Free Pierre Elliott Trudeau by Nino Ricci Page A

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 widelyknown 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-Francomeetings, 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