Citizen of the World The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau 1919-1968

Chapter One Two Worlds The Great War was over; the times tasted bitter. Influenza came back with the soldiers and killed more at home than had died in the trenches. Like the war, it preferred the young to the old. Death usually came quickly as the victims suffocated in a blood-tinged froth that sometimes gushed grotesquely from their faces. As winter became spring in 1919, theatres stayed empty. Men and women entered public places warily, concealing their faces behind gauze masks. The plague invaded private spaces, compelling isolation and reflection. What, then, did Grace Elliott Trudeau and her husband, Joseph-Charles-Emile, think when she learned she was pregnant in Montreal in mid-winter 1919? Pregnancy was dangerous in normal times, but the influenza surely terrified her as her body began to swell with her second child. The twentieth century had so far been a great disappointment especially for francophone Canadians. There was some excitement and hope when it began with Canada's first French-speaking prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier, in power, and an increasingly prosperous economy. The great transformation of Western society that occurred as electricity, steamships, telephones, railways, and automobiles upset the balance of the Victorian age profoundly affected the world of the young Trudeaus. In Quebec, as elsewhere, people were in motion, leaving the familiar fields of rural life and traditional crafts for the cities that were exploding beyond their pre-industrial core. In Montreal, the population rose from 267,730 in 1901 to 618,506 in 1921. The rich had clustered together, initially in mansions in the "Golden Square Mile" along Sherbrooke Street and north up the southern slope of Mount Royal, while the poor spread out below them and in the east end. It was said in 1900 that the Square Mile contained three-quarters of Canada's millionaires. Stephen Leacock, who knew them well, commented, "The rich in Montreal enjoyed a prestige in that era that not even the rich deserve." Unfortunately, the rich were nearly entirely English; the poor, overwhelmingly French. When the French lived mainly in the villages, the gap was less obvious. In the city, it sowed the seeds of deep discontent. And, as new immigrants, mainly Jewish, flowed in from continental Europe, new tensions emerged in the more diverse city. Even before the war, foreign visitors sensed trouble. In 1911 the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, after a visit to Montreal, said that all reasonable men should advise the French to abandon their resistance to assimilation. They were fast becoming simply an episode in history.4 Among francophones in Quebec, the challenge of the new century brought an increasingly nationalist response, particularly when English-Canadian politicians became entangled in the British imperialism that marked the years before the Great War. By then there was a new prime minister, Robert Borden, and the voice of French Canada in the federal government became faint. And in 1914 the war divided the country as never before between the French and the others. Once again, it seemed that a bargain had been broken. Now leader of the official Opposition, Wilfrid Laurier supported the war, along with the French Catholic Church. Even Henri Bourassa, who had founded the nationalist newspaper Le Devoir and become the vocal spokesperson for francophone rights throughout Canada, kept his silence. He and the bishops went along because Borden promised there would be no conscription, but, three years later, conscription was proclaimed, accompanied by vitriolic attacks in English Canada on the French in Quebec. In the bitter and violent Canadian election in 1917, francophones voted overwhelmingly for Laurier's Liberals, who opposed conscription, while anglophones responded by backing a coalition composed of English-speaking LiberalsEnglish, John is the author of 'Citizen of the World The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau 1919-1968', published 2006 under ISBN 9780676975215 and ISBN 0676975216.