Other people's nationalisms seem silly. American or Canadian, Québécois, Irish, Israeli – national claims to exceptionalism, unique values and special goodness appear dubious to those outside the charmed circle.
In René Lévesque, Daniel Poliquin delivers a concise, astringent biography of the late premier and founder of the Parti Québécois, who never quite shook the nationalist bug, although he did not (usually) succumb to its nastier symptoms. It is published in a handsome, compact volume as part of Penguin's Extraordinary Canadians series.
Lévesque was born at Campbellton, N.B. It is tempting, and probably unfair, to see passionate Québécoicité as a response to birth en dehors de la province, a case not unlike that of George W. Bush, Texas-talking and New Haven-born.
René Lévesque, by Daniel Poliquin, Penguin Canada, 219 pages, $26
Lévesque grew up in a prosperous family – his father was a lawyer – but in an unprosperous time and place: the Gaspé Peninsula in the 1930s. Poliquin calls it a Tom Sawyer-esque childhood-by-the-sea, but poverty in that region was dire. New Carlisle had a majority Loyalist population and Lévesque received part of his early schooling in English.
Like the separatist Pierre Bourgault, who grew up in the Eastern Townships, and Pierre Trudeau – but unlike almost everyone else in Quebec at the time – Lévesque had the advantage of a bilingual upbringing.
Like Trudeau, he was thereafter educated, or indoctrinated, by the Jesuits. After his father's death in 1937 and his mother's remarriage, the family moved to Quebec City, a town the Gaspésien would always loathe for its inland inwardness.
Like Trudeau, he did his ignoble best to ignore the war – until 1944, when he was expelled from law school at Laval University, and needed a job. Rejected by Radio-Canada, he applied at the Montreal office of the U.S. Armed Forces Network for a job as an announcer and translator, and spent the last months of the war in Europe attached to the U.S. Army and earning an impressive salary. He later claimed that he had joined the U.S. effort because he didn't want to wear Canadian uniform, but the Radio-Canada job would have taken him overseas with “Canada” on his shoulder flashes.
Lévesque often fudged the truth, and Poliquin suggests that there was a profoundly adolescent streak in his character, never outgrown.
After seeing the war, including Dachau, Lévesque disowned the Jesuit brand of conservative French Catholic nationalism but, unlike Trudeau, never intellectually broke free. He remained a nationalist all his life, though a staunchly democratic one.
Poliquin delivers strong opinions about the heroic-victim tendency in French-Canadian nationalism
After following the U.S. Army through vanquished France, Lévesque was immune to that sense of inferiority to France and the French that has crippled Québécois leaders before and since. He became enamoured of the Americans, a sadly unrequited love affair: René loved the jaunty GIs and the vacation beaches of southern Maine, but Americans never really saw his point about the need to break up terrible, repressive Canada.
He became a public figure in Quebec first as a radio journalist, then as one of the province's first television stars, when he used his show, Point de mire (Focal Point), to educate Quebeckers about the world in language they could understood.
According to Poliquin, a producers strike at Radio-Canada in 1958 was when Lévesque's distrust of the federal project darkened and deepened. The Diefenbaker government's refusal to settle the strike was seen by Lévesque, and others, as a sign of indifference to the cultural life of Quebec, which it probably was.
