Pierre Elliott Trudeau (8 page)

Aquin was perhaps the extreme end of the kind of circular self-consciousness the young Trudeau manifested, one that intellectuals in the hothouse culture of Quebec would have been particularly prone to whenever the calls of nationalism and collective loyalty made it difficult to indulge the usual ambiguities and doubts of an intelligent mind. The portrait of Trudeau that emerges from the war years is of someone living a divided identity, throwing himself full force into a lunatic revolutionary movement as if to prove he would never be the one to betray his race, as his anonymous accuser at Brébeuf had suggested, yet still winning his accolades at school, and still living out his Englishness at home.

Over the years there would be many casualties among Quebec nationalists of men who, like Aquin, were never able to reconcile the contradictions between collective and self. It may have been the church, again, that helped save Trudeau. His extracurricular readings of the time included not only
reactionaries like Charles Maurras and André Tardieu—and his commentaries on these were disturbingly uncritical—but also Catholic writers like Pascal and François Mauriac and Henri Bergson, who were somewhat more in the mainstream of Western thought. From them he would draw the ideas that became the basis both for his later “personalist” approach to his faith and for the values that would come to define his view of the individual and of human rights. The faith that had bound him to a regressive nationalism would also be his way free of it. In the 1950s, his personalism would make him one of the leading critics in Quebec of a church hierarchy whose paternalism and authoritarianism he had sought to glorify during the war.

At Brébeuf, where Trudeau valued his religion classes above all others, he jotted down these notes inspired by a teacher, Father Lamarche, for whom he had had a tremendous respect. “See the truth wherever it is to be found. If one is not strong enough to act accordingly, that is too bad. But one should at least be loyal enough to recognize that what is true is true.” These words sound like the Trudeau we would all eventually come to know. But if something in him during his war years in Quebec saw through to the truth, he was not “strong enough to act accordingly.” He went with the current. When the atrocities in Europe began to be widely
known he dismissed them as propaganda, as many Quebecers did, writing a vicious parody of Mackenzie King’s renewed call to arms for the university paper. Meanwhile he attended rallies that turned into anti-Semitic riots. He also staged a play in which Adam Dollard des Ormeaux, killed by the Iroquois in the 1600s, stood for the embattled French Canadians and the Iroquois, as in his anti-conscription speech, stood for the savage English (although Trudeau, always layering in his ambiguities, played an Iroquois in the actual production). In one of his more bizarre escapades, related by the Nemnis in
Young Trudeau,
he turned a debate on gallantry into an elaborate anti-British protest, lacing his comments with double meanings and planting his fellow
Frères chasseurs
in the audience to help further the spectacle. In the final moments, one of Trudeau’s plants pretended to heckle him and Trudeau pulled out a gun loaded with blanks and fired it at him. He then turned his back to the audience and made a gesture of being hanged, ending by pointing to his backside and suggesting a Union Jack be planted there.

We may recognize the later Trudeau in the style of these antics but not so much in their intent. In 2004 the CBC released a peculiar drama called
Maverick in the Making,
in which the young Trudeau was depicted as many of us would have imagined him in these years: attending anti-Franco
meetings, getting beaten up by the Montreal fascists, fighting the church establishment at every turn. Many of these scenes have so much the ring of truth that one has to keep reminding oneself that they are pure fabrication. At one point Pierre goes to confession, and just before launching into a diatribe against church authority he asks the priest if it is possible that the war against the Nazis is a just one. But there is little evidence that this question ever occurred to the real Trudeau at the time.

Trudeau’s flurry of public actions ended abruptly when he graduated from law school in 1943, as did his subversive activities with
les X
and a period of intense reading and writing and publication. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, he had also grown suddenly bitter and disillusioned. In a jotting that was never published he wrote, “If the ordinary people truly realized what sort it was they were relying on to ensure salvation … they would not wait another day before giving up altogether.” He had been disappointed by his own co-conspirators, or perhaps by the whole future elite of Quebec with whom he had just spent three years at law school, and whom he accused of being utterly “two-faced” and lacking in character.

