revealed in Catholic confession that he was seeing a psychoanalyst: “a secret ought to remain a secret,” he bitterly complained.⁷ On June 1, 1947, the mood was different when he wrote to “My love Therese, my loveable child, my crazy wise virgin.” Still doubts persisted. He said that “D.D.” had spoken with difficulty about Thérèse. What did D.D.’s silences mean? Why should he learn about her academic success from others? A week later, after a bad dream about Thérèse and an odd dream about “D.D.,”⁸ he wrote an angry letter, addressing her ambivalently as “My foolish love.”⁹

My very difficult darling, I have to rebuke you for being so worried, for being so full of fear and anguish. I pray for you often, as you have asked; but God is not pleased with you. He has told me that you were somewhat idolatrous and that you now find yourself being punished for worshipping science above Him. You are playing God, and are becoming caught up in your own game. Beware that your game does not first trap you and, then, strangle you.

My love, continue with your analysis, pursue it seriously and honestly. But don’t take tragically that which should only be taken seriously. Believe me, Péguy’s advice is important for you. Out of love for me—if you still have any such love left—do not try to do too much good. Remember that the arrival of this letter precedes my own arrival by only three weeks; be tamer in those few days that remain. Your soul is peaceful; your spirit should be so as well. Do not fight, do not yell (I am using your own expressions). Do not inquire so persistently: you have not lost anything and you are not yet lost yourself. You are in my heart, I am holding your heart; yet I cannot embrace your spirit; it should be a more calm and more loving one.

Believe me, out of love for me I ask you to believe me; can you do so out of love for me? Don’t take your analysis or [your analyst Father Noël] Mailloux so seriously in these few remaining days. You are so sad, and I hate myself because I am not there with you now. But give me only one half-moon, and I will be with you in Montreal. In the meantime, I urge you, at any cost, don’t finish the analysis. You will have all summer and all of next year, and your whole life to do what you wish. But right now, ask Mailloux for permission not to worry so much: perhaps you can go to Malbaie for a few days, and, then, maybe you will see my ship go by in the distance, past the whistling buoy.

Parch[eminey] often warns against needless fears, against unscientific inductions, and against generalizations and systematizations. One must be calm and patient. You shouldn’t believe in the bogeyman. Apparently, psychology students [like you] don’t heed such advice.

We must not destroy all that time has slowly created. Above all, we must not systematize. My friend, my friend, my love, I wish so dearly that you would not be so sad.

Pierre Me

P.S. I am leaving Paris on the 21st; you have time to send me a letter if you feel up to it.

Thérèse, I have just reread my letter, and I fear you will ignore all my words, instead choosing to portray me as ill-disposed towards psychoanalysis. You should not read my letter as such; I like your psychoanalysis, but I want you to do it better, in a way that is less caricatured. Either stop, or move forward “very cautiously.”

The letter arrived just before Pierre reached Montreal, not on the Empress of Canada to be greeted by Thérèse in her hat of flowers but by air from Paris at 6 a.m. on June 22. They met again nine days later, and their love affair began to end. Years later Thérèse reminisced that, in the spring of 1947, she had decided that “if she and Pierre were to marry, they would have endured marital misery of a monumental order, ‘un grand malheur.’”¹⁰ Perhaps. Certainly, if the two privileged and brilliant children of the francophone elite had wed, their lives together would have been very different from the lives they did in fact lead.¹¹ Thérèse became an eminent psychologist.^* Pierre would probably have become a university professor, a lawyer, or even a rich businessman. Again, perhaps.

What we do know is that he was most willing to marry Thérèse in the fall of 1946 and the spring of 1947 and that their relationship soured because of his jealousy, their professional ambitions, his suspicion of her psychiatric analysis—and his demand that she prematurely end it. We also know that, for a long time, they loved each other intensely in the peculiar fashion of their different time and place. Theirs was not a physical relationship but it was intensely emotional. For that reason, we know that when Thérèse ended their love affair, the disappointment shattered Trudeau more than any other event since the loss of his father. He wrote to her brother Lomer on July 10: “It is exactly 24 hours ago that your sister removed all reason for me to live.” Men, he said, cannot survive such deep wounds. And because he sensed there was a certain empathy between Lomer and himself, he asked him to discover whether Thérèse could even “bear my presence.” Could they meet just once more? He ended with the signature, “Your lamentable, etc. Pierre.”¹²

Brothers, of course, are seldom useful in such cases, but Pierre did try to meet “Tess” once more at the Gouins’ summer home in Malbaie on the St. Lawrence, but Thérèse, to her mother’s distress, would not see him. Trudeau stayed the night but left the morning of July 27, without talking to her. The next year she fell in love with Trudeau’s friend Vianney Décarie, a young philosopher. In the late spring of 1948, as Vianney and Thérèse were dining at the apartment of Jean-Luc Pepin in Paris, there was a knock at the door. It was Pierre, Jean-Luc’s former classmate, but he had come to see Thérèse. This time they did speak, but when Thérèse told him she was now engaged, he simply shrugged. In that case, he said, he would tour the world alone.¹³

Their paths crossed often in the future, Trudeau saved press clippings about the increasingly eminent psychologist Thérèse Décarie,¹⁴ and Vianney published in Cité libre—the journal Trudeau edited for several years. In 1968 the Décaries, both then professors at the Université de Montréal, circulated a petition soliciting support for the candidacy of Pierre Trudeau for the leadership of the Liberal Party.¹⁵ There’s also a story, repeated by Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall, that, after Trudeau became prime minister, Thérèse went to Ottawa and asked a staff member in the Prime Minister’s Office if she could see him and offer her congratulations. Trudeau was not there, but she asked for a sheet of paper, wrote Thérèse on it, kissed it, and left the lipstick-stained note on the desk.¹⁶

Madame Gouin Décarie laughs when asked about the story. There was neither the visit nor the lipstick on the paper: it was a prank by their mutual friend and congenital prankster, Roger Rolland, who was then a speechwriter for Trudeau. There is only one note from Thérèse in Trudeau’s papers after their love affair ended. It is undated, but was surely written in 1969 when his political fortunes began to fall after the triumphant election of 1968. “Pierre, our Pierre, what has happened to you? You always seem angry. Your eyes are spiteful, and you appear mean.” She cautioned him that those around him and those he must rely on would not understand. She ended gracefully: “We think so often of you. Thérèse.”¹⁷ The note lacks lipstick but not affection and dignity.

Thoroughly romantic, Trudeau deeply mourned the end of their relationship. It was, admittedly, an affair that seemed to flourish best when they were apart and one that faced many constraints. Still, its end was a decisive moment in the career of Pierre Trudeau. That summer in Montreal he seemed adrift. He saw a few old friends, including some women. In his quest for solitude, he journeyed by foot the hundred miles from Montreal to Lac St-Jean, experiencing the rough charms of La Mauricie, its surging rapids, deep forests, and high waterfalls.¹⁸ In early August he took his first flying lesson, and continued the classes every day for two weeks in a Curtiss-Reid plane. He managed to fly solo on September 3, but he does not appear to have earned a permanent flying licence, although in the early fifties he did take up gliding.

During the remaining few weeks of the summer and early fall, Trudeau did not sulk as jilted lovers sometimes do. His calendar was full and interesting. On July 7 he had lunch with his friend Gérard Pelletier, and he spent the evening with his erstwhile revolutionary companion François Lessard and his wife. In mid-August he went to Toronto with Catholic youth leader Claude Ryan, who would later become a rival and a Quebec Liberal leader—they were hoping to found a coordinating committee of Canadian Catholic associations. Pelletier, a key organizer, was unable to accompany them because he lost his train ticket. In Toronto, Trudeau met Ted McNichols, whom he described as a Protestant and a Communist. The meeting featured “lively discussions on democracy and the possibility of reconciling [democratic] life with Communism.” On his return, he went north on his motorbike, where he met an acquaintance whose girlfriend reminded him poignantly of Thérèse. He spent an evening with François Hertel, who was also back in Montreal, and visited Abbé Groulx. He spoke to Claude Ryan on Hertel’s behalf, probably to explore whether his old mentor, who had by now left the Jesuits but not the church, could find work with the groups Ryan was organizing.

