Pierre Elliott Trudeau (7 page)

TRUDEAU EMERGED
from Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf steeped in views that were fairly typical for his time and place and social class. Trudeau himself, however, was hardly typical. At Brébeuf he had been, as he would later be, a star. That quality would perhaps remain the real constant in his life, his ability to excel, to shine in the right ways and at the right moment. The skill seemed less the result of some natural flair than of an iron discipline, one that went back to the pains he had taken to please his father but that had been honed to a razor edge by the Jesuits at Brébeuf. He had mastered every subject there, and in his final year beat even his rival Jean de Grandpré to stand first in the school; he had read extensively, always beyond the required texts, and had written commentaries on everything he had read. He had been the captain of the hockey team; he had skied, played lacrosse, swum, boxed, and sailed. He had had his debates and his plays, his student politics and his student paper, had played piano and gone to the symphony. Among a group of already exceptional
students, he had been more exceptional, for which he had been rewarded with prizes—often, to his pleasure, in cash—and with praise.

When he emerged from this cocoon of adulation and familiarity, however, schooled in an ideology designed to prepare him to take his place in the French-Canadian elite, he promptly attempted to flee his French self and indulge his English one, applying for a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford. Until then he had expressed his hopes for the future mainly in the vague, lofty terms adolescents are given to. “I would like so much to be a great politician and to guide my nation,” he had written in his journal in 1938, though he had also flirted with the idea of joining the priesthood. In his Rhodes application, however, he stated quite unequivocally that he planned to pursue a career in politics. “For some years now,” he wrote, “I have sought out activities that prepare one most immediately for public life,” among which he included his diction lessons, his acting, and his singing lessons. Whether Trudeau, in the time-honoured manner of application-fillers, was merely trying to suggest some pattern to what might otherwise seem a hopeless hodgepodge, the idea of politics had at least crossed his mind by now, even if in his play,
Dupés;
Trudeau’s character Ditreau had been rejected by his beloved for being that vilest of things, a politician.

For once, Trudeau failed to get the prize. The Rhodes, despite his impressive credentials and glowing references, went to another candidate. Unexpectedly, Trudeau found himself at loose ends, and as a fallback began to study law at the Université de Montréal. In the meantime, the Second World War had broken out. In his memoirs, Trudeau gave the impression that he paid as little attention to the war as he could get away with. “[T]he instinct that made me go against prevailing opinion caused me to affect a certain air of indifference. So there was a war? Tough. It wouldn’t stop me from concentrating on my studies so long as that was possible.”

Again, Trudeau may have overplayed in hindsight his resistance to “prevailing opinion,” not to mention his interest in his studies. His studies, in fact, bored him. Though he performed with his usual brilliance, graduating, in 1943, once more at the top of his class, he often spoke dismissively of law school at the time, and never with any of the excitement with which he spoke of his days at Brébeuf. The one lasting legacy of his years there, perhaps, was that it was where he first came across a man who would later prove a great influence on him, the law professor, constitutional expert and civil libertarian, F.R. Scott, who spoke at the university in 1943 on the question of conscription. At the time,
though, Trudeau was apparently just as taken with an extracurricular lecture by Abbé Lionel Groulx, who, despite being a man of the cloth, spoke on the conditions under which armed insurrection could be justified, using the Lower Canada Rebellion of 1837–38 as his example.

Most of Trudeau’s time at law school, however, was taken up not with his studies but with exactly the sorts of issues which he later claimed to have had little involvement in. If in his desire to go to England—though only as a scholar; he’d shown no interest in going as a soldier—he had at some level been expressing a wish to escape the narrowness of Quebec nationalist culture, now that he was stuck in it he very much continued to play his part. In his memoirs, he shrugged off a speech he gave at an anti-conscription rally as a momentary effort that had less to do with the war than with the affront to democracy shown by the federal government’s reversal on conscription. In reality, however, Trudeau’s speech was the culmination of many weeks of involvement in a federal by-election on behalf of the anticonscription candidate Jean Drapeau. The speech itself, given at a rally in the campaign’s final days, made such an impression that
Le Devoir
quoted great portions of it. Speaking of the hysteria he claimed the government was stirring up of an imminent German invasion, Trudeau said he
“feared the peaceful invasion of immigrants”—often a code word for Jews—“more than the armed invasion of the enemy.” While in the past, he went on, the French Canadians had had to fight against the Iroquois, “today it is against other savages” they had to fight, namely the Mackenzie King Liberals in Ottawa.

