Judging from an anti-conscription speech that Trudeau gave in 1942 (supporting the young Jean Drapeau in an Outremont by-election), his would not have been a velvet revolution. Speaking to thousands at a rally, Trudeau said that government "traitors" should be "impaled alive."

And he urged his listeners that "if Outremont is so infamous that it elects La Fleche, and if because of Outremont conscription for overseas service comes into effect, I beg of you to eviscerate all the damned bourgeois of Outremont."

So Trudeau himself, as a young man, would not accept the democratic wishes of his fellow citizens. The only true French-Canadians were those who thought as he did, and any who disagreed could not be legitimate representatives. Had the anglos and Jews of Outremont voted for Drapeau, that was OK; when they voted instead for La Fleche, as they did, they were outsiders deserving only death. Democracy in any case would not survive Trudeau's coup.

Until the war was near its end, Pierre Trudeau appeared set on a course for oblivion. He had flourished in an airtight intellectual climate, sealed off from all but approved authorities. Far from challenging them, he had accepted them and pursued their ideas into a blind alley. If he had continued, he might have ended up in jail, or the Quebec equivalent of Doug Christie, defending francophone fascists and anti-Semites (and maybe the FLQ). He would have been, at most, a footnote in our history.

Escape from a blind alley

Instead, domestic and foreign events and his own intelligence appear to have pushed him out of the blind alley. Quebec nationalist politics in 1943 and 1944 were bitter and fractious, and the LX group evaporated. The collapse of fascism, and the growing revelations about life under the Nazis, discredited the Jesuits' fantasies.

The very traits and training that had made Trudeau such a good student were now to rescue him. His Jesuit education led him to see the follies of Jesuit politics. He continued to read right-wing thinkers, but more critically. Under a corporatist professor he had read Adam Smith without effect; reading Smith on his own, Trudeau understood far more.

He would go on to study at Harvard and to break decisively with a religious, ethnocentric vision of politics. He still saw himself as a statesman in training. But it would be a very different kind of state that he would build and serve.

Meanwhile, narrow Quebec nationalism would remain in the blind alley Trudeau had escaped: now more secular than religious, more left-wing than right, but still nursing grievances and resenting outsiders -- "money and the ethnic vote," as Jacques Parizeau in 1995 echoed the bigots of the 1930s.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau, once a privileged and bigoted insider, understood Quebec's nationalists better than they understood themselves. Thanks to this book, we too begin to understand.