In September, Trudeau left Montreal once more for study abroad, this time at the London School of Economics (LSE). Within a month he would celebrate his twenty-eighth birthday. He travelled in a first-class berth on the Empress of Canada, and among his fellow passengers were Allan Blakeney, the future Saskatchewan premier, and Marcel Lambert, later Speaker of the House of Commons, both in tourist class.¹⁹ Significantly, before he departed, he made certain that his Quebec links were strong. On September 8 he had lunch with Lomer Gouin; met at 3:30 with Gérard Filion, who became editor of Le Devoir in 1947; and followed with a call on the conservative nationalist Léopold Richer, with whom he spoke about possible articles for the journal Notre Temps. The following day he saw Claude Ryan again and had dinner with Hertel in the evening. Hertel was, in that month, his closest companion. He also had lunch with his classmate Charles Lussier, now a promising lawyer, at the home of Paul Gouin, Thérèse’s uncle, the former radical Liberal politician. And just before his departure, he met with the eminent civil libertarian, law professor, and poet F.R. Scott at the McGill Faculty Club.²⁰ Altogether, Trudeau’s agenda for the summer of 1947 confirms his strong political interests and his continuing links with Catholic youth groups (Pelletier and Ryan), with Liberals (Gouin), with socialists (Scott), and with older and more traditional Quebec nationalists (Groulx, Hertel, Lessard, and Richer). Already he was preparing for his future. He was keeping many options open.

What did he discuss at these meetings? Career most likely, his education probably, politics certainly. Some hint of Trudeau’s mood in these times is given in a letter to him from Lomer Gouin in the fall. Lomer, who had begun practising law, told Trudeau that he reminded him of “a bit of champagne that had turned into vinegar: you are full of effervescence, of young courage, but the taste is bitter.” He would never make a good saint, but he was “ripe” for politics, a profession where saints, apparently, did not thrive. Gouin encouraged him to halt his travelling and his studies and return home. There would be elections in the spring, and Pierre should run, presumably as a Liberal candidate.²¹

Confusion and contradiction more than emptiness seemed to mark Trudeau’s life in late 1947. He entered a doctoral program in political science at LSE in October, even though his Harvard doctoral thesis remained undone. And London, he soon found, was not Paris. The cluster of intense, madcap Brébeuf and Montreal friends was missing, and Trudeau stayed aloof, just as he had at Harvard. Paul Fox, a classmate and later an eminent Canadian political scientist, recalled that Trudeau seemed like a “young nobleman on a Grand Tour, very intelligent but quite disengaged.”²² As at Brébeuf, Trudeau deliberately concealed parts of himself, revealing only what seemed appropriate to the circumstances. His past, however, had made him, and the traces were clear: some he followed fitfully; others he began systematically to efface.

One trace was indelible: his commitment to Roman Catholic Christianity. But the nature of that commitment was changing. He could still write a letter that would have satisfied the most traditional of his Brébeuf teachers. At Easter 1947, for example, he had written to Thérèse about “the Christ of the Passion,” who had come to represent for him the fundamental humanity of Christ. Christ’s last days, he continued, were filled with uncertainty, betrayal, and defeat. He was no more than a poor fisher, and that humility bore His essential message to us. To the ever devout François Lessard, he sent a postcard that same Easter that ended with the words “Christ is King!”²³ In Paris he had paid scant attention to the atheist existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir, but Paris had nevertheless jolted him loose from the restraints on behaviour that Catholic devotion had previously entailed. In particular, his extended encounter with Freudian psychology at the dawn of the age of Kinsey began to loosen the religious bindings on his sexual behaviour.^* Trudeau’s faith was becoming more personal and less responsive to ecclesiastical authority and tradition, and in this respect he reflected his more fully defined personalist approach to religion and Catholic belief. While remaining a believer, he was becoming a sceptic towards the Quebec Catholic Church, which, in his opinion, lacked the breath of contemporary life.

Some critics have pointed to contradictions in Trudeau’s beliefs at this time. They certainly exist, as is to be expected in a man of his age, though his papers make it clear that they derived less from uncertainty on his part than from the influence of old friendships and relationships. He maintained close ties with the increasingly conservative and nationalist Quebec journal Notre Temps, in which he had invested the considerable sum of $1,000 in 1945. It had emerged from the rubble of the Bloc populaire canadien, where conservative and leftist nationalists had briefly embraced during the war. Subsequently, it had become increasingly supportive of the conservative provincial government of Maurice Duplessis and his Union nationale party.²⁴

In the spring of 1947, Trudeau had told Thérèse that he felt angry with Canada and that he intended to write a critical essay about his country. And, soon after he arrived in London, he produced a long article, “Citadelles d’orthodoxie,” which Notre Temps published in its October issue. As the title implies, Trudeau attacked the “orthodoxies” of contemporary Quebec society. While acknowledging that the conservatism of Quebec society had been essential in the resistance to assimilation, he deplored the way religion and nationalism had become stale “orthodoxies” that suffocated citizens who sought to be free, “without a system.” The article is curiously vague and refers to only two individuals, the nationalists Henri Bourassa and Paul Gouin. Trudeau linked both of them with the “courageous” initiatives of the Bloc populaire. On the whole, the article lacks clarity, detail, and force; it reflects a mind in motion, but one whose direction is still unclear.²⁵

Another major change came in Trudeau’s political understanding and outlook. Both the classrooms and the streets of Paris had taken him on paths that led towards the political left. At Harvard he had attended a couple of “socialist” gatherings, mainly out of curiosity. In Paris the Communists carried the cachet of wartime resistance and the promise of a revolutionary future. Trudeau was intrigued, particularly by the attempts of French Catholics to come to terms with the challenge of Communism. The eminent philosopher Emmanuel Mounier cast away the remnants of corporatist thought, which Vichy and wartime Belgium had discredited, and took up the cause of Christian socialism and opposition to the role of American capitalism in the postwar world. In his journal, Esprit, he linked personalism and Marxism, pointing out that both were concerned with alienation in modern industrial society. He saw the Communist revolution that was stirring in postwar France as a means of rejuvenating Christianity itself.²⁶

These thoughts intrigued Trudeau. When the excitement of the Parisian streets drew him into the mass movements of the left, he had related to Thérèse how a demonstration had carried over from the revolutionary cafés of the Left Bank to the government institutions on the Right Bank; how he had been surrounded by police but managed to escape, then waved “bye-bye” in the depths of a Métro station.²⁷ More seriously, he listened attentively as Mounier and other French Catholics turned to socialism to reinvigorate Christianity.

While still in Paris, Trudeau had begun to tell friends that the thesis he would finally write would not focus on a narrow academic subject but would make a major contribution to the grand debate about the reconciliation of Catholicism and Communism. Long into the nights that year he debated with Gérard Pelletier whether anyone could reconcile Communism and the Catholic faith. Later, before the Iron Curtain crumbled, Pelletier candidly admitted the attraction Communism offered in those years. His French friend at the time, Jean Chesneaux, said that the logic of Christianity compelled a Christian to be a Communist in the postwar years. Trudeau, Pelletier continued, was more informed, more rational, yet in those times, in “the pile of rubble Europe had become … with neighbourhoods … flattened by bombs, and where Auschwitz and Dachau were horrible testimony to the bankruptcy not only of fascism but also of pre-war conservatism, Communism was a temptation or, at the very least, intriguing to a young practising Catholic.”²⁸

The London School of Economics was poorly suited for the study of Catholicism but ideal for academic work on Communism. Although it already had some eminent conservative thinkers, notably Friedrich Hayek, whose 1944 classic, The Road to Serfdom, was a brilliant attack on state planning, the school was rightly identified with the British Labour Party and with socialism. Sidney Webb, whose admiring work on the Soviet Union Trudeau had scorned at Harvard, had founded the LSE in 1896 to advance “socialist” education. Britain’s postwar Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, had taught there, but its most noted faculty member when Trudeau arrived was Harold Laski, a political scientist and Labour Party adviser. Laski had taught at McGill during the First World War, knew the United States well, and was a highly controversial public figure because of his continued praise for the Soviet Union as the Cold War began. He was, moreover, a brilliant lecturer—Trudeau described him as having an “absolutely outstanding mind”—who encouraged debate among his adoring students. Ralph Miliband, a British Marxist political scientist, recalled how Laski came up by train during the war to lecture in Cambridge:

The winter was bitter and train carriages unheated. He would appear in his blue overcoat and grotesquely shaped black hat, his cheeks blue with cold, teeth chattering, and queue up with the rest of us for a cup of foul but hot coffee, go up to the seminar room, crack a joke at the gathering of students who were waiting for him, sit down, light a cigarette and plunge into controversy and argument; and a dreary stuffy room would come to life and there would only be a group of people bent on the elucidation of ideas. We did not feel overwhelmed by his knowledge and learning, and we did not feel so because he did not know the meaning of condescension. We never felt compelled to agree with him, because it was so obvious that he loved a good fight and did not hide behind his years and experience.²⁹

Trudeau cared little for London but very much for Laski. He became a major intellectual and, to a lesser degree, personal influence on the young Canadian. A decade after Trudeau had written the anti-Semitic Dupés, only five years after he had questioned Jewish immigration and participated in a riot where Jewish windows were smashed, his mentor was a Jew and a socialist.

