Young Trudeau: 1919-1944

This book shines a light of devastating clarity on French-Canadian society in the 1930s and 1940s, when young elites were raised to be pro-fascist, and democratic and liberal were terms of criticism. The model leaders to be admired were good Catholic dictators like Mussolini, Salazar in Portugal, Franco in Spain, and especially Pétain, collaborator with the Nazis in Vichy France. There were even demonstrations against Jews who were demonstrating against the Nazis’ actions in Germany.

Trudeau, far from being the rebel that other biographers have claimed, embraced this ideology. At his elite school, Brébeuf, he was a model student, the editor of the school magazine, and admired by the staff and his fellow students. But the fascist ideas and the people he admired—even when the war was going on, as late as 1944—included extremists so terrible that at the war’s end they were shot. And then there’s his manifesto and his plan to stage a revolution against les Anglais.

This is astonishing material—and it’s all demonstrably true—based on Trudeau’s personal papers that the authors were allowed to access after his death. What they have found has astounded and distressed them, but they both agree that the truth must be published.

Translated by William Johnson, this explosive book is a key part of Canadian political history.