Young Trudeau: 1919-1944: Son of Quebec, Father of Canada

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.

About the Author :
MAX and MONIQUE NEMNI are retired university professors who spent most of their working lives in Quebec. They were friends of Trudeau, who encouraged them to become the editors of Cité libre and agreed to let them write his intellectual biography. The authors have both been much published in academic publications in both English and French. They won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Young Trudeau, and were finalists for the same prize for Trudeau Transformed, the follow-up to Young Trudeau. They now live in Toronto.

Review :
“No single book had the psychological impact of Max and Monique Nemni’s Young Trudeau. It changed the perceptions and challenged the political reflexes of Canadians. Conceived as an act of homage, it turned into a journey of shocking discovery. As the Nemnis examined Pierre Trudeau’s private papers, they found a very different young man than they had expected or previous accounts had revealed. The unshakeable federalist who became Canada’s 15th Prime Minister had once plotted to take Quebec out of Canada. The eloquent democrat who penned Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms had once shrugged off Nazi atrocities and admired fascism. It is a tribute to the Nemnis’ skill and scholarship that Mr. Trudeau emerges undiminished from their portrait. They show how he was shaped by pre-war Quebec with its all-powerful church, its authoritarianism, and its separatist yearnings and how he eventually broke free.” —Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing jury citation “One of the truly great contributions to Canadian political history.” —National Post