Obviously “two-faced,” in Trudeau’s lexicon, was much more heinous than many-faced, as he was. Yet his bitterness
seemed genuine: he had seen past some scrim, had seen the divide between talk and action. He himself, despite a legitimate claim to divided loyalties, had been willing to give over the whole of his energies to the call of the collectivity. He may have found that others, for all their talk, were not quite so ready to rise to the challenge.

A YEAR OF ARTICLING
was enough for Trudeau to grow bored, as his father had, with the practice of law. “[T]hat’s the problem when you have an office,” he told George Radwanski. “People come to you with their problems.” Then, in 1944, he finally received permission from Canadian authorities, denied the previous year on account of the war, to leave the country to study in the United States. The next years would prove crucial. As John English shows in
Citizen of the World,
through Trudeau’s correspondence and other writings of this period, the man who left Quebec feeling intellectually bankrupt and hollowed out would return to it five years later with an outlook that was much changed from that of his youth, and that would come to define him for the rest of his life.

Trudeau had chosen to go to Harvard, to study “Political Economy and Government.” In his memoirs, he said he had been torn “between law, psychology, sociology, and political
science.” After consulting many people, including the great Quebec intellectual and political leader Henri Bourassa, by then in his seventies, Trudeau finally took the advice of André Laurendeau, at the time a Quebec MNA, who pointed out to him that Quebec was sadly lacking in economists. In his Harvard application, however, Trudeau stayed true to the hope he had expressed when he had applied for a Rhodes Scholarship to follow a career in politics. “I need not hide my conviction that Canada is decidedly lacking in statesmen. We French-Canadians in particular have too few political thinkers to lead us, and the sight of such splendid people going to ruin appalls me.”

It did not take Trudeau long to realize how blinkered his life in Quebec had been over the previous few years. In his memoirs, he recalled that in the “super-informed environment” of Harvard, he began to grasp, for the first time, the “true dimensions” of the war. Harvard had on faculty several professors who had fled the Nazis, including Hitler’s predecessor as chancellor, Heinrich Brüning. “I realized then that I had, as it were, missed one of the major events of the century in which I was living.”

A great deal seemed to go unstated in this recollection. He ended it thus: “Did I feel any regret? No. I have always regarded regret as a useless emotion.” But as the war was
ending in 1945, he wrote to the girlfriend he had left behind in Montreal expressing exactly that, regret, seeming mortified at the mindset that had allowed him to remain caught up his own partisan pursuits while unimaginable horrors were occurring across the sea. His laments had the quality of a
cri di cœur
—understandably so, given that the “true dimensions” of the war had been well enough known for some time by then, and he had chosen to discount them. As much as he later downplayed this moment of revelation, it was likely determinative for him in setting the future course of his thinking.

Trudeau’s notes from the time show he had been reading up on Fascism and National Socialism and understanding how narrow and unreflective his own political thinking had been. Commenting on one of his readings he noted that “democracy is not synonymous with capitalistic exploitation,” with the tone of someone who had just emerged from a pampered dictatorship to discover that the wider world was not the den of iniquity he had been led to believe.

Trudeau mentioned that Heinrich Brüning, a Catholic, had fled the Nazis for Harvard, but he didn’t mention any Jews who had found refuge from the Nazis there, probably because none had. Despite the massive influx of Jewish intellectuals into the United States before and during the war,
Harvard, in addition to a tacit quota on Jewish students, maintained a virtual moratorium on the hiring of Jewish faculty well into the 1940s. This “super-informed environment” was not exactly super-enlightened. Trudeau, however, an outsider now, keeping to his room in the graduate residence much of the time despite the “Citizen of the World” tag pinned to his door, and making few friends, might have grown more sensitive to other outsiders. A friend he did make, in fact, was fellow graduate student Louis Hartz, who became a sort of mentor. He was one of the few Jews who had managed to slip in under the quota and would later go on to become a full professor at Harvard and one of its most influential political scientists.