In the formal ways of even the socialist English, Laski required students to send him a letter requesting their first appointment. Trudeau saw him at 3:15 on October 8, and he asked Laski to be his thesis supervisor and told him he would like to research the relationship between Communism and Christianity. Trudeau, it seems, impressed Laski immediately: he agreed to supervise his thesis and allowed him to attend several of his seminars. Trudeau’s schedule indicates that he had classes with Laski on “Democracy and the British Constitution” for over three hours every Monday afternoon, another seminar on “Liberalism” every Tuesday, and a final one on “Revolution” every Thursday.³⁰ Trudeau claimed later that, when he left London, “everything I had learned until then of law, economics, political science, and political philosophy came together for me.”³¹ Certainly it was not “together” when he arrived, as the prolix and opaque “Citadelles” article demonstrates. Harold Laski became, for Trudeau, a model: an engaged intellectual whose philosophical and political thought had influenced one of the major movements of the twentieth century—the British socialist movement as embodied in the Labour Party. Laski and the experience of the postwar Labour government was, he wrote to a friend, “excellent training” that made him anxious to return to Canada and to play his own part in politics.³²

Laski may have influenced Trudeau in another way. He wrote superb accessible prose that Labour backbenchers, trade unionists, and Oxford dons could all appreciate. He began his work on the state with this gem: “We argue, as with Aristotle, that the state exists to promote the good life. We insist, as with Hobbes, that there can be no civilization without the security it provides by its power over life and death. We agree, as with Locke, that only a common rulemaking organ, to the operations of which men consent, can give us those rights to life and liberty and property without the peaceful enjoyment of which we are condemned to a miserable existence.”³³ In London, Trudeau’s mind became clearer, his prose sharper, and his political ambitions more strongly defined.

Trudeau brought from France his interest in the reconciliation of Christianity and Communism. But as the Labour Party under Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin joined the Western alliance against the Soviet Union, Laski became a critic of his own party, believing that it was Labour’s first interest to come to terms with Soviet Communism, which, even though corrupted by power, represented the ideal of economic equality and justice without which there could be no true democracy. These views influenced Trudeau deeply, and he quickly moved outside the North American liberal mainstream represented by men such as Arthur Schlesinger and Lester Pearson, both of whom argued that Soviet Communism represented a fundamental threat to the principles of individual liberty and the practice of democracy. Laski’s views on the Soviet Union and his later writings have aged badly; indeed, critics at the time said that his work seemed “very old-fashioned,” especially in his insistence, after the Nazi catastrophe and the evidence of Soviet imperialism, that capitalism was the greatest enemy of human freedom.³⁴ Still, Laski’s views found echoes on the French Catholic left, where Communism was a political force, and they resonated with the young Trudeau, who followed those debates closely.

Laski also influenced Trudeau’s interest in federalism, a topic of paramount importance in his later writings. He was a major theorist on federalism who argued, much like the later Trudeau, that authority should reside where “it can be most wisely exercised for social purposes.” Later he shifted to the view that the central government should have primacy because of broader social needs.³⁵ In this respect, trade unions have a fundamental obligation to become directly involved in political activity, both for the workers as individuals and for the working class in a pluralist democracy. Laski lamented the fact that American unions stood apart from the political process.

Trudeau had demonstrated little interest previously in the Canadian labour movement, which had advanced quickly in wartime, but in France and now in Britain he was witnessing first hand a different model, one he came to believe could be adapted to the political circumstances of Quebec. When he eventually returned to Canada, he immediately sought out labour leaders and spoke to the leaders of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, Canada’s socialist party, which was slowly moving towards a close embrace of the Canadian labour movement.³⁶

The impact of his work with Laski was already evident in an article he wrote for Notre Temps in November 1947. He followed his professor in emphasizing that a system of law bestows “a certain order of things that guarantees sufficient justice that no revolution occurs.” Similarly, he criticized the previous Liberal government of Joseph-Adélard Godbout because it had relied on the federal government to correct social and economic abuses, but in a way that abused the distribution of powers set out in the Canadian Constitution. The present Duplessis government, in contrast, abused the people of Quebec by refusing to enact social reforms, arguing that the Constitution prevented it from acting in these areas. Still, there was a chance for Quebec to act. It was not too late if Quebec rejected orthodoxy and if the people showed their disgust for the elites and their rigidity. If they did not, he would not hold much hope “for our Christian and French civilization which our ancestors created with so many hopes.” However, if Trudeau came to agree with Laski on the importance of a politicized and active trade union movement, he disagreed on one major item.

Unlike the atheist Laski, Trudeau was very active in Catholic circles in England. In early January he attended a conference on “Existentialism and Personalism” in which the French intellectuals Emmanuel Mounier and Gabriel Marcel participated. It was also at this time that he began to study the works of Cardinal Newman and to participate in Catholic youth discussion groups. He joined the Union of Catholic Students and helped to collect books to ship to Catholic universities in Germany.³⁷

Otherwise, he fraternized little with other Canadian students, who mostly lived in crammed student rooms. He, in contrast, could afford better accommodation—he lived at 48 Leith Manor in the tony Kensington section of London, met with the great names of academic life,^* and raced his motorbike around the city and through the narrow trails of the British countryside.³⁸ On the Harley-Davidson, he travelled 1,725 miles through England and Scotland, apparently following the shoreline as much as possible and staying in youth hostels when he could. On some weekends he disappeared to Paris, memorably when his wild, good-looking friend Roger Rolland married there on March 20, 1948. Suzette, who had a taste for gossip, reported to her brother that Madame Rolland had told her she was astonished at the marriage because she did not know her son was interested in women.^* Pierre, the best man, was overcome at the wedding and could not find the words he wanted to say at the reception afterwards.³⁹ It was an unusual lapse, but, given his own recent loss of Thérèse, completely understandable.

The spring brought uncertainty and illness. In February, he contracted a virus, accompanied by diarrhea, which led to several trips to a Harley Street doctor and a stay in the Charing Cross Hospital. He thought about returning home, and his family, particularly Suzette, who fretted about Pierre as older sisters often do, urged him to do so. He wrote to a “Monsieur Caron” about a teaching position at the Université de Montréal, adding in his letter that he had always aspired to be in “active politics one day or another.”⁴⁰

At the same time, unknown countries far away from home still beckoned. Trudeau had dreamed of a world tour while at Brébeuf, had tantalized Thérèse with the romance of travelling together around the globe, and had developed contacts with diverse people in several countries who might assist his passage. He had met the young Jacques Hébert at a Catholic gathering in the summer of 1946, and the two quickly became friends after Hébert regaled Trudeau with tales of his travels to exotic locales. A rebellious student like Trudeau, Hébert, four years his junior, had been sent by his father to Prince Edward Island to learn English after he was expelled from a classical college. Hébert then began a life of travel, and his tales intrigued Trudeau.⁴¹ After he had recovered from the intestinal illness in June, Trudeau went to Harold Laski and asked for a letter of recommendation, telling him he wanted to finish his thesis on Christianity and Communism by travelling through Communist lands as well as the birthplaces of the great religions in the Middle East and Asia.⁴² Jules Léger, later the Governor General of Canada but now a first secretary at the High Commission in London, and Paul Beaulieu, the Canadian cultural attaché in Paris, provided Canadian government letters of reference for Trudeau’s wanderings.⁴³

He was only twenty-eight, but his family remained troubled about his failure to “settle down.” Suzette had complained to him even before he went to Paris in 1946 that he “had enough studying for one lifetime: that’s what your friends and I have decided anyhow!” He should, she warned, not force himself to occupy every minute of his life with a “studied program—Learn to live and let yourself go,” she advised, “otherwise it will soon be too late.” More than two years later, in the fall of 1948, Tip gave the same message to his brother, urging him to settle down as he and Suzette had done earlier. Trudeau replied candidly, mildly rebuking his younger brother for the criticism:

You have chosen marriage, a home, the quiet life, the work you enjoy, and moderation. I’m a nomad by inclination, but also by necessity, for academic pursuits alone haven’t brought me wisdom. As I discover the world, I discover myself. This no doubt seems terribly trite, but I now accept the trite along with all the rest.⁴⁴

Trudeau wanted to strip down to the essentials. He would travel like “Everyman: on foot with a backpack, in third-class coaches on trains, on buses in China and elsewhere, and aboard cargo boats on rivers and seas.” Then, he would rebuild, taking the strongest materials he had found in his education and experience, and bonding them to the enduring pillars of his heritage.⁴⁵

Trudeau left London on a fine summer day in 1948 and headed east, determined to pierce the darkness that had fallen over Eastern Europe. Despite letters of introduction from Canadian officials, he encountered sullen border guards, machine guns, and barriers as he passed through Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria. Soot darkened the elegant mansions of the Hapsburg Empire, and the remains of war were everywhere. In Poland he saw Auschwitz, where, he wrote not entirely accurately, “5 million were killed by the Nazis (1/2 being Jews).” He seemed not to ponder then what Auschwitz meant, but he had long ago left behind the casual anti-Semitism of his adolescence.⁴⁶

What he retained was his intense curiosity, his sharp blue eyes that scrutinized all he encountered, and his lean, muscled physique. He sometimes shaped himself to his environment, wearing a full, albeit thin beard through the Middle East and donning native garb when appropriate. At other times, he was defiant, wearing North American shorts where none had been seen before. When he failed in his plan to visit the Soviet Union, he passed in the company of some students from Bulgaria into Turkey and the Middle East, where stability had been shattered first by war and then by the establishment of the State of Israel. In May 1948 five Arab armies had attacked Israel, but the better-disciplined Israelis defeated them and seized most of the lands the British had held as Palestine under the League of Nations mandate. When Trudeau came in the fall of 1948, the war had not officially ended, and tensions and suspicions abounded. Borders were in doubt; gunfire sounded throughout the nights.

