Pierre Elliott Trudeau by Nino Ricci

rooms in the family home into his forties and didn’t marry until his mother had passed into senility.
    Clarkson and McCall, in their own speculation about the impact of Charlie’s death on Pierre, extensively mined exactly this Freudian vein, seeing the sudden disappearance of “the most powerful presence” in Trudeau’s life as the source of a “psychic imbalance” Trudeau could never get beyond. “The day would never come … when paternal dominance would be replaced by the father’s acknowledgement of the son’s achievements as a grown man.” Later biographers have been skeptical of this analysis, taking Trudeau’s reaction to his father’s death somewhat more at face value, as the normal grieving of an adolescent at the loss of a beloved parent. But whatever twist one gives it, the death would surely have marked Trudeau profoundly, and likely in ways which neither his own comments on it nor the comments of those around him would have plumbed the depths of. Clearly it was something that hung over Trudeau all his life—forty years later the memory of it could still bring tears to his eyes—not least for the fact that the tremendous freedom he enjoyed throughout his life to do as he wished rested largely on the fortune that Charlie had almost literally killed himself to amass.
    In the short term, at least, the death may have brought some feeling of liberation along with the trauma. Suddenly Trudeau was free of this larger-than-life figure he had been trying to please all his childhood. This was the period in which a so-called anti-authoritarian streak began to come out in Trudeau at school, the elite Jesuit lycée Jean-de-Brébeuf, which had opened its doors in Montreal just a few years earlier. The streak manifested itself, however, mainly in a prankishness that seemed more calculated to call attention to Trudeau than to overthrow the established order. Even in the year of his father’s death, Trudeau managed to win awards and keep up his high academic standing. The evidence, in fact, suggests that far from becoming a maverick in these years, Trudeau, like most adolescents, was instead doing everything he could to be accepted and to fit in, tailoring himself to his differing environments in a way that went very much with the current rather than against it.
    At home, where the reign of Grace had now replaced the reign of Charles, the atmosphere had grown increasingly English and refined. Gone were the late nights, the physicality, the coarse language and jokes. “When my father was around, there was a great deal of effusiveness and laughter and kissing and hugging,” he told biographer George Radwanski. “But after he died, it was a little bit more theEnglish mores which took over, and we used to even joke about, or laugh at, some of our cousins or neighbours or friends—French Canadians—who’d always be very effusive within the family and towards their mothers and so on.”
    But while he was becoming increasingly English at home, at school, in an almost Zelig-like compartmentalization, he was becoming increasingly French. There, his father’s death seemed to have had the effect of leading him to seek out father figures among his Jesuit teachers, men whose difference from his father prompts the question whether Trudeau was trying to fill a lack or rather explore a new freedom. Some of these teachers were to exercise an enormous influence over him, in ways that were not generally known until Trudeau biographer John English and former Cité libre editors Max and Monique Nemni were granted access to Trudeau’s archive after his death. What these researchers found was a portrait of Trudeau’s formation substantially at odds with the standard, accepted version during his life.
    In their groundbreaking book Young Trudeau: 1919–1944, Max and Monique Nemni use materials from the Trudeau archive to show how, far from learning at Brébeuf, as one of his teachers was to claim, the values of “federalism,