René Lévesque: The Fascinating Life of a Separatist Icon

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, Chile and the Nazis, and The Diplomacy of War: The Case of
Korea.

From his birth and childhood in Anglo-dominated New Carlisle on the
Gaspé Peninsula; through Laval Law School, from which he was expelled
for insisting on his “right” to smoke in class; through family
problems and his career as a journalist and as a star on French-language
television, Durnford reviews René Lévesque’s life sympathetically
and quickly. We learn that during the famous CBC strike of 1958–59,
Lévesque was shocked to discover that Labour Minister Michael Starr
knew little and cared less about the lengthy shutdown of the
French-language television’s centre of operations, but according to
the author, he did not become a separatist at that point.

Lévesque’s entry into provincial politics as a Liberal during the
Quebec election of 1960, and his role as a cabinet minister in promoting
the nationalization of the privately owned electrical companies, is
covered. But Durnford ignores the anxiety and damaged careers of people
of good will who worked for Shawinigan Water and Power (one of the
companies absorbed into Hydro-Québec) and the fact that the Cuban
Missile Crisis coincided with the election campaign of 1962, which was
called to legitimize the HQ takeover. Events in Cuba, which threatened
life itself, absorbed everyone’s attention and relegated the election
campaign to inside pages. To Durnford, Lévesque was always in the right
and his opponents in the wrong.

According to Durnford, Lévesque moved toward separatism in 1966 and
espoused sovereignty association months before the notorious de Gaulle
visit of July 1967; she wrongly identifies Pierre Elliott Trudeau as
Canada’s prime minister when that happened. Durnford recounts the
birth of the Parti Québécois, which chose Lévesque as its leader,
lost the provincial elections of 1970 and 1973, won the election of
1976, and lost the referendum of 1980. There is no mention of the
heartbreak in many families as a result of the Lévesque government’s
language laws.

Peter Desbarats (1977), Graham Fraser (2001), and Dale Thomson (1984)
have written more scholarly books about Lévesque, but Durnford’s
offers a good read.