After he was told in Amman, Jordan, that all the roads to Jerusalem were closed, Trudeau joined a group of Arab soldiers and crossed over the Allenby Bridge to Israel, making his way up to the Old City of Jerusalem. Through gunfire, he sought refuge in a Dominican monastery. As he left, however, the pale-skinned, bearded Trudeau attracted the attention of Arab Legion soldiers, who promptly arrested him as a spy. He was briefly imprisoned in the Antonina Tower, where Pontius Pilate supposedly judged Christ. Fortunately, a Dominican priest, who, like most Arab Christians, probably sympathized with the Arab cause, convinced the jailers that Trudeau was simply a Canadian student, not a Jewish spy. A group of Arab soldiers returned him to Amman, no doubt convinced that the peculiar Canadian student was certainly a spy. In Jordan, where the government remained closely linked with Great Britain, the British passport that Trudeau had wisely procured in Turkey convinced the local authorities that he should be released.⁴⁷

In the turbulent Middle East, Trudeau constantly encountered new adventures and troubles of one sort or another. From Jordan he travelled to Iraq to visit Ur, Abraham’s birthplace, and the fabled Babylon. When he stepped off the train, he asked to be directed to Ur and was immediately sent to the great ziggurat. He left his baggage at the station and wandered through the ruins of the city, collecting a few shattered tiles inscribed with Sumerian characters before climbing to the top of the ziggurat. As he did so, he encountered some bandits:

They made it clear that they wanted money. One of them indicated by gesture: “Let’s see your watch.” Since I wasn’t wearing one, I replied, “Let’s see your knife”—and snatched it from his belt. They persisted: “We want whatever you’ve got. Hand it all over.”

But Trudeau now had the knife, and he persuaded them to go down the stairs to discuss matters. Meanwhile, he tricked them and stayed at the top, shouting down: “Now come and get me.” They stood transfixed while he began to scream “to the skies all the poems I have memorized, beginning with Cocteau’s verse about antiquity. I spewed octosyllables and alexandrines by the dozens. I accompanied them with dramatic gestures.” They quickly and understandably concluded he was “dangerously deranged.” He descended the stairs, “still yelling.” As the brigands disappeared into the desert, Trudeau suddenly realized that his study of poetry had brought him unimagined benefits.⁴⁸ He was alone in Ur, which was surprisingly pristine. After seeing the vast mausoleum, he climbed the ziggurat once again and reflected on the history that surrounded him and what it meant. To be sure, he wrote to his mother, some of the greatest treasures were now in the museums of the many conquerors:

But digging will always obsess archaeologists, and the compulsive ritual of the dig will continue to reward them mainly with frustration. Every bump may hide treasures, but every pit may also. Nothing is ever finished, even if you have to keep digging another six inches. And by removing soil, they make other mounds, and forget a shovel here and there, leading archaeologists of the year 10,000 to establish that 20th-century man had made little progress since his Paleolithic ancestor …

Having reached the top of the ziggurat, I saw an enormous black bird fly slowly away after defecating on the column whose offerings had once been made to the moon goddess … Vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas.

Alone, five days after his twenty-ninth birthday, he saw the burning sun create his shadow, the only human form where once a great civilization had thrived.⁴⁹ He felt mortality.

With his prized British passport, Trudeau set off on the fabled Silk Road that carried him through Samarkand to India and Afghanistan. He had already developed a lifelong dislike of Canada’s Department of External Affairs, whose representatives, he claimed, had treated the bearded backpacker with disdain—in sharp contrast with the friendly reception given by British diplomats. He wrote to his mother and sister on December 2 that, in India, the “people at the Canadian High Commission were quite nice for a change.”⁵⁰ In general, however, he sought out priests when he needed counsel and refuge, and they welcomed the ascetic of New Testament appearance who knocked on their doors. Curiously, although he had made no formal arrangements with any Harvard professor to supervise his proposed thesis on Communism and Christianity, he used the pretext of thesis research for Harvard to gain entry to political offices and to journalists and professors.⁵¹ As a result, the letters he wrote to his family from Asia present a remarkable portrait of a continent in turmoil and a young man in the process of finding himself.

Although Trudeau gloried the scantness of possessions and in the meagre cost of his trip ($800, he later claimed), he mingled with the mighty as well as the derelict and the desperate as he passed through the Middle East and on to India, China, and Japan, before returning to Canada in the spring of 1949, after almost a year on the road. He wrote several letters to his family as his adventure progressed. What they reveal is his fondness for his mother, whose travelling passion he inherited; his keen eye for the variety of human experiences; and his passion for understanding the basis of political action. In their own right, the letters are important as descriptions of Asia at this critical time, as the British Raj dissolved, India divided violently into separate pieces, and a new united China bloodily emerged.

He wrote from Kabul in early December, having passed through the Punjab, where he saw the Golden Temple at Amritsar. There he discovered few who spoke English and concluded that the Indians “seem to be getting even against all foreigners for 150 years of foreign domination.” Imperialism became a constant theme in his writings home. Stranded with only his knapsack, Trudeau found himself in the no man’s land between India and the new state of Pakistan. He was rescued from a walk of twenty miles to the Pakistani frontier by “a Muslim Punjab Police Captain,” who whisked him through police cordons in a private car. That night he went “to bed with a huge glass of sweetened warm buffalo milk” and “slept like an angel.” The next morning, he continued, “I bid this hospitable family good-bye, despite the invitation to remain longer; for the wife had to remain in purda all the time a foreign man was in the house, and I couldn’t bear keeping the man from his wife all the time I was there.”⁵²

He moved on to Peshawar in new Pakistan, which had a fascinating bazaar, “by no means pretty, and a hopeless jumble, but [with] the atmosphere of a frontier town, various races seem to mingle, the Mongolian with the Indian and with the white.” As he watched, “a troop of frontier tribesmen marched down the street, beating their tumtums obviously on their way to the fight in Kashmir, blowing their bagpipes and shooting in the air, something out of a movie.” Trudeau said he “wandered about at random,” and “dusk found me lost in the maze of lanes. I was too enchanted to be disturbed, except that my eyes stung with the heavy acrid smoke which hung about the place, smoke of that particular kind which comes from cooking over cow dung fuel.” Once again, the police picked him up, but his British passport secured his release.

He finally managed to get a ride with an American diplomat who took him through the Khyber Pass, where he saw on the mountainsides the plaques commemorating British battles long ago in the great game to win Asia. He reported the stories of refugees who were fleeing their ancestral homes as Hindus and Muslims set upon each other in the bloody aftermath to Indian independence:

We had a welcome breakfast at the outpost of the famous Khyber Rifles, high up in the pass. Wild honey was on the menu. Then on to Jahalabad: all along the way we passed endless caravans; these were the nomads of the heartland which I had thought had ceased to exist, but here they were, hundreds, thousands of them, men, women and children, all trekking south into Pakistan, through the Khyber Pass, coming from way beyond Kabul, whence the cold of the winter had driven them. The newborn babes ride on top of the camels with the chickens, perched high up on top of the huge load. I could write a book on these people, so much was I impressed by their features, their dress, their behaviours, their beasts of burden, their history, their inner mind; however I won’t write it now for I would never get you to Kabul, the city a mile above sea level … We crossed the final pass at sunset and the pink and purple mountains, stretching away to infinity, is something to behold. And as a cadre, on either side, higher mountains snowcapped and formidable. Then the descent into the valley of Kabul, where the crisp winter air and smell of wood fires awakened many longings within me; despite my crude room in the only hotel in the place, I slept happily. Here was a taste of winter, and of Laurentian air, a change from the six months of summer I had enjoyed by going gradually south all the way from England, as I went east.

