democracy, and pluralism” that would become the bedrock of Trudeau’s beliefs in later years, he was insteadinitiated into a brand of reactionary nationalism very much at odds with these values but quite common in Quebec in the years preceding the Second World War. Trudeau was in the habit of keeping thorough records, even going so far as to save drafts of his letters, and his archive contains a treasure trove of notebooks and journals and papers of every sort. Using these, the Nemnis have shown that the Trudeau who emerged from Brébeuf was one who subscribed not only to the widespread anti-Semitism of the day but to the church’s disdain for democracy.
In Quebec, the church’s preferred model of governance in that period was a so-called corporatist one, in which the state acted as a sort of benevolent parent, governing citizens who couldn’t be trusted to govern themselves. This was the very model that lay behind the fascist dictatorships then gaining ascendancy in Europe. The church’s ultimate goal in Quebec was an independent state that functioned as a kind of theocracy, Catholic and ethnically pure. In an essay Trudeau wrote at Brébeuf about his hopes for the future, he imagined just such a prospect. After establishing himself as an international war hero, he would return home “around the year 1976” just in time to lead the charge in the establishment of an independent Quebec that was “Catholic and canadien .”
Canadien, in Quebec, was always a term that referred not to Canadians as a whole but only to the “real” Canadians, the descendants of the pre-Conquest French habitants . Putting aside the unintentional irony of Trudeau’s reference to 1976—the year René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois would come to power—the swashbuckling tone of the essay was decidedly tongue-in-cheek. But this was not satire: however much Trudeau might have been indulging in a flight of fancy, he was doing so within terms that would not only have been accepted at Brébeuf but encouraged. The point comes through more starkly in a play the Nemnis quote that Trudeau wrote for the college’s tenth-anniversary celebrations. Originally titled On est Canadiens français ou on ne l’est pas, a popular nationalist saying of the day, but then changed to Dupés, “duped,” the play’s apparent message was that Jewish merchants were stealing the livelihoods of French Canadians. The idea echoed a buy-from-our-own campaign being championed at the time by the outspoken cleric and nationalist leader Abbé Lionel Groulx.
If Trudeau was rebelling against anything at this age, it certainly wasn’t the narrow-minded nationalism that later made Quebec seem “a citadel of orthodoxy” to him. Yet his writings of the time were full of the language of rebellion. In Dupés, a character named Ditreau, who claims a diploma in“commercial psychology,” advises the French-Canadian tailor Couture to pretend to be a Jew to improve his business. French Canadians, Ditreau says, prefer to buy from Jews, “firstly because they don’t want to enrich one of their own and then because they believe they will get a better price.” Couture goes along at first, then rebels. “Now it’s my turn to teach a lesson: the Canadien people is a sleeping lion. It will soon awaken.” Perhaps this was exactly the appeal of nationalism to someone of Trudeau’s disposition, that it allowed all the rhetoric of rebellion without costing him the approval of his superiors. One almost senses even in Dupés, which had the same tongue-in-cheek tone as his essay on his hopes for the future, that the actual content was just an excuse for indulging a certain irreverence. Ditreau—his name was an obvious play on “Trudeau,” who in fact played him in the production—can’t help but strike us now as offensive, but there is also a mischievousness to him that cuts in both directions.
Trudeau noted on his copy of the script that the play was presented “before
In Quebec, the church’s preferred model of governance in that period was a so-called corporatist one, in which the state acted as a sort of benevolent parent, governing citizens who couldn’t be trusted to govern themselves. This was the very model that lay behind the fascist dictatorships then gaining ascendancy in Europe. The church’s ultimate goal in Quebec was an independent state that functioned as a kind of theocracy, Catholic and ethnically pure. In an essay Trudeau wrote at Brébeuf about his hopes for the future, he imagined just such a prospect. After establishing himself as an international war hero, he would return home “around the year 1976” just in time to lead the charge in the establishment of an independent Quebec that was “Catholic and canadien .”
Canadien, in Quebec, was always a term that referred not to Canadians as a whole but only to the “real” Canadians, the descendants of the pre-Conquest French habitants . Putting aside the unintentional irony of Trudeau’s reference to 1976—the year René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois would come to power—the swashbuckling tone of the essay was decidedly tongue-in-cheek. But this was not satire: however much Trudeau might have been indulging in a flight of fancy, he was doing so within terms that would not only have been accepted at Brébeuf but encouraged. The point comes through more starkly in a play the Nemnis quote that Trudeau wrote for the college’s tenth-anniversary celebrations. Originally titled On est Canadiens français ou on ne l’est pas, a popular nationalist saying of the day, but then changed to Dupés, “duped,” the play’s apparent message was that Jewish merchants were stealing the livelihoods of French Canadians. The idea echoed a buy-from-our-own campaign being championed at the time by the outspoken cleric and nationalist leader Abbé Lionel Groulx.
If Trudeau was rebelling against anything at this age, it certainly wasn’t the narrow-minded nationalism that later made Quebec seem “a citadel of orthodoxy” to him. Yet his writings of the time were full of the language of rebellion. In Dupés, a character named Ditreau, who claims a diploma in“commercial psychology,” advises the French-Canadian tailor Couture to pretend to be a Jew to improve his business. French Canadians, Ditreau says, prefer to buy from Jews, “firstly because they don’t want to enrich one of their own and then because they believe they will get a better price.” Couture goes along at first, then rebels. “Now it’s my turn to teach a lesson: the Canadien people is a sleeping lion. It will soon awaken.” Perhaps this was exactly the appeal of nationalism to someone of Trudeau’s disposition, that it allowed all the rhetoric of rebellion without costing him the approval of his superiors. One almost senses even in Dupés, which had the same tongue-in-cheek tone as his essay on his hopes for the future, that the actual content was just an excuse for indulging a certain irreverence. Ditreau—his name was an obvious play on “Trudeau,” who in fact played him in the production—can’t help but strike us now as offensive, but there is also a mischievousness to him that cuts in both directions.
Trudeau noted on his copy of the script that the play was presented “before
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