Though Trudeau later spoke enthusiastically about his time at Harvard, his letters of the time, quoted at length by John English, show he was not very happy there. From having been the centre of attention he was suddenly a provincial; and everything he had learned and thought, his entire formation, must suddenly have seemed a bill of goods. Outside the conformist atmosphere of Quebec, where it had been possible to indulge his rebelliousness simply by subscribing to the views of his superiors, he was discovering ways of making sense of the world that he had never considered. Much of his later intransigence toward Quebec nation
alists likely went back to this time, when the scales fell from his eyes and he realized how blinded he had been by his own nationalism.

Even so, he allowed himself to ease toward a new understanding only by a kind of “
étapisme,
” not so much renouncing old views as reasoning toward new ones, as if to save himself the shock of complete reversal. One part of his past education he was happy to leave behind, however, was his time at law school: he now had confirmed for him what he had suspected all along, that much of what he had been taught there was beside the point. It was at Harvard that he came to understand the law not as a dull collection of jots and tittles but, as he would later tell Peter Newman when he became justice minister, as a structure for “planning for the society of tomorrow,” the very warp and woof of what held a society together. He also received a solid grounding in economics at Harvard, one of the reasons, after all, he had chosen to go there. He later tended to downplay his understanding of economics, always stressing his cultured side over his political one, but at Harvard he studied with people like the pre-eminent post-Keynesian economist John Kenneth Galbraith and the eventual Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief. It was at Harvard that he was first exposed to the Keynesian theories of interventionism that would guide his
own years in office. But there were also many opponents of Keynes at Harvard who left their mark. In
Citizen of the World,
John English makes the argument that what many people later took as a lack of rigour in Trudeau’s economic thinking was really the understanding he took from the divergent views he was exposed to at Harvard that “economic judgements were not the product of a science but more often the result of special interests.” What in Trudeau the politician came across as indifference to economics, then, may more properly have been distrust of it.

In later years Trudeau would give the impression that Harvard had merely confirmed him on a path he had already been on. The evidence, however, suggests that it was exactly at Harvard that the ideas that later defined him first took root. His writings of the time show that what he took from Harvard was not simple theory but a growing understanding of the complex ways in which societies function and of how their various aspects—their laws, their economies, their political systems—interconnect. From someone who had had a suspicion of liberalism and democracy and capitalism bred into him from a young age, he was becoming a grudging convert. He was also starting to understand how pie-in-the-sky some of his youthful ideas had been. Back in Montreal, writing his manifestos for
les X,
he hadn’t given
much thought to how his Laurentian state would put food on the table.

In 1946 he earned his master’s from Harvard and went on to Paris to do courses at the École libre des sciences politiques and the Sorbonne. His plan was to begin research for a doctorate on the relationship between Christianity and Communism, a topic that showed how far he had come in his thinking in his two years at Harvard. In Paris he ended up spending little time in class, however, and much more touring the cafés with old acquaintances from Quebec he had met up with there. These included Gérard Pelletier, whose close, lifelong friendship with Trudeau really dated to this time; Roger Rolland, who had been part of Trudeau’s Prussian soldier prank; Jean-Louis Roux, who presumably was still awaiting his reprisals from
les X;
and his former Brébeuf mentor, François Hertel. In 1947 Hertel would be expelled from the Jesuits for his controversial views, and eventually his trenchant nationalism would result in a bitter split between him and Trudeau. But for now his presence brought Trudeau away from his Harvard liberalism and back to the question of religion.

It was during his time in Paris that Trudeau came to embrace personalism, a philosophy that was to provide him another bridge between the values he had grown up with
and the ones he was evolving toward. Founded by the French thinker Emmanuel Mounier, personalism was a sort of spiritualized existentialism, asserting the primacy of the individual and of free will but balancing these with the demands of social conscience and social responsibility. For Trudeau, the philosophy became—perhaps a bit conveniently—a means both of holding on to his past and of remaking it, transforming a Catholicism that in Quebec had consisted of a close-minded authoritarianism into one consonant with the principles of liberal democracy and individualism. Implicit in the philosophy was an almost Protestant notion of personal conscience that would later serve as a bulwark for Trudeau in his battles with the priestbased Catholicism of Quebec.