In Kabul, time seemed frozen. The bazaars stood “as they have stood for centuries, all selling the same spices, silver jewellery, colourful silks, beautiful cloths, artistically worked shoes with pointed upturned toes, heavy woollens and brightly designed skullcaps, to wear under turbans, as they have done for centuries.” But he could see clearly that the twentieth century would bring changes as no other century ever had.

Later in December he returned to India, where he took a boat through the twisted bayous at the mouth of the Ganges. He passed through “lush jungles where tigers hunt the deer and gazelle, betwixt banks with their many villages of grass houses, whence primitive natives drive their sacred bulls and water buffalo towards rich prairies.” Surrounded by Hindus and some Muslims, Trudeau spent a pious Christmas Day: “I read the masses, sang the hymns and generally spent the day in deep meditation.” It was, he claimed, “good for the inners.” Then he discovered a priest from Quebec who had been in India since 1922 and was overjoyed, he told Suzette, to encounter a young guy from Montreal—a “petit gars de Montréal.”⁵³

“Do you remember the song we used to sing around you at the piano?” Trudeau wrote to his mother from Bangkok on January 18, 1949. The song included the lines “North to Mandalay … South to Singapore,” and, thanks to the Dutch and “their outrageous imperialistic policy” in Indonesia, Trudeau was forced to go north to Mandalay and, then, to China. Bangkok beckoned, because Trudeau believed it was the best “listening post” in the area. In Indochina, too, French colonial policy was “undergoing a very critical test,” though Trudeau was more sympathetic to it than to the British brand. He quickly passed through Burma, where “armed bandits” were everywhere. “I have seen no country,” he told his mother, “where chaos, bribery, looting, smuggling, insurrection and political assassination have been so prevalent and to so little avail. There is perhaps no weaker government in the world today; but there is no more divided and purposeless opposition, so the government still stands. But that is all it does, it stands … at a standstill.” He stayed, as so often, with priests and even gave a lecture to Catholic girls in a convent.⁵⁴

Then he arrived in Siam (now Thailand), a country that bewitched him and from which he drew important lessons. “If anyone ever called upon me in argument to give him evidence of the beneficial effects of Freedom upon the evolution of a nation,” he wrote to his mother on January 28, “I should suggest that he settle in Siam awhile.” There he found cordiality, grace, and a basic truth:

Practically alone in the East, this country ignores the vicissitudes of domination by an imperialistic power (the Japanese stay was too short-lived to have left an imprint). In consequence, hate, suspicion, envy and arrogance, which follow from the inferiority complex of colonies, or former ones, are entirely absent from the psychological make up of the Siamese; instead you find a good-natured curiosity and a genuine desire to live and let live—at worst, add a dose of disguised condescendence. The spoken word is superfluous here, you can smile and gesticulate your way to anything, bow, clasp your hands before your face and you are at peace with everyone.

As an added benefit, he said, “tipping, soaking the foreigner, begging, shoe shining, ‘guiding,’ and other forms of disguised servility are practically unknown here.”^* In Siam, he admired the way everyone went his own way in a population that was “hybrid, part Thai (ancient Chinese), part Laotian, part indigenous (of the same ethnical branch as the Polynesian).” He regretted that he had brought no camera to record the “fairy-like splendour, the stupendous colour, the tireless worship, the unthinkable shapes,” though the “very abundance of exotic form could not possibly fit into a camera.” Oh, he exclaimed to his mother, “that I could blindfold you and instantly transport you within some sacred precinct, and leave you sitting on the matting of some pagoda; you would find no single familiar form with which to gauge reality, and you would swear you were dreaming.”⁵⁵ Pierre, truly, had become his mother’s son; there is a warm, settled, and satisfying quality in their banter.

He also took a trip to the old Siamese capital of Chiang Mai with an unexpectedly distinguished group, including a Thai prince and princess, the American cultural attaché, the French military attaché, and assorted judges, bankers, and other dignitaries. His own attention, he admitted, was fully diverted between “a pretty fraulein and a jolie demoiselle,” although he did manage to talk to some missionaries and one of the “rare Communists” for the purposes of his thesis.⁵⁶ From Thailand he went to French Indochina, then in the first battles of a thirty years’ war. In Saigon he found “hate, strife and inevitable waste of men, money and morals.” Once again the youth of France were in uniform, fighting a war that was going “nowhere fast.” Soldiers were everywhere, and people could travel only in convoys. The French held the towns and main highways, the rebels ruled the countryside, and “nobody holds the peace, though on both sides men die, [are] wounded, suffer and atrocities are committed in the name of elusive righteousness and honor.” On the one side were patriots, “coupled together with cynical Stalinists and bloodthirsty thieves.” On the other side, “you find bewildered idealists joined together with greedy Imperialists and disgusting knaves.” Politics, Trudeau concluded, “thy name is mud.”

He managed to find a bus to the legendary Angkor Wat, but he thought it such “a disgusting trip” that “at times [he] was hoping that the convoy would be attacked and a few of us killed off, to make room for the rest.” Angkor, by chance, proved to be safe thanks to the presence of a Life photographer for whom French troops cleared out the beggars and bandits who normally lurked nearby. The grandeur and scale seemed to Trudeau to represent the “confused aspirations of an awesome builder, obsessed by the need to accumulate idol upon idol, height upon height, hallway upon hallway, in endless and fearful mountains of stone.” Surrounded by French troops, the photographer and sundry others toured the ruins by torchlight and listened to an aged conservator tell the history of the monuments and how, among other things, the French novelist and future culture minister André Malraux, against whose “Communist” presence in Montreal Trudeau had protested in 1937, had stolen some of the artifacts.

Trudeau returned in an all-day convoy to Saigon, where he managed to get an admission card to an elite private club. There, enjoying the swimming pool, were women whose “bathing suits have gone one better” than those in France. At this “Club sportif,” Trudeau sipped the forbidden absinthe and supped in regal splendour. The city itself was crammed, and he dwelt “in a makeshift dormitory, hot, noisy and crowded, only bearable because there are a few other shifty fellows like myself, foreign legionnaires, etc.” He asked his mother to tell his friends that he would eventually write, but, he concluded, “when I settle down on a side-walk café, I don’t seem to get much work done.”⁵⁷

From Saigon, Trudeau went to China, just as Mao’s Long March was ending in triumph. At the edge of chaos and conflict, he saw a society and a polity in the throes of death. From the safety of British-ruled Hong Kong, Trudeau went to Canton, a city crammed with “all types,” from “the escapists to the hard-boiled sewers of mankind.” Then he set out for Shanghai. Refugees and wounded soldiers were everywhere, and the value of money changed by the hour. There were still many missionaries, and they frequently gave the wandering Canadian refuge. The devout Catholic also found welcome in the Protestant YMCA, and, thereafter, he always had great admiration for it as an institution. The road to Shanghai was unforgettable:

I saw something of the real China; rambling mountains, wide rivers, endless rice fields in tiers along the hillsides or into gulches, poor villages, walled hamlets. I shivered at the poor peasant plowing his paddy fields with water buffalo, knee deep in the cold water. I slept in a tiny Chinese hotel and helped the daughter of the house with her English home work. I sat on a stool at a round table with many other famished travellers and learned to warm my fingers, numbed, on the boiling teacup, that I might be more agile with the chop sticks. Indeed, agility was an essential if I were not to go hungry; for there is no time to lose when everyone begins digging in at the common bowls.

When Trudeau left the crowded bus for a final journey by train to Shanghai, he noticed signs of a brilliant spring all around:

A warm breeze rolls through the mountain gaps, and sweeps along the broad valleys, carrying the fragrance of the exquisite peach blossoms. Flooded paddy fields alternate with Yu-tsai crops in flower. The shimmering silver and pure gold squares form a heavenly checkerboard. Broad rivers and swift streams chase wildly through lush green expanses, young wheat under quaint, steep, Chinese stone bridges. Peasant women in bright blue pajamas stand on the threshold of their mud or brick houses. Old men in their long blue gowns and silver chin beards, smoke their silver pipes. Coolies with conical straw hats bustle along with that quaint gait, synchronized with the oscillation of a double load dangling at either end of their bamboo yoke. Rolly-polly children in their over stuffed clothes look as wide as they are high. With mitigated attention, the sun beams benevolently on the glistening world. Yes it is truly great to be alive!⁵⁸

He told Grace on March 10 that he dreamed of being home for the three great events the next month: “your birthday, Easter and the sugar shack—la cabane à sucre.” China, however, delayed him. The ancient city of Hangzhou, the “noblest city in the world” to Marco Polo, so intrigued him that he decided to return to it one late afternoon by climbing a mountain rather than following the valley. With the earth drenched by rain, he climbed into the dark towards a Taoist monastery but, on reaching it, he discovered its entry heavily barred:

I pounded on the doors, exchanged foreign words with voices inside, but to no avail. They would not risk unbarring their gates to any weird devil of the stormy night. So I turned away, quite downcast. However I had discounted oriental curiosity, and when they heard my heavy boots begin to clang down the steep, flag-stoned path, a monk and several servants opened the gates to get a peep at the marauder. I brazenly (but with appearance of dignity) walked through the monastery, caught a glimpse of the Taoist monks in black silken gowns and silken cornered head-dress, sipping their tea, made my way to the temple where I was guided by the pounding of a drum. There I stood, shielded by a few candles against impending, incense laden darkness, and as I peered through the shadows towards the eerie idols, the drum beats quickened and suddenly gave away to a weird rhythm tapped out on loud gongs, against a background of howling wind and beating rain. I stood there as in a trance, feet together and hands joined, with a feeling of many eyes peering at me, hardly daring to bat an eyelid. Slowly the realization came to me that my hands had begun to tremble, and I awoke to the thought: enough of this foolishness. I hastened (walk, don’t run) through the halls and courtyards to the door of the domain, and out into the rainy but familiar night.

