Read Online Pierre Elliott Trudeau by Nino Ricci - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Nino Ricci
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of 1942, Trudeau and his friend Jean-Baptiste Boulanger worked on what they called the “Plan,” using writers like Trudeau’s beloved Plato to direct them, but also the anti-Semitic and anti-democratic Charles Maurras, a strong supporter of Marshall Pétain’s Vichy government. After several drafts they came up with a manifesto that summarized their aim as a “national revolution,” which they saw as “a permanent struggle aimed at the human excellence of the community.” The country to emerge from this revolution, the manifesto concluded, would be “Catholic, French and Laurentian” and would express itself “in a State that is at the same time authoritarian and the guardian of freedoms.”
The Nemnis were able to track later references to the society by some of its former members. Hertel, for instance,admitted Trudeau’s involvement in it to La Presse in 1977, even ascribing its formation to Trudeau. The playwright and actor Jean-Louis Roux, meanwhile, wrote about the society in his memoirs, recalling a document that was passed around explaining how the city’s police and fire stations would be captured and its radio stations occupied when the day of action came. Roux later paid heavily for his own antics during the war, losing an appointment as Quebec’s lieutenant-governor when it became known he had worn a swastika as a part of anti-conscription protest. But Trudeau, for some reason, was spared, even though many of the details about his wartime activities would have been readily available to journalists during his lifetime.
On the eventual fate of les X, the Nemnis have been unable to offer much direction. The paper trail ends in 1943; the society may have gone on working for years in deepest secrecy or may simply have collapsed from its own irrelevance. “Parfaitement loufoque,” Roux said of the enterprise, perfectly nutty, and it had enough of the same suspicious tone of highhanded irreverence of many of Trudeau’s earlier projects for one to wonder how seriously its own members took it. At the end of the manifesto for the group that Trudeau and Boulanger had written up, they had tacked the line “God approves.” Another document that outlinedmethods for dealing with traitors included “temporary kidnapping” among its suggestions. Roux, who announced he was quitting the group when it gave him the ludicrous task of recruiting to it the secretary general of the Université de Montréal, Édouard Montpetit, was made to believe that severe repercussions awaited those who tried to drop out. “The days, the weeks, the months went by,” Roux recalled later. “Nothing occurred. I’m still waiting.”
We may never really know if the young man whose rebelliousness at Brébeuf had seldom risen above the level of throwing snowballs was truly plotting a fascist coup—with what would have had to have been a nearly psychotic level of delusion—or if the whole project was merely an intellectual exercise to relieve the boredom of law school or confound his future biographers. This last possibility is a real one. In a commentary he wrote at Brébeuf on Pascal’s Pensées that is reproduced by the Nemnis, the young Trudeau reflected at length, with eerie foresight, on his future biographers. After admitting that pride—the fear he might later look ridiculous—often prevented him from putting down his true thoughts, he then admitted to the greater pride beyond this fear, namely the assumption “that some day biographers will delve into all that we have written down to follow therein the development of our thinking.” He wenton in that vein, trying to find the way around a selfconsciousness that only became more tortuous and inescapable the more he explored it. “Pascal, writing down his thoughts,” he concluded, “was more assured of surviving than I am (more assured because of his previous success, but not more convinced! Such is my assurance.) (I have this assurance because I’m role playing, and
The Nemnis were able to track later references to the society by some of its former members. Hertel, for instance,admitted Trudeau’s involvement in it to La Presse in 1977, even ascribing its formation to Trudeau. The playwright and actor Jean-Louis Roux, meanwhile, wrote about the society in his memoirs, recalling a document that was passed around explaining how the city’s police and fire stations would be captured and its radio stations occupied when the day of action came. Roux later paid heavily for his own antics during the war, losing an appointment as Quebec’s lieutenant-governor when it became known he had worn a swastika as a part of anti-conscription protest. But Trudeau, for some reason, was spared, even though many of the details about his wartime activities would have been readily available to journalists during his lifetime.
On the eventual fate of les X, the Nemnis have been unable to offer much direction. The paper trail ends in 1943; the society may have gone on working for years in deepest secrecy or may simply have collapsed from its own irrelevance. “Parfaitement loufoque,” Roux said of the enterprise, perfectly nutty, and it had enough of the same suspicious tone of highhanded irreverence of many of Trudeau’s earlier projects for one to wonder how seriously its own members took it. At the end of the manifesto for the group that Trudeau and Boulanger had written up, they had tacked the line “God approves.” Another document that outlinedmethods for dealing with traitors included “temporary kidnapping” among its suggestions. Roux, who announced he was quitting the group when it gave him the ludicrous task of recruiting to it the secretary general of the Université de Montréal, Édouard Montpetit, was made to believe that severe repercussions awaited those who tried to drop out. “The days, the weeks, the months went by,” Roux recalled later. “Nothing occurred. I’m still waiting.”
We may never really know if the young man whose rebelliousness at Brébeuf had seldom risen above the level of throwing snowballs was truly plotting a fascist coup—with what would have had to have been a nearly psychotic level of delusion—or if the whole project was merely an intellectual exercise to relieve the boredom of law school or confound his future biographers. This last possibility is a real one. In a commentary he wrote at Brébeuf on Pascal’s Pensées that is reproduced by the Nemnis, the young Trudeau reflected at length, with eerie foresight, on his future biographers. After admitting that pride—the fear he might later look ridiculous—often prevented him from putting down his true thoughts, he then admitted to the greater pride beyond this fear, namely the assumption “that some day biographers will delve into all that we have written down to follow therein the development of our thinking.” He wenton in that vein, trying to find the way around a selfconsciousness that only became more tortuous and inescapable the more he explored it. “Pascal, writing down his thoughts,” he concluded, “was more assured of surviving than I am (more assured because of his previous success, but not more convinced! Such is my assurance.) (I have this assurance because I’m role playing, and
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