was a far cry from the rhetoric of the Trudeau of a mere six years earlier. It was as if he was shedding his old self, ready to start anew from first principles. “Let’s batter down the totems, let’s break the taboos. Better yet, let’s consider them null and void. Let us be coolly intelligent.”
This was the tone that Cité libre was to keep under Trudeau’s reign. He had found an idiom, a way back to the language of protest he had always been most comfortable with, through an inversion that relegated what he himself had been to “the previous generation.” Not a language of flight or remorse but of moving forward, of accepting a challenge. Cité libre would remain true to the challenge, tacklingthe federal government, the provincial one, even the church, despite the fact that the church, through its index of banned publications, had the power to shut the journal down.
In an article in one of the journal’s early issues, Trudeau attacked the church’s interference in secular affairs and poked fun at the “divine right” in which bishops cloaked themselves. The jibe provoked a caustic response in a Jesuit publication from one of Trudeau’s favourite teachers at Brébeuf, Father Marie d’Anjou, as well as a summons for both Trudeau and Pelletier from the new Archbishop of Montreal, Paul-Émile Léger. Trudeau was rattled by the attack from d’Anjou, who had been one of his collaborators in les X, but at the meeting with Léger, who maintained a chilly diplomatic courtesy throughout, Trudeau refused to recant. Pelletier later described the encounter in his book Years of Impatience.
Trudeau … defended his position so sharply that the Archbishop was moved to say: “If I were to condemn the review … it would be with great regret, believe me.”
“And we,” interrupted Trudeau, “would appeal to the universal Church, as is our right.”
The Archbishop, disconcerted, stared strangely at Trudeau. He hesitated a moment, then went on to his next point. I have a lively recollection of those few moments during which, I believe, the fate of Cité libre was decided in the incredible atmosphere of a medieval dispute.
This sort of challenge required a rare strength of character in the Quebec of those years, particularly coming from someone who remained in his heart a committed Catholic. Yet despite Trudeau’s many successes of this sort and the tremendous personal energies he put into Cité libre, to people around him he often seemed adrift in this period. His only other major projects during the 1950s were the collection of essays he put together, at Pelletier’s request, on the Asbestos Strike, and a brief he prepared on behalf of the Quebec unions for a royal commission on federal–provincial relations. Interestingly, the brief, which actually garnered wide attention both in Quebec and in the rest of the country, took the view that economic issues were much more important than constitutional ones, and that workers needed adequate incomes more than they needed “constitutional guarantees of their religious, cultural, and political evolution.” Many of Trudeau’s critics in his latter years as prime minister, when Trudeau would keep hammering at constitutional reform while the deficit spiralled and interest rates and unemployment were in the double digits, might have made the same argument.
At the end of the decade, Trudeau, now forty, still seemed to have little to show for all the promise he had had as a young man. “Perhaps I seem superficial about certain things,” Trudeau had written in his journal back at Brébeuf. “But the truth is that I work.” This was as true of him in the 1950s as it had been at Brébeuf, but for all his activities, there was an air to him of someone who had never stepped fully into his own life. He was essentially jobless; he was unmarried. He might be in the midst of some project, then suddenly disappear on a months-long jaunt to Europe. He had become a frequent media
This was the tone that Cité libre was to keep under Trudeau’s reign. He had found an idiom, a way back to the language of protest he had always been most comfortable with, through an inversion that relegated what he himself had been to “the previous generation.” Not a language of flight or remorse but of moving forward, of accepting a challenge. Cité libre would remain true to the challenge, tacklingthe federal government, the provincial one, even the church, despite the fact that the church, through its index of banned publications, had the power to shut the journal down.
In an article in one of the journal’s early issues, Trudeau attacked the church’s interference in secular affairs and poked fun at the “divine right” in which bishops cloaked themselves. The jibe provoked a caustic response in a Jesuit publication from one of Trudeau’s favourite teachers at Brébeuf, Father Marie d’Anjou, as well as a summons for both Trudeau and Pelletier from the new Archbishop of Montreal, Paul-Émile Léger. Trudeau was rattled by the attack from d’Anjou, who had been one of his collaborators in les X, but at the meeting with Léger, who maintained a chilly diplomatic courtesy throughout, Trudeau refused to recant. Pelletier later described the encounter in his book Years of Impatience.
Trudeau … defended his position so sharply that the Archbishop was moved to say: “If I were to condemn the review … it would be with great regret, believe me.”
“And we,” interrupted Trudeau, “would appeal to the universal Church, as is our right.”
The Archbishop, disconcerted, stared strangely at Trudeau. He hesitated a moment, then went on to his next point. I have a lively recollection of those few moments during which, I believe, the fate of Cité libre was decided in the incredible atmosphere of a medieval dispute.
This sort of challenge required a rare strength of character in the Quebec of those years, particularly coming from someone who remained in his heart a committed Catholic. Yet despite Trudeau’s many successes of this sort and the tremendous personal energies he put into Cité libre, to people around him he often seemed adrift in this period. His only other major projects during the 1950s were the collection of essays he put together, at Pelletier’s request, on the Asbestos Strike, and a brief he prepared on behalf of the Quebec unions for a royal commission on federal–provincial relations. Interestingly, the brief, which actually garnered wide attention both in Quebec and in the rest of the country, took the view that economic issues were much more important than constitutional ones, and that workers needed adequate incomes more than they needed “constitutional guarantees of their religious, cultural, and political evolution.” Many of Trudeau’s critics in his latter years as prime minister, when Trudeau would keep hammering at constitutional reform while the deficit spiralled and interest rates and unemployment were in the double digits, might have made the same argument.
At the end of the decade, Trudeau, now forty, still seemed to have little to show for all the promise he had had as a young man. “Perhaps I seem superficial about certain things,” Trudeau had written in his journal back at Brébeuf. “But the truth is that I work.” This was as true of him in the 1950s as it had been at Brébeuf, but for all his activities, there was an air to him of someone who had never stepped fully into his own life. He was essentially jobless; he was unmarried. He might be in the midst of some project, then suddenly disappear on a months-long jaunt to Europe. He had become a frequent media
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