All of this went far beyond the innocent defence of democratic principles into the truly hateful. It was demagoguery; it was, in this man who would later be known by the motto “Reason over passion,” an appeal to the basest impulses. At twenty-three, Trudeau was still clearly of his times rather than above them. As at Brébeuf, he was still attracted to the rhetoric of revolution, but as then, he took care to apply it in a way more likely to earn him accolades than billy clubs.

The other holdover from Brébeuf, however, was Trudeau’s telltale playfulness. The speech was full of inside jokes and puns, playing throughout on the name Drapeau, or flag, and that of Drapeau’s rival, La Flèche, or arrow. It ended with the line “Enough of
cataplasmes
[bandages], bring on the cataclysms,” exactly the sort of clever formulation the young Trudeau revelled in, at once rousing and comic. As odious as the speech was, then, it bore the trace of the same doubleness as his play,
Dupés,
a tone of mockery whose target remained unclear. Self-mockery, perhaps, but also a kind of
subconscious escape clause, as if, in a pinch, one could claim to others, or to oneself, not to have been speaking seriously. The stakes were higher now than at Brébeuf—this was the real world, with real consequences—but Trudeau still seemed to be hiding behind the same mask, half-denying even as he affirmed. Perhaps that was what lay behind his later claim that he hadn’t involved himself much in politics during the war: the sense that he hadn’t, really, not in some essential part of himself, had merely been playing a role. In one of his pranks during the war years, he and a friend dressed up in old Prussian uniforms and toured the countryside on their Harleys calling on friends and frightening passersby, who perhaps thought that the Huns had truly arrived at their shores.

If he was playing a role, however, he seemed prepared to take it to extremes. At Brébeuf, Trudeau had come under the influence of one of the more politicized teachers, Father Rodolphe Dubé, better known by his pen name, François Hertel. In 1939 Hertel had published
Le beau risque,
a nationalist coming-of-age tale in which the young Pierre Martel turns away from the Anglicized and Americanized values of his father toward a renewed Catholicism and devotion to his
patrie
. Martel’s life so clearly paralleled Trudeau’s that Hertel had surely used him as a model, though Trudeau,
who reviewed the book in his journal, gave no indication of recognizing the resemblances.

After leaving Brébeuf, Trudeau kept up contact with Hertel, who was a frequent guest at the Trudeau home. In
Young Trudeau,
the Nemnis have made a convincing case that Trudeau was involved with Hertel and several of his old Brébeuf schoolmates in a secret society called “
les X
” or “L.X.,” also referred to as
les Frères chasseurs
. The society’s mission was the establishment of an independent Quebec organized on Catholic and corporatist—in other words, fascist—principles. Through the summer of 1942, Trudeau and his friend Jean-Baptiste Boulanger worked on what they called the “Plan,” using writers like Trudeau’s beloved Plato to direct them, but also the anti-Semitic and anti-democratic Charles Maurras, a strong supporter of Marshall Pétain’s Vichy government. After several drafts they came up with a manifesto that summarized their aim as a “national revolution,” which they saw as “a permanent struggle aimed at the human excellence of the community.” The country to emerge from this revolution, the manifesto concluded, would be “Catholic, French and Laurentian” and would express itself “in a State that is at the same time authoritarian and the guardian of freedoms.”

The Nemnis were able to track later references to the society by some of its former members. Hertel, for instance,
admitted Trudeau’s involvement in it to
La Presse
in 1977, even ascribing its formation to Trudeau. The playwright and actor Jean-Louis Roux, meanwhile, wrote about the society in his memoirs, recalling a document that was passed around explaining how the city’s police and fire stations would be captured and its radio stations occupied when the day of action came. Roux later paid heavily for his own antics during the war, losing an appointment as Quebec’s lieutenant-governor when it became known he had worn a swastika as a part of anti-conscription protest. But Trudeau, for some reason, was spared, even though many of the details about his wartime activities would have been readily available to journalists during his lifetime.