After this disturbing escape, Trudeau met the dean of the law faculty at the university in Hangzhou and discussed “politics at great length with the professors,” some of whom had attended Harvard or London in earlier and better days. He then left for Shanghai, where he immediately got into a fight “with a gang of rickshaw coolies.” He soon learned how to deal with the throng of “swindlers, pimps, coolies, rickshaw coolies, shoe-shine boys, down-and-outers, thugs and pests” that abounded in that city. Refusing to speak French or English, he broke silence only to shriek a few “ominous Russian words,” to which they immediately responded by slinking away.⁵⁹

In Shanghai he once more sought the company of Jesuit priests, with whom he had “several jolly get-togethers.” Refugees from nearby battles were flowing into the city with tales of the Communist army’s approach. “I sure would like to be here for the kill and see their operations first hand,” Trudeau wrote, no doubt to his family’s despair. As hundreds of thousands fled the looming battles, space was scarce on the ships leaving Shanghai, but Trudeau managed to find passage to Yokohama in Japan. There the Canadian government official^* initially barred the bearded backpacker from leaving the ship and further increased his animosity towards Canadian diplomats. Once released, Trudeau asked Grace if she wanted to join him on a tour through Japan, as she had the previous spring, when they travelled through Provence and the French Riviera on his motorbike. She apparently declined, so he left Japan on a ship crowded with refugees, most of them Eastern Europeans, who were once again fleeing Communist revolution.⁶⁰

At the age of twenty-nine, Trudeau returned to a home that he anticipated with uncertainty and ambivalence. He wrote much later in his memoirs that his return “threatened to be a nasty shock. It was.”⁶¹ In this respect he was referring to politics in the province of Quebec, but to others he also emphasized the personal doubts he had at the time. “But what did the wanderlust correspond to? Was it a basic loneliness? … I think the best answer would be that I was really completing the pedagogy of Pierre Trudeau, the growing up of Pierre Trudeau.”⁶² But had he yet grown up? Did Trudeau finally know who he was?

George Radwanski speculated that the trip and its deliberate “risk-taking” and “self-imposed hardships” reflected, on the one hand, his asceticism and, on the other, his desire to experience poverty, a “reality” that had eluded the wealthy young man.⁶³ Gérard Pelletier credited Trudeau’s travels with developing an “international” sense that others then lacked. He deliberately sought out political ideas that could be applied to Canada and Quebec.⁶⁴ Trudeau’s own letters and documents provide new answers to some of these questions. He did “miss” the war; and, during his political years, he expressed some regrets; he had told Thérèse Gouin in 1945 that he was too lost in his books as the war ended to understand the great “cataclysm” that had exploded around him. Yet there is little in his writings of 1948–49 to confirm that he regretted he had not fought in the war. In Notre Temps on Valentine’s Day, 1948, he wrote a scathing attack on the policies of the King government in wartime, indicating that his views had not changed since the war. There he listed the multitudinous sins of the King government:

Government by decree; suspension of habeas corpus, the Arcand, Houde, and Chaloult incidents. The lies of [Ernest] Lapointe. The joke of moderate participation. The farce of bilingualism and French-Canadian advancement in the army. The forced “voluntary” enrolment. The Drew letter and the scandal of Hong Kong. The fraud of the plebiscite, featuring the king of the frauds, Mackenzie King, the intimidating propaganda, and the no that meant yes.

The war, he said, had brought “the end of civil liberty” in Canada, and he vigorously denounced the wartime incarceration of fascist leader Adrien Arcand. This support led Arcand to write to Trudeau’s mother praising the article and asking for Trudeau’s address.⁶⁵ Probably shocked, she appears not to have replied. If some old grievances endured, others vanished, however, as Trudeau completed what he perceptively termed his “pedagogy.”

What is striking is how deliberately and systematically he sought perfection in himself. The Jesuits and the classics rightly received credit for this emphasis on excellence in all parts of his person. He was demanding of himself and, very often, too demanding of others. In terms of education, he was fully “grown up” by the third decade of his life. Whether on the steps of the ziggurat at Ur, where he hurled unending stanzas of poetry at bandits, or on the streets of Shanghai, where he shouted abusive Russian phrases to repel street thugs, or in Harold Laski’s office at LSE, where he defended his views, Trudeau demonstrated that he had an extraordinary range of knowledge. Fluently bilingual in French and English, comfortable in Spanish, understood in German, and with reading and writing knowledge of Latin and Greek, he knew the classics of Western thought in literature, economics, political science, and history. His travel writing drew on a deep understanding of historical and societal change, and his learning derived from his diligence in the classroom and in his private study. His receptive mind, with its unusually good memory, contained a deep reservoir from which he could draw as few others of his time could do.^*

But to what end? In the late 1940s, Trudeau was still not clear about his destiny. Rather, he was wrestling with the direction his erudition and experience would lead him in and what his future public career might be. His article in Notre Temps illustrates the contradictions that existed in his understanding of the future of Quebec. The journal was a conservative and nationalist publication, and Trudeau’s bitter attack on the wartime policies of Mackenzie King undoubtedly pleased most of its readers. At the same time, he also maintained some of his friendships from the days when he and others, enraged by the incarceration of Camillien Houde during the war and the betrayal on conscription, mused about revolution and separation. To two such friends, François and Lise Lessard, he sent a postcard on October 19, 1948, from Mesopotamia. Striking a strongly nationalist note, he wrote: “Here is a place which has known a bit more history than the island at the confluence of the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence. But what’s five thousand years; perhaps the next five thousand will belong to us. Mesopotamia, the birthplace of the human race; Laurentie, the birthplace of the new world.” He ended with a request that best wishes be sent to other nationalist friends.⁶⁶ It was a strangely discordant note for one who styled himself a “citizen of the world,” but it was a reminder of how much had changed since Lessard and Trudeau had dreamed of revolution in the streets of wartime Montreal. His chords were not yet in tune.

Some friends and themes persisted, but much had changed in Pierre Trudeau during his absence from Quebec. His Notre Temps article uneasily combined a defence of the rights of fascists and nationalists with a strong defence of liberal and popular democracy, one that had rarely been heard earlier. He argued that the governors believed in government for the people but not by the people. Some might object that, in wartime, democratic rights can be suspended. “Quite the contrary,” he asserted; “if there is any law upon which the individual citizen has the right to pass judgment, it is one that would expose him to death.” What is more important in the article is evidence that he had rejected the corporatism that he had learnt at Brébeuf in favour of popular democracy. Similarly, he had rejected the formalist approach to law in favour of the emerging American positivist approach: that law must express changes within society, “for the world marching forward continuously creates new needs.”⁶⁷ Among those needs in Canada was a more explicit understanding of human rights—a term that was becoming increasingly current in the postwar world.⁶⁸ These rights were to be grounded in a democratic society—“no other form of government safeguards those values better”—where the dignity of the individual person was most completely fulfilled.

Although the absence of ideology based on religion is striking here, Trudeau found grounds for his argument in a passage from Saint Paul that held that each human being was justified in obeying his own conscience. The study of Cardinal Newman had left a clear mark, as had Emmanuel Mounier and the French personalists, who stressed the role of lay Catholics as opposed to the clergy. In this case, diverse streams met and formed a stronger current in Trudeau in the wake of his travels, one that began to swell after he returned to Quebec and confronted the conservative government of Maurice Duplessis. Although he had become liberal, however, he was certainly not a Canadian Liberal—he believed the party had, among other sins, too poorly defended the rights of minorities.

