Free Pierre Elliott Trudeau by Nino Ricci

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 JeanMarchand, 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 ofany 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.
    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 onlyreactionaries like Charles Maurras and André Tardieu—and his commentaries on these were disturbingly uncritical—but also Catholic writers like Pascal and François