On the eventual fate of
les X,
the Nemnis have been unable to offer much direction. The paper trail ends in 1943; the society may have gone on working for years in deepest secrecy or may simply have collapsed from its own irrelevance. “Parfaitement loufoque,” Roux said of the enterprise, perfectly nutty, and it had enough of the same suspicious tone of highhanded irreverence of many of Trudeau’s earlier projects for one to wonder how seriously its own members took it. At the end of the manifesto for the group that Trudeau and Boulanger had written up, they had tacked the line “God approves.” Another document that outlined
methods for dealing with traitors included “temporary kidnapping” among its suggestions. Roux, who announced he was quitting the group when it gave him the ludicrous task of recruiting to it the secretary general of the Université de Montréal, Édouard Montpetit, was made to believe that severe repercussions awaited those who tried to drop out. “The days, the weeks, the months went by,” Roux recalled later. “Nothing occurred. I’m still waiting.”

We may never really know if the young man whose rebelliousness at Brébeuf had seldom risen above the level of throwing snowballs was truly plotting a fascist coup—with what would have had to have been a nearly psychotic level of delusion—or if the whole project was merely an intellectual exercise to relieve the boredom of law school or confound his future biographers. This last possibility is a real one. In a commentary he wrote at Brébeuf on Pascal’s
Pensées
that is reproduced by the Nemnis, the young Trudeau reflected at length, with eerie foresight, on his future biographers. After admitting that pride—the fear he might later look ridiculous—often prevented him from putting down his true thoughts, he then admitted to the greater pride beyond this fear, namely the assumption “that some day biographers will delve into all that we have written down to follow therein the development of our thinking.” He went
on in that vein, trying to find the way around a selfconsciousness that only became more tortuous and inescapable the more he explored it. “Pascal, writing down his thoughts,” he concluded, “was more assured of surviving than I am (more assured because of his previous success, but not more convinced! Such is my assurance.) (I have this assurance because I’m role playing, and not so much because it’s definitely within me.)”

By the end of the passage we feel as if we are in a house of mirrors, with no basis anymore for ascertaining which image is the true one. Trudeau, in a tone at once whimsical and troubled, gave us a window here onto a complexity of character that was both a sort of freedom and a sort of prison, that multiplied his possible selves but left him caught up in a selfconsciousness that then gave the lie to each of them. “If you want to know my thoughts,” Trudeau started his journal of 1938, “read between the lines!” The self-consciousness, the presumed audience, was always there, making every statement somehow doubly suspect. It would be a risk to take at face value the writings of a young man in whom selfrevelation and self-concealment were so interwoven.

John English notes in
Citizen of the World
that radical groups like
les X
were quite common in Quebec during the war. Gérard Pelletier recalled in his memoirs that Jean
Marchand, too, “had been recruited into one of the innumerable leagues that existed at the time (each one with twelve or fifteen members), all of which wanted to overthrow the government and put an end to democracy. That was the spirit of the age.” That same spirit would return some years later in the FLQ, only this time with real bombs and with real kidnappings. Trudeau by then would find himself on a very different side of the question, though some of the parallels between the two periods may provide insight into the younger Trudeau. There was something reminiscent of the young Pierre Trudeau in Hubert Aquin, for instance, the author, intellectual, and would-be felquiste who served time in a psychiatric hospital after announcing he was going underground to become a terrorist. In Aquin’s semi-autobiographical novel
Prochain épisode,
a narrator imprisoned for an unnamed revolutionary crime recounts a sort of spy story set around Lake Geneva that is a complex allegory of Quebec’s oppression and of the narrator’s, and Aquin’s, own experience. In its self-consciousness and reflexivity, where reality and fantasy become difficult to separate, the book recalls the writings of the young Trudeau, refusing ever to settle squarely on a clear self-characterization or on a single plan of action or point of view. Aquin was arrested after he declared his terrorist intentions but was never convicted of
any crime, and his life reads much less like that of a revolutionary than that of a tortured intellectual who was unable to escape the straitjacket of his cultural identity or the frustration of his own inaction. After discussing suicide with the people around him for many years, in a running dialogue that almost became a kind of farce, he finally shot himself outside a Catholic girls’ school in Montreal.