In his letter to his mother from Siam, Trudeau’s comments on the absence of “domination by an imperialistic power” are significant, particularly because they illuminate his detestation of colonial rule and minority intimidation. The result of colonial imperialism was, he claimed, “hate, suspicion, envy, and arrogance,” all the product of the “inferiority complex of colonies, or former ones.” Colonialism breeds suspicion and envy, qualities that are fundamentally destructive. From his travels and studies, Trudeau adapted this lesson to Canadian circumstances, as he and others began to draw parallels between the sullen anger of the Indians and the Indochinese emerging from colonial rule and the resentments of French Canadians. The killing of millions in the break-up of India, some of which he witnessed at close range, had an impact. Separation had brought massive bloodshed, and a federal solution was obviously the better alternative. Trudeau’s fascination with the emergence of former colonies remained in his later writings. It was also reflected in his approach to international politics after he became prime minister, when he regarded the end of the colonial empires and the establishment of new states as the most significant historical event of the second half of the twentieth century.

Most of the world Trudeau saw on his travels was poor beyond his expectations. His decision to strip himself of worldly goods on his trip derived only in part from asceticism; it also reflected a rich man’s attempt to enter into the life around him in all its facets. Like George Orwell’s ventures into the world of the down and out, Trudeau linked his experiences with his education, which both in Paris and in London had awakened him to egalitarian philosophies. In postwar France, he gravitated naturally towards the socialist left and, like Emmanuel Mounier, recognized that Communism’s greatest appeal came from its assertion of economic equality. His proposed thesis was based on the premise that the egalitarian character of Communism found echoes in the papal encyclicals that had long deplored the great material inequalities in modern industrial capitalism.

In Britain he encountered Laski, a controversial figure because of his defence of the Soviet system as one that attempted to create the economic equality he believed was the foundation of true democracy. Laski struggled both with Stalinism and with the obvious strengths and attractions of postwar American democracy. He prompted Trudeau to look at federalism, a subject Laski had long studied as a means of finding a balance between minority interests and an active central state that would be the strongest force in achieving the economic justice he regarded as essential. When he left London, Trudeau told a Harvard friend, he was “more and more preoccupied with problems of authority, obedience, the foundations of law etc.” Harold Laski had left his mark.⁶⁹

So had politics in Britain, where the Labour Party was creating a modern welfare state—something yet to take form in Canada. The importance of the trade-union movement in the Labour Party and, in a broader sense, in drawing workers into politics affected Trudeau’s perception of how change might occur in Quebec. No doubt recalling the workers in the Abitibi gold mines with whom he had shared so little in 1946, he determined to focus more closely on what trade unions did. He began to see the trade-union movement as a highly effective method of expressing the workers’ voice in politics. It was, he wrote in 1948, “the duty of all to participate in the body politic and to express one’s conscience in guarding the common good and in all things to bear full witness to the truth.”⁷⁰ The Welsh labour politician Aneurin Bevan, whom Trudeau came to admire during his year in Britain, would have strongly agreed.

Wearing a thin beard, Trudeau returned to Montreal in May 1949 with traces of the intense Middle Eastern and Asian sun on his hardened and lean body. He had acquired a broad knowledge of international politics and, through his education, of contemporary political economy. That knowledge formed the basis for political views that had become more secular, liberal, and egalitarian, and that coexisted with a renewed yet different Roman Catholic faith. He was less interested in nationalism and, indeed, in history and more concerned with what he was beginning to describe as “effective” and “rational” approaches to politics. He had, most definitely, grown up in respect to his “pedagogy” and his social and political views, although there remained an unpredictability and elusiveness about him.

And had he matured emotionally? He had outgrown the sophomoric hyperbole that he displayed in his major essay for the despised William Yandell Elliott at Harvard. His encounter with Freudian psychiatry seemed to be helpful in clarifying his adolescent fears about women and sex and in fortifying his belief in the importance of individualism. Freudian terms pervaded his prose over the next few years; and, although there is no definite evidence, it appears that the restraints on sex outside of marriage disappeared for Trudeau. Freud, personalism, and probably impatience apparently combined to do the trick. However, other restraints were accepted. The cascade of emotionalism and the regular outbursts of anger that had marked Trudeau in the early forties and, indeed, in his letters to Thérèse Gouin were tempered. Although he became a superb polemicist, his pen accepted limits, ones that eliminated the anti-American rants while at Harvard or the anti-English tirades whenever he had encountered the Union Jack. In fact, soon after his return he wrote a letter to the editor of Le Devoir, Gérard Filion, in which he dismissed Filion’s call for a republican “social” movement. Republicanism, Trudeau declared, would be a waste of scarce political time; the “social” revolution must come first.⁷¹

Trudeau had changed; but, despite his claims that, in Quebec, “nothing had changed,” it had, in fact, altered a lot.^* He recognized that change on May 19, when he bought a painting by Paul-Émile Borduas for $200.⁷² In August 1948 Borduas, then an instructor at the École du meuble, wrote a scathing indictment of Quebec society and its major institutions, Refus global, which he and fifteen other younger artists signed. Decades later, its anger still erupts from the page as Borduas attacks a society where feelings were “shamefully smothered and repressed by the most wretched among us.” The past could no longer beat down the present and the future: “To hell with Church blessings and parochial life! They have been repaid a hundredfold for what they originally granted.” Now was the moment for magic, for love, for passionate action, and a world where “the ways of society must be abandoned once and for all.”⁷³ Borduas set off a firestorm of criticism for his negativism and his tone. He lost his job and left Quebec within a few years, but the artist who had begun as a church painter had signalled the fundamental changes in Quebec society that were taking place. So had Trudeau, by his purchase of a Borduas canvas.

Gérard Pelletier did not approve of Borduas’s statement. Returning to Quebec to become a journalist at Le Devoir, he condemned the document as adolescent, adding that “Mr. Borduas is not a young man. This is a mature man.”⁷⁴ Yet Pelletier, too, was caught up in the sudden changes in Quebec society, and, when Trudeau sought out his old friend shortly after his return, Pelletier persuaded him to join the cause of the asbestos workers, who had been on strike since mid-February.

Trudeau had paid little attention to trade unions before his departure from Quebec in 1944, even though Thérèse’s father was the author of the major text on labour law in Quebec. Now, however, he was interested in the potential of trade unionism to effect political and economic change and, even before his return, he had contacted Canadian Labour Congress officials about a possible job with them in Ottawa. Nothing eventuated, so, still uncertain of his own future, he quickly accepted Gérard Pelletier’s invitation to join him in the Asbestos Strike, in the town of Asbestos, in the Eastern Townships.

This strike is a fabled moment in Quebec history because it illuminates the class and ethnic differences that fuelled the resentment and dissent in the province. The companies were overwhelmingly foreign-owned, and the managers spoke only English. The miners simply took the asbestos from the ground, loaded it on freight cars, and shipped it away. Less than 5 percent was processed in Canada. On the great rolling hills of the Eastern Townships where it was extracted, large gaping holes remained as testimony to their work. Although the postwar boom benefited the industry, and workers’ wages rose, they knew the rewards went mainly to the foreign owners and the English-speaking managers. Gradually, too, the miners became aware that the material they extracted daily was destroying their lungs. All this knowledge gave force to the strike that exploded when Jean Marchand, the secretary-treasurer of the Confédération des travailleurs Catholiques du Canada (CTCC or Canadian Catholic Confederation of Labour), first met with the workers about their grievances in February 1949. Spontaneously, the workers in their caps took to the streets, along with Marchand in his beret. The strike was illegal, passionate, and immediately controversial.

Trudeau and Pelletier set out to drive from Montreal to the strike sites in Pelletier’s decrepit British-made Singer. Along the way, the police stopped this suspicious-looking vehicle and took both occupants to the police station for questioning. When the officer asked Trudeau, who had been sitting in the left front seat, for his licence, he replied, defiantly, “I have none,” even though he had it in his pocket. The police were set to arrest him when Pelletier, in his typically calm fashion, asked the officers to come to the car. There they saw that the Singer’s controls were on the right, in the British fashion. After an exchange of barbed words, the police resentfully let them go.

Once they arrived at Asbestos, Trudeau met Jean Marchand, a social scientist who had become a brilliant labour organizer in the fashion of the American Walter Reuther. Personally striking, with an uncontrollable thatch of dark hair and a voice that easily reached the back of union halls, Marchand was an impassioned orator who moved to action the men (and the few women) who came to hear him talk. Four decades later, Trudeau’s boyhood friend Pierre Vadeboncoeur recalled Marchand in those days. “He had qualities that were truly exceptional,” he said: “a lively intelligence, sure judgement, a critical spirit, a passionate temperament, obvious sincerity, combined with the extraordinary eloquence of a popular champion that one encounters only two or three times in a century in a single country.”⁷⁵

Trudeau’s role in the strike was minor. He marched with the strikers, who called him Saint Joseph because of the oriental headgear, North American shorts, and straggly dark beard he still wore. But he made his mark when he gave a fiery speech attacking the Quebec police to five thousand miners. Jacques Hébert thought he spoke emotionally and well about the importance “of democracy, justice, and liberty in language they understood,”⁷⁶ but Marchand, more experienced with crowds, had a different take on the event. “Miners are not schoolchildren,” he warned, “and while students might steal pencils, the miners steal dynamite. I had managed to defuse two or three cute little plots by the boys which would have blown up the mine manager and most of his staff. So you can imagine that when Trudeau urged physical resistance by the strikers, I got a little worried.” All calmed down, but Marchand had discovered a valuable new colleague, and Trudeau had discovered where he belonged.⁷⁷

At Asbestos, Trudeau, Pelletier, and Marchand bonded together—and they stayed together for the rest of their lives. They seemed to understand their mutual strengths, interests, and beliefs. Jean Marchand was the organizer, who travelled the highways and backroads of Quebec and became one of the workers’ own. He slept in their bedrooms and spoke in their church basements, where he thrilled them as his emotions boiled on the tip of his tongue. He never had notes, but his thoughts suddenly exploded into the air. Sometimes, he would break into song, as he did in an Asbestos café one evening with “Les lumières de ma ville,” a ballad made famous that year by the young Quebec chanteuse Monique Leyrac in the film of the same name.⁷⁸ Gérard Pelletier was not a singer or even much of an orator, but he listened well, as the finest journalists do. He quickly provided stories for the press that helped to make Marchand’s case in the dailies.

Initially, Pierre Trudeau struck both Pelletier and Marchand as different but also remarkable, a man who brought the intellectual depth and international experience that Quebec labour badly needed in the forties. Pelletier’s father was a stationmaster, Marchand’s a worker, while Trudeau’s had been a millionaire businessman. Both Pelletier and Marchand had developed a contempt for the sons of Brébeuf and Outremont, with their “smart” clothes and special banter, but when they saw Trudeau speak directly to the workers about justice and democracy in ways that the workers listened to and understood, they realized he possessed the gifts and commitment they needed. As Pelletier remarked later, Trudeau “made no show either of his money or his muscles. Nor of his intelligence. But despite a strange shyness that [would] never leave him, and which made him less than talkative on first acquaintance, he aroused one’s curiosity.”⁷⁹ Beginning at Asbestos, Trudeau began to link the world of Christian personalism he had discovered in Paris, and the socialism he had encountered in Laski’s classrooms, with the needs of the Quebec working class. The workers became for him the best hope in a Quebec that had disappointed him on his return.

What Trudeau found there was, in his later words, “a Quebec I did not really know, that of workers exploited by management, denounced by government, clubbed by police, and yet burning with fervent militancy.” It was, in many ways, a new Quebec, a fact he recognized in his finest publication—the introduction and conclusion to a 1956 book he edited on the strike. Although there had been other strikes, he wrote, the Asbestos Strike “was significant because it occurred at a time when we were witnessing the passing of a world, precisely at a moment when our social framework—the worm-eaten remnants of a bygone age—were ready to come apart.”⁸⁰

Trudeau did not forget the smoke-filled union halls or the workers in checked flannel shirts, their faces lined from years of hard and unhealthy work. After he went back to Montreal, he took on their case against the provincial government and the police, who had broken into workers’ homes, falsely imprisoned many of them, and generally intimidated their towns and villages. He did not charge his clients a penny.⁸¹

But the strike was illegal and the workers were violent, destroying the property of the “scabs” who replaced them. The Duplessis government opposed the strikers on the legitimate basis of illegality, but it went much too far, breaking its own laws with impunity. The Catholic Church was divided on the strike, with parish priests rallying to their parishioners while most of the hierarchy backed the government—as they normally did. There were, however, notable exceptions: Archbishop Charbonneau of Montreal strongly supported the strikers’ cause, and dozens of truckloads of food went from working-class Montreal parishes to feed the miners’ families. Charbonneau’s vigorous support of the strike became a principal factor in Duplessis’s decision to have “a showdown with elements of the Church that he considered were subverting his authority and working iniquity with his constituents.”⁸² With prodding from conservative elements of the church and from the government of Quebec, the Vatican persuaded Charbonneau to resign his archbishopric on the grounds of “ill health,” and he spent the rest of his life in Victoria, British Columbia. Pelletier realized that he and the others who had supported the strikers so vociferously had also become “marked men.” Trudeau could no longer get a university job. Jean Marchand therefore offered him a position with the labour movement in Quebec, where he could continue to fight Duplessis.

But, in one of the surprising moves that mark Trudeau’s life, he left Quebec just when, in his own words, the strike brought “a turning point in the entire religious, political, social, and economic history of the Province of Quebec.”⁸³ To the shock of Pelletier and other friends, Pierre Trudeau departed for Ottawa and became a civil servant.

* Priestley was second only to Churchill in his influence on the BBC in wartime. His broadcasts appealed enormously to the British working class. Trudeau told Thérèse that her father would not approve of Priestley’s socialism.

* Thérèse became one of Canada’s best-known psychologists, the author of several important works on the psychology of children, and an interpreter of the experimental psychology of Jean Piaget. An outstanding researcher and academic, she became an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1977 and served as president of several psychology associations.

* The Toronto conference of young leaders that Trudeau, Claude Ryan, and others attended in August 1947 indicates that most Canadian young people were conservative in their personal behaviour. The meeting discussed a poll taken in 1945 of 57 Catholics, 56 of whom went to church every week. They were all opposed to gambling; 40 were opposed to drinking; and only 26 were supportive of “kisses and caresses” between unmarried men and women. All said they were opposed to going further than kisses and caresses—a frontier Trudeau was soon to cross. TP, vol. 8, file 16.

* Modern students can only envy Trudeau, because it is unusual for students to meet the great names of academic life. In London, Trudeau met with the famed Fabian socialist G.D.H. Cole (an “anti-papist”) and Harold Laski on October 8, soon after his arrival. The next morning he met with Ritchie Calder, a celebrated journalist and politician. Within two months, he had attended lectures by the Labour intellectual Richard Crossman, the historian Arnold Toynbee, and the philosopher Bertrand Russell.

* Roger Rolland denies Suzette’s tale, pointing out that his mother knew of his many girlfriends (including Thérèse Gouin). She was upset that she had not met Roger’s fiancée. Letter from M. Rolland, June 7, 2006.

* Tipping was a practice Trudeau despised. Some of his later dinner companions sometimes discreetly left additional cash on the table as Trudeau walked out of the restaurant.

* Likely Herbert Norman, who was later accused by the Americans of being a Communist agent of influence and driven to suicide.

* John Crosbie, who possessed both a Newfoundlander’s gift of gab and a fine education, had a grudging respect for Trudeau which transcended their profound political differences. He wrote in his memoirs that Trudeau “was a worthy adversary. Duelling with him was always risky, but it was very tempting.” On one occasion, Trudeau was challenged about corruption in government and responded: “Quad semper, quad ubique, quad ab omnibus.” Crosbie heckled, “That’s the Jesuit coming out in you,” to which Trudeau replied that Crosbie clearly did not understand what he had said. Crosbie replied with the lawyer’s standard “Res ipsa loquitur,” to which Trudeau replied in Greek. A frustrated Crosbie could only mouth the Greek motto of St. Andrew’s College, the private school he had attended in Ontario. John Crosbie with Geoffrey Stevens, No Holds Barred: My Life in Politics (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997), 236–37.

* In his Memoirs, written in the early 1990s, Trudeau makes this claim and adds that “Quebec had stayed provincial in every sense of the word, that is to say marginal, isolated, out of step with the evolution of the world.” He quotes the chansonnier Jacques Norman, who predicted that “when the Soviets invade, they’ll rename Montreal; they’ll call it Retrograd” (61). Scholars now tend to emphasize the forces of change that were strongly felt in Quebec in the 1940s. Social and economic historians stress the impact of war on even relatively isolated areas of Quebec. In Quelques arpents d’Amérique: Population, économíc, famille au Saguenay, 1838–1971 (Montreal: Les Éditions du Boréal, 1996), Gérard Bouchard indicates that the period after 1941 saw decisive shifts in major indicators such as the use of contraception, age of marriage, and, most important, literacy, where the rise was dramatic (455). In the area of intellectual history, Michael Behiels published a study of Quebec liberalism and nationalism which stressed how much change had occurred before 1949. Writing of the impact of war and depression in Prelude to Quebec’s Quiet Revolution: Liberalism versus Neo-nationalism, 1945–1960 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985), he argued: “Shattered beyond repair was the belief that Quebec was a society where nothing changed or would change.” Despite the book’s extensive and largely favourable treatment of him, Trudeau did not acknowledge its arguments in his memoirs. He did admit, however, that there was “a bubbling of ideas that already, in a very timid way, presaged the changes to come” (62).